In case you’ve somehow missed it, Photo Stream in iOS5 is quite a game changer. Once you’ve upgraded all your devices, whenever you take a photo on one, it auto-magically syncs to all the others. Let’s say you are projecting a presentation with Air Sketch and want to quickly add a photo of something in the room. You can take a photo with your iPhone, tap on the insert photo button,  open the Photo Stream album, and your photo will appear after a few seconds. Instant new feature that would have been pretty hard to do before. No wires, no new hardware needed, no mess. Apple really did a great job with Photo Stream, and we’ve found that it does indeed work as advertised.

Note that it does take a few seconds to a minute for the photos to sync, depending on your network connection. If you are doing this in a live presentation, it would be a good idea to take the photo first, finish your current slide, then try to add it.

Works with iPhoto too:

Bonus tip: It seems that the latest version of iPhoto ‘11 also automatically synchs newly imported photos to Photo Stream. We found that if you drag a photo from the Finder and add it to iPhoto, it will appear in Photo Stream shortly. However, it seems that the Photo Stream is sorted by the File date, not the added date, so older files may appear at the beginning of the Photo Stream album, not the end as you would expect.

*** Update: Download our brand new App, Vittle, which turns your iPad into a Recordable Whiteboard. You can now make videos right on your iPad! ***

Here’s a quick tutorial on how to record your live sketches using Air Sketch on your iPad and QuickTime Player on the Mac.

Most people may not be aware that QuickTime X that ships with Snow Leopard has a built-in screen recording feature, which works great with Air Sketch. Here’s how to use it to create quick videos of your live sketches:

 

1. Start Air Sketch on your iPad.

2. Open Safari on your Mac. Under the bookmarks menu, select “Show All Bookmarks”, then select the Bonjour category on the left list. Double click on “Air Sketch by qrayon”. If you are using a different browser, such as Firefox, tap on the server icon on the bottom left of Air Sketch and type in the displayed address into the browser’s address bar.

3. Adjust the size of your browser window to show the full drawing area. It may be easiest to just make it full screen.

3. Open QuickTime Player. Under the file menu, select New Screen Recording, or Control+Command+N.

The Screen Recording window will appear:

4. You can choose to also record sound via your computer’s microphone, or not via the dropdown. This also let’s you set the quality and destination of the recording.

5. When you are ready, click the record button, then “Start Recording”.

6. Create your masterpiece.

7. Click “Stop Recording” in the menu bar or Command+Control+ESC when you are done. This will open the movie you just created.

8. You can trim the movie using QuickTime Player. Useful to remove the inadvertent pause at the beginning and end.

 

9. You can now rename your movie file, and perform any additional post production work you need.

Here’s an example of a movie that was produced this way:

For Windows users, check out the amazing and free CamStudio recording tool.

Feel free to post links to your own creations in the comments!