I don’t know how Brett Terpstra finds the time to do everything he does, but I do know I enjoy the results.

Brett’s latest effort is SearchLink, a system Service to generate Markdown links automatically for a variety of web services. In Brett’s words:

SearchLink is a System Service for OS X that handles searching multiple sources and automatically generating Markdown links for text. It allows you to just write, marking things to link as you go. When you’re done, you run it on the document and — if your queries were good — have your links generated automatically without ever opening a browser.

Essentially, SearchLink is a Ruby script that, in the background, generates valid Markdown for inline links inserted in plain text. These can be links pointing to a Google search, a Mac App Store or iTunes search, last.fm, Wikipedia, and more. Instead of having to switch to the browser when you’re writing, you can just write using SearchLink’s simple syntax. Once you’re done, run the Service, and SearchLink will contact web APIs to transform your text into the first/best result for your query, formatted in Markdown. (more…)

Last night, Apple launched a first developer beta of iCloud.com, a set of web apps based on the iCloud functionality originally introduced in iOS 5 beta that mimic the appearance of Apple’s Lion desktop apps like Address Book and iCal, or the Mail app for iPad. The new web apps, seen as replacements for MobileMe’s existing web offerings, have been completely rewritten to take advantage of iCloud’s faster and invisible sync of content between devices, and they also include a new web-based version of iWork that, however, isn’t live yet. Screenshots (and videos) of the iCloud web apps have surfaced online and partially on Apple’s website too; early screenshots of the login page had been leaked ahead of the WWDC in June.

The iCloud web apps provide an alternative to their iOS and OS X counterparts — being entirely web-based, they can come in handy “if you happen to be away from home without your computer or one of your iOS devices” so that “you can access your mail, contacts, and calendar — ad-free — from any computer at icloud.com”. (more…)

Automator, the suite of automation tools for OS X that can create user workflows, services or apps, has received a series of interesting improvements in Lion, some of them useful additions that will likely eliminate the need for certain kinds of third-party software for many users. In spite of Lion being described as a “user-friendly” OS thanks to the implementation of gestures or full-screen apps, as we’ve seen in our review and other articles following the Mac App Store launch it’s clear there’s still much room for tweaking and “taking control” of the OS when you want to get the most out of it. Take the Option key for example: Option has been capable of reversing certain behaviors in Mac apps for quite some time, but in Lion it gets a whole new usage as it can reverse the entire Resume system, show the Library in the Finder’s menubar, or change the Finder’s “Arrange By” feature to “Sort By”. And that’s just the Option key. Personally, I disagree on the assumption that Apple is “dumbing down” the operating system only by introducing functionalities that make interacting with a computer easier. The way I see it, Lion is the most powerful and feature-rich version of OS X to date (and several developers, from a technical standpoint, agree with this) and, actually, the gestures themselves can appease any power user when correctly mastered. Lion may look simpler on the surface (and to an extent, I can see why the addition of the Launchpad doesn’t help as far as this argument goes), but it’s a very powerful entry in the OS X family once you take a peek under the hood. (more…)

Evernote, the digital capture tool that allows you to save anything from the web and access it from a variety of devices and computers including iPhones and Macs, announced earlier today an updated version of the popular Chrome extension that, following the recent interface changes to the iPhone app, offers a more elegant way to clip content from webpages and have it synchronized with your Evernote account.

The new extension, available here, packs a whole new UI with slick buttons and text entry fields for quick tag and note input, but more importantly adds a new Article Clip feature that, with just one click on the browser’s toolbar, automatically selects the main content of an article to save it as full-text in Evernote. The extension worked perfectly with all the blogs I’ve visited today, and the new extension window makes it easy to edit the title, tags, notes and notebook. If you feel like you don’t want to clip the whole article, but only a portion, the extension is also capable of recognizing a selection and enable you to switch between that and the full article from a dropdown menu. The same menu is also being used to only clip a page’s direct URL, if you prefer to bookmark stuff, rather than archive it as a text document. (more…)

With rumors floating around about Apple’s upcoming cloud music service (especially after last night’s report on the company signing a deal with EMI) and others like Google and Amazon moving forward on the streaming bandwagon with products to upload and stream music at any time with smartphones, tablets and desktop web browsers, subscription-based payment systems are often seen as the only feasible solution to guarantee a continuos cloud service without interruptions, always available anywhere you go. Just like Spotify and Rdio let users stream large collections of music they don’t necessarily own by paying a monthly or annual fee, Apple is rumored to extend the iTunes subscription system it created for magazines to music, movies, and a combination of both for the ultimate iTunes Store cloud experience. But just how much are phone and tablet people willing to pay for these new cloud services based on subscriptions? That’s what research firm Nielsen takes a look at in its latest survey, asking users of “connected devices” how much they would pay for media subscriptions that would give them access to a variety of content on their mobile devices.

It turns out, music, movies, magazines, books and TV shows are something people would pay for — sure, there are different results, but take a look at the graph above and you’ll see that these 5 categories are the ones with less orange, which stands for “not willing to pay.” On the other side, sports content, streaming radio and news are something people would be less prone to subscribe to. Overall, the sweet spot for subscriptions seems to be around $4.99 – $9.99 per month, which is what most cloud services ask for these days. There’s an interesting difference about music, however: people would pay for “downloaded music”, and not for “streaming radio.” Assuming “downloaded music” stands for “music you own”, and people care about having online access to music that’s ultimately theirs, services like Amazon Cloud Player and Google Music Beta should be exactly what people are looking for, as they let you upload your own music to the cloud. Also assuming Apple is working on a similar solution, this survey suggests the company should allow for both uploads and Spotify-like streaming, enabling users to lock their own collections in the cloud, and get access to stuff they didn’t buy as well. Maybe that’s what these deals with music labels are all about.

Tablet and smartphone owners with proper Internet access on the go are willing to pay for online media available through apps, and if that’s their own media, there’s an incentive to subscribe. A report in the past weeks suggested Apple was considering offering a free initial trial for its new cloud music service, with a $20 yearly subscription once the demo is over.

Following the release for Windows Phone 7 in March, Microsoft today announced the availability of the Azure toolkit for iOS, which can be downloaded now from GitHub. Similarly to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft’s Azure is a cloud platform hosted on the company’s servers that allows developers to build, host and scale web applications. Today’s iOS toolkit includes resources and services for developers to integrate Azure in their iPhone and iPad apps, including an Objective-C library to work with Azure services (such as storage and push notifications), documentation, a sample iOS app with full Azure storage integration, as well full source code for the aforementioned Objective-C library with Xcode project files. More details on Azure Toolkit for iOS can be found here.

Last March we released the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone 7, which provided a set of generic services for Windows Azure.  This toolkit was the first step in enabling developers to build native experiences on multiple platforms using Windows Azure.  As the next step in this process, today we’re pleased to announce the release of the Windows Azure Toolkit for iOS.  This toolkit contains resources and services designed to make it easier for iOS developers to use Windows Azure.

Downloads:

• https://github.com/microsoft-dpe/watoolkitios-lib
• https://github.com/microsoft-dpe/watoolkitios-samples
• https://github.com/microsoft-dpe/watoolkitios-doc

Microsoft has also release a Cloud Ready package to simply the process of setting up Azure services, and it has announced the release of an Android toolkit for next month. [via The Next Web]

An interesting mix between third-party Twitter app Birdbrain and Ego for iOS, Follows is a new app for the iPhone aimed at collecting and displaying data from your social profiles on a variety of services. Currently, the app supports stats coming from Twitter, Facebook, Feedburner, MySpace, Vimeo, YouTube, Flickr, and LinkedIn.

While Birdbrain goes really in-depth in the way it aggregates and displays Twitter data over time and Ego is more geared towards website owners with Mint and Google Analytics integration, Follows offers a lightweight approach at gathering statistics from the supported services such as view counts, followers, visits and subscribers. From the main, dark-styled dashboard, you get a quick recap of all your online profiles with a series of tabs allowing you to get a more detailed look at numbers and graphs. It sounds complicated, but it’s not. Instead, Follows wants to be an easy way to, say, see how many people follow you on Twitter or are subscribed to your RSS feeds or, again, have liked your Vimeo videos. Plus, it’s a free app.

Once authenticated with the services (you can add multiple usernames for each one of them), everything goes into the main screen. Tapping on an item will display a different single view with additional stats (for Twitter, total amount of tweets, favorites, people you’re following) and two graphs depicting your “social growth”. The system works the same for all the services integrated into Follows. The app is fast at fetching updates and the latest version (released today) fixed an issue with the app crashing as you selected dashboard items.

Follows isn’t as full-featured as Ego (especially for bloggers) or Birdbrain when it comes to Twitter, but it gets its job done. The design is elegant and minimal, and in-app purchases allow you to remove ads and unlock “custom URL tracking”. It’s a free download in the App Store.