Last night emails were sent to develpers by the App Store team announcing a new iTunes Connect feature – weekly App Analytics email reports. This is a welcome addition to iTunes Connect. I check App Analytics occassionally, especially after a significant app release or marketing push, but getting analytics data on a regular schedule is a nice way to keep on top of analytics more regularly.
You can opt into emailed reports with the link provided in the email you receive from the App Store team, or go to iTunes Connect and opt in under the Users and Rolls section.
Gabe Weatherhead at Macdrifter highlights something that puzzled me when I wrote a roundup of screenshot apps last December:
While there’s a wealth of options on the Mac for image annotation, there are very few complete options on iOS. PointOut is wonderful for creating magnifier callouts but not much else. Pinpoint has really easy redaction, annotation and arrows but nothing more. Omnigraffle has everything plus a great deal of control but it’s too many taps to do anything basic.
The problem is compounded by the fact that many screenshot apps on iOS are unable to detect a screenshot once it has been edited by another app. As a result, there is often no good way to pass a screenshot from one app to another to apply multiple edits.
Gabe’s solution is clever. He uses Pixelmator, one of the most powerful image editors available on iOS, to create call-outs, redact sections of a screenshot, and draw arrows. I use Screenshot++ and Pinpoint regularly, but it’s good to have Pixelmator as an option for more complicated combinations of edits. Check out Gabe’s post to see how it’s done.
Text and Link Utilities iOS text editors are great, and some, like Editorial, have vast amounts of power built in that allow you to do amazing things with your writing. But there is also a rich world of other apps on iOS that fill the specific needs of writers and that don’t tie you...
Terminology, created by Agile Tortoise, doesn’t offer a Mac app, but you can easily integrate its dictionary into the built-in Mac dictionary app. All you need to do is download a ZIP file, uncompress it, and double-click the ‘Install.command’ file. Next, open the built-in Dictionary app, go to Preferences, and check the ‘Terminology’ dictionary...
Agile Tortoise’s development of Drafts never seems to slow down. Today, version 4.6 was released with a long list of new features and refinements. Here are my favorites:
- Trash Can: Drafts now saves 30 days of deleted drafts in a trash can from which they can be restored, which makes writing in Drafts safer than ever.
- Interface Enhancements: The Drafts editor has been refined to improve the readability of your drafts, especially on the iPad.
- Automatic Dark Mode: Drafts can now monitor the ambient light in a room, and turn its dark mode on and off according to a brightness threshold that you select.
- Box Support: Last year the MacStories team started using Box as part of our document collaboration workflow, which makes Box support especially welcome. Much like Drafts’ Dropbox and Google Drive support, you can now create files in Box, and append and prepend to existing Box files.
- Today Widget: Drafts 4.6 debuts a redesigned Today Widget with a streamlined look.
- Icons: Drafts has added many action icons, which I like because it makes it even easier to identify my Drafts actions.
There are also some treats in Drafts 4.6 for power users too:
- Open in Drafts: Instead of opening Safari, you can set a URL action to open URLs in Safari View Controller, which keeps you inside Drafts. The Agile Tortoise blog includes a couple good examples of this that search Google and DuckDuckGo.
- ‘replaceRange’ URL Scheme Action: When used with an x-success callback parameter in a URL scheme action, ‘replaceRange’ can replace selected text in a draft with the results of a URL scheme call to another app. This is powerful stuff, and means you can do things like send selected text to Agile Tortoise’s dictionary app, Terminology, to look up a synonym, select it, and return it to Drafts, replacing the originally selected text. A similar action works with my app, Blink, where the selected text kicks off a search. After you select an item from the results, Blink sends an affiliate link back to Drafts, replacing the selected text with the link. I have more detail, and a demonstration of the Blink action on squibner.com. Both of these actions work on any iOS device, but the first time I saw them in action with both apps running in Split View on an iPad Pro, I was blown away. Writers will love these actions.
- Include Action: You can now incorporate one action into another by reference, which makes building actions more modular.
With version 4.6, Drafts continues its steady pace of innovation by continuing to redefine what a text editor can be, which is why it has been one of my go-to text editors for many years now.
Drafts 4.6 is a free update for existing customers, and $9.99 for new users.
GIFs are everywhere. Sites and services like Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook breathed new life into GIFs and created demand for things like Giphy, a GIF search engine. But a good search engine isn’t always enough. Sometimes I want to make my own GIFs. For that, I use GIF Brewery 3 from Hello, Resolven Apps.
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Sometimes apps are hard to ‘get’ because you don’t know you have the problem they intend solve until you try them. Airfoil by Rogue Amoeba was like that for me. Airfoil acts as a hub, routing audio from your Mac to anything connected to your local network. Between technologies like AirPlay and Bluetooth, I initially wondered what purpose Airfoil served. It wasn’t until I got eight devices streaming at once in perfect sync that I started to see some of the interesting possibilities.
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Last week I introduced the idea of ‘attention,’ which I think is the single most important problem facing app developers. Attention is a gating issue, without which your app may as well not exist because no one is going to find it. This is a great topic because it has so many different facets to...
Over the past few years, Twitter has created and acquired an impressive array of mobile developer tools that it offers under the umbrella brand of Fabric. Today, Twitter released an iPhone companion app for Fabric that puts two of its most popular tools in your pocket – analytics and crash reporting. I have been testing Fabric, the iOS app, with two iOS apps provided by Twitter for the last few days and I’m impressed with its ability to sift through, organize, and display large quantities of data in an effective and meaningful way on an iPhone.
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