Watermarker 1.1 with Batch Processing

When my dear friend and MacStories writer Don Southard released the first version of Watermarker, I didn’t know whether posting about it here on MacStories would be appropriate. However, after I’ve come to use the app and know how much Don is committed to making it great, I now think not mentioning it would be a disservice to my readers.

Watermarker provides a simple and automated way to add watermarks to images. You can choose between various options including text, your own logo, or even a customizable strikethrough. The app has a clean interface with the “canvas” (the area where you can drop an image) displayed on the left, and watermarking settings on the right. I like how you can save presets (so I can have one for my “large” MacStories watermark, another one for the smaller version), and the fact that an image’s size is reported right below its preview. Don’t take my word for it – I’m not the only one who thinks Watermark is a fine app.

Today’s update is particularly interesting for my workflow because it adds batch processing. You can drop multiple images at once into the canvas or dock icon (you can also drop an entire folder), and Watermarker will display a red badge in the canvas on top of your “stack” of photos (I wish I could click on the photos in the stack to select them). Once imported, you can set your watermark, and the app will apply it to all images at once; I like how Don also created a slider to set opacity for an image. To export, you can simply drag the images out of the canvas or save them. In both cases, a copy will be created.

I don’t like watermarking images, but Watermarker makes it extremely easy and fast. If I had to nitpick, I’d say that it’d be nice to navigate images in the canvas using the arrow keys (so you could still get a preview of the images you’re watermarking) and have AppleScript support for deeper automation workflows. Even without AppleScript, however, version 1.1 is a great improvement over Watermarker 1.0, which required you to import images one-by-one.

Go check out Watermarker here. The app is available at $7.99 on the Mac App Store.

Longform for iPad

I’ve recently tweeted about how I re-discovered Longform and their iPad app, and I thought the app deserved a mention here as well. Like the name implies, Longform is a service that curates “new and classic non-fiction from around the web” in the form of direct links to articles you can read in your browser. While there are many services like it, I prefer the clean look of Longform’s website and the human aspect of their curation: for instance, the summaries Longform provides feel like they’re written by humans rather than automated scrapers. The format of the website, Twitter account, and “Best Of” lists feel like they’re managed by people who actually read the links they curate. Even their About page is simple and elegant.

The iPad app (soon to be joined by an iPhone version) has become my go-to app for discovering articles I want to read. Even better: while I discover a lot of articles about tech via Twitter and RSS, Longform allows me to read great pieces of non-fiction out of my “geek comfort zone”, such as this story about Apollo Robbins or this terrific story by Eric Puchner. The iPad app comes with the standard stream of Longform-curated links, but it also lets you add “subscriptions” to specific sites, so you can, for example, view only articles from The New Yorker or GQ.

Longform doesn’t care about read-later drama and nerd gossip: it’s service-agnostic in the way it supports Instapaper, Pocket, and Readability – so you’ll be able to easily send articles to your app of choice. A subtle touch that I really appreciate is that, while the app comes with its own text-only “Read mode”, it defaults to a standard Web view when opening links, so I’m sure the website owner gets a page view from me before I send the article to Instapaper. If you do want to read within Longform, there are settings to adjust fonts and sharing options, but, overall, I prefer the presentation and feature set of Instapaper for these tasks.

More than an anonymous web service, Longform is a group of human editors whom I trust to bring me content I wouldn’t discover otherwise. The iPad app is only $0.99 on the App Store.