Posts in Linked

Teleprompt+ 3→

I’ve always heard good things about Bombing Brain’s Teleprompt+, a popular teleprompter app for iOS. While I don’t personally use it (although it may be worth experimenting with it for podcasts), I wanted to link to the latest version, released this week.

Teleprompt+ 3 adds rich text support for inline formatting, a quick edit mode to make last-minute changes to displayed text without leaving the current session, and a new design for a Universal app that runs on both the iPad and iPhone. Because it’s an app, Teleprompt+ takes advantage of iOS to enable features like remote control for multiple devices (have a technician adjust text and speed on a master device while text is displayed on a second iPhone or iPad), Dropbox import for text, and audio and video recording through the built-in microphone and cameras. I find it fascinating when old equipment and technologies are made obsolete by cheaper and smarter software, and Teleprompt+ is a good example of how iOS devices can be integrated in professional environments (it even supports third-party accessories).

Teleprompt+ 3 is a new version of the app, and it’s available on the App Store at $14.99 as a launch sale.

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Delight Can Trump Efficiency→

David Sparks, writing for Macworld:

We’ve been using computers with keyboards and mice for decades now, and many of us are quite adept at bending this traditional paradigm to our will. Then along come the iPhone and iPad, with no hardware keyboard and much less power, and they still manage to turn the computing world on its head. “But it’s not as powerful and I can’t script it,” some power users argue. True, but there’s a reason why we love our iOS devices despite these supposed inadequacies. Simply put, they delight us.

They delight us less when they randomly reboot or apps crash, but the underlying idea is absolutely true for me as well.

When people ask me why I like to get work done on my iPad, the hardest point to get across is that I have more fun with my iPad than my Mac.

Initially, I thought that novelty could be the reason, but after four years of iPad I don’t think that’s the case anymore. It may also be that I liked working around the limitations of iOS, but ultimately that’s a weak argument because I don’t like productivity masochism and most readers aren’t interested in complex workflows or scripts.

It’s difficult to quantify it, but I believe it’s important to have fun when working. I’m constantly amazed by the things modern iPhones and iPads can do, and I find a peculiar kind of geeky satisfaction in writing and publishing articles on the iPad or talking to people around the world with Tweetbot for iPhone. That’s why I’m always concerned when I read rumors of Apple trying to make iOS devices more like Macs – if that ever happens, I hope they won’t take the fun away but still combine delight with efficiency.

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Grave Business→

A great passage from Christian Donlan’s piece for Eurogamer about the E.T. landfill in New Mexico and lack of restraint on modern app stores:

But with that access - and without curation by companies that actually appreciated games - came a race to the bottom, where much of the good stuff was then buried by an endless deluge of miserable clones and cash-grabs that were allowed in because the gatekeepers didn’t care. Free-to-play is not the problem - it’s that publishers and platform holders and sometimes even developers let the deeper value of a game erode, that there was often a failure to find the correct free-to-play model that enhanced a game - and that some people apparently think it’s fine to refer to their most valued customers as whales.

The difference is that, thirty years from now, there won’t be a New Mexico landfill to recover old apps from.

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Apple’s iOS Human Interface Guidelines Now On The iBooks Store→

Previously available on the web from Apple’s developer portal, the company’s iOS Human Interface Guidelines are now on the iBooks Store as a free download (via Dave Addey). The 20 MB guide is compatible with iPads as well as Macs running iBooks on OS X Mavericks, and it takes advantage of the app with inline video playback, two-page page layouts, and built-in annotations (plus, of course, font size and color controls for reading settings).

It looks like Apple did a nice job in converting the guidelines to iBooks, and annotations appear to be especially useful for developers and designers learning the principles of the iOS 7 visual language. The iOS Human Interface Guidelines are available on the iBooks Store here.

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Pocket Casts 4.5→

My favorite podcast client for iOS 7, Pocket Casts by Shifty Jelly, was updated over the weekend to version 4.5, which added Chromecast support and some welcome additions to the app’s built-in Charts view.

When browsing podcasts in the app’s directory, you can now see Trending shows and change countries for Top Charts. Pocket Casts still has a general worldwide view, but now you can also filter charts by country; for me, this means I can easily find other Italian shows besides the excellent ones provided by the EasyPodcast network (pictured above; EasyApple is the best Italian podcast about Apple, hands down).

Pocket Casts continues to be a solid client that I particularly enjoy because it’s also available on the iPad. It’s $3.99 on the App Store.

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Mobile Is Burning→

I am arguing that this is what we have forgotten in our chase for mobile profit, that we can’t see the creative woods for the data trees. For all our mountains of information we’ve collected about user habits and sales, the gut-level ability to give joy and inspire our audience remains the job of our industry’s creative people first and every other industry role second. Our ability to communicate to, reach and inspire the people that we make things for is the foundation for everything any artist or craftsperson ever produced.

The fundamental communication power of mobile as a platform to push gaming remains entirely intact. But the logic of chasing mountainous profit is self-defeating.

Inspiring, thought-provoking piece by Fireproof Games’ Barry Meade over at Polygon. Data and analytics should aid creativity, not dictate and restrain its genius.

If you read one thing about mobile gaming today, make it this one.

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Facebook Pulls Poke and Camera Apps From The App Store→

Ellis Hamburger:

To Facebook, Poke was always “more of a joke” than anything else — so why did the company leave it in the App Store for more than a year after its troubled debut? We may never know, but today, Facebook finally put an end to Poke. If you check the App Store for Facebook’s famed Snapchat clone, you won’t find it. Facebook also took the opportunity, seemingly, to remove Camera, its photo uploading app. A Facebook spokesperson confirmed the removals to The Verge, but provided no further comment.

Poke was indeed a joke, but Facebook Camera was a solid app with lots of clever details. From our original coverage in 2012:

Animations throughout Facebook Camera are fluid, the app is fast, and there’s a lot of clever interaction to take advantage of throughout the interface — clearly Facebook’s acquired talents have been hard at work in making the app to not just feel like a boring extension of Facebook, but rather a necessary addition that belongs, no, deserves to be on a Facebook user’s smartphone. Facebook has made an incredibly bold statement with Facebook Camera — they’ve stepped up to the plate to deliver a solid application that doesn’t feel tacked on or only done for the sake of their platform. It’s a serious release. Just look at their landing page.

In fact, the way uploads and editing were handled in Facebook Camera were so good, Facebook eventually integrated them into the main Facebook app, making Facebook Camera essentially useless. The app never received an iOS 7 update and I’m surprised it stuck around this long.

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Chrome Canary Adds OS X Finder Integration for Chrome Apps→

Kevin C. Tofel, writing for Gigaom:

Google’s strategy to use the Chrome browser as a desktop replacement took another step forward on Friday. Users of Chrome Canary, an experimental version of Google’s browser, can now associate Mac files with supporting Chrome apps in the Finder. This means that instead of opening a basic text file with the native OS X TextEdit, you can open it with a Chrome app like Text, Caret or Simple Text.

Interesting move from Google, but not a surprise either. Google has been building an ecosystem of apps on iOS for over a year, and it’s only obvious that they’re going to continue extending the effort to OS X, where they have even less limitations.

On iOS, they redirect YouTube links to the YouTube app, leverage x-callback-url for Chrome, and make sure you always use Google apps when opening links; on OS X, the Finder’s “Open With” menu makes perfect sense to redirect users to Chrome – especially for Office-type documents.

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Great Coffee App→

As listeners of Directional may have guessed at this point, espresso is my favorite coffee drink. Living in Italy and being extremely conservative with my espresso choices, I’ve never got into coffee-related iPhone apps (I don’t have a fancy coffee-making ritual; it’s just an espresso machine), but Great Coffee App is, as the rather bland name implies, actually pretty great.

Great Coffee App provides an introduction to 16 popular espresso-based drinks. The app is delightfully skeuomorphic in its presentation of espressos and coffee cups; there’s some nice background music when you browse the main screen, but it can be disabled. In the app, you’ll find descriptions and interesting facts for the classic espresso, the espresso lungo, the macchiato, as well as the more peculiar Irish Coffee and Cafeccino; you can tap on each drink and see zoomed-in view of its ingredients and layers. For each drink, the app comes with good localized descriptions (at least based on what I saw for the English and Italian versions), and a downloadable video showing the preparation process.

I found Great Coffee App to be beautifully done, informative, and a great visual introduction to popular espresso-based drinks. It’s only $2.99 on the App Store.

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