Posts in Linked

Nebulous Notes Updated for iOS 7→

Nebulous Notes, a Dropbox-enabled text editor with a macro system, has been updated for iOS 7 with a design refresh and fixes for iOS 7.1 (via Macdrifter).

Nebulous Notes is the app that kickstarted my interest in automating tasks on iOS thanks to its macros, and while I’ve switched to Editorial for my daily writing, Nebulous Notes is still a great choice on the iPhone. Combined with Byword for publishing, Nebulous Notes lets you speed up writing on the iPhone to assemble posts on the go; the macros that I published in October 2012 still work today, and some additions to the macro system were brought with version 6.1 released in November 2012.

Nebulous Notes is available at $4.99 on the App Store.

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Paul Thurrott Reviews Office for iPad→

A positive review from Thurrott, who calls the suite of apps for iPad “the real deal”. He also makes a good point on the decision of allowing users to view documents for free:

Once you get past the weirdness of Office even being on the iPad, it sort of settles in. Yes, it’s here. Yes, it works as expected. But … why bother? Why even release such a product? Obviously, the success of the iPad and similar Android-based tablets—and their use as productivity devices in some cases—warrants the release. But it’s more than that. Users of the iPad get built-in viewers for Office documents, and they’re lousy. They don’t show the correct formatting on anything but the simplest documents, making it hard for users to move documents back and forth between a PC and the device.

iPad users also have their choice of Office-like apps such as Apple’s iWork applications and various third party apps. These apps let you open and edit Office documents, but they also screw up the formatting fidelity of those documents. So if you’re trying to integrate your iPad into your workflow you may end up screwing up those documents, not just for yourself but for others. Only Office treats Office documents correctly.

Look no further than Apple’s Top Productivity charts to understand why Microsoft is calling them “the real Microsoft Office apps for iPad”.

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The Prompt: Progress, Not A Revolution→

With Stephen being away this week, Myke and Federico talk about the things they always talk about—music services and video games. More specifically, advancements to iTunes Radio and Facebook buying Oculus.

I’ve been taking notes about iTunes Radio and Oculus for a while now, and I like how the discussion turned out. Get the episode here.

Brought to you by:

  • Lynda (get a 7-day free trial with our link)
  • Squarespace (use code TALLYHO3 for 10% off)
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Keyboard Maestro Adds Mavericks Tags Integration→

With version 6.4 released yesterday, Keyboard Maestro (one of my favorite utilities to automate tasks on OS X) added support for Mavericks tags alongside improvements to AppleScript, asynchronous macro and script execution, and a variety of bug fixes and refinements.

Introduced last year in OS X Mavericks as a way to quickly group and organize related files, tags have been integrated in various automation-related apps and workflows that include Hazel, Alfred, script launchers, and command line utilities. With version 6.4, Keyboard Maestro is now capable of getting and setting tags as attributes to files – with just a couple of actions, you can now set up a macro that tags multiple files at once with a hotkey.

If you work with tags on Mavericks and wish you could speed up the process of adding or removing tags, Keyboard Maestro 6.4 is available here; if you’re new to Keyboard Maestro, check out my previous coverage here.

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Why Is Candy Crush Saga So Popular?→

Stuart Dredge:

Really, though, if you want to find out why Candy Crush Saga is so popular and makes so much money, you should ask the other people: the ones actually playing it. Mums and dads, aunts and uncles. Grandparents, even. Housewives and househusbands. Commuters from office juniors through to CEOs.

Your non-gamer friends, especially. Even if you’re not quite as aware of how much they’re playing Candy Crush Saga and similar games since you figured out how to turn off their Facebook alerts begging for help. Candy Crush Saga’s audience isn’t just huge: it’s hugely mainstream.

The question is whether King will end up like Zynga or not.

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Dark Game Design→

Tadhg Kelly, writing for Edge:

In the short term, your game’s player numbers may go up and your revenue might explode, but you inevitably sacrifice integrity. You might have onboarded a few players to pay for stuff, but you’re teaching many more to ignore any messages that the game spits out. It becomes harder to communicate with players and you lose their loyalty or the possibility of a game building a unique, defensible culture.

“Integrity” – most tech pundits will tell you that it doesn’t matter when you can monetize free-to-play with behavioral strategies that increase engagement and other meaningless buzzwords.

Luckily, there are exceptions, even on the App Store.

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Facebook’s “Tweaks” For iOS Developers→

Today, Facebook spent $2 billion and open-sourced a library for iOS developers.

Tweaks, available on GitHub, provides an interface for developers to make minor adjustments and tweak parameters of an app directly inside the app, in a few seconds. Those changes can be the color of a button or the speed of an animation, and Facebook says that Tweaks helped them build Paper, the highly praised alternative Facebook app.

Here’s TechCrunch’s Greg Kumparak on Tweaks:

For developers, it means being able to fine-tune applications faster and with less code. As an added bonus, it lets any of their designers who might not love to code help figure out the best settings without having to pop into the source or pester the dev team for a million new builds.

And Facebook, on the project’s page:

Occasionally, it’s perfect the first try. Sometimes, the idea doesn’t work at all. But often, it just needs a few minor adjustments. That last case is where Tweaks fits in. Tweaks makes those small adjustments easy: with no code changes and no computer, you can try out different options and decide which works best.

Some of the most useful parameters to adjust are animation timings, velocity thresholds, colors, and physics constants. At Facebook, we also use tweaks to temporarily disable new features during development. That way, the designers and engineers involved can enable it on just their devices, without getting in the way of others testing the app.

Tweaks looks like a handy solution for developers, designers, and, to an extent, even testers of apps. It’s available here.

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The WSJ Interviews Original iPhone Engineer→

The WSJ’s Daisuke Wakabayashi interviewed Greg Christie, one of the original iPhone engineers, about the creation of the device that launched seven years ago.

In late 2004, Mr. Christie was working on software for Apple’s Macintosh computers when Scott Forstall, a senior member of the company’s software team, walked into his office, closed the door and asked if he wanted to work on a secret project, codenamed “purple.” The team would develop a phone with an integrated music player, operated by a touch screen.

There are some new anecdotes to me in the interview, as well as a photo of a system Apple created to test the iPhone software in 2006 (it’s big and clunky as you imagine). You can read the interview here.

See also: Andy Grignon’s story.

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