This week Federico and Myke discuss April fools customs around the world, a look back at the wonderful age of video game manuals, the Vita TV and Fez.
For the episode, we put together two Flickr galleries comparing old GameCube manuals to the current Wii U ones. We also continue the discussion on streaming and second screen experiences with the PS Vita TV. Get the episode here.
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New website launched today by Otto the Automator after the release of iWork updates that improved AppleScript support considerably:
The whole point of using a productivity suite is to be, well… productive. And the more time you invest in performing repetitive or complex processes, the less productive and creative you become. The reimagined iWork is designed to eliminate the drudgery, with elements, tools, and media libraries, shared by every application in the suite. And now there’s one more thing they have in common: automation with AppleScript.
The site already has a detailed explanation of the updated AppleScript dictionaries (Pages sections, for instance) for iWork, as well as scripts. Here’s one to transform data from Numbers in a vertical bar chart on a new slide in Keynote; this one will create and email encrypted PDF files generated from a Pages template.
Apple seems to have listened to the power user community and there’s lots of AppleScript goodness in the new iWork for OS X. I’m looking forward to knowing more about new features that were added to the dictionaries, and not just the ones that have been brought back.
Check out the iWork Automation website here.
Day One for iOS was updated to version 1.14 earlier today, which, alongside bug fixes and the ability to insert photos copied in the clipboard, adds support for the Publish service to the iPad app. Day One introduced Publish in March, allowing iPhone users to publish their journal entries on a public webpage directly from the app; on the iPad, Publish works in the same way, but the larger screen makes it easier to assemble longer entries spanning multiple paragraphs.
Day One 1.14 is available on the App Store.
I don’t use Bohemian Coding’s Sketch for Mac, but a lot of designers I know love the app and rely on it for their work. Version 3 is coming soon and the developers have launched a teaser page.
Khoi Vinh tried a beta of Sketch 3 and he was positively impressed by the new features:
Several weeks ago, I was lucky enough to get access to the Sketch 3.0 beta and much to my delight, it prominently includes a symbols feature. The new version brings with it an upgraded file format which is not backwards compatible (that is, Sketch 3 will open files created with its predecessor, but not vice versa), so I haven’t moved over the majority of my workflow to it yet. But I have used it extensively for a few other, more isolated projects, and it’s been fantastic. Sketch’s symbols are as intuitive and powerful as I had hoped they would be; make a change to one symbol, and almost before you can blink, every other instance of that symbol is instantly changed, across every artboard in your document.
And today, Geoff Teehan of Teehan+Lax has announced that their popular iOS 7 GUI template will be pre-installed in Sketch 3:
I’m really excited today to share the news that our iOS 7 GUI template is going to ship natively in Sketch 3 (Sketch 2 shown above). No longer will you need to Google ‘iOS GUI Sketch’ and download the file from our site. You can just open Sketch 3, select our iOS 7 template and starting building out your next iOS app.
To stay updated on Sketch 3 news, check out the teaser page here.
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.
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”.
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.
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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.
