Posts in Linked

Stockfish For Mac with Chess Analysis→

Developed by Daylen Yang, Stockfish is a free and open-source chess app for Mac based on the Stockfish chess engine.

The app does a couple of interesting things: it’s Retina-ready and it can go full-screen, so you’ll enjoy a chess game on your MacBook Pro’s display without distractions. It supports two-player games and it’s got exporting capabilities and keyboard shortcuts. But more importantly, it comes with advanced chess analysis that lets the computer tell you who’s winning and calculate the best move. I’m fascinated by the technological premise: the app can let you choose to optimize analysis for maximum performance so that more cores will be used to compute chess analyses; even the amount of memory to use can be adjusted. It should be pretty impressive on a new Mac Pro.

Stockfish is free on the Mac App Store and open-source. The Stockfish engine is available here.

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Keep Your iTunes Wishlist in Mentio for iPhone→

If you’re saving up for a that special movie, latest iTunes albums, or popular new app, keep track of it with Mentio. The wishlist app lets you add media by searching iTunes and the App Store, lets you share your wishes with friends, and has both light and dark themes for your viewing pleasure. Each item you add contains a small summary (like descriptions for movies), and the option to purchase the item once you’re ready to buy. Useful if you buy apps and media using iTunes gift cards. Download Mentio for a dollar on the App Store.

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The Evolution Of Simogo→

From Lee Bradley’s profile of Simogo at Eurogamer:

Go back a decade, however, and the art, design and audio half of Simogo wasn’t even interested in making games. In the early 2000s, while working as an animator on movies and commercials, Simon Flesser felt that games were in a pretty uninteresting place. Then, in 2004, the Nintendo DS arrived with its touch-sensitive screen and a new set of inputs. His imagination was lit.

I loved Year Walk last year, but I still haven’t played DEVICE 6. I remember how different Another Code felt to me when it came out in 2005, and Simogo’s games have the same effect – they are uniquely designed for a platform and a multitouch screen, rather than just tweaked for them.

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BugshotKit→

Marco Arment:

I’m starting the Overcast beta soon, and I wanted an easy way for my testers to report (non-crash) bugs and provide UI feedback. I also wanted a way to remind myself of UI or feature ideas easily, and I’ve occasionally needed to view the error console on the device when tracking down difficult bugs.

BugshotKit addresses all of these: it’s an embeddable Bugshot annotation interface and console logger, invoked anywhere in your app by an otherwise unused gesture (e.g. a two-finger swipe up, a three-finger double-tap, pulling out from the right screen edge, etc.), that lets you or your testers quickly email you with helpful details, screenshots, and diagnostic information.

I’ve tried BugshotKit in an app I’m testing, and it’s a fantastic idea: screenshot annotations and logging are available in a single screen that doesn’t require you to switch between apps, save screenshots, copy logs, and put everything together in Mail. If you’re a developer and you’re building an app, consider implementing BugshotKit to have happier, more efficient beta testers.

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Panels, Popovers And iPad Pro→

Good post by Benjamin Mayo. I don’t think that the idea of snapping sidebars is the best way to handle multitasking on a tablet, but he makes a great point I forgot to cover in my article last week:

Apps should also have the capability to be ‘faceless’, so that other apps can query for data without needing any intermediary UI. This would enable apps like to draw on information available in other apps without pushing additional UI. For example, GarageBand could import sound-clips from apps like djay or Animoog in addition to the Music app. Similarly, a word processor could retrieve definitions from the users’ preferred dictionary app rather than stick to whatever the developer bundled with the app.

In my case, that would be a list of synonyms from Terminology. But imagine if Editorial could provide its workflows as services to other apps, or if you could retrieve files from Dropbox without opening the Dropbox app. Android is far ahead of iOS in this field, and it’s time for iOS to grow up.

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Tapstream→

Our thanks to Tapstream for sponsoring MacStories this week. Tapstream helps app developers earn more from their apps.

For those of you who don’t advertise your app, Tapstream is completely free. You can embed it in your website to understand which referring sites and which landing pages are responsible for the biggest share of installs. Alternatively, use Tapstream’s URL shortener to get this same data from social networks, email or anywhere else on the web. If you decide to spend money on mobile ads, Tapstream is partnered with the best ad networks out there to help you advertise and make sure you’re not double-charged for your users.

Beyond just telling you how your users are getting to your app, Tapstream keeps track of exactly how valuable each channel is. Automatic In-App-Purchase reporting tells you where you get the most of your revenue from. Add to that a bevy of features like device-aware shortlinks (that discriminate between iPhone, iPad and Android visitors to send them to the correct destination), cohort tracking and integrations with HootSuite, KISSmetrics and MixPanel.

Tapstream is already on your iPhone in many of the apps you use today - it should be in your app too.

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A History of People Telling Apple What To Do→

Harry McCracken calling out all of this nonsense:

Some wise person — I wish I knew who — once said that everybody has two businesses: their own, and show business. The same is true in the world of technology, except the two businesses people have are their own, and Tim Cook’s.

Everyone, in other words, seems to have strong opinions about what Apple should be doing. And a remarkable percentage of the people who share their thoughts state them not as a suggestion or a preference but as an imperative so absolute that ignoring it could plunge the company into crisis. To emphasize the seriousness of the matter, their headlines usually use the words “Apple must…”

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