Posts in Linked

Why Pull-To-Refresh Isn’t Such A Bad Guy→

Nick Arnott:

Carr would like to see more developers experiment with new interactions for swipe down gestures, and I cautiously agree. Pull-to-refresh is one of those ideas that seems so obvious in hindsight, but took a talented engineer to think of it. The brilliance of pull-to-refresh is just how well it fit into the existing design. When users try scrolling past the top of a table cell view, they’re trying to view newer content. Pull-to-refresh intelligently extends that scrolling to have an app refresh the content to load any new data. A perfectly logical and intuitive extension of the existing functionality.

This, in response to an article by Austin Carr from December. I especially agree with Nick when he says that fast, reliable data connections that never fail aren’t a reality yet, though they have gotten better over the years.

Pull-to-refresh may seem simple and obvious today, but it was a great design challenge for its inventor back in 2010. Nick makes a lot of valid points about its existence and evolution.

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Sifttter: An IFTTT To Day One Logger→

Sifttter takes the concept of Slogger and applies it to IFTTT by using Brett’s original TaskPaper script. Though it is essentially limited to current IFTTT channels, there is lots of flexibility through IFTTT itself, as well as the opportunity for individual input and customization. I’ve been using this for several months, and am happy to share it here for those who might be interested.

While I decided to avoid tools like Slogger for my Day One journal, I think that the solution Craig put together is fun and nerdy. Not for me, but a good weekend project.

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Shoots and Leaves Uploads Photos and Sends Links to Other Apps→

Shoots and Leaves, a snap and forget it photo app akin to something like QuickShot, uploads captured photos to services like Imgur, Dropbox, or CloudApp, and then sends the public links to an app like Mail, Reminders, or Safari. Given our focus on productivity apps, an app like this is useful for generating Markdown links that can be pasted into upcoming articles. Inspired by Shoots and Leaves’ Reminders integration, I’d love if Evernote was added as a service, with the ability to send a photo’s link to an Evernote reminder. It’s laser focused, does one thing well, and is $2.99 on the App Store.

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Mophie Announces the Space Pack: An iPhone Battery Case With Local Storage→

At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, Mophie has announced the Space Pack, a backup battery case that comes with 16 or 32 GBs of local storage. Like the Juice Pack Air, the Space Pack has a 1700mAh non-removable battery that Mophie claims will recharge the iPhone to a 100% charge. Through a companion app, the Space Pack can store and retrieve videos, photos, documents, and more from its own internal storage. The 16 GB Space Pack will cost $149.95, while the 32 GB model will cost $179.95, going on sale March 14th.

Update 1/8/14: pre-orders are open.

[via Engadget, Mophie]

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WIRED & Branch Collaborate to Design a Better Connected Smartwatch and Pair of Glasses→

WIRED & Branch’s smartwatch concept blends classic design with modern technology. Image via WIRED.

For WIRED’s January 2014 issue, the publisher reached out to product-design company Branch to conceptualize wearable gadgets that sensibly brings together fashion and function. WIRED’s Cliff Kuang writes:

The watch and glasses are meant to be fashionable enough that the technology is a bonus rather than the big sell. That’s important. If we’re ever going to want to wear computers on our bodies, they’ll have to be stylish enough that we’d wear them even if they weren’t computers.

That, as my colleague Bill Wasik points out in his essay, is the key thing about fashion that tech companies fail to understand. It’s the difference between glasses so cool you want them even if you don’t have bad eyesight and, well, Google Glass, which you couldn’t pay most people to wear.

Yesterday evening, John Gruber said something similar in regards to the new Pebble Steel.

If Pebble, or any “smartwatch” maker, wants to succeed in the real world, they need to make watches that look good compared to any watch, not just “looks good compared to other even uglier smartwatches”.

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App Store Sales Top $10 Billion In 2013, $1 Billion In December Alone→

Apple PR:

Apple today announced that customers spent over $10 billion on the App Store in 2013, including over $1 billion in December alone. App Store customers downloaded almost three billion apps in December making it the most successful month in App Store history. Apple’s incredible developers have now earned $15 billion on the App Store.

In the press release, Eddy Cue calls it “the best year ever for the App Store”. Apple said that developers updated their apps for iOS to bring “content to the forefront while increasing the overall efficiency and performance of their apps” and it notes that several hits of the year were created by developers outside the US. In terms of numbers, Apple confirms that over a million apps are available on the App Store, with 500,000 made for iPad.

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The First App You Open In The Morning→

MG Siegler:

You wake up. You grab your phone. What’s the first app you open?

This sounds like a silly question — or worse, an insulting one. But I find it’s a rather enlightening question. Depending on when the question is asked, the answer can either be telling about the current state of apps or the current state of you.

Like MG, the first app I open every morning is Twitter – well, Tweetbot anyway. It used to be email; then Tweetie; at one point, it was Reeder; for the past year, the first app I’ve always opened in the morning has been Tweetbot. Twitter used to be described as the “water cooler”, and maybe to an extent it still is – but the scope is much larger these days. I can open Twitter and instantly see my mentions about MacStories or The Prompt, direct messages from friends, breaking news, interesting articles, the latest meme – anything. In fact, when in the morning I tell my girlfriend I’m “catching up on the news”, it means I’m scrolling through Tweetbot/Twitter.

In the past few months, I’ve been enjoying the Discover section of the official Twitter app as a “catch up system” too. However, my favorite aspect of the morning Twitter routine remains Tweetbot’s support for background fetching of tweets on iOS 7 – it’s why Tweetbot for iPhone is the first app I use.

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Backblaze→

My thanks to Backblaze for sponsoring MacStories this week. You need a backup of all the data on your computer, and Backblaze offers unlimited and unthrottled backup at just $5 /month per computer. Backblaze automatically backs up all your files – not just a subset of them – every day, all the time, so you won’t lose any of your data in case of theft, fire, flood, stolen or broken computer.

Backblaze was created by former Apple engineers, and the company understands the needs of Apple users. Backblaze has a native Mac app for Mavericks and it comes with an iOS app to remotely access, view, and share your files. Secure and offsite, Backblaze’s continuous backup ensures you can always view and restore files; once installed, you don’t have to think about complicated options and configurations – if it’s installed, Backblaze will do the rest for you.

Among other features, Backblaze supports external drives, uses military-grade encryption for your files, and it has a free web restore feature that also has file versioning built-in. Backblaze is online backup made easy, and you can check it out and sign up for a plan here.

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Building A Better Evernote→

Evernote CEO Phil Libin:

I got the wrong sort of birthday present yesterday: a sincerely-written post by Jason Kincaid lamenting a perceived decline in the quality of Evernote software over the past few months. I could quibble with the specifics, but reading Jason’s article was a painful and frustrating experience because, in the big picture, he’s right. We’re going to fix this.

Honest and concise. I personally haven’t noticed major issues with Evernote for Mac, but the iOS versions of the app have long been affected by bugs and a general instability that iOS 7 only made worse. It’s refreshing to hear a CEO say the things Libin did.

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