Posts in Linked

Sunlit→

Manton Reece’s new iPhone app, Sunlit, is out today and available for free on the App Store (with an In-App Purchase to unlock the full version). I think it’s a nice idea: Sunlit is Manton’s take on iPhoto web journals, but built for App.net file storage and sharing.

You choose some photos that “tell a story” – could be a trip, a family gathering, anything you want to remember – and the app pulls in their metadata for date and location. You can add text comments to jot down memories, import photos from Dropbox if you don’t keep them in the Camera Roll, and even add check-ins manually, from Foursquare, or from Steve Streza’s Ohai app. When you’re done, you end up with a story that has full-res photos, text, GPS and time metadata, check-ins, and possibility to invite other App.net users to collaborate (here’s my sample story).

I don’t think that I’ll use Sunlit regularly because I’m not sure I could get my parents (essentially, the only people I share personal photos with) to sign up and use App.net. But I think that Sunlit is a good idea that shows how the App.net API can be used for more than social updates (Broadcasts being another good example). Manton knows the importance of preserving digital memories and I’m looking forward to future updates to Sunlit (there’s no iPad version or video support for now). Sunlit is available on the App Store.

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Horizon Captures Landscape Videos, No Matter the Orientation→

Here’s an app that fixes a common problem in recording videos: recording horizontal, widescreen videos no matter how you’re holding your iPhone. As you rotate the phone from landscape to portrait, or vice versa, Horizon uses the iPhone’s sensors to keep the aspect ratio the same. The phone rotates around a virtual frame, rather than being the actual frame. The transitions aren’t perfect yet, but it works pretty well and I imagine camera shake can be ironed out in future updates. Horizon lets you capture video in other aspect ratios as well, has few different filters to choose from, and lets you share your videos to social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Download it from the App Store for a dollar during their launch sale.

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When Apple Reached Parity With Windows→

Horace Dediu:

The decision making process for buying computers, which began with large companies IT departments making decisions with multi-year horizons, has changed to billions of individuals making decisions with no horizons. Companies have become the laggards and individuals the early adopters of technology.

The fundamental shift is therefore in the quantity of decision makers and the quality of those decisions. Those who buy are also those who use and their decisions will be perhaps whimsical, maybe impulsive and not calculated, but fundamentally, in the aggregate, wise.

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CleanMyMac 2→

Our thanks to MacPaw for sponsoring MacStories this week with CleanMyMac 2. CleanMyMac is the simplest, fastest way to clean your Mac and remove unnecessary junk that your computer doesn’t need or has accumulated over time.

CleanMyMac can scan your Mac and find – besides unnecessary system files – files that you haven’t opened in a long time and that you likely don’t need anymore. CleanMyMac’s algorithms will find cache files, system and user logs, broken login items and preferences, old iOS software updates, hidden iPhoto files, and other large files that only waste space on your Mac; with an intuitive interface, the app will allow you to safely remove them and regain space without causing any issue with OS X (the app is ready for Mavericks).

In order to ensure that CleanMyMac would always remove the right files from OS X, MacPaw built a Safety Database for the app – a set of rules and exceptions that CleanMyMac uses to properly clean up junk files without doing any harm to the user’s system. The developers published a blog post on this feature, which you can read here.

CleanMyMac 2 is available at $39.95. A free trial is available at MacPaw’s website.

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A Software World→

Great article by Robert McGinley Myers on cynicism in the tech press. I agree with every word of it.

Software is the magic that makes our devices “indistinguishable from magic”. Many of us think of it as an art form, and yet it’s a strange sort of art form. Most art forms don’t remind you to take out the recycling or help you lose fifty pounds. But the things software can do are almost limitless. Maybe tech journalists would be less cynical about the advances of technology if they wrote more about software than hardware, and more about the how than the what — how software is not only changing its shape, but changing our shape, in more ways than one. That is the real, ongoing technological revolution.

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Brett Terpstra’s New Adventures→

Brett Terpstra is now an independent developer and writer:

Monday will be the start of increased focus on existing projects and attention to new ideas that have been bubbling up. I’ll be writing, including finishing my tagging book and working on the children’s book. I’ll be developing Marked (starting with the App Store version) and adding a couple of smaller apps to the App Store list. I’ll continue blogging, which brings me to a final request.

If you’ve ever played with OS X automation workflows, Automator, scripts, or TextExpander snippets, it’s likely that you used one of Brett’s tools. Brett is the developer behind Marked 2 (one of my must-have Mac apps) and I’m excited to see what he’ll do next.

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Everpix Shares Full Company Dataset→

Everpix:

Building a startup is about taking on a challenge and working countless hours on solving it. Most startups do not make it but rarely do they reveal the story behind, leaving their users often frustrated. Because we wanted the Everpix community to understand some of the dynamics in the startup world and why we had to come to such a painful ending, we worked closely with a reporter from The Verge who chronicled our last couple weeks. The resulting article generated extensive coverage and also some healthy discussions around some of our high-level metrics and financials. There was a lot more internal data we wanted to share but it wasn’t the right time or place.

With the Everpix shutdown behind us, we had the chance to put together a significant dataset covering our business from fundraising to metrics. We hope this rare and uncensored inside look at the internals of a startup will benefit the startup community.

A comprehensive dataset that includes all kinds of metrics: besides user subcriptions, revenue, and monthly costs, you’ll also find metrics for latency between freemium trials and subscription purchases, user engagement, AWS cost breakdowns, and more. It’s sad that Everpix shut down, but the data they have open-sourced will certainly help anyone who’s building out a startup and never had access to this kind of documented data before.

Don’t miss the VC pitch decks and email exchanges. One of the investors’ primary concerns was that Everpix was difficult to explain to mobile users who just want their photos to “work”, and I think they have a point there. Apple needs to get their act together and streamline the way iCloud, Photo Stream, and the Photos app work. Everpix had built an impressive technology (check out their original plans for 2014 in the presentations) and, through the data, you can get a glance at the various reasons why it didn’t work out. Sections about their propretary image analysis tools have been redacted, which makes me even more curious to know who bought the company’s core technology.

[via Bradley Chambers]

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Terminology Workflows For Editorial→

Greg Pierce:

Terminology has always had great direct integration with our own apps, Drafts and Phraseology that allows you to easily lookup and select replacement words and have them directly replaced inline with your editing. You can see that integration in action.

In the latest version (3.0.6) of Terminology, I added a tweak to its URL schemes to allow it to integrate more easily with certain other apps, particularly Editorial, Ole Moritz’s excellent iPad text editor.

Terminology is my favorite dictionary app and I wish Editorial had a popover to replace Apple’s default dictionary, like Instapaper did. The workflows are the best alternative to that for now, and they work well.

It would be nice to have selectable synonyms and antonyms built into the system dictionary in iOS 8.

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The Internet In Your Pocket→

On the seventh anniversary of the original iPhone announcement, the boys take a look back at Steve Jobs’ keynote.

Seven years ago today, Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone at Macworld. We wanted to properly celebrate the iPhone’s seventh birthday with a special episode that would offer a look back at the rumors, excitement, and speculation that led up to Jobs’ keynote. I think that we did a good job, and you can find the episode here.

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