Posts in Linked

The App Design Handbook for iOS 7→

Nathan Barry and Jeremy Olson have released the iOS 7 edition of The App Design Handbook, a fantastic guide for anyone who’s interested in iOS app development but doesn’t know where to look or how to start. I have read the book today – even if you’ve been working with iOS for a while, Nathan and Jeremy explain iOS 7 with practical examples and why the changes the OS brings aren’t just cosmetic (or “flat”). The style of the book is informative and concise and several aspects of app planning, design, development, and marketing are covered. I’ve known Jeremy for years, and he knows how to make good apps, pitch them, and turn them into financial and personal successes. These guys know what they’re talking about.

What I like is that you can choose between various options for purchase, starting from the standalone book to the $199 package that comes with 9 interviews with folks like Mark Kawano and Marc Edwards, 9 video tutorials, and 5 resources for app design and development.

With the holidays coming up, The App Design Handbook makes for a great gift to friends or relatives who think they have a potentially good idea but don’t know how to turn it into a successful app. Nathan and Jeremy did a great job and you can buy the book here.

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Apple Announces Features Coming Back to iWork→

Apple responds to iWork criticism:

The new iWork applications—Pages, Numbers, and Keynote—were released for Mac on October 22nd. These applications were rewritten from the ground up to be fully 64-bit and to support a unified file format between OS X and iOS 7 versions, as well as iWork for iCloud beta.

These apps feature an all-new design with an intelligent format panel and many new features such as easy ways to share documents, Apple-designed styles for objects, interactive charts, new templates, and new animations in Keynote.

In rewriting these applications, some features from iWork ’09 were not available for the initial release. We plan to reintroduce some of these features in the next few releases and will continue to add brand new features on an ongoing basis.

I’m glad I didn’t believe Apple was a company that didn’t care about advanced users anymore (as the narrative goes in some corners of the Internet these days). I still think that Apple should avoid this kind of software launches (no criticism is better than criticism, after all), but I’ll take promised features over nothing. If Apple can’t afford to ship more complete rewrites on day one (and it’s not like Apple didn’t think this would happen), being communicative about future changes is obviously better than silence (and we have plenty of precedents).

AppleScript “improvements” have been announced for Numbers and Keynote, but not for Pages (who’s going to tell Pierre Igot?). Seems like a curious omission.

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The Everpix Shutdown→

From the Everpix blog:

It’s frustrating (to say the least) that we cannot continue to work on Everpix. We were unable to secure sufficient funding in order to properly scale the business, and our endeavors to find a new home for Everpix did not come to pass. At this point, we have no other options but to discontinue the service.

I’m sad that Everpix is going away. For a very long time, I debated whether Everpix was worth trying out: the service looked good, and I was only hearing great things from happy customers. So after the discussion we had with Bradley on The Prompt, I signed up, imported seven years of photos, and then paid the annual membership to support Everpix and unlock all features.

I’m not disappointed about the money (Everpix says that all paying customers will be refunded) – I’m just sad that an amazing service is going away because they couldn’t figure out a business model. Everpix was fantastic: photos were grouped by year and pulled from a variety of sources like Instagram and even Messages for OS X automatically. The Flashback feature showed me each morning photos that I took on the same day years ago. They weren’t always the most pleasant memories, but they were my memories, and as such they were cherished. That part – the magic of this software going away – is what saddens me as a user, not just as a customer. I genuinely loved what Everpix was doing.

If there’s a lesson to be taken away, it’s that building great products doesn’t equal building solid businesses. It’s a harsh reality and it’s applicable to any kind of entrepreneurial endeavor – the product that you love crafting for yourself (as Everpix did) doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve created a sustainable business. The Verge has a good story about Everpix, and I’d like to highlight this bit:

The founders acknowledge they made mistakes along the way. They spent too much time on the product and not enough time on growth and distribution. The first pitch deck they put together for investors was mediocre. They began marketing too late. They failed to effectively position themselves against giants like Apple and Google, who offer fairly robust — and mostly free — Everpix alternatives. And while the product wasn’t particularly difficult to use, it did have a learning curve and required a commitment to entrust an unknown startup with your life’s memories — a hard sell that Everpix never got around to making much easier.

Rimer put it a bit differently: “Having a great product is not the only thing that ultimately makes a company successful.”

I loved my three weeks of Everpix. It would be great to see an open-source version of its engine, or perhaps Apple taking everything that made Everpix great (including its team) and using it for the ridiculous mess that is iPhoto (and Photo Stream).

I don’t know if I’ll have the energy to fall in love with another third-party photo service any time soon. I’m just glad that I never stopped backing up my JPEGs.

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Doxie Mobile Scanners [Sponsor]→

Our thanks to Doxie for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Doxie Go is the tiny, rechargeable mobile paper scanner that scans anywhere with no computer required. Scan paper, receipts, and cards, then sync to Doxie’s elegant Mac software.

Doxie makes it easy to go paperless, create searchable PDFs with integrated ABBYY FineReader OCR, and send scans to your favorite Mac and cloud apps – Dropbox, Evernote, and more.

It’s time to finally go paperless. Get your new Doxie Go direct from Doxie, from Amazon.com in the USA, or from Amazon.co.uk in Europe.

Federico’s note: I have two Doxie scanners at home and my family and I have been using them for almost two years to scan important work/health-related documents and old photographs. I like the Doxie scanners because they produce higher-quality scans than what you’d normally get with an iPhone’s camera, but they’re portable and they don’t require much desk space.

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Mavericks Tags with Alfred 2→

I was really excited when Apple announced to add tag support to Finder with OS X 10.9 Mavericks. But after installing the OS update and playing with the new tag feature, I was a bit disappointed on how the feature was implemented. There was neither a command line utility to manage tags nor was there a way to do this with AppleScript. – At least, I did not find a proper solution. So, to add/remove tags to/from a file or folder one had to open the info dialog (⌘+I) and modify the tags in the new input field at the top.

Good work by Marko Kästner. Mavericks’ Finder can be slow at searching or adding tags for power users; Marko’s workflow is nicely integrated with Alfred and it can be activated with a keyboard shortcut.

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Fixing iOS Screenshot Status Bars with Python→

Dr. Drang:

On last week’s episode of The Prompt, Federico went off on a rant about ugly iOS screenshots. He wasn’t complaining about the apps themselves being ugly, he was chastising those of us who post screenshots with status bars showing inconsistent times, signal strengths, and battery levels. And Lord help you if your battery icon is in the red.

His recommendation was Status Magic, a Mac app that cleans up the status bars in your iOS screenshots and makes them uniform. It looks like a nice app, but my thoughts gravitated toward a script using the Python Imaging Library. Why would I write a script when an inexpensive app is available?

Fixing iOS status bars is one of the reasons I need to use my Mac with Status Magic because there is no similar app on iOS. I am playing around with Dr. Drang’s script, which can be easily adapted to Pythonista and integrated with the app’s photos module for Camera Roll integration. Putting together status bar replacement images that match Apple’s ones is a bit of work (it’s tricky to get the fonts right, but now I’m trying this) and they won’t produce good results with blurred status bars, but those are the same inconveniences that iOS 7 brought to Status Magic anyway.

I’m looking forward to seeing what tweaks and improvements the Doctor will make to his script. Once I have a good solution for Pythonista (which I already use to combine screenshots on iOS), my iOS writing and editing workflow for text and screenshots will be largely similar to the OS X one (I still need a good uploader for Cloud Files and an iOS version of this).

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Retiring Fontcase→

Bohemian Coding:

Fontcase saw its first light in 2009, and the Mac landscape has changed a lot since.

The App Store came along and we jumped in enthusiastically, but with the advent of enforced sandboxing, and the tightening up that every OS release brings, things have become rather difficult.

Fontcase was one of my first app reviews for MacStories in 2009 and we even had a “behind the scenes” look at Fontcase 1.0 with prototypes and mockups shared by lead developer Pieter Omvlee. Retiring Fontcase allows Omvlee and his team to focus on Sketch, which is great news.

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Marked 2 Tips for Long-Form Reading→

Brett Terpstra:

Marked 2 is great for live previews while you write Markdown, but it’s also very handy for reading long form articles. There are a variety of themes and many features for quickly navigating through long pieces.

I use Brett’s Marked when I’m writing on my Mac. With Sublime Text, it’s easy to run a custom build command (preview) for Marked and I love that the app (unlike many others) supports header IDs when it converts Markdown to HTML. When I was working on my Editorial review, Marked was essential in the editing process to preview images, code blocks, and navigate through the final 25,000-word document.

Nothing beats Marked’s Markdown preview tools. It turns out, it’s pretty great at enhancing long-form web reading too. Who else thinks this would be fantastic on an iPad?

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