Posts in Linked

AppleScript XML-RPC

Daniel Jalkut:

My mind was fairly well blown this morning to learn that for more than ten years, AppleScript on Mac OS X has included a built-in command for communicating with XML-RPC and SOAP endpoints on the web.

I had no idea this existed either. Following Daniel’s example script, I have put together a Keyboard Maestro macro that, with a single hotkey, gets the latest post from MacStories, shortens its URL, and tweets it with Tweetbot. It’s the Mac version of my Editorial workflow, and I’ll share it soon.

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First Photos of Jony Ive-Designed Leica M Camera

PetaPixel:

Admittedly, there’s only so much you can alter a Leica M, but now the company has finally released press images of the Ive-designed shooter, and as you might expect, it could be described as “unapologetically simple.”

Jokes aside, the camera basically looks like what you would expect an Apple-Leica hybrid might look like. The aluminum design is to be expected, but apparently it actually took some serious time to get right. According to Leica, the camera you see below is the result of 561 models and nearly 1000 prototype parts made over the course of an 85-day design marathon.

From Leica’s official Google+ account:

Leica Camera is pleased to present The Leica M for (RED), designed by Jony Ive and Marc Newson. The camera, based off the Leica M, will be auctioned off at Southeby’s on November 23rd 2013 to raise money for The Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

From a design standpoint, it features a laser machined aluminum body and an anodized aluminum outer shell. A total of 561 models and nearly 1000 prototype parts were made during the 85 days it took to create of this unique, one of a kind camera.

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Blur 2.0

The new version of Blur, an app to create blurred wallpapers for iOS 7 that I mentioned a while ago, includes a new feature to generate a random wallpaper by tapping a button. What’s nice is that Blur loads random photos from Flickr, displaying a link to the original photo at the bottom of the screen. It’s a cool idea and it can generate interesting wallpapers that you wouldn’t be able to create off your own photos.

Blur is $0.99 on the App Store.

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PDFpen Scan+ [Sponsor]

Our thanks to Smile for sponsoring MacStories this week with PDFpen Scan+.

Smile just released a new app in their PDFpen suite of PDF editing tools. PDFpen Scan+ lets you scan documents, articles, receipts, and more, using your iPhone or iPad camera.

PDFpen Scan+ performs OCR right on your device, with support for 16 languages. Once OCR has been performed, the text in the scanned document can be copied and pasted into another document or the PDF can be exported with searchable text included. You can also open your scans in PDFpen for iPad or PDFpen for iPhone for further editing or share them via Dropbox, Evernote and other services for seamless editing on your Mac.

PDFpen Scan+ is available on the App Store at the intro price of $4.99. Check out the video demo to see all the powerful features packed into this indispensable tool.

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Capturing the Aura of the Scottish Highlands With the iPhone 5s

With intense use (I’ve made about 4,000 pictures in the last four days) I’ve discovered that the iPhone 5S is a very capable camera. The color and exposures are amazingly good, the HDR exposure feature does a stunningly good job in touch situations, the panorama feature is nothing short of amazing—seeing a panorama sweeping across the screen in real time is just intoxicating. Best of all it shoots square pictures natively, a real plus for me since I wanted to shoot for Instagram posting.

This is photographer Jim Richardson, writing for the National Geographic. He continues:

What surprised me most was that the pictures did not look like compromises. They didn’t look like I was having to settle for second best because it was a mobile phone. They just looked good.

The pictures are indeed good, and Apple’s Phil Schiller seems to appreciate the article, too.

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Dr. Drang’s Scripts For Photo Management via the Finder

Dr. Drang, following our photo management discussion on The Prompt #15:

As the podcast proceded, I soon learned that I wasn’t the only one with a photo mess on his hands. Myke Hurley has apparently never organized his photos. He has gigabytes and gigabytes of photos just sitting on his phone. Backed up to iCloud, yes, if you consider that a backup, but with no structure. Bradley began an intervention.

I agreed with much of what was suggested: bringing the photos onto Myke’s Mac through Image Capture and setting up the year/month folders. But Bradley then suggested Myke move his photos into the folder structure by hand, doing maybe fifty a day for the thousands of photos Myke has. This is madness. It’s using a human to serve the computer rather than the other way around. Like me, Myke needs an automated solution.

So I decided to use Myke’s plight as the kick in the pants to get me to finish the scripts I’d been planning to write. As I suspected, it didn’t take very long. Imagining poor little Myke dragging files for weeks on end was just the motivation I needed to sit down and do it.

Personally, I use Hazel for this, but if you don’t want to buy the app, check out Drang’s scripts.

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