Emoji keyboards have become one of the most popular consequences to Apple offering third-party keyboard replacements in iOS 8. Apple’s default emoji keyboard leaves much to be desired, and developers are finding a new opportunity in being able to give users better input methods for the emoji millions of people use every day. Last week, I covered David Smith’s excellent Emoji++, but I’ve also been enjoying Keymoji, available for free on the App Store.
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Keymoji Custom Keyboard Lets You Add Emoji by Typing Their Name
Emoji++ Is an Emoji Keyboard That Makes Sense
I wouldn’t consider myself a professional emoji user as Casey Liss, but, like many others, I do use emoji to enrich communications with friends and colleagues on a daily basis. Apple’s Emoji keyboard never made much sense to me: it’s hard to find the right emoji in the keyboard’s questionable category choices and characters are organized in pages that you need to swipe multiple times. I often want to use new emoji I haven’t sent before, and it always feels like I’m playing a guessing game against iOS to remember where the koala or the monkeys are.
Thankfully, Underscore David Smith has accepted the challenge of improving the emoji keyboard and released Emoji++ today, an iOS 8 custom keyboard that makes it easier to find and use emoji.
Paste+, a Clipboard Action Widget
When iOS 8 launched three weeks ago, I came across a company called Avanio Labs that had launched a set of three apps on the App Store: Paste+, Agenda+, and Forecast+. The apps were presented as Notification Center widgets, and I found that interesting as I assumed that Apple would reject apps that only offered widgets with no primary functionality. Of Avanio’s three apps, I’ve been using Paste+ on a daily basis. I think it’s a nice little utility to save taps and launch specific iOS features faster with Notification Center.
Tweetbot 3.5: iPhone 6 Support, Interactive Notifications, and iOS 8 Extensions
For the past two months, I’ve been switching back and forth between Tweetbot and Twitter’s official app for iOS in a personal quest to understand what’s the best Twitter client for me today. Tweetbot 3.5, available today on the App Store, has given me the biggest incentive to keep using Tapbots’ app yet: integration with iOS 8 extensions in my Twitter timeline.
Built for iOS 8, DateStamper Lets You Apply Date Stamps to Photos
When I was a kid, my parents used to take a lot of pictures. Family gatherings, vacations, Sunday road trips, our dog growing up. They weren’t photographers by any means – they just wanted to document our lives and create memories. They useddisposable Kodak cameras most of the time – lots of them. Before smartphones and when “cellphones” meant this, those thousands of pictures collected in dozens of photo albums are the ones that stuck around to this day. They haven’t been lost in a cloud backup. They’re in my closet.
Saving Recipes with the AnyList Extension
My girlfriend and I are moving into a new apartment next month, and to justify the expense of a new kitchen I promised myself (and my friends) that I would learn new recipes to go beyond my repertoire of a couple of dozen pizza types and pasta sauces. Cooking is a passion of mine, but I feel like I need to extend my knowledge to a wider catalogue of recipes and ingredients. Therefore, I’m in the process of reading and bookmarking several recipe websites (primarily Italian ones) and I thought it’d be interesting to combine that with recipe apps for iOS 8.
PCalc and the Everything Calculator for iOS 8
I never thought I’d use a complex calculator app such as PCalc, but, following an iOS 8 update and praise from Dr. Drang and Jason Snell, I reconsidered. PCalc is now on my Home screen and I’m using it on a daily basis for all kinds of calculations and conversions.
View Source Code in Safari with an Action Extension
Developed by Paul Hudson, View Source is a $0.99 Universal app that, as the name largely implies, lets you view the source code for webpages (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) in iOS’ Safari with an action extension.
Awesome Screenshot Captures Webpages As Screenshots with an iOS 8 Extension
Available for free on the App Store, Awesome Screenshot lets you capture screenshots of webpages from Safari through an action extension. The idea is a great one – I’ve always looked for a more integrated way of capturing webpages directly in Safari for iOS – but the execution has a couple of flaws that I’d like to see fixed soon.