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Year Walk Review

Last night, I finished Year Walk – the latest game from Simogo, creators of Bumpy Road and Beat Sneak Bandit – and even if games don’t belong in my usual area of coverage here at MacStories, I think Year Walk deserves a special mention.

Calling Year Walk a “game” is actually reductive. Even though it plays like a game, Year Walk is an experience spanning various aspects of storytelling, Swedish folklore, multitouch interactions, sound, and additional reading material available in a Year Walk Companion app.

Year Walk is the most unique “game” I have played on iOS in years. I’ll try my best to describe its appeal in this post. Read more

Twitterrific 5.1 Adds Muffling, a New Font, and Picks Up Speed

MufflingSorry Zac! I promise I did it just for the screenshot.

Muffling

When The Iconfactory launched Twitterrific 5, they launched an app that reflected a specific vision of what a Twitter client should be. Twitterrific certainly hasn’t lost its charm since it launched back in December. Setting itself apart with a modern interface and clever gestures, Twitterrific started anew with a clean slate and plenty of room to add features thanks to feedback from their fans. Throughout the last few months, The Iconfactory has been progressively iterating Twitterrific, leading up to the first major update which launched yesterday evening.

The most notable feature in Twitterrific 5.1 is muffling. It’s muting made simple.

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Reader X 2.0

ReaderX

ReaderX

MacStories readers know that my favorite Google Reader client these days is Mr. Reader, especially after an update that added a “services menu” to the app, substantially increasing its interoperability with other apps. However, I’ve also been a fan of Reader X as a companion Google Reader app. A year after its original release in February 2012, developer Wolfgang Augustin released Reader X 2.0, which is a solid update that adds several new functionalities while building upon the original concept of the app.

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Cloudier: A Detailed, Yet Minimal CloudApp Client for iPhone

URL shorteners – most of us use them to compact long URLS for sending files and links to friends, clients, and social networks. Although sites like Twitter have wrapped their t.co links around everything, people still want to have their own solution to share and track links that they share with the world. Droplr and CloudApp are two of the top services out there with free and paid subscriptions. Each are similar but each have their own caveats. While Droplr has an official iOS client, CloudApp still does not, but there are some great third-party apps out there like Cloud2go and Cloudette.

Designer Jackie Tran and developer Benjamin Mayo have teamed up to create their very own CloudApp iPhone client, Cloudier. Cloudier debuted on the App Store today and it’s a minimal yet feature-filled CloudApp iPhone client that I really have enjoyed using. Read more

Instashare: Transfer Files the Easy Way

Instashare is a new iOS/Mac app by the folks over at Two Man Show, also known for their popular Finder style iOS app – iStorage 2. Instashare is a unique app for effortlessly transferring files between your iPhone or iPod touch and a Mac computer.

The iOS app is extremely well built. It has an interface consisting of three main pages that the user must swipe through to navigate the app. The first page displays the files you have available to share with other devices running Instashare; the second page gives you quick access to the photos in your Camera Roll; the third page is reserved for some basic settings, help documentations, and for the $0.99 In-App Purchase to disable ads. I made one transfer from my iPhone to my Mac, and immediately paid to remove ads because I knew this app would be a frequently used tool in my iOS workflow.

Instashare’s UI is clean and intuitive to use. Simply hold your finger down on any file or picture and you will be presented with a list of any nearby devices to which you can drag and drop your file. The drag and drop functionality along with the animations and user interface are a complete home run. Read more

Control YouTube Videos with Your Mac’s Media Keys with Tube Controller

Out of habit I tend to reach for my media keys when playing music and videos. While Rdio has certainly spoiled me with its compatibility I’ve yet to learn that the rest of the world, the web mainly, doesn’t work with the three most useful keys on my keyboard. While trying to pause YouTube videos with the play / pause key can lead to some egregious overdubs, it’s always a little frustrating when it doesn’t just work.

Enter Tube Controller, a free app from the Mac App Store for anyone running Snow Leopard and beyond. Interfacing with Chrome and Safari, Tube Controller sits in the menubar and enables your Mac’s media keys to fast forward, rewind, and pause videos on YouTube. It’s simple and convenient. You can’t hide the menubar icon, but you can tuck it away with Bartender if you’d like.

Tube Controller does a few clever things. Rewinding and fast forwarding YouTube videos is interesting because it always feels like it works perfectly. That is to say in just the right increments. It isn’t an exact amount, but Tube Controller seems rewind and fast forward in roughly 3.5-percent increments based on some quick math and plentiful watching of various length videos. Some more complicated algorithm looks at the duration of the video and slightly adjusts where needed.

The app is also aware of iTunes and what it’s doing. If it’s in the background, Tube Controller will keep eyes on YouTube, letting you play and pause the video even when you’re browsing other tabs or jumping into different apps. Once iTunes comes into the foreground or you close whatever tab your YouTube video is playing in, Tube Controller directs the media keys to control iTunes instead. Apps that implement their own media key solutions like Rdio will override the controls.

Without the Flash Player installed, I’ve found Tube Controller doesn’t work with the YouTube 5 extension I have enabled on Safari. Others, in the app’s review section and on Twitter, have noted that Tube Controller also doesn’t work in a full screen view. I’ve personally had success with Chrome and both its full screen and presentation modes, as well as YouTube’s full screen video player in that browser.

I don’t know why you would watch two YouTube videos at once, but if you do, Tube Controller handles it pretty well. The last video you viewed takes precedence over the other. It doesn’t work on web pages with embedded YouTube videos, however.

Tube Controller offers to launch when you log on and there’s a few other settings such as keeping your Mac awake while YouTube is playing (although I don’t think my Mac has ever gone to sleep while YouTube is playing) and changing the color of the menubar icon from black to red. You can enable and disable its functionality manually if you’d like.

I’m keeping Tube Controller running in the background (it uses up a measly amount of memory) for the convenience of using my media keys with YouTube. It’s certainly recommended if your play / pause reflexes are anything like mine. Download it from the Mac App Store.

Side note: The developer doesn’t have a personal site or a landing page up, but you can check out some of his other work on Bipolar (a game also available on the MAS).

iOS Automation and Workflows with Drafts

The latest update to Drafts – a “quick note capturing” app that I’ve covered several times on MacStories – adds a series of features aimed at increasing the possibilities of workflows automation on iOS devices. Obviously, this is something I’m interested in.

It seems like enabling users to save time while using apps has been a common thread in the past few months. The success of Launch Center Pro probably “raised awareness” in regards to the whole concept of URL schemes, but it’s been the increased adoption of x-callback-url and interest in automated workflows that proves better inter-app communication is something that (at least) third-party developers are thinking about. Google included a powerful URL scheme in Google Maps and Google Chrome; more recently, Mr. Reader showed how to enable a “services menu” by requiring users to mix URL schemes from other apps with parameters for an article’s title or selected text. These aren’t ideal solutions, but it’s all we have for now.

Greg Pierce, creator of the x-callback-url specification, has improved Drafts in ways that not only make the app more useful to get text onto other services, but also broaden the possibilities for automation through the use of URL schemes.

There are three main new features in the new Drafts: Dropbox actions, URL actions, and an improved URL scheme with support for callbacks and action triggers. I am going to explain how they work and include various actions and bookmarklets to demonstrate different use cases. Read more

Mr. Reader And The Services Menu for iOS

A “services menu for iOS” is a chimera advanced users and developers have long been trying to hunt down. It all started with a mockup Chris Clark posted in 2010, showing how third-party iPhone apps could offer their “services” – just like OS X apps – to the user through a contextual menu. The concept became popular fairly quickly, but, eventually, Apple did nothing.

Fast forward to 2013, iOS users are still asking for better integration of third-party apps with each other. Developers have resorted to using URL schemes, a rather simple way to directly launch other apps and pass information to them – usually bits of text. App Cubby’s Launch Center Pro has become the de-facto solution to create a “Home screen of app shortcuts”, offering a series of tools (such as automatic encoding and different keyboards) to make the process of customizing URL schemes as user-friendly as possible. Launch Center Pro is, in fact, the utility behind many of my favorite iOS tricks.

Pythonista has also become a big part of my iOS automation workflow. Combining the power of Python with the possibility of launching URL schemes, I have created a series of scripts that help me get work done on iOS on a daily basis. Further leveraging Greg Pierce’s x-callback-url, I have ensured these scripts can take a set of data, send it to other apps, process it, then go back to the original app. You can read more about Pythonista in my original article, and I’ve been following updates from developers who implemented URL schemes as well with a dedicated tag on the site.

I concluded my Pythonista article saying:

I believe that, going forward, Pythonista and other similar apps will show a new kind of “scripting” and task automation built around the core strenghts of iOS. As we’ve seen, x-callback-url is a standard that leverages a part of iOS – URL schemes – to achieve simple, user-friendly and URL-based inter-app communication that can be used in a variety of ways. Looking ahead, there’s a chance rumored features such as XPC will bring more Mac-like functionalities to iOS, but developers will still find new ways to make iOS more powerful without giving up on positive aspects such as increased security and the simplicity of the app model.

Mr. Reader – a Google Reader client that I’ve covered on MacStories in the past, and my favorite RSS app – has today been updated to version 1.11, which introduces a generic solution for launching URL schemes that shows how iOS automation is a growing trend, albeit substantially different from what we’re used to see on OS X. Read more