This Week's Sponsor:

Copilot Money

The Apple Editor’s Choice Award App for Tracking Your Money. Start Your Free Trial Today

Posts in stories

Yerba Buena Poster Created By Stretching App Icons, Download A Recreated Version As A Wallpaper

On Friday, workers put up the traditional event banners on the Yerba Buena building in which Apple is holding its special media event next Wednesday. You can have a look at the banners here, but as an eagle-eyed reader of MacRumors realised, it seems as if Apple made the poster by stretching various app icons vertically. Another one of MacRumor’s readers, roosternugget, put together a little graphic to indicate which apps were most likely used (see below). It’s pretty clever by Apple’s designers to stretch iPhone app icons vertically and use it as the event poster, given we expect the iPhone 5 itself to feature a vertically larger (or “stretched) display. If you recall, Apple also had fun with the media event invitation which subtly features a shadow with the number “5” coming down from the number 12.

With this knowledge, I decided to open Photoshop and do my best to recreate the event poster. Now it certainly isn’t a perfect recreation but I’ve done my best and it comes close to the banner featured in a photo below. I’ve created multiple versions with and without the Apple logo and for various screen resolutions so that you can use it as a wallpaper, including the following:

  • [16:10] 2880 x 1800 - aka. Retina MacBook Pro
  • [16:9] 2880 x 1620
  • [5:4] 1280 x 1024
  • iPhone 4/4S
  • iPhone 5
  • iPad (Retina)

Download the wallpapers (.zip archive)

Direct links for iOS devices:

The Rise Of Third Party Services And Fall Of Google In iOS

When Apple introduced iOS 6 to the world at this year’s WWDC, one of the most talked about moves was Apple’s decision to step away from their partnership with Google Maps and create their own maps app. In many respects, it wasn’t too surprising given the increasingly strenuous relationship between Apple and Google in the years since the iPhone launched and Google became a competitor with Android, but in recent weeks it was also revealed that YouTube will also no longer be included as a pre-installed app from iOS 6. That leaves Google Search as the only remaining Google service to be integrated into iOS. Yet whilst Apple has been severing its relationship with Google, it has been courting numerous other service providers and integrating them into iOS over the past few years.

Curious to visualise this information, I made a list of every notable service that has been integrated with iOS (and when) and then created the above graphic (click on it to view a larger version). When I had compiled the list, it was pretty compelling (and longer than I had realised), but I think the graphic takes it to the next level and really tells a story about iOS and Apple’s relationship with other services.

Read more

An Apple I In My Town

I live in Viterbo, a small town in Lazio, Italy, not too far away from Rome. My town is a beautiful place to visit with a rich history behind its Etruscan origins; unfortunately, it is often vastly undervalued by its citizens and municipal administration. My town lives and breathes in history, but very few people seem to appreciate its roots.

I took a walk in the center of my town today, and I ended up gazing upon an original Apple I. And an Apple II. And a Lisa. And a Macintosh. Today, the medieval buildings that make Viterbo an evocative architectural tapestry of art and history became, for a moment, a gallery for the modern history of technology.

Thanks to the efforts of Medioera, a festival of “digital culture” at its third annual edition here in Viterbo, Marco Boglione’s original Apple I gained a prominent spot in the gorgeous Piazza del Gesù (take a look at the location) alongside other Apple computers from the 70’s and 80’s, as well as Atari, Commodore, and IBM machines. Read more

New Apps & Tools For More Efficient Writing

For the past week, the entire MacStories team and I have been focusing on finalizing our coverage of Mountain Lion, which, according to recent speculation, may be coming out next Wednesday, July 25th. As you may have noticed, we have been posting less frequently on the site, but we wanted to get our coverage just right, and I think we’ve managed to come up with a good plan. More details soon.

In the meantime, I’d like to share some links of apps and tools I have been using to research, write, and edit my review of Mountain Lion. As a general tip, make sure to check out our Reviews section, as several of the apps we have reviewed recently have a spot on my iPhone or iPad Springboard. But I’ve also discovered some new gems that, while working on the review, have helped me organize all my material more efficiently.

Scrivener. Per Dave Caolo’s recommendation, I decided to give Scrivener a try as a desktop app for writing and researching articles, and I’m glad I did. I’m still a novice – Scrivener is very complex and feature-rich – but here’s a few things that immediately enhanced my workflow: possibility to organize ideas and drafts as outlines, text, or visual notes; support for file attachments and OPML; document references for webpages; split-mode for comparing “snapshots” of document copies without creating duplicates of a file. I have been using Scrivener to compare various edits of my review, and I love it. An iPad app is coming, and I also got this book to learn my ropes around the app. Even better: Scrivener can sync to Dropbox, so I can make additions using the app I prefer. For iOS integration, I’ve been testing an app called Index Card, though I’m still not entirely sold on its implementation of the cork board.

Marked. To preview Scrivener’s contents (written in Markdown), I use Marked. Its exporting features are fantastic, and I have been using the outline navigator to get a better sense of my review’s structure. If you write on a Mac, you need Marked.

Keyboard Maestro Markdown Library. I only found out about this collection of macros this week, when I was looking for ways to automate link insertion in my article with Markdown. It turns out, the Keyboard Maestro Markdown Library contains macros for links, formatting, lists, and even images. I have tweaked them to better suit our site’s requirements (for instance, I have added captions to my image macro, and article titles to the link one using this tip), and, in total, I’m pretty sure they have already helped me save minutes I would have spent copying & pasting HTML instead. Amazingly useful. More on why I love Keyboard Maestro here.

OmniOutliner and CarbonFin Outliner. I have recommended these two apps in the past, but they’re worth a second mention. For my review, I created an outline on my iPhone months ago and started adding new ideas and notes from there. On iOS, I like Outliner because it supports Dropbox and has a simpler interface than OmniOutliner for adding notes and indenting elements. But on the Mac, I rely on The Omni Group’s app because it’s got the best support for keyboard shortcuts and notes – which are both essential to my workflow.

NoMoreiTunes. I had to look up several iTunes applications in the past week, and this Safari extension did the trick (read: it doesn’t launch iTunes when Safari opens an iTunes link).

Markdown Service Tools. Because sometimes I want to use my Mac’s contextual menu to quickly generate HTML off some Markdown.

Macdrifter’s Dictionary Macro. Mountain Lion features a new three-finger single-tap action for Dictionary lookups and file previews, but some apps don’t recognize this gesture. If you use Keyboard Maestro, this is a nice way to forward any selected word to Dictionary.

Evernote. While my writing happened in Scrivener, all other research material that didn’t strictly belong to the article went into Evernote. With it, I use a combination of other apps and hacks that make it easy to save URLs, images, and just about anything. I use EverWebClipper to quickly beam URLs into Evernote from Mobile Safari; lately, I’ve also been playing with EverClip, which doesn’t feature a bookmarklet but can run in the background (“listening” for every new copied file) for 10 minutes. It’s sort of like Pastebot, but for Evernote, which is nice. To automate the process of saving links while on my Mac, I use a couple of AppleScripts put together by our Don Southard, which are obviously configured to work with Keyboard Maestro.

Captio. Indispensable utility to quickly save new tasks into my OmniFocus database.

iFiles. Following GoodReader’s somewhat unexpected removal of its iCloud-based file storage, iFiles came out with a similar functionality, and it works pretty well. iFiles hasn’t received a major update in months – apparently, the developer is working on a 2.0 version – but this iCloud integration is interesting, and works as you’d expect from an iOS file manager.

Last, IFTTT. If I’m not writing, I’m typically distracted by Internet while I browse around looking for interesting stuff. To make sure I can focus on writing without missing out on cool links, I have set up IFTTT to backup favorite tweets and starred Google Reader items to my Evernote and as a text file in my Dropbox. This way, if these services go down or will someday cease to support these functionalities, I’ll still have a complete archive of everything I had saved.

Get A Sense Of What A 7.85” iPad mini Would Be Like

Rumors of a smaller iPad were back again this week with a report from Bloomberg and since then the rumor mill has been in full swing. Not much detail was in the rumor, other than it’s a smaller iPad and that it’ll launch later this year. Earlier in the year, the display was rumored to be around 7.85” and A.T. Faust of AppAdvice gave compelling reasons as to why it makes sense. That number seems to have stuck around with this latest round of iPad mini rumors.

“The reason we [won’t] make a 7-inch tablet isn’t because we don’t want to hit [a lower] price point,” Jobs said. “It’s because we think the screen is too small to express the software. As a software driven company, we think about the software strategies first.” - AllThingsD

When I read the rumors this week I sighed, not again. I wasn’t the only one either, an iPad mini seems like a compromise, with little advantage. Plus the old Steve Jobs quote about 7 inch iPads just kept circling around. But others weren’t so closed minded and were considering whether it might actually have a place in Apple’s product line.

The biggest issue I have is with the screen, and whether the screen can still be sufficiently useful at the smaller size. To find out, I decided to do the old hack of making a little paper template of the iPad mini and see how it looked. I decided to stick with the 7.85” diagonal display size suggested and use a bezel only slightly smaller than those on the current iPad. For comparison I also made a paper template for the current iPad and versions of both with the bevel colored in. You can download, print and cut them out for yourself.

Note: make sure when printing that it isn’t being scaled up or down, as that will adjust the size of the “screen”. Check the little measurement guides to ensure it printed out correctly.

That was all good and well, but it didn’t really give me a sense of what the UI might look like on an iPad mini. So I decided to take some screenshots and shrink them down to the appropriate size. But I also made a duplicate copy of the screenshot and using Photoshop, reconfigured the UI to fit on a 7.85” display without adjusting the size of the buttons. To my mind that’s the only way that Apple would do this - Apple does frequently remind iOS designers to keep buttons at a tappable size (mentioned prominently in iOS Human Interface Guide), just shrinking the current iPad display would make buttons more difficult to tap.

Finally I put it all together into a Keynote presentation so that I could view it on my iPad and visibly see and compare how it would look. I’ve uploaded it, so you can do the same yourself. You just need Keynote for iOS and go into presentation mode to look at it yourself. If you want to go the extra step, cut your iPad mini template out and place it on top of your iPad whilst viewing the screenshots.

Read more

MacStories Interviews: Brett Terpstra

In our ongoing series of interviews with developers and creators in the Apple community, I recently had the chance to talk with Brett Terpstra, developer of Marked, Senior Developer at AOL Tech, TUAW blogger, and “mad scientist” with a knack for finding great solutions through code. When he’s not making awesome things or writing at his personal blog, Brett tweets as @ttscoff.

The interview below was conducted between January 17 and July 4, 2012.

MacStories: Hey Brett! Could you introduce yourself to the readers who haven’t heard about you or haven’t tried any of your apps & scripts before?

Brett Terpstra: Hey Federico,

I’m the original author (now working with Elastic Threads) of a Notational Velocity fork called nvALT, which seems to be what I’m best known for. I also sell an app in the Mac App store called Marked; a MultiMarkdown previewer that watches your text file for changes and updates the preview every time you save it. I’m a bit of a plain text nerd, and a lot of my work focuses on working with and manipulating plain text, as well as keeping data portable and application agnostic. Most of what I do is pure experimentation, coding for the joy of problem solving. Mad science, if you will. Read more

The Current State Of Music-Making and Discovery On The iPad

I have a confession to make: I’m a nerd. Yes, and I’m proud of it, because I think being a nerd means two things: I’m constantly curious about details, and I don’t hesitate to try out new stuff. To satisfy my curiosity, I’ve always dived into Apple’s ecosystem and the latest hardware related to it. Fortunately, my passion for Apple correlates with my love for discovering new music. I’ve been playing guitar since I was eight years old, and I love electronic music from the bottom of my heart as well. I’ve always found myself interested in both the traditional (perhaps organic) hardware side of music, and the more modern, digital software production process.

When the iPhone came out, many blogging colleagues and people around me predicted that its new software system, combined with the mobility of the device itself, would change the way people produce music and think about audible art as a whole. Three years later Apple unveiled the iPad. iPhone music software was indeed present at the time, but people soon recognized that the device’s screen was too small to create usable professional software for it — playing on-screen keyboards was nearly impossible and attempts to build high-end software synths like ReBirth or drum machines ended up in cluttered, untidy screens.

This problem seemed to get solved with the large screen of the iPad. Professional software retailers like KORG immediately started coding software versions of their most successful hardware. For instance, the iElectribe was one of the first apps available after the device’s launch. Over the years, I constantly tried out music apps for the iPad, tested hardware accessories (made possible with the release of iPhone OS 3), and never stopped investigating advantages, problems, and future possibilities of all those apps. Now, five years after the launch of iOS and the iPhone, I think it’s time to look back at how Apple’s mobile devices, with the focus clearly on the iPad, have changed the world of music and how they’ll continue to affect the future.

To do this, I recently went through my app archive and analyzed which kind of music apps remained installed on my devices, and which ones I liked when I tested them, but didn’t gain a place in my personal workflow. I discovered that I had to clearly divide music apps in several areas when discussing them. I distinguished between eight types of available music apps: promotion, discovery, entry level playing apps, handy/learning tools, sketching apps, recording, and professional software.

Throughout this post, I will cover each of those areas separately and point out their current state by discussing the most elaborate app(s) in their respective areas. I will point out the advantages and problems iOS brings to them, and predict — as far ahead as possible — what the future might hold.

Read more

MacStories Interviews: Brett Kelly

In our ongoing series of interviews with developers and creators in the Apple community, I recently had the chance to talk with Brett Kelly, Evernote extraordinaire, founder of NerdGap, and creator of Evernote Essentials. When he’s not making things with words and computers, Brett tweets as @inkedmn.

The interview below was conducted between February 3 and July 3, 2012.

MacStories: Hey Brett! Could you introduce yourself to the readers who haven’t heard about you before?

Brett Kelly: Ahoy Federico! I sure can…

My name is Brett Kelly. I’m a writer, podcaster and software developer from Southern California. By day, I’m the Technical Communications Manager for Evernote where I write user documentation and build cool software tools. I write a blog at nerdgap.com and I’m probably best known as the author of the popular getting started guide for Evernote, Evernote Essentials. I’m happily married to my first wife and we have two crazily wonderful children who are crazy.

MS: I’m a proud Evernote customer myself – I use the service every day – and I have read your Evernote Essentials guide. How did you get started with Evernote in the first place? Getting to work for the company you’re already passionate about sounds like a dream job.

BK: Always nice to meet a fellow Evernote user.

Back in early 2008, a friend of mine send me an invite to the private beta for this thing called “Evernote”. I gave it a brief spin and, as soon as I realized that I could stick stuff in there and it would sync between my work and home computers, I was hooked. Remember this was before the iPhone app, as well as the App Store!

I immediately started using the crap out of it; work stuff, personal stuff, it all ended up in Evernote. Almost four years and over 10,000 notes later, I’m a bigger fan of the product than I was last week and I’m both proud and humbled that I get to work with such a ridiculously smart group of people. Read more