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The Numbers From Apple’s October 23 Event

As usual with every Apple product announcement, keynotes start with “state of the business” introduction that, through various numbers and facts, reveals how the company is doing in several areas such as retail, the App Store, and hardware sales. At today’s media event in San Jose, Apple CEO Tim Cook shared some interesting details on a variety of subjects.

  • iPhone 5 is off to a “tremendous start”. It’s been the fastest-selling opening weekend in the history of mobile phones.
  • Apple has already sold 3 million units of the new iPods (combined with the rest of the line-up).
  • 200 million devices have been updated to iOS 6.
  • 125 million documents have been stored in iCloud.
  • 300 billion iMessages have been sent to date.
  • 28,000 iMessages are sent every second.
  • 160 million Game Center accounts have been created.
  • 70 million photos have been shared with Photo Stream.
  • 700,000 iOS apps are available, 275,000 iPad apps.
  • Customers have now downloaded 35 billion apps from the App Store.
  • $6.5 billion have been paid to developers.
  • 1.5 million books are available on iTunes.
  • 400 million books have been downloaded since the launch of the Store.

For more coverage, check out our October 23 news hub and follow @macstoriesnet on Twitter.

Apple To Live Stream Today’s Media Event→

Apple To Live Stream Today’s Media Event

As reported by MacRumors, Apple has added an “Apple Events” application to the Apple TV software, confirming that it will offer a live stream of today’s media event starting at 10 AM PT. Among other additions to the software, the Apple Events app is noteworthy as it marks a return for Apple to offering live streams for its media events. It’s not clear yet whether Apple will also provide a live video feed for other devices or browsers.

In the past, Apple experimented with live video streams through Safari on Apple.com. Notably, Apple’s last video stream took place in 2010 for the Back to the Mac event, when the company unveiled OS X Lion and the new MacBook Airs.

Today’s event, rumored to be focused on the debut of a smaller iPad, will begin at 10 AM in San Jose, California. Check your time zone below, and stay tuned for our coverage through @MacStoriesNet and our October 23 hub.

Time Zones:

13:00 — New York, New York
10:00 — San Francisco, California
04:00 — Sydney, Australia
02:00 — Tokyo, Japan
01:00 — Shanghai, China
10:30 — New Delhi, India
21:00 — Moscow, Russia
19:00 — Rome, Italy
18:00 — London, England

Update: Beau Giles has posted two direct links for the live stream and XML file of the event. The links were found in the Apple TV software passed through a proxy. They’re likely to change later today, and we’ll keep you posted on solutions to stream the video elsewhere, if possible.

Update #2: Apple just confirmed they will also stream the event through Apple.com. This is the direct link for the browser-based live stream. As for the requirements:

Live streaming video requires Safari 4 or later on Mac OS X v10.6 or later; Safari on iOS 4.2 or later. Streaming via Apple TV requires second- or third-generation Apple TV with software 5.0.2 or later.

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Automatically Save An OmniFocus Project As iThoughts Mind Map→

Automatically Save An OmniFocus Project As iThoughts Mind Map

After I posted about my OmniFocus > iThoughts mind-mapping workflow, several readers asked whether it’d be possible to only convert a specific section of OmniFocus to iThoughts format (as well as plain text and OPML). As Robin Trew, creator of the script, explains in the Help section:

Specify a sub-tree by the OmniFocus id of its root node. Defaults to None.

You can, in fact, slightly modify the script  by adding an -a switch and the ID of a particular project to restrict the query to that project and its subtree. This will work if you only want to export a specific Project to mind-map; Contexts have a different subtree structure in OmniFocus’ database.

For instance, I only wanted to create a mind map for my MacStories project. To do so, I control-clicked on the project in the app’s sidebar, and selected “Copy As Link”; this will give you an OmniFocus URL like omnifocus:///task/oREye1BBxdg. The ID is the alphanumeric string after /task/.

Follow my tutorial, and add the -a switch as an additional filter:

python $HOME/ofoc_to_mindmap_018.py --output=$HOME/Dropbox/Maps/MacStories -m map.itm -c '0' --format=itmz -a oREye1BBxdg

Make sure to check out Robin’s script, as it’s much improved since the original release. You can also visit Robin’s website (and follow him on Twitter) for several AppleScript-related custom scripts and resources.

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Use Twitter for iOS with App.net→

Use Twitter for iOS with App.net

Developed by Steve Streza, Apparchy is a proxy server that lets you use the official Twitter apps for iOS with App.net. Built for the App.net hackathon that took place yesterday, Apparchy provides a functional API that lets the official Twitter clients work with App.net. As Streza explains on his personal blog:

Today I shipped the first alpha of Apparchy, which turns Twitter’s official iOS apps into App.net clients. You sign up for a free account on apparchy.net, add your app.net account, and then log into the Twitter app with your Apparchy username and password. Then, the Twitter app will start loading data from app.net through the Apparchy API. You can view your stream, your mentions, your profile, your followers, and your friends, as well as post, reply, star, and repost. It’s not entirely complete, and some parts of the app will have no data or return nothing, but the core experience is pretty good.

I have set up Apparchy with my App.net account, and it works just as advertised. Some Twitter-related features and UI elements aren’t obviously compatible with App.net, but for the most part, Apparchy is indeed reliable as a Twitter=App.net bridge. There are some bugs, so use caution if you already rely on Twitter for iOS for your Twitter accounts.

If you, like me, don’t use Twitter for iOS but have it on your device, delete your existing accounts and set up Apparchy. I don’t like Twitter for iOS, but this is a cool experiment nevertheless.

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Convert Twitter.com URLs to Tweetbot Links

I communicate with my team through iMessage. We’ve tried many “communication services” over the years, yet, since last Fall, we’ve always come back to Apple’s solution. It’s not perfect for us, its reliability is far from 100%, but it works.

As we keep using iMessage every day, there’s one category of “media” we’re constantly sharing: Twitter URLs. We find some cool piece of information or news on Twitter, we share it with the team. Linking back to tweets has, in a way, become our favorite type of commentary for fun, news-hunting, and everything in between.

Twitter.com URLs, though, aren’t the best way to jump back to a tweet, especially when you’re on a mobile device. When you’re on a Mac, clicking on a Twitter link will open a new browser tab, which doesn’t really bother us as we’re used to opening background tabs on our computers. But on the iPhone and iPad, it can become annoying: there’s a limit of 8 Safari tabs on the iPhone, you get yanked out of Messages, and, most of the time, mobile.twitter.com URLs just don’t work. In our team chat, we’ve speculated the “Not Found” errors we’ve seen may be related to how Tweetbot generates Twitter URLs when you hit “Copy Link to Tweet”: instead of using status in the URL slug, it uses statuses, which seems to be the reason behind erroneous redirecting on mobile devices.

We’ve come to the conclusion that we want to be able to easily copy twitter.com URLs and turn them into links based on Tweetbot’s URL scheme. Using a simple tweetbot:// URL, you can use Twitter’s status ID – the same you receive when you copy a link – to open a single tweet directly in Tweetbot. And the best part is, the same URL scheme works consistently across Tweetbot for iOS and Tweetbot for Mac. As everyone on the MacStories team is already using Tweetbot, the solution seemed obvious – plus: no more browser tabs.

The problem was finding a way to convert twitter.com URLs easily, without having to remember complex combinations of keystrokes and commands. Furthermore, as I promised my team I’d come up with a way, I had to figure out a solution to do text conversion directly on iOS.

As a result, I’ve come up with an AppleScript, a Keyboard Maestro macro, and a simple Python script to transform Twitter URLs into their Tweetbot counterparts. Read more

Apple Decorates California Theatre for iPad Mini Event→

Apple Decorates California Theatre for iPad Mini Event

As reported by Techie Buzz, Apple has decorated the California Theatre in San Jose, CA – the location for its upcoming media event next Tuesday – with colorful banners. Using the same graphical approach of the media invitation, the banners show an Apple logo inside a “psychedelic” background that also forms an Apple logo. The theatre marquee simply read “Apple Special Event”.

As we noted when Apple sent the invitations for the event to the press, the graphics are somewhat reminiscent of the first iPad event’s invitation, as well as background images Apple has used for recent events in San Francisco. Continuing an unofficial trend that has members of the press constantly speculating, Apple this time chose to use a “We’ve got a little more to show you” tagline.

Apple is, in fact, rumored to be announcing a smaller version of the iPad next week. Rumored to be called “iPad Mini”, the device will likely feature a 7.85-inch display and a thinner, lighter form factor. However, recent rumors have claimed Apple will also announce iBooks 3.0, a 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro, and new iMacs and Mac minis at next week’s event.

Check out the entire photo gallery at Techie Buzz.

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Send Selected OmniFocus Task to Plain Text File

I save a lot of stuff into OmniFocus: bits of text, URLs, emails. I used to save favorite tweets into it, too. The app’s Quick Entry panel is so easy to invoke and so well-integrated with core parts of OS X  that, most of the time, I find myself clipping information that shouldn’t be into OmniFocus at all. However, I also find the process of manually going through that information beneficial to my workflow: it allows me to mentally and practically separate actionable items (tasks) from things to read and things to write (Instapaper material and my future articles, essentially).

I have created a simple AppleScript to send the selected OmniFocus task to a text file. The script is meant for how I use OmniFocus; hopefully you’ll find it useful as well. Feel free to modify it.

Typically, when I decide to go through my OmniFocus inbox, I find a lot of tasks that are actually ideas of things I want to do or write. Ideas don’t go into OmniFocus. Until those ideas become actionable items, I send them to a text file so I can elaborate on them and see if they can evolve. Like I said, most of the time those ideas are for new articles.

I store all my notes in a single Apps/ directory on my Dropbox. Based off the same AppleScript, I have created a Keyboard Maestro macro to create a new text file for each processed task; this is for ideas I know will turn out to be single, standalone articles. For ideas I’m not so sure about, I prefer to append them as text to an Ideas.txt file I keep in Dropbox as an “everything bucket” for inspiration. Read more

Single Podcast Episodes, Huffduffer, and Podcast Apps

Last week I tweeted that developers of podcast apps should figure out a way to let users quickly add podcast episodes from anywhere. I am subscribed to less than 10 podcasts, and I listen to nearly each new episode of them. However, there’s been so much good stuff lately that I’ve found myself wanting to check out another podcast’s episode every once in a while. Maybe it’s an episode of a 5by5 show I’m not subscribed to, or an interview I’m interested in. How can I save these “single episodes” from any device?

Downcast, my podcast client of choice, comes with a “mark for streaming” functionality that lets you add a single episode to a temporary list you can go through later. But I wanted something more like Instapaper: I want to save an episode to a “for later” list I can access and listen to from any device, at any time. I want to be able to save an episode with the click of a button and forget about it – it has to be frictionless.

Huffduffer does just that. It is web service that lets you “Instapaper episodes”: it has a bookmarklet which lets you clip podcast pages and save them to a single list on your account, which, unfortunately, can’t be set to private (unless I’m not seeing a setting). It doesn’t bother me to have my profile public, but a private option is always welcome. You can tag episodes, browse other people’s profiles and tags, and check out popular episodes on the homepage.

The cool thing about Huffduffer is that your profile is, essentially, an RSS feed that you can add to any podcast app that supports RSS – which means basically every app nowadays. Adding your Huffduffer profile’s RSS feed as a podcast will enable you to listen to the episodes you’ve saved through the bookmarklet, as Huffduffer directly fetches the audio file of a webpage you save. In my tests, it worked perfectly with podcast pages from 5by5, 70Decibels, and Mule Radio.

To add an RSS feed in Downcast, simply choose Add Podcasts > Add Podcasts Manually; your Huffduffer feed will be added as a podcast with its own episodes. I’ve also found that refresh times are fast – as soon as you add an episode to Huffduffer, your RSS feed will be updated.

It is slightly more complicated with Apple’s Podcasts app. The app doesn’t have a visible “Add from RSS” button, but you can force it to add one by pasting the URL into the search field. The app will recognize the URL and ask you to subscribe.

Huffduffer is a niche tool that, for me, solves a recurring problem. I can now save episodes from any device without having to subscribe to an entire show if I’m just interested in a a single episode. If I had to nitpick, I’d say I’d like Huffduffer to offer higher-res (Retina-quality) artwork for its default image.

Check out Huffduffer here.