Google Announces Google Maps App Coming to iPad “Soon”

In a a blog post published today to detail the new features of Google Maps for Android devices, Google has announced that the app will also be released for iPad “soon”. Following the removal of the native, Google-based Maps app in iOS 6 (replaced with a new Maps app using Apple data), Google released a native iPhone app last December.

In describing the tablet version of Maps for Android, Google says that the larger screen makes “exploring the world from the comfort of your living room much more fluid, smooth and fun”. Based on the Android screenshot shown on Google’s blog, it appears the Maps app for iPad may be somewhat influenced by the new Google Maps for the web with fullscreen map views and floating cards for menus and discovery.

The updated Google Maps app will focus on exploration to browse and discover new places through a new cards interface that shows “great places to eat, drink, sleep and shop”. Alongside improvements to navigation and reporting of traffic conditions, Google will also bring Zagat and Offers integration, retire Latitude and My Maps, and release new location sharing and check-in options for Google+ (coming soon to iOS). According to Google, the My Maps functionality will return to future versions of the app.

You can read Google’s blog post (with screenshots of the new Google Maps app for Android) here.

The Dropbox Platform→

At its first developer conference that kicked off today, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston announced the Dropbox Platform, a new initiative aimed at making Dropbox the “best foundation to connect the world’s apps, devices, and services”.

Part of the Platform is the new Datastore API, which will allow developers of Dropbox-enabled apps to sync more than just files:

Our Sync and Core APIs already take care of syncing files and folders, but as people use mobile apps more and more, a lot of their stuff doesn’t really look like a file at all. It could be anything — settings, contacts, to-do list items, or the latest doodle you drew.

With the Datastore API, we’re moving beyond files and providing a new model for effortlessly storing and syncing app data. When you use an app built with datastores your data will be up-to-date across all devices whether you’re online or offline. Imagine a task-tracking app that works on both your iPhone and the web. If it’s built with the Datastore API, you can check off items from your phone during a cross-country flight and add new tasks from your computer and Dropbox will make sure the changes don’t clobber each other.

It’s unsurprising to see various comments on how Dropbox Datastore looks like what Apple should have done with iCloud for third-party developers. Last month at WWDC, Apple acknowledged the issues that troubled iCloud’s Core Data sync and promised several fixes coming with iOS 7 and OS X 10.9.

It’ll be interesting to see if a new architecture based on drop-ins (components) that include (for now) a Saver and Chooser (for saving files to and picking them from Dropbox, respectively) will convince third-party developers of iOS apps to keep avoiding iCloud and embracing Dropbox. For as much as Dropbox improves upon its platform, key aspects of the iOS experience such as photos, videos, music, mail, contacts, and todos remain natively tied to Apple’s iCloud service. Can Dropbox apps, developers, and users grow faster than Apple can improve iCloud? Assuming that iCloud will work reliably in iOS 7 and Mavericks, will developers of groundbreaking and innovative apps support both iCloud and Dropbox? How many platforms is too many?

Dropbox says they now have 175 million users; the latest number from Apple is the 300 million iCloud accounts shared at WWDC ‘13. A first result of the new APIs will soon be shown in an update to Mailbox, which Dropbox owns.

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Sponsor: Smile

Our thanks goes out to Smile for sponsoring MacStories with TextExpander.

TextExpander takes the pain out of typing the same mundane things over and over again. If you work in customer support, respond to inquiries, work with various signatures, or find yourself typing the same boilerplate text, TextExpander saves you time. On the Mac, TextExpander lets you create short phrases and keywords that can expand into dates, addresses, and paragraphs of text with just a few keystrokes. You can even create pre-formatted forms that let you add in things like a person’s name. For those who want to take TextExpander to the next level, TextExpander even lets you perform custom actions on text that you might regularly copy and paste from somewhere else, like a technical support guide. If you work with words, TextExpander will prove to be an invaluable tool for your Mac.

TextExpander touch 2.0 on iOS devices now comes with the same great features that are found on the Mac, such as formatted text and fill-ins. If you’re working on the go, it’s a great way to get the same benefits from of the desktop onto your iPhone or iPad.

Try TextExpander for your Mac today by downloading a free trial. If you like it, be sure to try TextExpander touch, which can be downloaded  from the App Store.

Learn more about the benefits of TextExpander here.

Evernote for Mac Gets Direct Skitch Integration

Evernote and Skitch

Evernote and Skitch

With a new version released today, Evernote has updated its Mac app to include a brand new communication layer with Skitch, the company’s image/document annotation and sharing tool.

When Evernote acquired Skitch in the summer of 2011, I wondered how they would manage to deeply integrate the two apps in a way that would make storing a note and annotating it a seamless experience. In the past two years, Evernote focused on revamping its desktop and iOS clients and on launching a new version of Skitch with Evernote integration – meaning that Skitch could sync notes to Evernote, and those notes would show up inside an Evernote notebook with inline previews and changes, but Evernote couldn’t direct plug into Skitch for further editing. Here’s what I wrote in 2011:

According to Evernote, the engineers at the two companies will be working closely in the coming months to deeply integrate Skitch and Evernote with each other, as right now the only way to let the apps communicate on a Mac is by annotating an image in Skitch, and manually drag it into Evernote. It wouldn’t be a surprise if the app gained a feature to push annotations to Evernote’s cloud to avoid drag & drop — considering the app is coming to mobile devices, this has been certainly considered by the Evernote team.

Users could drag and drop images between Evernote and Skitch, but that would result in duplicate files and wasted storage space – an issue that was exacerbated by iOS’ inferior sharing capabilities and limited “Open In” menu. In short, it always struck me as unusual that Evernote couldn’t figure out a way to let its apps “talk” to each other, avoiding manual interaction in favor of simple, intuitive inter-app communication that treated Evernote as a storage space and browser, and Skitch as an editor.

Today’s Evernote 5.2 for Mac does exactly this, and quite admirably as well. I have been testing the new version, which has gained a new Skitch button in the note editor that allows you to send any note – either as text, image, or combination of both – directly to Skitch for editing. When you’re done annotating in Skitch, you can send a file back to Evernote – and not just back to Evernote’s cloud, but back to the Evernote app itself, which will automatically come in the foreground again, showing the new version of an image/document already inside a note. Read more

Watermarker 1.2 with Editable Custom Image Watermarks→

I first looked at Watermarker, developed by my friend and colleague Don Southard, back in January when version 1.1 added batch processing:

Watermarker provides a simple and automated way to add watermarks to images. You can choose between various options including text, your own logo, or even a customizable strikethrough. The app has a clean interface with the “canvas” (the area where you can drop an image) displayed on the left, and watermarking settings on the right. I like how you can save presets (so I can have one for my “large” MacStories watermark, another one for the smaller version), and the fact that an image’s size is reported right below its preview.

Version 1.2 of the app, released today, comes with several enhancements for custom image watermarks, which are now editable. You can resize an image watermark that you want to place on top of other images through a pinch-to-zoom gesture or manual controls. Aside from the default positions, you can also click to drag a watermark around or use the arrow keys for additional precision. I’m happy with the feature because I often end up with watermarks that are either too big for a screenshot/photo, or that I would like to position elsewhere on an image.

You can check out Watermarker here. The app is available at $7.99 on the Mac App Store.

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CoolIris for iOS Adds Evernote Integration→

Gabe Weatherhead on CoolIris’ latest update:

There is now support for connecting with Evernote. Importantly, it can be configured to show photos for a specific tag as well, searches or all photos. This is a nice option for using Evernote as a photo locker. I’m loving it for the scans of my daughter’s school art I collect in Evernote.

This is an interesting idea – I imagine I could plug CoolIris into Evernote’s “skitch” tag to view a stream of my Skitch notes, or perhaps the “Paperless” notebook to view the most recent receipts and bills I have scanned. I don’t use Evernote as a photo locker (my photos are all backed up to Dropbox, shared through Instagram and backed up with IFTTT, or uploaded to Droplr), so I guess I would only rely on CoolIris for screenshots or documents archived as images.

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Getting Safari’s Selection on iPad As HTML With A JavaScript Bookmarklet→

I modified this bookmarklet posted by “Tim Down” on StackOverflow to send selected text from Safari to Drafts as HTML. The result is the following code:

javascript:(function(){var%20h="",s,g,c,i;if(window.getSelection){s=window.getSelection();if(s.rangeCount){c=document.createElement("div");for(i=0;i<s.rangeCount;++i){c.appendChild(s.getRangeAt(i).cloneContents());}h=c.innerHTML}}else%20if((s=document.selection)&&s.type=="Text"){h=s.createRange().htmlText;}window.location='drafts://x-callback-url/create?text='+(h);})()

So let’s say you want to grab the first paragraph in this post. Normally, in Safari for iPad you’d end up with the plain text fetched by window.getSelection:

This is a fantastic report with lots of data points for any developer trying to get their apps featured by Apple. Dave Addey’s highly interactive regional graphs and notes are very well done. Be sure to check out Dave Addey’s other works on his main blog.

As you can see, formatting and hyperlinks have been removed. With the bookmarklet above, you’ll receive the HTML version of the selection – which looks like this. But what’s the point?

My idea was that I wanted to be able to automate the process of capturing rich text from iOS’ Safari; I wanted to achieve the same kind of functionality I have on the Mac, where rich text can be dragged from Safari or Chrome and dropped into Evernote, preserving styles, hyperlinks, and images. I thought that combining HTML output with an Evernote Append action (with the “Send as Markdown HTML” option turned on) would let me receive valid HTML content in Evernote starting from an iOS workflow. And, for the most part, I was right, because the workflow does mostly work.

As it turns out, Evernote is extremely cautious with the HTML tags they accept, and the ones that are supported follow the XHTML guidelines as ENML is a superset of XHTML. This means that my bookmarklet will work for something as simple as selecting a single paragraph, but may easily fail with multiple selections, inline images, complex styles, and so forth. When that will happen, Drafts will return an error when trying to append HTML to Evernote; obviously, this will work just fine with Dropbox, which doesn’t care about the kind of text you’re using in your actions. Even better, this should work very well with Textastic’s just-released update that supports x-callback-url.

I guess the solution would be to build a Pythonista-based converter for Evernote-approved XHTML tags and place it between Safari and Drafts, converting HTML tags Evernote won’t like to compatible ones. If you’re interested, my birthday is August 10.

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The Apps That Get Featured in the App Store→

Over the past few months, I’ve been researching the kinds of apps that get featured on the iOS App Store home page for different countries around the world. I’ve posted my initial findings as an online report with dynamic graphs and analysis.

This is a fantastic report with lots of data points for any developer trying to get their apps featured by Apple. Dave Addey’s highly interactive regional graphs and notes are very well done. Be sure to check out Dave Addey’s other works on his main blog.

The most interesting data point involves free vs. paid apps. It’s not really surprising in hindsight, but there’s a much higher number of apps that were free when they were featured compared to ones that had paid features. The exceptions seem to be books and productivity apps.

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