Sponsor: Smile

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

TextExpander saves you time regularly spent writing out the same addresses, signatures, and prose when composing emails, replying to business correspondance, and helping customers. Instead of copying and pasting common replies, TextExpander becomes your magical shorthand for quickly typing out paragraphs and signatures with just a few key presses. By setting up small, text reminders and snippets, you can quickly expand bits of text into long paragraphs, addresses, symbols, boiler plate text, code snippets, and more. Inserting dates, creating statements with customized form fields, and fixing common misspellings will make TextExpander an invaluable tool as a part of your daily workflow. Plus, you can sync TextExpander with Dropbox for keeping shortcuts shared between the office and your personal devices. TextExpander is also integrated into over 140 iOS apps, giving you the option to use your shortcuts anywhere with your iPhone or iPad.

TextExpander is available for only $34.95, and the complimentary version of TextExpander touch for iOS is only $4.99. You can learn more about TextExpander and a download a free trial for your Mac here.

Vector Tiles for MapBox Streets→

MapBox is a platform for creating custom maps, integrating with social networks like Foursquare and services like Hipmunk to provide relevant points of interest on top of data sourced from the OpenStreetMap project. MapBox Streets is a component of the platform that lets developers beautifully stylize OpenStreetMap data, providing an opportunity for businesses to customize map views to better fit their brand.

MapBox is announcing vector tiles for MapBox Streets, which will offer developers working with the platform a single format for powering custom maps that can be shared on mobile devices and on the web.

TileMill, our open source design studio, is going to relaunch with vector tiles fully integrated to be a powerhouse tool for custom cartography. Design iterations can happen in seconds and be applied to a full global vector tileset without lengthy downloads, imports, or time spent tuning database queries. In short, anyone will be able to make a totally custom branded map, of the entire globe, that is lighting fast on every device.

As we’ve seen with Apple’s Maps and Google Maps, vectors make for a lightweight, data efficient way to display what’s around you. Vectors load much more quickly than rasterized images, and their small footprint allows map data to be cached on devices without taking up lots of storage space. MapBox claims that, when powered by vector tiles, their MapBox Streets’ dataset of the entire world can fit onto a single thumb drive.

[via Daniel Jalkut]

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Flipboard 2.0.2 Surfaces Magazines Your Friends are Sharing

New Profile and Friends Screens

New Profile and Friends Screens

Having just shipped a web editor for managing magazines, Flipboard released a small update this morning that focuses on bringing forward basic readership activity and the magazines your friends are curating, as well as adding more options for sharing articles with a new share menu.

Flipboard is continuing to flesh out features related to magazines by first revisiting profiles. Profiles have been updated to display some basic information such as the number of magazines you’re sharing and the number of readers that are currently subscribed to the content that you’re curating. You can’t delve into any kind of trend data at the moment (as you can with Pocket for Publishers for example) — all Flipboard is providing are simple stats that don’t divulge specifics.

Magazines, being a focal point since Flipboard hit verison 2.0, are now included in an additional Friends category as you open the Content Guide. Instead of searching for topics or things you like, you can browse the magazines your friends are publicly curating and subscribe to them. Friends, for example, can be pulled in from Twitter if you’ve added your Twitter account for browsing Tweets and links.

New Share Menu Screen

New Share Menu Screen

The share menu has been vastly improved, and I’m very happy with what’s been done to make sharing links easier than ever. Flipboard now plugs into a variety of social networks, letting you tap icons for Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ in addition to email and sharing via SMS. There’s also new options for copying links to the articles and saving photographs to the Camera Roll.

While Google Reader is being shut down on June 1st, Flipboard is continuing to improve upon integration with the RSS service by making it easier to navigate folders.

Flipboard is available as a free download from the App Store.

ofexport for OmniFocus→

An interesting project by Paul Sidnell:

ofexport is a command line utility that reads and exports the task database from the OmniFocus application.

While similar to Robin Trew’s export utility, ofexport has a series of extra options worth trying out. I’m particularly intrigued by the control you can have on date and calendar filters, as well as regular expressions. I constantly check on my OmniFocus todos through the calendar, so I’ll make sure to test ofexport. [via Sven Fechner]

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Two-Step Verification for Apple IDs Now Available in More Countries→

AppleInsider writes,

Users from Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Italy, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Germany, Mexico, the Netherlands and Russia are reporting the appearance of Apple’s new two-step verification feature, which was previously limited to the US, UK, Australia, Ireland, and New Zealand.

As updates are rolling out, Apple’s support documentation hasn’t been updated to reflect the changes. For those that now have access to Apple’s Two-Step Verification for your Apple IDs, I’ve written a comprehensive how-to that should clear up questions about anything you might see as you go through the process.

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Amazon Cloud Drive Photos Copies Your Photographs to the Cloud→

Mel Martin from TUAW has a nice overview of Amazon’s latest iOS app, which utilizes the capabilities of their Amazon Cloud Drive for storing up to 5GB of photos for free from your iOS device.

Amazon offers more free storage than Apple, and Apple will only store up to 1000 of your photos for 30 days compared to about 2000 photos with no expiration from Amazon. With Apple, after 30 days you must sync to your main computer. I see the Amazon service as a nice extra backup to what Apple offers.

If you use Amazon Cloud Drive, you can also access documents, music, and photographs through the desktop application for transferring files to and from the web.

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Marco On Free Trials→

Some great counterarguments by Marco Arment on the (annual) debate on App Store free trials.

Personally, I think that free trials would help the sales of apps priced at $9.99 and above. While it’s true that we, as geeks, tend to try as many apps as possible, I admit that I would feel uncomfortable with spending $40 on four apps that may not even be what I’m looking for. But I also agree that trials may create new problems for the “middle class” of apps that get tried but not bought. It’s a difficult problem to solve. Surely Apple must have better data and insight to corroborate whatever decision they’ll end up making.

From Marco’s post, I’d also highlight this footnote:

Abolishing the “top” lists from all App Store interfaces and exclusively showing editorially selected apps in browsing screens would do a hell of a lot more than trials to promote healthy app economics and the creation of high-quality software.

Exactly.

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Sid Meier’s Ace Patrol for iOS→

Fun and intriguing air combat title, programmed by Sid Meier himself, and available to download for free from the App Store. It’s in the same vein as the currently popular free-to-play game War Thunder, featuring historical WWI aircraft and dogfights in a turn-based strategy sim that’ll have you trying to outsmart enemy AI for air dominance. A demonstration of the game, as played by Touch Arcade, shows off the game’s mechanics and various IAP options for unlocking skins and additional pilots.

Polygon also has a short interview with Firaxis’ associate producer Pete Murray, who explains why the studio pursued the WWI theme amongst other titles like XCOM and Civilization.

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