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Produce Morse Ringtones With iToneMaker

Some of you who are interested in electronic music may know Moog analog synthesizers and guitar effects. With their big stainless steel knobs, LEDs and very elaborate technology behind them, they create enormously noisy, grungy and disturbing sounds. The company also managed to create a very polished music production app for the iPad, animoog. The UI designer of today’s pick, iToneMaker Morse Code, was definitely inspired by this company’s product design, but nevertheless the app is a very unique and lovely compiled ringtone maker for your iPhone.

As the name might already suggest, the app’s sound production is based on the morse code principle. Hence you have to type in a word or a random letter/digit combination as the basis of your new ringtone into a message panel within the main window. The slightly different sounds of the single characters are played consecutively and result in the final ringtone.

Within this main window you can also change the basic elements of your ringtone: like “normal” analog synths, iToneMaker is based on (in this case obviously digital) oscillatory sound production. You can choose between triangular, saw and square oscillators and adjust their pitch, speed and break length between the morse sounds via custom sliding controls. Just push the central play button and your ringtone is played back, over and over… it can get pretty annoying, I warrant you.

If you are not satisfied with the output of these few controls - which happened to me literally every time I tried to produce an agreeable sound - you can additionally superimpose more editing features via the option button. You’ll find reverb and low-pass filter regulators plus some different effector types and the ability to change pitch while a morse tone is played. Besides that, developers Eiji and Tom kindly created some presets to choose from so that you never have to start from scratch completely and possibly never get to a passable ringtone result.

But let’s go back to the Moog-inspired UI. The knobs marking the advanced features are designed threedimensionally with a reflecting silver tone and are definitely dominating the individual style of the app. Everything else has got a monochromic look to it and the selector buttons feature a very nice custom indicating orange LED-design when their function is active. iToneMaker is coherent in every little detail and works really smooth with iOS 5 on my 3rd generation iPod touch. Even the implementation of the address book in order to use a friend’s name as a morse code pattern and entering longer character lines works as fast as the rest does.

There is just one small problem to the UX which I consider as relatively disadvantageous: if you superimpose the options panel it overlaps the (actually pretty big) play button and you can not stop the playback from there, if your ringtone is still running. But for an app which features such a cool and elaborated interface and is still available for free, this seems like a quite acceptable problem to me.

Shazam Player Now Available for iPad

Shazam Player, the app from the creators of popular music recognition utility Shazam, has today reached version 1.5, adding support for the iPad, Retina graphics, and better display of lyrics on screen. Shazam Player, as I outlined in my original review of the iPhone version, provides an alternative view to Apple’s Music app, enhancing your music library with a plethora of sharing and discovery functionalities for artists and albums.

Like its iPhone counterpart, Shazam Player for iPad offers users the ability to create separate playlists from Apple’s Music app and organize songs in “good” and “bad” lists for easy retrieval later. The whole interface has been revised to take advantage of the iPad’s real screen estate, adding a “Player” box on the left side to visualize the songs playing in your queue. These songs can be rearranged for a particular order, and lists can be saved for later or cleared with one tap. You can send single songs or entire albums to the player with a tap or swipe. Tapping on the triangle button next to a song gives you access to a separate popover window containing the same sharing options of the iPhone app: you can share on Facebook and Twitter, check out related YouTube videos, artist information, and activate LyricPlay.

Shazam Player’s standout feature, in fact, is its support for song lyrics visualized on screen through a system Shazam calls LyricPlay. This functionality is only available for tracks that have been “scanned” and matched with Shazam’s servers, and unfortunately I found this new 1.5 version to be mostly hit or miss when it came to, say, matching popular songs from Drake, Oasis, or even The Eagles – all of them available on iTunes and well-known to Shazam (the standard app can fetch song info through the device’s mic). On the iPad, when the feature works, lyrics have been updated for the Retina display and they follow a song’s progression with an animation on screen. Lyrics can now be sent to the Apple TV via AirPlay, and songs that aren’t matched for LyricsPlay usage have also received a new UI for full-screen cover art and music visualizer.

Overall, I still find Shazam Player a solid alternative to the iOS Music app if you’re looking for on-device playlist creation, sharing and queue options, and online lyrics support all in the same package. Keeping in mind that LyricsPlay won’t probably find all your lyrics, you can check out the app for free on the App Store.

Keep An Eye On Your Twitter Followers With Detective

When it comes to research for new subjects to write about, I’m constantly confronted with ones that are at heart too marginal to discuss, but I’m doing it nevertheless, because they have some interesting touch to them. In Apple news, editors know that kind of problem and the question connected to it always sounds like: “Should I post about it or not? Will it be interesting enough?” When it comes to apps and good design, it’s much easier most of the time. Most of the time I can divide UI/UX design in two parts. Either the app works, looks fine and is easy to use or it does not. When I started to test Detective by Notion, I immediately recognized: Oh god, that’s a hard decision; it has got a very nice look but I am not sure about its feature. Is it that good? To go even further, I’m still asking myself if the app has a feature at all. But let’s dive in a bit deeper and you’ll hopefully get my point.

What Detective basically does is list your new Twitter followers and unfollowers in a top-down window from a menu bar icon. That’s it. Yeah, that’s it, really. You’re probably thinking that you could check that by yourself or that perhaps you don’t care at all about who and how many followers you have as long as you can tweet and follow what or whom you want. That’s all understandable, but I thought about it more and came to the conclusion that Detective — and especially its UI design — has got some advantages that may make the use of it legible to some people.

First of all, Twitter doesn’t notify you when people unfollow you at all. Psychologically speaking, that’s a good move, since everyone is more likely to enjoy seeing how he gets more and more famous over time without spending a thought on those who may dislike him (or her). But there are still some serious Twitter users out there, who do still care about their followership, they’re rare but they exist, trust me. They may even like to ask some of them why they stopped following them and what they could do better. For them, Detective could be nice to have. It just serves the need of showing up these people and does that with a polished, gloomy monochrome design only interrupted by the green pluses for new or red minuses for ex-followers, respectively. Apart from the very poorly designed preferences panel — which is in fact offending the rest of the app’s design and looks like it doesn’t belong to the app at all, Detective is minimalist, functional and performs very well.

Which brings us the the second, even more pleasant feature of Detective, at least to me: it’s totally unobtrusive. And I consider that as the main reason for granting this app such a long post. I assume that most of you who are twittering already deactivated the notification mails Twitter sends out if you have a new follower, direct message and so on. Detective on the other hand is faster than those notification mails and its basic approach of notifying you is different. It’s just there, you can check the changes by yourself when you want or you can choose Growl notifications if you’re too lazy to click on the menu bar icon, but even that is still better than those annoying mails which constantly interrupt your workflow and clutter your mail inbox. The rest of the time, when you don’t want to get distracted, Detective is completely invisible (yes, I know, there’s still that icon in the menu bar, but let’s be honest, no one can get distracted by an icon that small).

To me, it is this unobtrusiveness that really makes the app valuable, despite its very limited feature set and purpose. It definitely is an indicator for a knowledge of good design, if a developer is not out to usurpingly bring his work to the foreground just for the sake of making the user aware of it. Unfortunately I consider its price of $2.99 still too high. Although it’s by and large a very decent app, Detective needs way more features (which are promised indeed, but obviously not included in the current version) to justify such an expenditure. Hopefully Notion will keep their promise of implementing stuff like multiple account support or retweet/favorite notifications — because then I could recommend it with no hesitation.

 

Ken Segall Remembers Noah Wyle and Steve Jobs’ “Moment Of Truth”→

Ken Segall Remembers Noah Wyle and Steve Jobs’ “Moment Of Truth”

Ken Segall has posted a fun anecdote about Steve Jobs and actor Noah Wyle from 1999, when the two orchestrated a fake keynote opening address at Macworld.

Steve’s response surprised me. “No, that’s just it. I never said anything. This never happened — it’s all made up.”

So there you have it. It was all a lie. Granted, Steve wasn’t exactly under oath when he offered this testimony, but he did deny it emphatically. Maybe one day we’ll get a rebuttal from an eyewitness to the event.

Make sure to check out his post for the full story. Here’s a video of the “performance” on stage at Macworld 1999.

Ken Segall is also working on “Insanely Apple”, a book about Steve Jobs and the importance of Simplicity in his career, and inside Apple as a company. Segall worked alongside Steve Jobs and the Chiat\Day agency for a number of ad campaigns, including the original iMac’s one. We’ll have a review of Insanely Simple when it becomes available on April 26th. [image via]

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DragonDrop Simplifies OS X Drag & Drop

Ever since Lion’s release last year, I have been looking for ways to improve the system’s support for drag & drop. Lion is so focused on gestures, yet incredibly similar to older versions of OS X when it comes to file management, that I am still surprised the Finder didn’t get new functionalities aimed at increasing our efficiency with working with files on trackpads. A number of utilities have sprung from many users’ need to have a simpler drag & drop, such as Yoink.

DragonDrop, another take on simplified drag & drop for the OS X Finder, offers a solution that’s somewhat in between the aforementioned Yoink and Quick Look previews. DragonDrop lets you “pause” the drag & drop action by temporarily placing a file – being it an image, text document, webclip, or just about anything OS X can drag & drop (even colors) – in a floating shelf. When you’re ready to “resume”, you can pick up the file and drop it on your destination as it came from the original source.

While this concept is nothing new, DragonDrop provides a unique implementation – a feature that caused the app to take some time to be approved by Apple for sale on the App Store. DragonDrop can be activated by dropping files onto its menubar icon, or by performing a “shake” gesture with your finger while dragging. Apple didn’t like this feature – which is optional in the app’s Preferences – but eventually decided to approve DragonDrop as other Mac App Store apps already modify system functionalities.

Not everyone’s going to like the possibility of bringing up DragonDrop’s shelf with a shake gesture, but I’ve been using it extensively over the past weeks to quickly copy text from webpages and emails (without having to perform a long, precise drag & drop) and folders from the Finder. I like how the shake gesture makes the floating shelf appear next to the mouse cursor, rather than up in the menubar.

At $4.99, DragonDrop is a very focused utility (it also supports cut/copy/paste in the menubar) aimed at enhancing one core functionality of OS X. I recommend it, but if you’re not sure you might need it, there’s a free trial available on the developers’ website.

Interview: Nate Weiner Talks Pocket Launch, Read It Later Evolution

I recently had the chance to talk with Nate Weiner, the creator of Read It Later, to discuss today’s launch of Pocket (here’s my review), the state of “read later” apps and reading on the web, and the direction Pocket is taking in enabling users to save their favorite content. Nate Weiner had the idea for Read It Later in 2007, when he found out he was constantly emailing links to himself for articles he wanted to read later. After five years, Read It Later is reborn today as Pocket.

MacStories: Looking back at my Purchased history on the App Store, I see the original Read It Later is the third app I installed on my iPhone. How has Read It Later changed in the past three years, leading to Pocket, launching today?

Nate Weiner: Was it really? That is awesome.

A lot has changed since then. When I launched the first iPhone app for Read It Later, I was just a solo developer working out of my bedroom in Minnesota. Today, I’m sitting in Read It Later’s office in downtown San Francisco alongside 7 other incredibly talented people.

What hasn’t changed is our focus. Read It Later was a simple tool that focused on doing just one thing: saving things for later. Pocket is about taking all of the core parts of what people did with Read It Later and making them better, easier, and quite honestly, just a lot more fun to use. Read more

Read It Later Reborn: Pocket Saves Everything “For Later”

In the past five years, reading on the web has fundamentally changed. Read It Later, the first popular service to pioneer a certain kind of “bookmarking” for web articles, is reborn today as Pocket, and it promises to change the way users think of web content to “save for later”. Most importantly, Pocket wants to address what has become the scarcest resource of web citizens: time.

Read Later

People never had time to check out all the cool stuff that happens on the Internet every day. As blogging platforms started taking off in the past decade, sometime during 2006 some people began to realize they didn’t have time to read every article that was posted online. The digital publishing revolution had already happened, but the explosion of blogging was just starting to produce high-quality, journalistic and well-informed pieces that, due to a simple scarcity of time and intuitive tools, people didn’t have time to read in their entirety. Whilst the act of “bookmarking” something on the Internet goes back to several years ago, the more focused, practical act of “saving an article for later” can actually be traced back in the form of popular consumer software to somewhere in between late 2006 and 2007.

Nate Weiner was one of the first developers (and avid web readers) to understand that the bookmarking systems in place at the time (Delicious, magnolia, or simple browser bookmarks) weren’t cutting it, from a technical and psychological perspective, for those users that just wanted to put off an article for later.

The difference between “bookmarking” and “saving for later” is both practical and conceptual: a regular bookmark is usually archived for good, as bookmarking services place great emphasis on letting users store bookmarks – links to webpages – forever in their accounts. There are some exceptions today, but the underlying philosophy has pretty much stayed the same. The action of “saving an article for later”, on the other hand, takes a more pragmatical approach: an article a user wants to read today or tomorrow isn’t necessarily representative of a webpage he wants to store and archive for eternity. The terminology itself – “for later” – indicates that something is going to happen “later”. Once an article is read, most users tend to go on with their lives and forget about it. Like I said, it’s different today, and there are some specific use cases in which someone might want to archive articles – but the original concept lives on. People don’t have time to read every web article ever published.

Back in 2007, Nate Weiner set out to create a simple Firefox extension that would allow him to keep articles he found at work (and wanted to “read later”) in a different place than its browser bookmarks. On August 6, 2007, he launched the aptly-named Read It Later, a Firefox extension that did one thing well: it kept articles in a cozy little extension, saved for later. Users could hit a button to quickly save an article, and they could even save multiple browser tabs at once. As the extension started taking off, Nate began adding more features to Read It Later, such as offline support in December 2007.

Meanwhile, Marco Arment, developer at Tumblr, was facing a similar problem himself in 2007. He was constantly coming across news or blog articles he didn’t have time to read at the moment, and he needed something to read while on the bus or waiting in line. Arment discovered that there was no easy way to save links from a computer and access them later from the iPhone – we’re talking mid-2007 here, when the iPhone was getting in the hands of the first millions of customers, and when there was no SDK for developers to build native apps. So Arment decided, as he would later explain, to build just the service for that: Instapaper, a webpage that collected links saved from a bookmarklet, was launched publicly in January 2008. Like Read It Later, Instapaper solved a twofold issue: it allowed users to quickly save articles, and retrieve them later. Unlike Weiner’s app, though, Instapaper saved links in a webpage that could be easily accessed from the iPhone – mobile reading, in fact, seemed to be one of Instapaper’s primary features from the get-go. As Arment’s service became popular, he also went back to the drawing board – or in his case, programming tools – to implement new functionalities for Instapaper. The service’s hallmark feature, a text mode that strips unnecessary content out of web articles, was released in April 2008.

The rest is history. As Apple kept improving its mobile ecosystem with new devices, OS upgrades, and the App Store, Read It Later and Instapaper evolved, and iteratively became two fantastic services that serve millions of users every month. Over the years, we have followed both Instapaper and Read It Later closely at MacStories. Read more