New screenwriting app for OS X by Stu Maschwitz. I like how Jonathan Poritsky briefly describes it:

Slugline allows you to write in Fountain while making your script look like a formatted screenplay. It’s like Final Draft without all the headaches. It’s magic. And since your documents are always in plain text, you can take them with you anywhere.

Fountain is, of course, the plain text syntax for writing screenplays inspired by John Gruber’s Markdown. I don’t write screenplays, but I’m aware of the alternatives that already exist on the market (namely, Final Draft). Slugline, from what I see, looks like a mix of FoldingText and traditional screenwriting software: it’s got automatic formatting of plain text for screenplay documents, deep OS X integrations, and a rich preview that, however, is still based on a plain text file. I also like the Outline view, which more Mac text editors should support. Plus, even John August seems to like this app.

Slugline is available for $39.99 on the Mac App Store. You can watch the promo video below.

Interesting work by Nicolas Dienstbier:

Sublpress is a Sublime Text WordPress Plugin that allows you to remotely manage many WordPress 3.5 installations from within Sublime Text. The mostly quick panel based system allows for managing settings, posts(and custom post types), pages and taxonomy terms of a WordPress blog.

I use Sublime Text 2 as a Markdown text editor every day, and I’m intrigued by this plugin. Once I’m done with a post in Sublime, I fire up Marked, hit CMD+Shift+C to copy the HTML code, and go to WordPress to post it. With Sublpress, I could do the posting directly from Sublime, so I’ll make sure to check it out.

Sublpress works with both Sublime Text 2 and 3. You can find it on GitHub (via Brett on Pinboard).

Cloak is an easy-to-use VPN service that safeguards the flow of information to and from your computer on public networks (like a Wi-Fi hotspot at Starbucks). Cloak’s plans have always been inexpensive at less than $15 a month for their top tier 60 GB plan, but their new $1.99 Mini Plan for 5 GB is absolutely killer. It’s incredibly affordable, offering just the right amount of data you’d likely use on the road.

Casey Newton:

Yahoo Weather represents one such attempt to delight users into giving the rest of the company’s products a try. Meteorology has been a strength for Yahoo, which has provided data for the default weather app for iPhone since it came out in 2007. But Apple’s weather app has evolved very little over the years, and Yahoo decided to build a new app that emphasizes photos over text. Open Yahoo Weather in big cities around the world and you’ll see sharp, high-resolution images that have been gathered from Yahoo-owned Flickr. The app displays different photos based on location, weather conditions, and time of day.

Nice updates by Yahoo, which seems to be iterating faster than ever with Marissa Mayer at the helm. The new Weather app uses a photo background fetched from Flickr, with clean font and icon overlays for weather information. For my location, the app can only fetch one photo; interestingly, weather data for forecasts is provided by Wunderground.

There are several nice touches in the app. Information is laid out vertically, and as you swipe the background is slightly blurred to put the focus on weather data. There’s no pagination, and the only screen that snaps into view is the first one; at the very bottom, the Wind & Pressure and Sun & Moon sections are both animated (and the current time of the day is reflected in Sun & Moon). Something I don’t like is the advertisement for other Yahoo apps in the left sidebar, though I understand why the company wants people to know Yahoo does still make stuff for the App Store.

I won’t switch from Today Weather, but Yahoo Weather is a good 1.0 release. I like it more than Apple’s own Weather app (which is powered by Yahoo).