Simple Japanese Emoticons with Kaomoji

At MacStories, we use iMessage on a daily basis as our team chat. Alongside the occasional meme, Twitter link, or article we need to check out, the Japanese emoticon is a common occurrence in our group thread. I’ve always wondered whether my fellow teammates learned to manually type out flipping tables and other emoticons – also known as kaomojis – while I was stuck using the good-looking, but obvious Apple default emoji. If you happen to live in a team chat of remote workers every day you know how much more successful an original GIF or meme can be.

My quest towards iMessage emoticon domination is over with Kaomoji. A simple $0.99 iPhone app made by Richard Henry (product designer at Quora), Kaomoji contains 1,000 Japanese-style emoticons organized in 28 categories such as Happy, Sad, Evil, Love, Cats, Dogs, Dancing, and the game-changing Table Flip.

Kaomoji’s UI is clean and focused on the actual emoticons. Categories are color-coded, and tapping on one will open a dedicated page with properly colored highlights and fonts. It’s a nice touch. The app has only one feature: copy. Tapping on a kaomoji will bring up a manga-like success message showing a bigger version of the emoticon with the text “Copied”. Once copied, you can paste the text anywhere – be it iMessage, Twitter, Facebook, or any other app.

Kaomoji does one thing extremely well. I like the selection of emoticons, and if I had to nitpick I’d say it’d be nice to have built-in Twitter and Messages/Facebook actions to send text without leaving the app. I would also like to see an iPad version in the future.

Kaomoji is only $0.99 on the App Store.

Let’s also put the table back. ┬──┬◡ﾉ(° -°ﾉ)

Create and Share Evernote Notes With Pythonista On iOS

I use Evernote on a daily basis, but there’s no easy and quick way to create new notes and receive their shared URLs on iOS. While I tend to prefer plain text files, Evernote notes are quite useful when I need to share rich text (containing formatting and inline images) with someone else. Sharing via the official Evernote app takes too long[1], and I don’t like the UI of other Evernote clients.

Yesterday, Pythonista developer Ole Zorn posted an installer script for the Python Evernote SDK. By putting together all the necessary dependencies, he created an installer script that will create an “evernote-sdk” sub-folder in Pythonista 1.3; with that, you’ll be able to access the entire Evernote API to create and manage notes – all while taking advantage of the uniqe iOS-related features of Pythonista.

Inspired by Ole’s demoes and the snippets posted by Brett Kelly in the past weeks, I created a script that does exactly what I need: it lets me enter text to save it in an Evernote note that will be shared publicly. If triggered by an app like Drafts or Launch Center Pro, the script will take the text sent by those apps. If formatted in Markdown, the text will be converted to HTML before saving it to Evernote. Read more

Evernote 5.2 Gets New Snippet View, PDF Viewer

Evernote52

Evernote52

Evernote for iOS has been updated today to version 5.2. I have been testing the update for the past weeks, and I believe it brings a number of very welcome improvements, especially for iPad owners.

In my original review of Evernote 5, I noted how the new app’s interface felt clunky to navigate in notebooks with a large number of notes, causing related slowdowns when scrolling a note list and, worse, crashes. Version 5.2 brings an all-new snippet view for iPad, which speeds up navigation considerably and works better than the old thumbnail-based navigation when dealing with multiple notes.

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Day One for iOS With PDF Export→

Day One for iOS With PDF Export

DayOne

DayOne

Day One is my favorite journaling app for iOS and OS X. The app <a href=”https://www.macstories.net/news/apple-posts-mac-app-store-best-of-2012-list-day-one-is-app-of-the-year/” title=”Apple Posts “Best Of App Store 2012″ Lists”>was chosen as Mac app of the year by Apple, and for good reason: both on Macs and iOS devices, Day One is a finely crafted piece of software based on an even more powerful idea – archiving your memories. From my review:

Day One stands out because it’s not a tool, it’s a personal experience. I can tell you what Day One does, and I can write about the things I do with it. But I can’t tell you how you should use it.

In November 2012, the app was updated with tags, search, and support for MultiMarkdown footnotes. Version 1.10, released today, brings a new option to export your entries as PDF. The update also contains fixes and other improvements such as a new reminder sound, historical weather data increased from 3 to 30 days (useful when adding old entries), and a new font option.

PDF export is interesting because it enables Day One users to get their journal entries out of the app and save them in a format that is more future-proof than Bloom’s own file format. Available in the Settings, you can export all entries at once, or filter specific ones by date range or tag. In my case, I filtered entries tagged with my dog’s name and emailed a beautifully formatted PDF full of photos to my friends. Exports are listed in the same menu and they can be deleted with a single swipe. Email exports can contain attachments up to 25 MB in size, but the app also comes with an “Open In…” menu to send PDFs to other apps like Dropbox and Google Drive (if installed).

I like the changes in Day One 1.10 and I keep recommending the app as, by far, the best journaling experience on iOS and OS X. Day One is available on the App Store.

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Bad Piggies Update Brings New Levels, Attacking Angry Birds

Rovio today released the second major update to its Angry Birds spin-off game, Bad Piggies. The big new addition to the 1.2 update are the 30 new ‘Flight in the Night’ levels, with some of them requiring you to “sneak past the napping Angry Birds” - making too much noise will wake the birds up who will attack to try and sabotage you.

In this massive update to IGN’s 2012 game of the year, the Bad Piggies are on the move, and they’ve managed to hang on to the eggs so far! But watch out - you need to sneak past the napping Angry Birds, and they’re sleeping with one eye open! Navigate through 30 new Flight in the Night Levels but don’t make too much noise, or you’ll wake up some seriously furious birds! Also make sure to check out the new “Road Hogs” time trials: can you beat the clock (and your friends) with your crazy contraption?

Also included are 6 ‘Road Hogs’ levels which are time trial levels, another new sandbox and six new achievements. The teaser video of the update which highlights some of the new features is embedded below.

Download Bad Piggies: iPhone, iPad, Mac, Android

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A Look Back At Instagram’s Growth As It Hits 100 Million Monthly Active Users

Instagram today announced that it has over 100 million monthly active users, an increase of 10 million since they announced in early January that they had passed 90 million monthly active users. In a lengthy blog post, Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom shares a story from the early days of Instagram and highlights a few Instagram users that have inspired him and highlight the power of Instagram.

Images have the ability to connect people from all backgrounds, languages and cultures. They connect us to aid workers halfway across the world in Sudan, to entrepreneurs in San Francisco and even to events in our own backyards. Instagram, as a tool to inspire and connect, is only as powerful as the community it is made of. For this reason, we feel extremely lucky to have the chance to build this with all of you. So from our team to the hundred million people who call Instagram home, we say thank you. Thank you for sharing your world and inspiring us all to do the same.

Given the news I thought I would go back and create an updated version of our Instagram users graph which you can see above: it plots all of Instagram’s publically released user statistics since its release in October 2010 (click it to view a larger version). Note that the last two data points are ‘Monthly Active Users’ rather than total number of signed up Instagram users. Nonetheless, it hasn’t taken too long for the Monthly Active Users catch up and hit the 100 million users mark.

Siri Date Calculations and WolframAlpha→

Siri Date Calculations and WolframAlpha

SiriLOL

SiriLOL

Speaking of Siri, David Sparks posted a great overview of how you can perform date calculations with Siri. I didn’t know any of those tips, and I was surprised to find out they are based on WolframAlpha. I have been doing date calculations in WolframAlpha for years, and I didn’t even think about using Siri for that purpose.

David’s post convinced me to do the same with Siri’s Italian sister. Unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, the results were disappointing. First, I asked Siri to calculate the days between April 3, 2010 and September 1, 2010. The query was parsed correctly, but Siri said she couldn’t find a contact in my Address Book.

For the second test, I asked which day it’ll be in 20 days from now, and Siri replied with the following mix of Italian and English:

E’ Tuesday, February 26, 2013

It basically told me that today is (“E’” in Italian) February 26th, completely ignoring my date query. Last, I asked which day it was 17 days ago, and this time Siri didn’t combine languages, but it replied with 17 days from now – March 15th, 2013.

I believe part of the culprit is that iOS 6 can still get confused if you use Siri in Italian but keep your device’s settings to English. Another example is how, with a device set to English and Siri in Italian, Maps navigation in iOS 6 still speaks Italian directions…in English. You can imagine how that sounds. But generally, it’s Siri’s own parsing engine that’s inferior to the “real” English Siri.

Like I said many times in the past, Siri has still a long way to go with the Italian language, and the software hasn’t improved much since I last checked in November 2012.

WolframYAY

WolframYAY

What I have been using for quick and reliable date calculations is WolframAlpha. On iOS, the company has a native Universal app that understands my queries just fine 99% of the time and that allows me to type characters faster with series of extra keyboard rows. It’s not pretty, but it is efficient and it also displays additional information related to your date query – such as date formats, events on a specific day, and time difference from today. I may not have the same date calculation skills of Dr. Drang, but WolframAlpha never disappointed me.

The WolframAlpha app is $2.99 on the App Store.

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