Watermark Releases iPhone App→

Watermark Releases iPhone App

Twitter and App.net archiving and search tool Watermark.io gained a first official mobile companion today, a native app for iPhone. Dubbed “Watermark Mobile”, the free app is very simple, as it’s solely focused on letting you search and copy links to tweets or posts.

Watermark is a searchable archive of tweets and App.net posts. It downloads tweets from everyone you are following, so you can go back and find older tweets later. And it provides a backup of all your own tweets and favorites forever.

Watermark Mobile is, for now, an interface to your archive. There are no options or sidebars – just a search bar to retrieve posts from your Watermark archive. Right now, you can search and tap & hold on a post to copy its link; you can tap on usernames to open their profiles on Twitter or App.net. For a future version of the app, I hope developer Manton Reece will add native integration with Watermark filters and saved searches.

You can download Watermark Mobile for free on the App Store. You can catch up on our previous coverage of Watermark here.

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Mapping The Entertainment Ecosystems of Apple, Microsoft, Google & Amazon

Please note: An update to this article is available here, it includes the December 2012 iTunes expansion (Music & Movies) as well as Xbox Music.

 

The choice of what phone or tablet to buy is one that often involves many considerations, chief amongst those is the physical device and the operating system that it runs. But I think there is a third fundamental consideration that is growing in importance: what services and entertainment ecosystems you’ll be able to access. You need only look back to the recent criticism of iOS 6, in which Apple replaced Google Maps with their own Maps app. Summing it up generally, Apple’s Maps app is sub-par to what it was replacing and that mattered to people - enough that Tim Cook felt the need to apologise for the frustration the switch caused.

Today I want to focus specifically on the entertainment ecosystems of Apple, Google, Microsoft and Amazon. I’m referring to the various digital content stores that are run by Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon - specifically their Music, Movies, TV Shows, eBooks and App stores. In my mind, there are four general aspects that make a good entertainment ecosystem:

  • Wide selection of quality content
  • Competitive prices
  • International availability
  • Interoperable on a user’s devices

I want to explore the third aspect in depth today, because it’s something that I feel is all too often downplayed by the technology press (which, coincidentally, is based predominantly in the US). I’ll also briefly discuss the fourth aspect as well at the end. Why are these two aspects so important? Well, smartphones and tablets are devices that have universal appeal, so for Apple or any of the other three to win the smartphone or tablet “race” - an entertainment ecosystem that is available across the world, not just in the US, isn’t just a cool extra feature, it’s a necessity. The US may be one of the biggest markets for such devices today, but is there any doubt that these devices will rival the prevalence of personal computers (which are everywhere) in years to come?

I’ve collected data on which countries each service is available in and then added in population figures to create many of the graphs and diagrams you’ll see below, mixed in with some of my own analysis and thoughts. Please note that the five HTML5 map diagrams are interactive, click on the logos of the four companies to compare their coverage.

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Apple’s Hire of William Stasior May Be for More than Just Search→

Earlier this afternoon, AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher reported that Apple has hired Amazon executive William Stasior, who was in charge of Amazon’s A9, which focuses on product and visual search technologies. Swisher reports that Stasior will be working with the Siri team in his new position at Apple.

What’s more intriguing is what else Stasior might find himself working on — presumably, strengthening Apple’s search and search advertising technology in the wake of its increasing competition with Google.

“Apple’s search and search advertising technology” covers a broad swath of search that could be… well anything. If I was to take a stab at what Apple might specifically want Stasior for, I’d look at one of the products A9 ended up introducing on the App Store. Flow Powered by Amazon is a visual search app that attempts to visually recognize and display relevant information about books, music, video games, and more by simply pointing your smartphone’s camera at the cover or UPC barcode. The app allows people to bring up product details and customer ratings by identifying the product’s packaging (it’s in the same vein as Google Goggles).

Siri would be well suited as not just a voice assistant, but as a visual assistant. Given Apple’s recent foray into books, magazines, and textbooks, using Siri to scan and subscribe to a magazine through your iPhone, get more information on a paperback, or find more novels by an author could be a possibility. I could see Apple offering album ratings for music from iTunes, or displaying rental fees when you scan the cover of a Blu-ray boxset. A9 also powers CloudSearch and Product Search at Amazon — I don’t see the hire being related to search advertising, but rather for product search as it applies to Apple’s digital ecosystems.

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Tracking Stolen Macs with Undercover 5

I’m a big fan of Orbicule products. Aimed at making your Mac more secure, I’ve previously taken a look at Witness, a background application that, once activated, “blocks” your Mac’s screen and activates the built-in camera to snap pictures to see who’s using your computer. It can also do fancy things like running AppleScripts and recording sounds using the Mac’s internal microphone.

I recently installed Undercover 5, the latest version of Orbicule’s OS X tracking solution for stolen Macs, and I’m very impressed by it. Think of Undercover 5 as Find My Mac on steroids.

In my coverage of the new iCloud web apps launched in September, I mentioned the improvements made to Find My iPhone, which included a new UI and more iOS-related functionalities, but nothing new on the OS X side. With Find My Mac, you can visualize computers on a map, lock them, and erase them, but there isn’t much you can do to identify the person using your computer or to gather information about his/her habits and identity. This is were Undercover comes in. Read more

Pinbook: A Fast Pinboard Client for iPhone

For all its popularity, there’s always been a shortage of great Pinboard clients for iOS. Pinboard, a bookmarking service I use on a daily basis, has a very clean and fast website that works fine on the iPhone and iPad, but I’ve always been looking forward to having a client with all the perks of native code: clipboard integration, support for URL schemes, and caching are just a few options that come to mind. However, in spite of the service’s growing userbase, I haven’t been able, in four years of App Store, to find a Pinboard app I could rely on.

Pinbook by Collin Donnel finally provides a (partial, for now) solution to this problem. Released a few days ago on the App Store, Pinbook for iPhone is the best Pinboard client to date, in spite of the lack of numerous Pinboard-related functionalities in the app.

Pinbook is fast. Using Apple’s own pull to refresh mechanism, the app takes a second to refresh your Pinboard account and fetch the latest bookmarks. From my tests, the initial sync (I have 388 bookmarks) took just a few seconds. Pinbook is snappy, and scrolling through hundreds of bookmarks is butter-smooth, as you’d expect from any great iOS app. You can tap on a bookmark to open it in the in-app browser, which features a button to open the link in Safari, and another one to bring up the native iOS 6 share sheet (which includes an Instapaper button). As far as browsing bookmark is concerned, Pinbook’s workflow is extremely simple and effective.

In the main screen, you can swipe on a bookmark to delete it, or tap & hold to open the share sheet. However, as you’ll notice, you won’t be able to tap on the tags underneath a bookmark’s title: one of Pinbook’s current limitations is the inability to explore the various sections offered by Pinboard. In Pinbook 1.0, you can’t browse the global feed of a specific tag, open a user’s profile, or view the Popular page (something I do every day on my Mac); you can only view your bookmarks and search amongst them. For search, you can refine your query by title, tags, or notes; unfortunately, there’s no auto-complete for existing tags.

Pinbook lets you add new bookmarks directly from the app. The New Bookmark screen allows you to add a URL, title, tags, a description, and to choose whether you want a bookmark to be “private” or set to “read later”. The app comes with clipboard detection: it recognizes when a URL has been copied, but just like lack of tag auto-complete (which is absent from this screen as well), Pinbook can’t automatically fetch a webpage’s title. So when you add a URL, unless you type a title manually you’ll end up with the URL itself being the bookmark’s title.

Pinbook comes with a URL scheme. Documented here, it has arguments for URL, titles, tags, and description; if you’re thinking about setting up Pinbook with Launch Center Pro, be aware the arguments will have to be properly encoded.

I think there are several additions the developer could make to Pinbook to make it a more complete app with a faster workflow. Firstly, I’d like to have a bookmarklet that sends a page’s URL and title to Pinbook; for as much as Launch Center support is handy, it doesn’t allow me to copy two arguments simultaneously to the iOS clipboard. The great thing about the Pinboard bookmarklet is that it grabs a link’s URL and title automatically, and then offers suggested tags with auto-completion: Pinbook should do the same.

An iPad version and more navigation options would also be welcome. Like I said, I don’t just use Pinboard to add new bookmarks, but also to discover new ones added by someone else. Access to Popular page and user profiles would be a start.

In spite of the features it lacks, Pinbook is still the best Pinboard client for iPhone to date. Not simply because of the shortage of competition – the app really is fast, easy to use, and responsive. Here’s to hoping more functionalities will come relatively soon without hampering the app’s focus on simplicity and speed.

Pinbook is available at $4.99 on the App Store.

Scapple Beta→

Scapple Beta

Developed by Literature and Latte – the creators of Scrivener – Scapple is a new “mind-mapping” app for OS X that has been released as public beta on the developers’ forums. Featuring a clean canvas to write notes and draw connections, Scapple’s focus is on not forcing users to maintain a hierarchical structure of the document.

There is a veritable panoply of mind-mapping software out there, but what’s different about Scapple is that it doesn’t force you to make connections. It doesn’t expect you to start out with one central idea and branch everything else off that. Instead, you are free to write anywhere on the virtual paper. Individual notes can be as short or as long as you like. Scapple allows you to get all of your ideas down, move them around, and find and make the connections as you go along. And it’s designed to make the whole process just as quick and fluid as it is on paper.

The app is clearly in beta and not finished, but I’m seeing some interesting ideas already. The app is easily navigable with either the cursor or the keyboard; you can create a new note with a double-click anywhere on the canvas, and you can select notes as you would with multiple files in the Finder. Notes can be “stacked”; to connect a note with another one, simply drop the source onto the destination. You can change the style of borders, lines, arrows, and every single note with an Inspector. I found Scapple very easy to pick up.

Dr. Drang notes an interesting feature about zooming: you can get a “quick” overview of a document by simply holding the Z key temporarily.

As someone who’s often working zoomed-in on a small section of a document, I love the idea of getting a temporary overview of the entire document by holding down a key. And the added ability to move when you unzoom just makes it that much better. If this is available in other graphics apps, I’d like to know about it; and if it isn’t, other developers should steal it.

Personally, my curiosity was piqued when I saw the already-available exporting options: maps can be exported (aside from the app’s own .scap format) to PDF, PNG, plain text, rich text, rich text with attachments, OPML, plain text list, or a folder of images. In fact, one of Scapple’s feature is the ability to present both text and images inline with the document.

I’m looking forward to the final version of Scapple. I hope it’ll support AppleScript to make it easier to script the export/import process and allow the app to be integrated with iThoughts on iOS. In the meantime, you can download the public beta of Scapple here.

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Change Default Sync Times of OmniFocus For Mac and iOS→

Change Default Sync Times of OmniFocus For Mac and iOS

In my post about OmniFocus and flagged Mail.app messages, I wrote that there’s no way to tell the app to sync every few minutes. I was wrong. As reader Bill Pallmer told me, there are two settings to change the default sync behavior of OmniFocus for Mac. In Terminal, you can use these commands to change how often OmniFocus will start a new sync and sync after an edit, respectively:

defaults write com.omnigroup.OmniFocus MaximumTimeBetweenSync -float 30

defaults write com.omnigroup.OmniFocus TimeFromFirstEditToSync -float 2

The numeric value after the -float flag indicates time in seconds. As explained by Ken Case on The Omni Group forums, you’ll have to quit and restart the app after using these in Terminal; you also can’t go lower than 2 seconds for TimeFromFirstEditToSync and 15 seconds for MaximumTimeBetweenSync.

There are two hidden preferences which control the timing of automatic synchronization, MaximumTimeBetweenSync and TimeFromFirstEditToSync. Both are specified in seconds. MaximumTimeBetweenSync is how often OmniFocus looks for changes on the server when no changes have been made locally; it defaults to 3600 seconds (one hour). TimeFromFirstEditToSync is how soon OmniFocus will sync after you’ve made an edit, and it defaults to 60 seconds (one minute).

If you have the Mac App Store version of OmniFocus, change the first part of the command to com.omnigroup.OmniFocus.MacAppStore.

The great thing about these commands is that they also work on iOS in debug mode. They share the same name and settings, but a different URL:

x-omnifocus-debug:set-default:TimeFromFirstEditToSync:2

x-omnifocus-debug:set-default:MaximumTimeBetweenSync:30

To activate the iOS settings, choose the value you want, and paste the URL into Safari: OmniFocus will open and tell you that you’re enabling a debug option, as pictured above. The app will quit; restart, and it’ll now sync more often according to how you changed the default setting. Obviously, remember that you’ll be consuming 3G data for sync, so don’t set it to refresh too often, unless you don’t have a problem with that.

To revert to factory settings on iOS, use:

x-omnifocus-debug:reset-default:MaximumTimeBetweenSync

This is a great tweak, because I run my own OmniFocus sync server for a variety of reasons, and I always want to make sure I have the latest version of my database. Thanks Bill.

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Drafts 2.2 Adds Custom Email Actions

Agile Tortoise’s Drafts for iPhone and iPad is one of my most-used apps for iOS. It sits on the Home screen of both my devices, and I rely on it to send text to a variety of apps and services. With a combination of support for URL schemes and external APIs, Drafts has become a fantastic way to get text saved somewhere else quickly. Plus, we’ve been following Drafts here at MacStories for a while now, and the app underwent quite the evolution recently.

After the major 2.0 update (our review here), I have been looking forward to version 2.2. Released today (app is version 1.2 on the iPad), Drafts now includes new actions for Nebulous Notes (a personal favorite of mine), Netbot, Notefile, and Pastebot. It’s also got a new “Use First Line as Title” setting and advanced options for actions.

More importantly, Drafts 2.2 comes with support for custom email actions, which is the reason I’ve been using Captio for the past two years. It’s with a bit of sadness that I drop Captio, but the app hasn’t even been updated for the iPhone 5 yet, and Drafts does so much more. Custom email actions allow you to send emails to predefined addresses using either your own email accounts, or a background service provided by Agile Tortoise. Read more

iOS 6 GUI PSD for iPhone 5 Now Available→

iOS 6 GUI PSD for iPhone 5 Now Available

With every new major version of iOS or new device from Apple, design studio Teehan+Lax releases a free iOS GUI PSD. The PSDs, downloaded millions of times in the past few years, have helped designers and developers mock up their apps and iOS designs using Photoshop, while relying on graphic assets that look just like interface elements and controls of iPhones and iPads.

Today, Teehan+Lax released its new iOS 6 GUI PSD for iPhone 5:

This version, iOS 6 for iPhone 5, is a bit different than previous version. Those of you who have downloaded and used these files have probably noticed they’ve become quite bloated. As fast as our computers are today, they still get pretty sluggish when working in a document that contains tens of millions of pixels with hundreds of shape layers. This time around we focussed on making the file a bit more usable. It’s smaller in file size and has a reduced canvas making it quite a bit more manageable. We did this by removing some of the more obtuse elements.

Weighing at 13 MB, you can download the iOS 6 GUI PSD here.

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