Saks 5th Ave. Storefront Features 64 iPads→

Saks 5th Ave. Storefront Features 64 iPads

Jim Dalrymple at The Loop:

To celebrate Fashion’s Night Out, Saks and Stylelist.com have partnered to create an interactive storefront at Saks’ flagship 5th Avenue store.

Designed, developed and built by Gin Lane Media the three-window display features 64 iPad 2s in the center window and nine 27-inch Cinema Displays in each of the two side windows.

Looking at the photos, it’s another reminder of what’s possible to achieve with the right combination of apps and hardware. Back in April, we saw how 40 iPads could be connected on a network to form a single, giant whiteboard for collaborative efforts. Saks’ display will be used for Stylelist images, videos, and tweet aggregation through a specific hashtag. An iPad app was built specifically for this occasion, allowing for nice and smooth animations as well as simple setup and control on the network.

Perhaps not one of the iPad uses Apple imagined, but still an example of the versatility of the device, which “disappears” in the storefront once content – its glass screen – is the focus.

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WebMarker Brings Tweet Marker Support To Google Chrome

While many are still wishfully hoping Twitter will update its official Mac and iOS client with support for Manton Reece’s excellent Tweet Marker service, the reality is third-party developers are once again leapfrogging Twitter in terms of innovation, experimentation, and willingness to improve existing solutions with new techniques and add-ons. Such is Tweet Marker, a web service for syncing timelines across Twitter clients. By implementing the service’s free API, clients like Twitterrific and Tweetbot have gained the capability of syncing the “last read” tweet in user timelines and mentions, with lists and direct messages soon to be supported as well. You can read more about how Tweet Marker actually works in our previous Twitterrific 4.3 and Tweetbot 1.6 coverage.

WebMarker is a new Chrome extension that brings Tweet Marker integration on Twitter.com. Whereas many may quickly dismiss this extension because “really, no one uses Twitter’s website anymore these days”, I believe that’s not the case. Twitter.com still provides a great alternative to desktop clients in some specific scenarios – MacStories’ favorite deals hunter Chris, for instance, is forced to use a Windows PC at work, and he prefers to use Twitter.com rather than a third-party Windows client. Wouldn’t it be great if all office workers could sync their Twitter status while at work, and come back home to find their Tweetbots and Twitterrifics ready to pick up where they left off?

Being a Chrome extension, WebMarker works on any platform Google’s browser is available on. Once installed, the app will redirect you to Twitter.com for OAuth access (good choice), then it’ll sit in Chrome’s Omnibar, waiting for you to visit Twitter.com. Here’s how it works:

When you open Twitter or refresh your open page you should see the app icon right in the Omnibar. If it’s colored, a click will scroll you down to the last marked tweet. If it’s gray it scrolls to bottom to let Twitter load more tweets until the marked tweet is found (for a maximum of 3 trys).

Current tweet reading position will be set if page is in idle, or tab is inactive, for at least 10 seconds.

I tested WebMarker on Google Chrome Canary for the Mac, and it worked as expected. I was able to sync my “last read tweet” back to Twitterrific and Tweetbot once Chrome’s tab became idle, and the extension’s icon in the Omnibar allowed me to quickly jump back to Tweet Marker’s synced status with ease.

WebMarker is a nice addition to Tweet Marker’s growing ecosystem, and a useful way to keep your timelines in sync if you happen to use Twitter.com in your daily workflow. Download it here.

MacUpdate Bundle: A Fine Selection Of 11 Mac Apps For Just $50

Following Monday’s Bundlehunt package of 11 great Mac apps and various ‘design goodies’, today there is a new MacUpdate Bundle which also comes with a selection of top-notch Mac apps and utilities for just $49.99. The bundle includes some of MacStories’ favourite Mac apps including the excellent Fantastical (review here), the informative iStat Menus and the useful Printopia (review here). If you tried purchasing the included apps individually you’d be paying nearly $500, so if you’re looking to beef up your collection of Mac apps this is a terrific deal at just $49.99.

The MacUpdate Bundle includes:

  • Toast 11 Titanium - if you need to do more than the basic disc burning that the iLife software provides, Toast is an excellent option. It also has a solid set of video conversion tools as well as supporting the ability to burn copies of recorded video from EyeTV and copying CDs and DVDs with no fuss.
  • Printopia - only available to the first 10,000 purchasers of the MacUpdate Bundle, Printopia allows you to share your printers connected to a Mac (physically or over a network) with an iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch - allowing you to print from an iOS device to virtually any printer (as opposed to the limited selection of HP printers that are natively supported).
  • Data Rescue - this is an advanced piece of digital data recovery software for the Mac, allowing you to safely recover previously deleted files.
  • FX Photo Studio Pro - this Mac post-processing image editor comes loaded with over 150 image effects and comes with some substantial customizations options, allowing you to mix and match effects to perfect an image.
  • Fantastical - this is a powerful Calendar application that sits in your menu bar, working with existing calendars and comes with a powerful natural language engine that can create an event from a simple phrase (e.g. Lunch with Matt on Wednesday 1pm).
  • iStat Menus - monitor all of your Mac’s vital statistics with just one glance to the menubar, it supports monitoring everything from CPU usage to component temperatures to network usage and more.
  • Phoneview - access and export various pieces of data from your iPhone or other iOS device from call history, text messages, photos, voice memos and more.
  • Concealer - conceal important snippets of data in an encrypted archive - everything from license keys to diary entries can be concealed.
  • EarthDesk - replace a boring desktop background with a live-updating image of the Earth with real time movement of the sun and even cloud coverage.
  • Mellel - a powerful word processor that is appreciated by scholars, students and those writing technical documentation.
  • Bookends - for professionals and students this is an extremely powerful reference management application (and it integrates perfectly with Mellel)

 

Disclaimer: For every bundle purchased through MacStories, we receive a small kickback. If you’re interested in the bundle and supporting the MacStories crew, please use the link here or any of the affiliate links above.

Adobe Adds Full Support For Newsstand In Its Digital Publishing Suite

Adobe has today announced that publishers who use the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite will be able to create newspaper and magazine files that appear in Apple’s new Newsstand feature. Announced at WWDC and arriving in iOS 5 this Fall, Newsstand will allow new editions of Newspapers and Magazines to be automatically downloaded (in the background) as soon as they are made available - and storing them all in a pseudo-folder on a user’s home screen.

Today’s announcement by Adobe reveals that their Digital Publishing Suite will be able to create files that are compatible with Newsstand, allowing publishers to create and deliver new editions directly to users with little fuss. Todd Teresi, from Adobe’s Media Solutions department said the “support for Newsstand will provide Adobe’s publishing customers the ability to deliver engaging content directly to the digital doorstep of subscribers on their iPads”.

Applications built with Adobe Digital Publishing Suite and enabled for Newsstand will allow publishers to better merchandise their content with support for Newsstand push notifications and icon covers displayed on the Newsstand shelf, reflecting the latest issue of the magazine or newspaper.

This move by Adobe is quite a significant motion of support for Apple’s Newsstand feature because their Digital Publishing Suite is already used to create more than 600 titles, including high profile publishers such as Conde Naste and Reader’s Digest. With little effort, all these publishers can now add support for Newsstand.

[Via MacRumors]

Verizon Promotes The 3G iPad 2 In New Commercial

It certainly doesn’t have the flair and emotional connection of one of Apple’s iPad adverts, but Verizon has aired its own iPad 2 commercial, promoting the use of the device with their 3G network. It highlights a few specific iPad features that are made functional with Verizon’s network such as downloading a new book from iBooks at the beach and tweeting at a campsite. Consistent with other Verizon adverts, specific mention is also made towards the end of the advert of Verizon’s network coverage across the US, stating that it is “America’s largest and most reliable network”.

Salesperson: It’s faster, thinner and lighter and with the power of Verizon you can stay connected almost anywhere. Lets say you want to download a best-seller at the beach. Done. Or if you want to stay connected when your miles away from WiFi. No problem! You can even tweet when you’re nowhere near your followers… and you can post pictures too! So what do you think?

Customer: I’ll take it.

Narrator: The iPad 2, on America’s largest and most reliable network. Verizon.

Jump the break to have a watch of the Verizon iPad commercial for yourself, as well as one of Apple’s own iPad adverts, to see for yourself some of the differences. [via 9to5 Mac]

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Facebook for iPhone 3.5 Released With New Sharing Options, Wall Design

A major update to the official Facebook app for iPhone was released earlier today, adding new sharing options from the compose screen and privacy controls that match the options set on Facebook’s website. First off, Facebook 3.5 brings a new design for Profile and Group walls; the app appears to be more streamlined and in line with Facebook’s recent changes to its web UI.

Perhaps more importantly, Facebook for iPhone now lets you tag friends and places in posts, and share links from a web view opened through Facebook. The updated compose screen has got buttons to add friends from a list (and even search), tag a place, or add a new photo or video. As for sharing links, Facebook now lets you open a webpage in-app, and instantly reshare it (with an optional comment) with your friends. When sharing a webpage from a web view, tapping on its link in the compose screen will enable you to remove the link entirely, or just its thumbnail.

Facebook 3.5 also comes with bug fixes, as mentioned in the changelog:

  • Improved Notifications speed
  • Fixed a number of Chat bugs
  • Made it easier to select filters in News Feed
  • Fixed a bug with the Notifications bar disappearing
  • Fixed a number of Photos bugs
  • Improved performance and stability overall

An official iPad app from Facebook is expected to be officially unveiled soon, likely at the upcoming f8 conference on September 22. The iPad client was discovered inside the iPhone application back in July, although it appears the latest version removes iPad elements, thus making it impossible for Cydia tweaks like FaceForward to force-enable the yet unofficial iPad app.

Facebook for iPhone is a free download on the App Store.

Screentaker Helps You Take Beautiful iOS Screenshots

I first mentioned iPhone Screentaker from developer Fabian Kreiser in a post from January 2010, in which I collected some of the tools we used at MacStories to produce beautiful high-quality screenshots of iPhone apps for our articles. We were big fans of Fabian’s side projects, and although he updated the app on his website with support for the original iPad, he never included an iPhone 4 template we could use for our iPhone screenshots. But fortunately for us, and any designer/developer who wants to create better iOS screenshots than a device’s original output, 13 months after the release of the iPhone 4 a completely revamped version of iPhone Screentaker is out, and available on the Mac App Store under a new name.

Screentaker for iOS Apps is available at $4.99, and it’s a very niche app. In fact, my guess is that Kreiser created it to scratch his own itch for better screenshots to present on websites and blog post – Screentaker is an app that might appeal to people like me, who take screenshots of iOS apps every day, or website designers that don’t want to create their own iPhone, iPod touch and iPad templates. Read more