This Week's Sponsor:

Copilot Money

The Apple Editor’s Choice Award App for Tracking Your Money. Start Your Free Trial Today

Apple’s App Search API Validation Tool→

I haven’t seen this linked before – and I certainly didn’t see it when I first wrote about iOS 9 search – but Apple has a new validation tool to test websites for App Search, coming with iOS 9 in Spotlight.

Apple writes:

Test your webpage for iOS 9 Search APIs. Enter a URL and Applebot will crawl your webpage and show how you can optimize for best results.

As I wrote, iOS 9 won’t be limited to searching for local app content:

To enhance web crawling with structured data and, again, give developers control of indexed content, Apple has announced support for various types of web markup. Developers who own websites with content related to an app will be able to use Smart App Banners to describe deep links to an app (more on this in a bit) as well as open standards such as schema.org and Open Graph.

Apple calls these “rich results”: by reading metadata based on existing standards, Apple’s web crawler can have a better understanding of key information called out on a webpage and do more than simply parsing a title and a link. With support for schema.org, for instance, Applebot will be able to recognize tagged prices, ratings, and currencies for individual listings on Airbnb, while the Open Graph image tag could be used as the image thumbnail in iOS search results. An app like Songkick could implement structured data to tag concert dates and prices in their related website, and popular concerts could show up for users with rich descriptions in the iOS 9 search page.

The validation tool does indeed analyze information that will be used to power iOS 9 search results – such as thumbnails, descriptions, and deep links to apps. You can try it out here.

Permalink

Focus: Your Productivity Timer [Sponsor]

Focus is a time manager that helps you beat procrastination and work more efficiently. Available on iOS, OS X, and Apple Watch, Focus lets you work in intervals and reminds you to take breaks regularly (based on the Pomodoro Technique).

Taking breaks regularly enables you to be more concentrated, more thoughtful, and ultimately more productive. With its simple and lightweight way to organize and manage your tasks, Focus lets you set and achieve daily goals to keep you motivated; because its task management features are unobtrusive by design, you’ll spend your time working on a task instead of fiddling too much with the app.

Focus is designed to work seemlessly together across all platforms and devices. You can switch devices by using Handoff and with iCloud, so everything stays in sync. On iOS, you can see your current progress with a Today widget, and use interactive notifications to start, stops and extend your work. On the Mac, a beautiful and clear design feels natural on OS X Yosemite (including dark mode), and a menu bar item lets you see your current progress at a glance (it even works with a closed Focus app window).

Focus is available for iOS and OS X. For more information, visit focusapp.io.

Our thanks to Focus for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Elegant Image Watermarking and Resizing with Watermarker 2

I’m a bit behind in mentioning it, but Watermarker 2 is out. This Mac app from developer (and former MacStories writer) Don Southard lets you quickly resize and add professional watermarks to batches of photos. It’s a great-looking app that elegantly accomplishes its goal.

You can use custom text, import your own logo or image, and apply a customizable strike-through “X” over an image (all with adjustable transparency). You can also add pixelation to an image to obscure parts of it, and annotate images with additional shapes.

Watermarker 2 offers powerful batch photo manipulation features such as renaming groups of files based on patterns and resizing using pixel or percentage constraints.

You can save your watermark settings as presets, and apply them to batches in the future with a couple of clicks. There’s even an Action Extension for sending images from other apps to Watermarker, and a Share Sheet for sending watermarked images to others.

Watermarker 2 Action Extension

Watermarker 2 Action Extension

Watermarker 2 is available for $14.99, both on the Mac App Store and through direct purchase (with a free trial available).

Instant Hosted Web Pages From Markdown With Loose Leaves→

Loose Leaves is a handy (free) utility for OS X that takes selected Markdown text from almost any app and instantly creates a web page on the secure Loose Leaves server that you can link to and share.

Loose Leaves is available anywhere, and just a hotkey away in any app. If you’ve ever needed to share more than 140 characters, link long text in Trello or Slack, or just effortlessly share an idea from your notes, this is a handy tool to have.

Permalink

Acorn 5: Shape Generators, PDF Import, and More

I’ve been an Acorn user for years now. I first started using it as my primary photo editing tool because I could open, edit, and export a perfectly-optimized web image before Photoshop had finished bouncing in the Dock. Photoshop has improved its launch time in recent versions, but Acorn has stepped up its game, too.

Acorn 5 came out this week, and it adds some powerful new features. Notably, it adds tools for vector manipulation and generation, as well as additional bezier and vector tools, PDF Import, snapping to grids, guides, other shapes, and more.

If you’re a Photoshop user looking for an alternative, Acorn has the tools you’re used to: dodge and burn, hue and curve adjustments, custom selection editing, and everything you need to do advanced photo editing. Acorn 5 can even import Photoshop brushes. Given the wide diversity of custom brushes available on the net, this opens up a lot of possibilities.

Version 5 also adds additional non-destructive filters and adjustments for both raster and vector layers, and the new Shape generators and processors are stackable and non-destructive as well. The layer adjustments are stored in the native Acorn file format, so you can always access and update them.

Acorn still has all of the great tools from version 4, including professional photo editing tools, Smart Layer Export for automatic 1x and 2x images, and the best compression on exported PNGs you’re likely to find.

Acorn 5 is $24.99 US on the Mac App Store (also available for direct purchase, with a few small differences). Check out the website for more info, and read the release notes for a mind-boggling list of all of the new features.

Apple Posts New iPhone Advert: “Apple Pay”

Apple’s fourth advert featuring the new “If it’s not an iPhone, it’s not an iPhone” tagline was last night posted online. The new advert, “Apple Pay”, naturally focuses on Apple Pay, demonstrating Apple’s contactless payment method available on the iPhone 6 in the US and UK. The advert’s narration makes particular mention of how Apple Pay is “faster”, “safer” and keeps your information private.

This is an iPhone, and this is Apple Pay, which lets you shop in a faster, simpler way. For groceries, and kicks, toys and your lunchtime fix. It’s safer than a credit card and keeps your info, yours. And you can already use it in one million stores. If it’s not an iPhone, it’s not an iPhone.

You can watch the new advert below the break, or on YouTube.

Read more

1Password 5.5 Brings UI Tweaks and Improvements to Touch ID, Apple Watch App, and Security

Released today on the App Store, the latest update to our favorite password manager brings some nice minor adjustments. Most of the changes improve the flow and ease of use of the app, and while there aren’t any game changers here, numerous tiny annoyances that have been frustrating me for a while have been wiped out.

The first feature mentioned in the release notes is the ability to switch between multiple vaults with only two taps using their new vault switcher. I personally only use one vault with 1Password so I don’t have much to say here, but I’m always a fan of doing things in fewer taps so this feature gets a thumbs up from me.

My favorite changes have to do with Touch ID and security tweaks. There have been quite a few times when I’ve accidentally canceled the Touch ID dialogue, and until now that meant that I was then required to type my password back in before the app would unlock. With version 5.5, there is now a very nice looking fingerprint button that will show up beneath the password input box. If you accidentally cancel Touch ID before unlocking the app, you can now tap the fingerprint button to bring the Touch ID prompt back up and unlock without typing. The feature of course still respects your Touch ID timeout settings, so if you’re trying to unlock when Touch ID has been disabled until the next time your password is typed, tapping the fingerprint button won’t do anything.

Next on security, in regard to the 1Password extension, the extension and the main 1Password app now share unlock settings. This means that if you unlock the app, the extension is unlocked, and vice versa. If you, like me, have experienced typing your password into the extension (which should then enable Touch ID) and then going to the main app and discovering that you now need to type the password again, then you’ll be happy about this feature as well. Timeout settings are still respected on the extension as well, also of course.

Another small but appreciated security improvement: if you fill your login credentials on an unsecured website (think http://) when the saved URL for the login is secure (think https://), 1Password will warn you that this is about to happen. This is one of those features that you hope you would never need anyway but if you do it could save you a lot of trouble.

Finally, among some other various and very minor changes, the Apple Watch app has been updated to allow you to see the PIN numbers on your credit card entries. Convenient if you’re into that sort of thing.

Overall, 1Password 5.5 is a solid update. Mostly polish, but polishing shiny things just makes them shinier, and who doesn’t like that? If you don’t have 1Password yet then I’m not sure why you read all of this, but you can find it in the App Store, and you should go buy it right now.

Dropbox Adds Support for Storing URLs Alongside Files

Example from the Linked Dropbox Blog post

Example from the Linked Dropbox Blog post

Dropbox yesterday announced a new feature to allow you to drag URLs from websites into your Dropbox folders to store them alongside your files. The feature is available on both the desktop and web versions of dropbox, and is as easy as dragging from the address bar on a web browser and dropping the URL into a local Dropbox folder or the Dropbox web app in a browser window. The URL is stored right alongside the rest of your files. Clicking on it from a Finder window opens it right away, while clicking on it from the browser version will open a page with a large “Open in new tab” button in the center. You can open the same page on the Dropbox mobile app, and open the URL in Safari from there, but there’s no way as of yet to store URLs to your Dropbox from mobile.

The new feature is reminiscent to me of a similar feature in the upcoming iOS 9/OS X El Capitan version of Apple’s Notes app. You can save URLs directly into your notes, which allows you to easily keep relevant sources or other web media close at hand while working on or reviewing the note. Dropbox’s take on this allows that type of easy organization of sources or relevant web media without forcing you to use a proprietary file format. While Notes may let you view previews of the URLs inline, in exchange the files can only be opened in the Notes app. If you want them elsewhere you’ll need to export them to PDF and lose any interactivity with the file or the associated URLs. With Dropbox’s new URL storing feature, you can store websites alongside files no matter what the project that you are working on may be, and then access them from any platform.

The lack of support for adding URLs from mobile does seem like a shame to me. I often go through Twitter on my iPad or iPhone, and it would be great to be able to quickly save URLs to my Dropbox via the iOS share sheet when I come across something relevant to a project I’m working on. That said, it seems like such an obvious feature that I would be surprised if it was not implemented eventually. Hopefully we’ll see it soon.

While I’m not certain right now if I will go all in with this feature and start saving all of the sources for projects I’m working on into Dropbox alongside the project files, it’s definitely nice to have the option. In fact that’s my favorite part of the implementation: it will integrate directly into existing workflows without requiring any changes whatsoever. Since the URLs are stored separately from the files, the most you’ll need to do is move your project into it’s own folder (but let’s be real, who doesn’t keep projects in their own folders anyway?) and then you can drag links on top of the folder to store them alongside the rest of the project. You can do this right now, the feature already works.

This feature is an excellent example of Dropbox innovating on its platform while still staying true to itself. Rather than getting sucked into the modern trend of proprietary file formats with fancy inline previews and interactivity, Dropbox kept things simple, and kept their hands out of our file extensions; yet they still made a way for us to achieve the same overall goal that apps like Notes and Evernote have shown to be useful. I love seeing implementations like this from Dropbox, and I hope they continue finding new ways to make their system more powerful without adding layers of complexity for their users to deal with.

Google Photos Will Now Show You Photos and Videos From the Past→

Sean O’Kane at The Verge:

The Google Photos app will now serve up cards in the “assistant view” that urge you to “rediscover this day,” and they can include photos, photo collages, or videos. The cards will tell you where you were and who you were with on that day, and the app also sticks a little graphic over everything that tells you which year it was from — another little bit that is extremely similar to Timehop.

The first rule of modern photo management services is that, sooner or later, they’re going to bring back a feature from Everpix. I used to love this in the defunct service; it makes sense for the Assistant view of Google Photos. It’s surprising to me that Apple still hasn’t added something like this to Photos (you can search for “one year ago”, but it’s not as precise or visible).

Permalink