An update to Skitch – Evernote’s image annotation and sharing tool – was released earlier today for iPhone and iPad, quietly adding action and photo editing extensions to edit images in Apple’s Photos and other apps.
Skitch for iOS Update Adds Extensions
The Return of a Macintosh Shareware Classic→
In the heady days of Macintosh shareware gaming, Ray Dunakin was a star. His 1990 world-hopping adventure title Ray’s Maze puzzled and delighted Mac gamers the world over, despite it having been made with an early black-and-white Mac program called World Builder, and his later games Another Fine Mess, A Mess O’ Trouble, and Twisted! only added to his reputation. But fate conspired to force the games into oblivion as Apple moved the Mac into OS X and then over to Intel processors.
Until now. Marc Khadpe is Ray’s biggest fan. He’s been the proprietor of the Ray’s Maze Page since he created it in 1996. And he’s spent the past decade, on and off, rewriting the World Builder engine for OS X.
Over at US Gamer, Richard Moss tells the story of Ray Dunakin’s games, icons of Macintosh gaming in the early ’90s recently re-released with OS X compatibility on the Mac App Store.
Make sure to check out the original and restored games here, and if you’re into classic Macintosh gaming grab A Mess O’ Trouble from the Mac App Store at $4.99.
Connected: Artisanal Emoji→
This week, they boys break down Apple’s Q2 results and walk with Myke as he spends a day with Apple Watch.
On this week’s Connected, I also share some thoughts on the iPad’s declining sales and its perception in the tech industry. You can listen to the episode here.
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How to Configure Gmail with OS X Yosemite Mail
My friend Amy is having her first experience with using Gmail, and, it, um, isn’t going as well as she’d like. The good news is that although Apple’s Mail.app and Gmail have had a rocky relationship in the past, Mail.app in Yosemite works pretty well with Gmail, but there are some things that you should understand before you proceed.
StretchLink Unshortens and Cleans URLs from Your Menu Bar→
Brett Terpstra, writing about StretchLink 1.0:
It’s an easy-to-use tool for expanding shortened links, fixing redirects, and cleaning out referrer junk from Google Analytics and others. StretchLink runs in the OS X menu bar. You can click the icon to open the main panel from which it can expand and clean links on demand with a single click. Even better, it can be set to silently watch your clipboard. You can turn this on with a switch from the main panel, or just right click the menu bar icon to toggle it.
StretchLink 1.0 is priced at $1.99, with a free trial available on the website. An introductory sale of $0.99 (50% off) starts now and goes through the end of May. StretchLink didn’t get a beta round, but it’s been tested on a variety of my own machines. If you do run into issues, don’t hesitate to contact me. A Mac App Store release is planned for the near future, if all goes well.
As a shell script nerd who loves automation and clean URLS, I had, of course, written my own shell script to expand and clean URLs. I installed StretchLink last night, and I am sure that I will never use my script again. That’s how much better Brett’s app is.
My biggest criteria (after, of course, that it actually works) is how fast would it work. So I did what any self-respecting geek would do: I wrote a shell script to test how fast it would expand a given URL. The result was that StretchLink expanded it in less than 1 second. 1
You can download StretchLink here.
P.S. If you’re looking for something similar on iOS, checkout Clean Links.
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If you want more details about how I tested this, I posted my script as a gist. Because of course I did. ↩︎
Christy Turlington Burns’ Big Finish→
Following Christy Turlington Burns’ blog on Apple.com has been a fascinating and educational experience. After setting a new personal record at the London Marathon last week, Apple has published the final installment of Christy’s blog posts with her thoughts and photos from the event.
They also produced a new video, which you can watch below. And, check out Every Mother Counts here.
Apple to Reject Watch Apps ‘Whose Primary Function Is Telling Time’→
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Apple updated their App Store Review Guidelines to state that Watch apps built primarily to tell time will be rejected.
Got our first Watch App Review guideline: 10.7: Watch Apps whose primary function is telling time will be rejected https://t.co/EbsKqsuCJN
— David Smith (@_DavidSmith) April 28, 2015
In the past few weeks, I’ve heard about a few timezone apps primarily designed to show world clocks that were rejected for unknown reasons, with developers annoyed about the lack of official guidelines. Today’s change is better than approving and then rejecting an app, I guess, but maybe Apple could have shared this piece of information sooner. I don’t know if those timezone apps ended up being approved or not, and there could be other developers with a different experience from the ones I talked to.
From Apple’s standpoint, however, I can see why it makes sense to avoid confusion with apps that replicate a watch face UI – at least initially. It’s not too dissimilar from Apple’s stance on third-party apps that replicated native functionalities with the original iPhone App Store.
Adobe Slate Review
In recent years Adobe has made a concerted effort to develop a collection of mobile apps that make it easy to accomplish various creative tasks. But rather than make one monolothic app that does everything (like Photoshop on PCs), they’ve been splitting up features into many apps that each focus on a different, and specific, creative aspect. For example, there is Adobe Brush CC, which enables you to create custom brushes for Photoshop and Illustrator based off photos you take on your iPhone or iPad, or Adobe Color CC, which will create a custom color palette from your photos. As Adobe has continued to release more and more of these apps every few months, their efforts have become more and more impressive. Adobe now has a sizeable collection of mobile apps that are some of the most technically impressive and well designed apps available on the iPhone and iPad.
Which brings me to Adobe Slate, one of the most recent additions to Adobe’s mobile app stable. Unlike many of their other apps which directly integrate and complement Adobe’s desktop apps like Photoshop or Illustrator (such as Brush and Color, described above), Slate is its own distinct product. Adobe describes Slate as a tool to “turn any document into a beautiful visual story”, which is actually quite a good way to describe it. A more mechanical way of describing Slate would be that it is an iPad-only app for creating a webpage (not a website) for situations where the content you want to share or display is a mix of text and images.
I recently had an assignment at university that permitted a more creative format and layout than the typical essay or report. Because I had heard about Adobe Slate launching a few weeks earlier, I decided to test it out. I ended up submitting my assignment as a webpage created with Slate, and I really enjoyed using it and think the result was pretty great.[1]
Apple Q2 2015 Results: $58 Billion Revenue, 61.2 Million iPhones, 12.6 Million iPads Sold
Apple has published their Q2 2015 financial results for the quarter that ended in March 2015. The company posted revenue of $58 billion. The company sold 12.6 million iPads, 61.2 million iPhones, and 4.6 million Macs, earning a quarterly net profit of $13.6 billion.
“We are thrilled by the continued strength of iPhone, Mac and the App Store, which drove our best March quarter results ever,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “We’re seeing a higher rate of people switching to iPhone than we’ve experienced in previous cycles, and we’re off to an exciting start to the June quarter with the launch of Apple Watch.”