This Week's Sponsor:

Copilot Money

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

A Teenager’s View on Social Media→

Andrew Watts has an excellent take on modern social media from a teen’s perspective:

Those are some reasons why many people my age tend to use Instagram more than they do Facebook. Everything about the application makes it less commercialized and more focused on the content, meaning more teens are inclined to visit it. When we do visit the application it is a much more pleasant experience so we are more inclined to Like and interact with the posts more. This increases our interaction with the application, meaning we will use it more, etc.

Facebook gets all of the photos we took — the good, the bad, etc—while Instagram just gets the one that really summed up the event we went to. It is much more selective, and honestly people spend more time on the captions to make them relevant/funny. On Facebook we just throw up everything we got so people can tag each other and show our family members that we’re still alive.

Do not dismiss this article, as Andrew makes some astute observations about how apps like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are used. Most of my non-geek friends are slightly older than Andrew’s (they’re under 25), but I also see the same behaviors mentioned in the article. WhatsApp is obviously huge in Italy (as he notes), but everything from Facebook Groups to Instagram’s massive popularity and Twitter’s struggle to become huge is true for my circle of friends as well. Recommended read.

Permalink

Pixel Picker iOS 8 Extension Picks Colors from Images in Any App

The Pixel Picker action extension in Apple's Photos app.

The Pixel Picker action extension in Apple’s Photos app.

I sometimes need to pick specific colors from screenshots I take on my iPhone and iPad, and while I’m aware of the existence of more powerful color pickers for iOS, I’ve been using and liking Pixel Picker.

Developed by Muse Visions, Pixel Picker is a simple and free app for iOS 8 that uses an extension to bring up a color picker in the Photos app. Through an action extension, you can bring up Pixel Picker for any image in your library; the extension will take the selected image, put it in a popup, and display a picker you can move over the pixels you want to know the color of. Because the extension works for any image that can be passed to the iOS 8 share sheet, you can run Pixel Picker in any other app that can share images, such as Messages or Twitterrific.

You can pick pixels more precisely by zooming and panning on the image, and the extension will display the RGB code of the recognized color in the upper left corner of the popup window.

Unfortunately, Pixel Picker doesn’t come with a button to quickly copy the RGB value to the clipboard, nor does it offer additional options besides picking one color at a time. It’d be nice to save colors into personalized palettes, have different output values, or perhaps have a history of colors saves from the extension.

Pixel Picker is decidedly not for designers and developers who need a serious tool for web or app design. In spite of its limitations and barebones UI, Pixel Picker gets the job done for me. The action extension is simple enough and it works, and, while the app is free, you can unlock a $0.99 In-App Purchase to remove ads in the app (you never see them in the extension) and support the developer.

Pixel Picker is available on the App Store.

Apple Announces New App Store Numbers and Milestones→

With a press release, Apple today announced new App Store numbers and milestones, as well as updated statistics on job creation in the United States and globally.

From the press release:

Apple today announced that the first week of January set a new record for billings from the App Store with customers around the world spending nearly half a billion dollars on apps and in-app purchases, and New Year’s Day 2015 marked the single biggest day ever in App Store sales history. These milestones follow a record-breaking 2014, in which billings rose 50 percent and apps generated over $10 billion in revenue for developers. To date, App Store developers have earned a cumulative $25 billion from the sale of apps and games. The introduction of iOS 8, the most significant iOS update ever, gave developers the ability to create amazing new apps and offers innovative features which proved wildly popular with App Store customers around the world.

In the press release, Apple announced that 1.4 million apps are now available on the App Store, with 725,000 of them made for iPad. Apple estimates that the “iOS ecosystem” has created 627,000 jobs in the US, and, in an updated job creation webpage, they put that number at slightly over a million for jobs “created or supported” by Apple. The same mini-site includes other numbers related to the company’s future Campus 2, US-based customer support, and more.

The App Store numbers come at an interesting time for Apple – the company has been criticized for some of its App Store practices over the past few months, but the stats shared today appear to paint a more positive picture in terms of overall growth and health of the market. Below, I’ve included some tweets by Horace Dediu for further context and analysis.

Read more

Ten Years of Mac Mini – A Timeline→

This weekend marks the ten year anniversary of the first Mac mini. I feel confident in saying that no one has watched this little machine grow more intently than I have watched it. It’s the center of everything I do here at Macminicolo.

Macminicolo’s Brian Stucki has put together a timeline with highlights from the past 10 years of the Mac mini. It’s fun to look back at the original “iHome” rumor and I’m glad the mini (the small but powerful machine that runs this website) is still around today.

Permalink

Connected: 50% My Duty→

To ring in 2015, the boys spend some time with weird old browsers, Hackintoshes, the rumored 12-inch MacBook Air and Federico’s attempts to reinvent his nerd life.

This week’s Connected includes notes about my experiments with new apps and services as well as a good discussion about the rumored 12-inch MacBook Air. You can listen to the episode here.

Sponsored by:

  • Hover: Simplified Domain Management. Use code ‘RECONNECTED’ for 10% off your first purchase.
  • Loot Crate: a monthly subscription box service for epic geek and gamer items and pop culture gear. Use code VIRTUAL for 10% off.
Permalink

A History of Apple News and Rumors During CES

To those of us who follow technology news closely, this time of the year is dominated by the barrage of CES news. But it often seems as though Apple, which doesn’t attend the exhibition, also has some of its biggest days in the press – coincidentally, or not. This was brought to light again yesterday as Mark Gurman of 9to5Mac published details of a rumoured 12” MacBook Air and a timeline for the Apple Watch launch. I have no idea whether the information leaked to Gurman was timed to coincide with CES or not – it may very well just be completely unrelated.[1]

But regardless of the intention of Gurman’s leaker, I was curious to see whether Apple really did have big news days during CES in past years as I had remembered. So I ventured over to Techmeme (which links to big technology stories every day) and went into their archives to look at what was on their front page at 7:10 PM on every day of CES since 2007. Whenever a big Apple news story appeared, I made a note of it. This is the result.

Read more

The Ultimate Unofficial Dropbox Guide [Sponsor]

Dropbox isn’t just a folder, and you can maximize its potential to simplify your work and personal life.

The Ultimate Unofficial Dropbox Guide was created to help the modern knowledge worker who wants to make their digital life more organized and efficient. The guide is a comprehensive look to power-using Dropbox, whether you’re just setting up your Dropbox account or already think you’re a pro.

Sample topics include: Comprehensive walk-throughs for photo sharing; best practices for organizing your folders and documents; keeping your files secure; and automating tasks using IFTTT.

Complimentary bonus products include a handy keyboard-shortcut reference page, 15 Tips and Tricks for Families, and Photosharing Guides for you and a beginning photo guide to giv eaway to your less-savvy family members who still want to see photos of your kids.

For more information and to preview free samples, check out The Ultimate Unofficial Dropbox Guide’s website here.

Our thanks to The Ultimate Unofficial Dropbox Guide for sponsoring MacStories this week.

The 2014 Panic Report→

Panic is one of my favorite software companies and I’m happy to see Cabel Sasser posting this today:

Panic is a multi-million dollar business that has turned a profit for 17 years straight.

It just hit me, typing those words, that that’s a pretty insane thing to be able to say. (And, sure, we barely qualify). Believe me, I know it won’t last forever — but wow, what a kind of crazy deal.

All the problems mentioned by Cabel in the post are related to the App Store. If you look closely, the 2014 Panic Report is also a well written summary of areas where Apple’s App Stores (plural, for iOS and Mac) could improve.

Permalink

Improving iOS 8 Keyboards→

David Chartier sums up my feelings on custom iOS 8 keyboards so far:

As interesting as iOS keyboards can be, their initial implementation at the OS level is severely flawed. They’re cumbersome to setup, switching between them is needlessly tedious, and limitations make it difficult to teach users about keyboard features. As far as I can tell, all these problems require solutions and improvements from Apple at the OS level.

I only use custom keyboards that solve a specific problem: Clips, for copying multiple bits of text; KuaiBoard, for visual snippets; Emoji++, because it’s better than Apple’s emoji keyboard. Even with these keyboards (which I only activate when I need them – as utilities) I’ve been annoyed by the system’s tediousness in switching between them and lack of consistency.

I haven’t been able to stick with any replacement keyboard as my primary one. In the first version of iOS 8, keyboards were too buggy to be used as daily drivers, but even after fixes I can’t use a non-Apple one on a daily basis. I’d miss the system autocorrection, QuickType, dictation, and shortcuts that I’ve grown to know over the years. Hopefully Apple will soften its stance on what’s off-limits to custom keyboards with iOS 9. Personally, I quite like Apple’s keyboard – I just wish it supported multiple languages at once.

Permalink