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Susan Kare on Icon Design→

May: 2014, Susan Kare walks us through some key points regarding the design of icons and symbols. Kare is an artist and designer and pioneer of pixel art; she created many of the graphical interface elements for the original Apple Macintosh in the 1980s as a key member of the Mac software design team, and continued to work as Creative Director at NeXT for Steve Jobs.

A great talk by Susan Kare at EG Conference, especially because of how she reflects on limitations and constraints of icon designs that occurr over time in spite of technology becoming more powerful. And I loved the anecdotes and photos of the original Macintosh icons and fonts.

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Gamevice Controller Announced for iPad mini

Wikipad, the company behind a gaming-focused Android tablet released last year, has announced Gamevice, an iOS game controller made specifically for the iPad mini. The Gamevice was originally announced for Android and Windows tablets in January but, as noted by TouchArcade, the company has seemingly switched to an iPad-only device, targeting a public release later this year with “additional platforms” following soon.

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MagiCam Is a Fun Photo App from the Creators of Camera+

“We wanted to create a complementary camera app to Camera+ for users who wanted a simple, one-touch app for shooting and sharing on the go”, Lisa Bettany tells me over email. Lisa is the co-founder of Camera+, the popular camera app by Tap Tap Tap that, since 2009, has amassed over 12 million downloads and become a fixture of the App Store’s Top Charts, which can be rare for a paid app with additional In-App Purchases. Today, Tap Tap Tap is launching MagiCam, which, unlike Camera+, does away with professional editing tools and focuses on simple filters and quick sharing.

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The iOS App Teaching Kids How to Program→

Cassidee Moser writes about Hopscotch, a coding app for iPad:

Turbine Truck is a small iPad game made up of very basic mechanics. Players guide a cartoon truck across a 2D plane, smashing into as many oncoming cars as possible while evading the police. It lacks complexity and isn’t necessarily a grueling test of skill, but Turbine Truck remains notable for one reason: it was created by a child using Hopscotch, an iOS app with its own visual programming language used to teach kids the basics of coding and programming.

Hopscotch is impressive, and you should check it out on the App Store.

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Scanbot 2.0

I covered Scanbot in May, calling it a “fast and efficient scanner app for iOS 7” powered by a delightful UI, integration with cloud services, and a user-friendly experience:

Scanbot covers the basics of mobile scanners well: it’s got color schemes for captured scans; it can save PDFs at 200 dpi and automatically send them to a variety of web services (including Dropbox, Evernote, and Google Drive); and, it can handle multiple pages per scan as well as editing features such as manual border cropping and annotations. Scanbot looks fairly obvious on the surface, as it doesn’t reinvent the way a mobile scanner is supposed to work on iOS – the app’s features can be found in other similar apps, while more advanced ones haven’t been added to Scanbot yet.

Scanbot 2.0, released last week, doesn’t add the advanced features that I mentioned in my original review, but it brings a native iPad version and support for QR code scanning, both of which are welcome additions.

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Tools to Organize Browser Tabs for Mac Users→

Here’s a strategy that you might consider trying: Prepare some tools which can, at the moment you’re ready, put all those tabs exactly where you need them so you can close those tabs. If most of those tabs are really your to-do list, line them up in one window and then get them into your actual to-do list. I’ve found that if your tools are easy to use, you’ll be more likely to make it a part of your routine.

Justin Lancy has created a great collection of tools to export browser tabs on a Mac. These tools include AppleScripts and downloadable Alfred and LaunchBar extensions, and they support apps like Evernote, OmniFocus, and Reminders – for both Safari and Chrome.

I have installed the Alfred extension to export a list of tabs to Evernote, and it works very well. Check out Justin’s tools for browser tabs here.

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Facebook Launches Slingshot→

Today, Facebook has launched Slingshot, a new messaging app that mixes ephemeral photos with “pay to play” mechanics. Like Snapchat, photos you share with your friends disappear after you close them, but there’s a catch: you can only view messages shared with you if you send a photo (or video) back. If you don’t share, you won’t “unlock” messages, which will accumulate in the app showing a numeric count and a pixelated preview.

Slingshot was developed by Facebook Creative Labs, the same team behind Paper. From their announcement:

With Slingshot, we wanted to build something where everybody is a creator and nobody is just a spectator. When everyone participates, there’s less pressure, more creativity and even the little things in life can turn into awesome shared experiences. This is what Slingshot is all about.

The Slingshot team mentions Snapchat but notes that they wanted to do “something new and different” with shortcuts to share with all your contacts at once:

We’ve enjoyed using Snapchat to send each other ephemeral messages and expect there to be a variety of apps that explore this new way of sharing. With Slingshot, we saw an opportunity to create something new and different: a space where you can share everyday moments with lots of people at once.

In his overview at TechCrunch, Josh Constine highlights the fact that Slingshot could be seen as a gimmick or an advantage over established messaging apps:

The reply-to-unlock mechanic could create the right incentive to share back, feeding on our natural curiosity. It’s gamified sharing. The satisfaction of revealing hidden content could be enough to entice people to find something worth capturing. Perfect pics could end up on Facebook and Instagram, especially intimate ones could go to Snapchat, and Slingshot could pull in our day-to-day moments

Alternatively, reply-to-unlock could be seen as an annoying gimmick, introducing too much friction. Why make a friend work for your photo when you could just text them? The chore could leave Slingshot wasting away in some folder on your screen.

Over at The Verge, Ellis Hamburger reviews Slingshot, with a focus on notifications and sharing options:

But because you have to respond to a shot before you can see it, these notifications act as nags instead of notifiers. If you tap on a new notification, “Shot from Adam,” you won’t be able to view it — until you send a shot of what you’re doing back to Adam. Thus, shots feel less urgent than messages, since there’s no expectation that you’ll be able to open them immediately. The app feels far more like a News Feed with push notifications than anything else — except this News Feed requires you to share a post before you can view it, so there’s its no place for lurkers.

Slingshot is free on the App Store, and requires your phone number to sign up.

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Here, Look Lets You Choose Photos You Want to Show to Your Friends

Here, Look is a simple iOS app developed by Paul Roub that solves a specific problem: you want to show some photos to your friends but you don’t want them to scroll through all your photos in the Camera Roll.

We’ve all been there. You’ve just returned from a well-deserved vacation and you’ve taken many pictures with your iPhone, many of which you want to show to your friends…except those few ones that you like to keep private. Apple’s Photos app doesn’t have a built-in presentation mode for selected photos, so, unless you want to create a specific album for photos you want to show to your friends every time, you’ll be forced to try your luck and hand over your phone with all your photos and the risk that swiping will eventually bring up that awkward selfie that you forgot to delete.

Here, Look lets you create an on-the-fly gallery of selected photos in three easy steps: select photos that you want to show; tap the Here, Look button; and, hand your phone to someone else. The developer says that the app is aimed at eliminating swipe panic, and the description is quite accurate. Once your device in your friends’ hands, they can only swipe between the photos you’ve chosen and they won’t have any kind of controls visible on screen. They can rotate and zoom, but they can’t keep swiping to see all the photos in your library. When they’re done looking at your photos, just take your device, triple-tap the screen, and you’ll be back in photo selection mode.

Perhaps you have better friends than mine, and they’re never tempted to take a look at your photos when they have a chance. For me, Here, Look provides a simple solution to a common problem that irks me every time I want to show some photos, and it’s only $0.99 on the App Store.