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Marked Released On Mac App Store, Discounted, and Updated→

Marked, developed by Brett Terpstra, is my must-have utility to convert MultiMarkdown to HTML on my Mac. Whenever I need to publish an article from OS X rather than my iPad (usually because I need to record and include GIFs or screencasts), I rely on Marked to handle conversion to valid HTML with a keyboard shortcut. And yet, as we’ve shown before, there is so much that Marked can do, such as printing to a variety of formats, keyword and readability analysis, and more.

Today, Brett released version 2.3 of Marked and made it available on the Mac App Store as well. Both versions of the app share the same features and they are both sandboxed to comply with Apple’s App Store rules. However, in spite of the restrictions, Marked hasn’t lost its functionality – instead, Brett managed to add new options such as full GitHub Flavored Markdown support, improved PDF export stability, a document reading progress bar (I love this), and a mini map for navigation with fast scrolling.

What I still find most impressive about Marked isn’t its feature set per se, but rather how the app can be used as a simple tool for short posts or an advanced solution for writers who are working on a book or long documents. Marked is incredibly powerful and flexible and, at $9.99 on the Mac App Store as a limited time sale, I highly recommend it.

(Check out Brett’s blog post and our previous coverage of Marked.)

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The Eighth Annual iTunes Festival Returns to London This September

Apple today announced that their annual iTunes Festival will once again return to London’s iconic Roundhouse for the eighth year. The month long festival will happen throughout September and will feature Maroon 5, David Guetta, Calvin Harris, Beck, Sam Smith, Blondie, Kylie, 5 Seconds of Summer, Chrissie Hynde and many more of the world’s biggest artists.

“The iTunes Festival in London is back with another stunning line-up of world class performers and tremendous new acts,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services. “These live shows capture the heart and soul of iTunes and we love bringing them to our customers in the Roundhouse, as well as to the millions of people watching all over the world for free.”

Apple will once again stream the festival live as well as offer the performances on demand to iOS, iTunes and Apple TV users - just as they have for previous iTunes Festivals, including earlier this year in their first SXSW iTunes Festival. For those looking to attend the festival, Apple will be giving tickets away through iTunes and select media partners including Global Radio and the London Evening Standard.

You can read more information in Apple’s Press Release or keep an eye on the iTunes Festival website for more information in the coming weeks.

Sue Wagner Elected To Apple’s Board of Directors, Bill Campbell Retires

Apple’s board of directors received a slight change yesterday when Sue Wagner was elected and Bill Campbell retired from the board. Apple’s chairman, Art Levinson, says the election of Sue Wagner to Apple’s board comes after an exhaustive search by the company, in which they sought to “further strengthen our board’s breadth of talent and background”.

Sue is a pioneer in the financial industry and we are excited to welcome her to Apple’s board of directors,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “We believe her strong experience, especially in M&A and building a global business across both developed and emerging markets, will be extremely valuable as Apple continues to grow around the world.

Wagner is the co-founder and director of BlackRock, one of the world’s most successful asset-management companies, and also serves on the boards of BlackRock, DSP BlackRock (India), Swiss Re, Wellesley College and Hackley School.
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Unreal Engine 4.3 Adds Metal Support→

From Unreal Engine’s blog:

Unreal Engine 4.3 includes greatly improved mobile support, awesome new rendering features, improved Blueprint workflows, and strides toward an excellent experience on Mac and laptops. Be sure to check out the new World Composition tools, spline features, and the preview of Paper2D, our 2D toolset! Today we’re also shipping SpeedTree 7 support, our work on Metal API for iOS 8 to date, and new Oculus Rift features such as time warping.

Unreal is one of the most popular engines used by game developers today. With iOS 8 and new devices on the horizon, I can’t wait to see what kind of advancements Metal will bring for mobile graphics.

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The Prompt: World’s Greatest Finale→

The young men (and Stephen) of The Prompt gather one last time and discuss Overcast and IBM.

In the final episode of The Prompt, we take an in-depth look at Marco Arment’s new app, Overcast, with a discussion on its feature set and business model. You can get the episode here.

I’d like to thank everyone for listening to The Prompt over the past 57 episodes. It’s been a fantastic journey, and I can’t wait for what’s next.

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Overcast Review

When I received the first beta of Marco Arment’s new app, Overcast, back in May, I didn’t think I could use an iPhone-only podcast client with no iPad version and no streaming support as my daily podcast listening solution. Overcast, available today on the App Store, is launching to high expectations and hype for what Arment, best known for creating Instapaper, founding The Magazine, and co-hosting the Accidental Tech Podcast, has been working on since his reveal in September 2013.

Two months after putting Overcast on my Home screen as a vote of confidence and using it to listen to podcasts every day, I don’t want to go back to any other podcast app I’ve tried before. In spite of lacking iPad and OS X versions and some features from popular podcast apps, the listening experience in Overcast and its approach to podcast discovery have been so thoughtfully implemented and cleverly engineered, I find it to be a superior choice for my listening habits.

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AppbotX Launches in an Effort to Help Developers Better Communicate with Users

Launched earlier today, AppbotX is a new open source support and communications solution for developers of iOS apps and soon for apps on other platforms including Android, Windows Phone and Unity. AppbotX is designed as a library that can be built into any app, allowing developers to easily provide inline notifications, smart feedback forms, FAQs, version updates and review prompts. It is the natural evolution of the Appbot service which launched in 2012 and enables developers to keep track of user reviews of their apps.

We’ve delivered over 15 million reviews for more than 34,000 apps with Appbot. We understand the pain points app developers have, complaints and bad reviews lead to fewer sales and poor rankings for apps. Now we’re launching AppbotX to solve communication problems mobile developers have with customers.

AppbotX looks to be a huge time saver for developers who want to implement better support mechanisms within their apps but don’t want to spend the time and expense of developing it themselves. I should caveat that statement by noting I’m not a developer, but even as a user the functions that AppbotX enables seem great. In particular I really like the idea of inline notifications that would allow a developer to send notifications to their users if there is a critical bug, server downtime or other important news. Because it runs on AppbotX’s servers, those notifications will still get to the user even if the developer’s servers are down.

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