The E-ink Companion For Your Favorite Tools
This week, Federico, Myke and Stephen reflect on their input into the world of dental healthcare, then move on to discuss Dropbox’s recent news, shake-ups in Apple’s design department and the WWDC lottery system.
For more on Carousel, see my thoughts on the app – I like its browsing experience a lot, but it needs more options for uploads and folder-based structures. Get the episode here.
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Nine months after being pulled from the Mac App Store following the Google Reader shutdown, Reeder for Mac, Silvio Rizzi’s popular desktop RSS client, is back with a public beta that offers a glimpse at the app’s new service integrations, refreshed design, updated gesture navigation, and new features that will come in the final version.
During the beta stage, Reeder 2 for Mac will be free to download from Rizzi’s website.
The Reeder 2 beta builds on the design foundation of the old Reeder for Mac and the latest Reeder for iOS to offer a mix of new functionalities and tweaked layouts that should be familiar to both audiences. In July 2013, Rizzi pulled Reeder for Mac from the App Store due to the discontinuation of Google Reader (the RSS service that powered Reeder 1.0) as he couldn’t ship compatibility updates in time for Google’s deadline and preferred to jump directly to a 2.0 update that, however, is taking longer than expected. Originally announced for Autumn 2013, Reeder 2 for Mac still isn’t feature complete according to Rizzi, but he’s confident that the public beta should provide a solid preview of the changes he’s been working on while also serving as a way to gather feedback for what will become a paid app on the Mac App Store. Read more
Let me be clear. Steve was not some mercurial ogre or cartoon autocrat. He was just very, very busy. He didn’t have time for “yes men,” the easily frightened, or those who didn’t know what the fuck they were doing or talking about.
In that way, he wasn’t different from any other executive. At least those with good sense.
Steve expected excellence. Which is why he so often got it.
Fantastic collection of stories about Steve Jobs and working at Apple by Don Melton (an extended, unified version of what first appeared on The Loop Magazine).
If you read one thing today, make it this one.
It’s a fairly hidden feature that not many people seem to know about, but the Apple TV has some pretty great options for customizing its screen saver. There are a few default sources of photos you can choose from, including National Geographic (probably what you are using now), Animals, Flowers, Trailers (which shows movie posters of films on the iTunes Trailers website) and iCloud Photos (Photostream and iCloud albums).
But more interesting is the option to use Flickr. That may sound odd, but the reason I say it is because when you combine it with the awesome power of IFTTT, you can create some really unique screen saver options. For example, for the last few months I’ve been using a combination of Flickr, IFTTT and Instagram to create an Apple TV screen saver that cycles through images that I have liked on Instagram and it is far better than seeing the same old National Geographic photos (as great as they are) over and over again.
Cult of Mac’s Luke Dormehl posted a look behind the scenes of Monument Valley, one of the most unique and beautiful iOS games I’ve played this year. There are photos of early sketches and an interview with Monument Valley designer Ken Wong, which includes this important quote about movies and game design:
A lot of games make too much sense,” Wong says. “Their makers try and emulate movies, for example — wanting to look like Star Wars or The Godfather. Games can be so much more. The titles that excite us the most here at ustwo are the ones where you get to do really strange things. It doesn’t have to make sense. That’s where Monument Valley came from conceptually.
Carousel, a new gallery app released today by Dropbox, aims at providing an integrated solution for all photos and videos stored in a Dropbox account, unifying them in a single interface that automatically sorts files by time and location. As someone who relies on Dropbox and a custom workflow for photo backup, management, and viewing, I followed today’s announcements with curiosity and anticipation – the company’s previous photo products weren’t the most advanced or versatile ones on the App Store, but they showed an interest for turning Dropbox into a cloud-based Camera Roll, which is where Apple is struggling with its confusing Photo Stream.
I’m still exploring various possibilities for my photo management workflow (I played around with Everpix, Loom, Picturelife, Unbound, and many other services and clients) and Carousel offers an interesting take on the problem: it’s photo and video archival based on Dropbox storage, but it’s also a separate iOS app with sharing options that include messaging and public links on the web.
I took Carousel for a spin[1] this afternoon, and I collected some first impressions below. They’re not exhaustive, but I believe they’re fairly indicative of the app’s current state and limitations. Read more
Alongside Carousel, today Dropbox also announced an update to Mailbox for iOS and showed the first screenshots of a Mailbox beta for OS X. In Mailbox for iOS, Dropbox is introducing a feature called Auto-Swipe, which will let the app learn a user’s patterns for archiving, deleting, or snoozing emails containing certain addresses or subjects and try to perform the same action automatically in the future:
Today, we’re proud to announce a new service built directly into Mailbox that learns from your swipes and snoozes to automate common actions. Mute that thread you don’t care about, snooze messages from your friends until after work, and route receipts to a list — automatically. We call this service Auto-swipe.
According to a post on the Mailbox blog, Auto-Swipe is made possible by the service’s new infrastructure, likely helped by resources made available by Dropbox (the company was acquired by Dropbox in March 2013). In a feature story at The Verge, Ellis Hamburger has shared details on how Auto-Swipe will work and even integrate with Mailbox for Mac:
If you want to manually archive any thread for good before waiting on Mailbox’s suggestion, you can open it up, and then tap and hold on the archive button. Similarly, if you keep snoozing your Groupon emails until after work, or your club soccer emails until Friday afternoons, Mailbox will notice your actions and offer to do them for you for incoming emails of those kinds. Or you can manually invoke action by tapping and holding on the snooze button. The goal is to remove all the clutter you didn’t even know existed — the messages that you assumed needed to stay in your inbox because they showed no signs of stopping.
Mailbox for Mac will sport a design inspired by the popular iOS app, with support for quick gestures and snooze (two of the app’s marquee additions to classic email) and a clean widescreen layout to manage accounts and lists. The Mailbox Mac app isn’t available today, but Dropbox is letting users apply for a beta invitation here.
At a press event held in San Francisco this morning, Dropbox announced Carousel, a new dedicated gallery app that combines all of a user’s photos and videos from all connected devices in a single interface. Carousel will be available both as an iOS and Android app, separate from the main Dropbox client but based on the same storage space.
During the event, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston announced that the company has now 700 employees and over 275 million users, who rely on Dropbox to store a variety of personal and work files, documents, and media. With Carousel, Dropbox allows users to look at photos and videos stored in their accounts, which are automatically sorted by time and location: large thumbnail previews group related items together by location, while a timeline scrubber at the bottom allows users to quickly navigate through time to view and select old photos.
According to Dropbox, Carousel is faster than Apple’s built-in Photos app when dealing with hundreds of files even though they are stored in the cloud, and not on a user’s local device. Carousel is built with sharing in mind: the app makes it easy to select multiple photos and send them to another person directly from the app alongside a message; the recipient can then view the full-resolution photos, and optionally save them to Carousel.
Dropbox has long enabled users to automatically upload new photos from their devices through the official Dropbox client, but Carousel marks the company’s debut into the photo and video management space with a dedicated app that’s been specifically created for upload, management, and sharing outside of the Dropbox client.
From the Dropbox blog post:
It combines the photos in your Dropbox with the photos on your phone, and automatically backs up new ones as you take them. Carousel sorts all these memories by event so you can easily travel back in time to any photo from any date. And unlike other mobile galleries, the size of your Carousel isn’t constrained by the space on your phone, which means you can finally have your entire life’s memories in one place.
Carousel will be available for free on the App Store later today. We’ve embedded the official promo video below.
Read more
Nuclear Throne, the upcoming game from Vlambeer (Super Crate Box, Ridiculous Fishing, Luftrausers) currently in development and available through Steam Early Access, will receive native Mac support today. Previously, the game was only playable through Early Access on Windows machines.
Nuclear Throne is now live and should be stable on Mac. It’s also live for Linux, but we can’t promise stability (or even functionality) just yet, but rest assured we’re working closely with YoYo Games to make sure the Linux build will be up to speed. If you own the game on Windows, the Mac and Linux builds should show up on Steam right around now, and the Humble builds will be uploaded later.
Nuclear Throne is an action roguelike title from the award-winning studio that can be played during the development process thanks to Early Access; Vlambeer is regularly hosting live streams on Twitch to offer a glimpse into the game’s creation and showcase the latest additions.
You can more on Vlambeer’s “performative development” of Nuclear Throne at Edge and watch Polygon’s demo and interview with Vlambeer from last month’s GDC. The Mac build of Nuclear Throne will be available today on the game’s Steam page.
