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Codea 2.0→

Codea is an incredible app that allows you to create games and interactive simulations directly on an iPad with graphical assets, sounds, and a full code editor. Codea is built on Lua and it adds various native options for managing resources and functions visually – it’s one of those apps that gives a new meaning to the “post-PC” idea.

Today, Codea 2.0 was released with full iOS 7 and 64-bit support alongside new features that tie in with more aspects of iOS. The app has a location API to access a device’s location, Bluetooth keyboard shortcuts, a new unified asset system, new sound and music functions, and specially commissioned audio packs with music and effects made specifically for the app. The code editor has been completely rewritten with autocomplete, smart indentation, and inline errors; there are dozens of other changes that make game creation on iOS both simpler and more powerful.

I don’t use Codea, but I’ve always been interested because I’m fascinated by the app – to me, it looks like the kind of iOS-only, Pythonista-like breakthrough that’s possible on modern devices and that augments classic programming with native integrations and a touch interface. The new version sounds amazing and it’s only $9.99 on the App Store (free update for old customers).

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Behind Flipboard’s Layout Engine→

Charles Ying, developer at Flipboard:

When you read Flipboard, articles and photographs are laid out in a series of pages you can flip through, just like in a print magazine. Each magazine page layout feels hand-crafted and beautiful — as if editors and designers created it just for you.

We automate the whole process of layout design and editing by slotting your content into custom-designed page layouts — like fitting puzzle pieces together. We start with a set of page layouts created by human designers. Then our layout engine figures out how to best fit your content into these layouts, considering things like page density, pacing, rhythm, image crop and scale. In many ways, that is the key to Flipboard’s signature look and feel: at its heart are the work of real designers.

I’ve always appreciated the way Flipboard presents web articles into magazine-like layouts that, however, also feel “smarter” than print in how they treat images and text flow. It turns out, Flipboard built an entire engine that is capable of combining layout designs with algorithms to determine the best way to display articles depending on multiple variables and filters. Great read.

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Bookmarklet To Open Twitter Profiles In Tweetbot→

Dave Bradford had one of the same problems I deal with on a daily basis:

While using mobile Safari on the iPhone I sometimes come across a Twitter account I’d like to follow or check out, to follow them I have to select the users handle from the URL, open Tweetbot, go to search, then copy the username into the search field.

It’s a minor annoyance, but those few seconds you spend copying and pasting add up over time. Dave made a bookmarklet to open Twitter profile pages as usernames in Tweetbot – it works on OS X too if you remove “mobile.” from the bookmarklet to work with desktop Twitter pages.

Get the code here.

Update: Phillip Gruneich also has a few bookmarklets that look cleaner and work with both Twitter and App.net.

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Slow Feeds Updated for iOS 7, Adds Background Fetch and Subscription Management

Unlike most RSS clients for iOS and OS X, Slow Feeds doesn’t prioritize the latest items from feeds you’re subscribed to – instead, it highlights feeds that don’t post several items a day, called the “slow” ones. We first covered Slow Feeds in May 2012, and followed its progress as it added Hot Links and more RSS services.

Earlier this week, Slow Feeds gained proper support for iOS 7, receiving a refreshed design and new subscription options that allow for better organization of feeds.

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Behind The Sales Numbers Of Badland→

Brandon Sheffield, writing for Gamasutra:

Frogmind was founded in 2012, by two developers from Trials developer RedLynx. In 2013, they released their first game, Badland, and immediately got 100,000 downloads at $3.99, which was great, but sales took a nose dive after the first weekend, going down to 1,000 downloads per day, and eventually less.

Badland is a fantastic iOS game that’s truly built with touch controls in mind. In Frogmind’s GDC session, CEO Johannes Vourinen shared some interesting numbers that iOS game developers thinking about other platforms (Google Play Store, Amazon Appstore) should take a look at.

Also interesting is his report on temporary sales and Apple’s “Free App of the Week” initiative (which Badland participated in, although during the special App Store anniversary week) – because the game is typically a paid download with no In-App Purchases, the result after the promotion wasn’t what most people think it is.

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Twitter #music Shutting Down→

Mike Beasley:

According to a pair of tweets posted on the official @TwitterMusic account, the app will be removed from the App Store later today and all streaming service will end on April 18th—one year after the app first launched.

Twitter #music launched on April 18, 2013. The #music app wasn’t necessarily bad – it had some interesting touches and design details – but its implementation of streaming was confusing, as I noted in my original article:

As a daily music listener, the 1-song limitation is confusing and anachronistic. It feels like Last.fm all over again: in spite of its direct plug into Rdio and Spotify, Twitter will only play one song from an artist – their “top” one, according to Twitter – then move on to the next one. Why is that so? Do they expect users to always want to listen to just one song and jump from artist to artist all the time? I understand this for #NowPlaying, which is a Twitter-like feed for single songs in your timeline, but I can’t seeem to find a good motivation for this choice in other areas of the app. Why wouldn’t I want to listen to three songs from an artist I just discovered while, to use Twitter’s parlance, I keep engaging with him on Twitter?

Twitter never put much effort into #music after that; in the meantime, new on-demand streaming services have arisen and Apple has built iTunes Radio directly into the iOS Music app. It appears, then, that Twitter #music will follow the demise of Ping, Apple’s social music recommendation service that never took off.

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Evernote 7.3.2→

In a seemingly minor update to their iOS client, Evernote added a few tweaks and fixes that improve the experience of using the app, especially for image attachments. In the Business Card camera mode, it’s now possible to make a contact request to LinkedIn without leaving Evernote. If you’re using LinkedIn as a contact management service and scan cards in Evernote, the new integration should be good news.

For my workflow, the new image picker is an even better change. Now, when picking an image to add to a note, the picker allows you to select multiple images at once to add them to a note in a single action. I use Evernote to collect screenshots from various sources, and the new picker speeds up and simplifies the process of adding attachments considerably.

Evernote 7.3.2 is available on the App Store.

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The Next Big Health App Needs To Do More Than Just Track Our Numbers→

Spot on article by Mat Honan, writing for Wired:

We tend to focus on individual metrics in isolation–like heart rate or step counts–because they are easy to measure. It means we sometimes track fitness metrics and mistake it for health simply because it’s something we can measure. Fitness is a component of health, sure, but so is diet. So is your genetic makeup, disease, and your environment. It’s all important, and you need to know how it interacts to get truly meaningful information about your health. But there isn’t a great holistic way to first track all this stuff and then extract meaning from it. Which makes it very tempting to look at how many steps you took yesterday and conclude, “I’m healthy.” Yet change may be coming in the form of a new app called Healthbook.

In my post about health and smartwatches yesterday, I had a bit of fun imagining how health tracking may have practical implementations in the apps we use every day, like Maps. While that may be too futuristic for a first version of Apple’s possible wearable device, the underlying concept still applies: health stats alone don’t mean much if not given proper context understandable by humans.

Parsing health-related values and summarizing them into something like this could be a good start.

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Command-C Updated with Clipboard History, Mac to Mac Sharing, Connection Improvements

Command-C

Command-C

Danilo Torrisi’s Command-C, my favorite utility to share the contents of the clipboard across Mac and iOS devices, has been updated today with reliability improvements for Bonjour connections, a new clipboard history view, Mac to Mac sharing, and several other tweaks and fixes to the app that was first released in January.

From my original review:

Command-C brings back the old concept of local clipboard sharing, with some unique twists. Thanks to iOS 7, Command-C on an iPhone or iPad (the app is Universal) can always be available as a receiver in the background, using notifications to alert you when the clipboard has been received from another device. Communication between devices (which includes a dedicated menubar app for the Mac) happens on a local WiFi network, it’s encrypted, and no data is sent over the Internet; though the app works with a “one tap” approach to send your current clipboard to another device, there are some fantastic tools for power users who want to do more with keyboard shortcuts, URL schemes, and bookmarklets. Command-C is a clipboard sharing tool for the modern age, built with iOS 7 (and a new set of limitations that the current OS entails) and multiple iOS devices in mind.

I use Command-C on a daily basis to share text, URLs, and pictures between my iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and the improvements to local connections have been noticeable in my tests. Command-C uses the Bonjour technology to handle communications between devices, and, according to Torrisi, the core of the app has been rewritten from the ground up in version 1.1. In trying the update before today’s release, I noticed that the app would keep running in the background more reliably under iOS 7.1, resulting in fewer disconnections (which used to force me to manually open the app to receive the clipboard) and speedier clipboard transfers. The setup process was faster in version 1.1, and adding multiple devices to the app showed no errors or slow loading times, a problem that occurred for multiple users in previous versions of the app. Read more