My friend Amy is having her first experience with using Gmail, and, it, um, isn’t going as well as she’d like. The good news is that although Apple’s Mail.app and Gmail have had a rocky relationship in the past, Mail.app in Yosemite works pretty well with Gmail, but there are some things that you should understand before you proceed.
How to Configure Gmail with OS X Yosemite Mail
StretchLink Unshortens and Cleans URLs from Your Menu Bar→
Brett Terpstra, writing about StretchLink 1.0:
It’s an easy-to-use tool for expanding shortened links, fixing redirects, and cleaning out referrer junk from Google Analytics and others. StretchLink runs in the OS X menu bar. You can click the icon to open the main panel from which it can expand and clean links on demand with a single click. Even better, it can be set to silently watch your clipboard. You can turn this on with a switch from the main panel, or just right click the menu bar icon to toggle it.
StretchLink 1.0 is priced at $1.99, with a free trial available on the website. An introductory sale of $0.99 (50% off) starts now and goes through the end of May. StretchLink didn’t get a beta round, but it’s been tested on a variety of my own machines. If you do run into issues, don’t hesitate to contact me. A Mac App Store release is planned for the near future, if all goes well.
As a shell script nerd who loves automation and clean URLS, I had, of course, written my own shell script to expand and clean URLs. I installed StretchLink last night, and I am sure that I will never use my script again. That’s how much better Brett’s app is.
My biggest criteria (after, of course, that it actually works) is how fast would it work. So I did what any self-respecting geek would do: I wrote a shell script to test how fast it would expand a given URL. The result was that StretchLink expanded it in less than 1 second. 1
You can download StretchLink here.
P.S. If you’re looking for something similar on iOS, checkout Clean Links.
- If you want more details about how I tested this, I posted my script as a gist. Because of course I did. ↩
Christy Turlington Burns’ Big Finish→
Following Christy Turlington Burns’ blog on Apple.com has been a fascinating and educational experience. After setting a new personal record at the London Marathon last week, Apple has published the final installment of Christy’s blog posts with her thoughts and photos from the event.
They also produced a new video, which you can watch below. And, check out Every Mother Counts here.
Apple to Reject Watch Apps ‘Whose Primary Function Is Telling Time’→
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Apple updated their App Store Review Guidelines to state that Watch apps built primarily to tell time will be rejected.
Got our first Watch App Review guideline: 10.7: Watch Apps whose primary function is telling time will be rejected https://t.co/EbsKqsuCJN
— David Smith (@_DavidSmith) April 28, 2015
In the past few weeks, I’ve heard about a few timezone apps primarily designed to show world clocks that were rejected for unknown reasons, with developers annoyed about the lack of official guidelines. Today’s change is better than approving and then rejecting an app, I guess, but maybe Apple could have shared this piece of information sooner. I don’t know if those timezone apps ended up being approved or not, and there could be other developers with a different experience from the ones I talked to.
From Apple’s standpoint, however, I can see why it makes sense to avoid confusion with apps that replicate a watch face UI – at least initially. It’s not too dissimilar from Apple’s stance on third-party apps that replicated native functionalities with the original iPhone App Store.
Adobe Slate Review
In recent years Adobe has made a concerted effort to develop a collection of mobile apps that make it easy to accomplish various creative tasks. But rather than make one monolothic app that does everything (like Photoshop on PCs), they’ve been splitting up features into many apps that each focus on a different, and specific, creative aspect. For example, there is Adobe Brush CC, which enables you to create custom brushes for Photoshop and Illustrator based off photos you take on your iPhone or iPad, or Adobe Color CC, which will create a custom color palette from your photos. As Adobe has continued to release more and more of these apps every few months, their efforts have become more and more impressive. Adobe now has a sizeable collection of mobile apps that are some of the most technically impressive and well designed apps available on the iPhone and iPad.
Which brings me to Adobe Slate, one of the most recent additions to Adobe’s mobile app stable. Unlike many of their other apps which directly integrate and complement Adobe’s desktop apps like Photoshop or Illustrator (such as Brush and Color, described above), Slate is its own distinct product. Adobe describes Slate as a tool to “turn any document into a beautiful visual story”, which is actually quite a good way to describe it. A more mechanical way of describing Slate would be that it is an iPad-only app for creating a webpage (not a website) for situations where the content you want to share or display is a mix of text and images.
I recently had an assignment at university that permitted a more creative format and layout than the typical essay or report. Because I had heard about Adobe Slate launching a few weeks earlier, I decided to test it out. I ended up submitting my assignment as a webpage created with Slate, and I really enjoyed using it and think the result was pretty great.[1]
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Apple Q2 2015 Results: $58 Billion Revenue, 61.2 Million iPhones, 12.6 Million iPads Sold
Apple has published their Q2 2015 financial results for the quarter that ended in March 2015. The company posted revenue of $58 billion. The company sold 12.6 million iPads, 61.2 million iPhones, and 4.6 million Macs, earning a quarterly net profit of $13.6 billion.
“We are thrilled by the continued strength of iPhone, Mac and the App Store, which drove our best March quarter results ever,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “We’re seeing a higher rate of people switching to iPhone than we’ve experienced in previous cycles, and we’re off to an exciting start to the June quarter with the launch of Apple Watch.”
SketchParty TV: The Fun, Fast Drawing and Guessing Game for Apple TV [Sponsor]
SketchParty TV is the fun, fast drawing and guessing game for Apple TV.
Using AirPlay Mirroring, you can turn your HDTV into a Wifi drawing canvas and a high-tech party game. It’s perfect for parties and family get-togethers, special occasions or impromptu game nights.
SketchParty TV is a drawing game for two teams of up to eight players per team that plays a bit like Pictionary. The standard gameplay settings give each player five words to draw in two minutes, and each player gets two of these two minute turns. With six total players, a full game can be played in about 30 minutes.
All you need is an Apple TV and an iPad or an iPhone.
Games can be customized to be as long or brief as you like, with options for the number of words to draw per turn and time limit to draw them, and word lists of varying difficulty. There’s even a word list for kids. There are thousands of words to draw in seven different languages, including French, German, Spanish, even English and Italian.
SketchParty TV is great for classrooms, too, with a built-in custom word list editor. Create your own vocabulary lists with ease. Regularly $9.99, now available for a limited time price of $4.99.
Critically acclaimed and enjoyed worldwide, SketchParty TV is available on the App Store or at SketchParty.tv
Our thanks to SketchParty TV for sponsoring MacStories this week.
Watch Faces and Complications→
With the Apple Watch now in the hands of customers, some smart people have started commenting on the device and sharing their first impressions.
A recurring theme in my RSS feeds today has been the wish for third-party additions to complications and watch faces.
The third-party story is going to be huge as time goes on. Current third-party apps are okay, but they’re incredibly limited. With some of Apple’s built-in apps, you can get a better sense of what might be possible on this device. But I have to admit, I’m most excited by the idea of third-party watch faces or, at the very least, third-party complications for existing watch faces. I’m not convinced that developers will make pretty watch faces—I’ve seen all the awful third-party Pebble faces—but I do want more variety in my watch faces. I’d be fine if Apple took a strong hand with faces and only approved a very small number that passed a very high bar. But I’d be okay if Apple kept tight control of the faces… if developers could provide data from their apps as complications on existing faces. I’d love to plug in my Weather Underground temperature, for instance—today Apple’s standard temperature widget was a full ten degrees off of the actual temperature in my town.
Casey Liss shared similar thoughts:
Like third-party watch faces, I think third-party complications could take a turn toward awful. However, with a light hand and an eye toward brevity, allowing third parties to create their own complications could make an already impressive information appliance even more useful.
And here’s Abdel Ibrahim:
I still believe that apps on Apple Watch are mostly meant to be repositories. The idea of pressing in the Digital Crown and tapping a tiny icon to get to the home screen and launch an app still makes little sense to me. As of right now, the future of the Watch seems to me to be in meaningful Glances, Notifiations, Faces, and Complications (provided Apple allows the latter two). In some cases, like with Uber for example, I can see the need for launching an app. But in most cases, I still don’t see why I should bother.
Between WatchKit and the lack of personalization in some areas of the software, initial limitations of the Watch are creating a whole crop of low-hanging fruit for the next few years.
Featured on Tim Cook’s Keynote→
Frederic Filloux on the story of Replay and how it got featured at Apple’s iPad Air 2 keynote last year:
In September 2014, while at the Stupeflix Paris office, Nicolas Steegmann got a call from Apple in Cupertino. Once the caller identified herself, Nicolas knew something up. The contact came after Stupeflix presentations to Apple’s team in Paris. In rather elliptic terms, Steegman’s interlocutor said it would be great if two members of the company, a developer and a designer, could be in Cupertino the next day. ‘They will have to stay at least two weeks’, she said. 48 hours later, the team was on Apple’s campus. They quickly found themselves in a windowless room and given a straightforward brief: Devise the coolest possible demo for your app. No more details, no promises whatsoever.
You can watch the original demo from October 2014 below.