If you’re not a fan of Apple’s unergonomic Magic Mouse, or making broad gestures with Hot Corners, Spacious 2 gives you a wheel of commands with a click of the middle mouse button. Spacious presents a small palette of tools for switching to the Dashboard, activating Mission Control, or switching to another space. The app includes an alternative app switcher, and can be configured to your liking if the defaults aren’t for you. If you don’t like using keyboard shortcuts or regularly use your Mac’s trackpad gestures, Spacious can help make the most of your desktop with your favorite mouse. You can download a free trial for 30 days, and purchase the app direct for €9.99.
Spacious 2 for OS X is a Mouse Friendly App for Navigating the Desktop→
Threes: A Game of Multiples
Threes is a game of multiples. It’s a game of combining pairs of numbers to make even bigger numbers. It plays on idea of a sliding puzzle, except the board becomes more populated the longer you play. A new piece falls onto the board after every slide, until the board is completely populated. The end goal is to end up with a board full of large numbers, hopefully in the greater double digits, and maybe even a triple, for a high score.
You play on a 4 x 4 grid, shaped like mahjong pieces, where you slide pieces up, down, left, and right. The game doesn’t really start until you begin combining your blue ones and red twos to create threes. Threes combine to make sixes, which combine to make twelves, etc. Every time you combine two numbers, the result doubles. Only multiples of three count towards your end score, thus the name of the game.
While Threes is largely a game about numbers, there’s lots of little touches in the game, including an unintended achievement system, where creating bigger multiples of three unlocks new personalities. Each multiple of three has a different face, and they’ll smile at each other if they can combine. Threes maintains a history of your previous scores, and includes a toggle to reduce animation frame-rate to save battery life if you’re out and about.
If you love games like Letterpress and Dots, you’ll love Threes. It’s easy to grasp and hard to master. It’s classy.
Threes is $1.99 on the App Store.
How to Optimize Your Settings in Paper by Facebook→
Facebook’s new Paper app is the best excuse yet to ditch the social network’s older offering. But while the re-imagined mobile experience adds beautiful fullscreen images and new, intuitive swipes to the mix, it also comes with a few limitations. So before you banish that blue and white standby to the netherworld of discarded apps, you probably want to make a few quick changes.
Roberto Baldwin for Wired writes about how toggling a few switches can make Paper by Facebook better and turn off some annoyances, like videos that automatically play.
All the Little Details in Paper by Facebook→
Brian Lovin, Product Manager at Buffer, captures all of the little details of Facebook’s Paper with a series of GIFs.
Paper by Facebook has been out for a day now and the reviews are, for the most part, quite divided. I haven’t been an avid Facebook user for some time, but the design and attention to detail on Paper is unmatched, and is worth sharing with other designers.
The Prompt: One Chance With Jony→
Efficient Writing On iOS with Phraseology 2.0
My iPad writing setup primarily consists of Evernote, Editorial, and WriteRight, three apps that I use to research, write & edit, and proofread my articles, respectively. For the past few months, I’ve been using Greg Pierce’s Phraseology 2.0 for iPad, which is out today on the App Store and which I consider a must-have companion app for people who write on the iPad and want to craft better text.
Collect and Share GIFs In Dropbox with GIFwrapped
GIFwrapped, developed by Daniel Farrelly and brought to my attention by Casey Liss, is making me reconsider how I organize my collection of reaction GIFs.
Until today, I’ve stored my GIFs in Evernote, using tags to group them together and search to filter results. Just a few days ago, I noted that the improved note editor in Evernote for iOS makes for smoother GIF animations, but the sharing aspect remains one of my system’s shortcomings – when I want to get a GIF out of Evernote and send it to someone else, I have to upload it somewhere else. Evernote works as a GIF archiving tool, but it’s not optimized for it. Read more
Apple References In Futurama and The Simpsons→
With a combined 33 seasons between them, both Futurama and The Simpsons are awash with references to Apple. Some of these references take the form of biting commentary while others are much more subtle.
In compiling this list, I was lucky enough to chat with famed Simpsons writer Bill Oakley (seasons 4-8) and talented Simpsons director David Silverman (seasons 1-present). They were both gracious and kind enough to answer many-a-question and provide me (and you) with some behind-the-scenes information about the “how and why” behind some of the Apple references you’ll find sprinkled throughout this post.
Great work by Yoni Heisler at TUAW. #4 is a classic.
TAKE ACTION - Action Menu Generator For Launch Center Pro→
Nice work (and great name) by Jeff Mueller: starting from my idea for an action menu for Safari in Launch Center Pro, he made a web app to simplify the process of assembling the bookmarklet. You can choose from a set of emojis for icons, select one of the built-in actions (so you don’t have to write URL schemes), and hit Create Menu to generate a menu. It’s very simple and much better than writing code manually.
I hope that Jeff will add more app actions and emojis soon. Check it out here.