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A Software World→

Great article by Robert McGinley Myers on cynicism in the tech press. I agree with every word of it.

Software is the magic that makes our devices “indistinguishable from magic”. Many of us think of it as an art form, and yet it’s a strange sort of art form. Most art forms don’t remind you to take out the recycling or help you lose fifty pounds. But the things software can do are almost limitless. Maybe tech journalists would be less cynical about the advances of technology if they wrote more about software than hardware, and more about the how than the what — how software is not only changing its shape, but changing our shape, in more ways than one. That is the real, ongoing technological revolution.

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My iOS Screenshot Generation Workflow

Screenshots

Screenshots

I didn’t think that complaining about iOS status bars on The Prompt would result in Dr. Drang going on a vision quest to produce better screenshots with Python. But I’m glad that I took the time to point out my dislike for messy status bars, because it led the good Doctor to work on some great scripts to automate the entire process with Python, which are compatible with Pythonista for iOS.

I waited to share my workflow for automated screenshot cleaning/generation because I wanted to see where Dr. Drang would end up with his script, Cleanbar. Now that he appears to have settled on a solution that requires standalone image files to act as partial status bar replacements, I think it’s the right time for me to share how I produce iPhone and iPad screenshots for MacStories.

The first step is to set up Cleanbar. I don’t need to repeat what Dr. Drang already explained, but to sum up: grab a black status bar, crop it to get two files similar to Drang’s, then run a script to pack those images as strings. Once set up, you’ll be able to a) use Cleanbar to clean single images picked from the Camera Roll with Pythonista and b) integrate it as cleanbar in other scripts to clean status bars programmatically.

As for my needs:

  • I usually need to combine two iPhone screenshots side-by-side in a single image as you can see in most reviews on this site;
  • I may or may not need to clean their status bars;
  • I don’t have to combine iPad screenshots. I only need to resize them and I may or may not have to clean their status bars;
  • Occasionally, I want to produce a banner with three screenshots (like this one), which can have original or cleaned status bars;
  • Sometimes, I only need to clean one screenshot out of two;
  • I always need to upload the final image to a Dropbox folder, which is monitored by Hazel.

And, because I’m not an animal, I wanted to automate all of this. The scripts that you’ll find below are the result of late night tweaking and lots of tests; they probably aren’t the most elegant or “Pythonic” way to handle this kind of image generation, but they work for me and they make me save several minutes every day. I haven’t been generating review screenshots manually in months, and they’re more flexible than my old workflow based on Keyboard Maestro.

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Simbol for iPhone

Simbol

Simbol

Developed by Amit Jain, Simbol is an iPhone utility to view symbols and special Unicode characters. If you ever play with URL schemes on iOS, you know how tedious it is to convert special characters to HTML codes: Simbol comes with this feature built-in, allowing you to tap on each symbol to copy its HTML or entity code (of course, you can also copy the symbols themselves).

The main screen of the app shows a list of symbols organized in categories; in this first version, categories include Special Symbols, Math Symbols, and Reserved Characters, among others. There is a search bar at the top to look for a specific character by name and you can tap & hold on each symbol to add it to a temporary holding tray for equations. Personally, I just find it handy to be able to quickly search for something like “greater than” and copy its HTML code without having to Google for it.

If I had to nitpick, I’d say that it would be nice to have Favorites, a way to launch searches from Launch Center Pro, and the possibility to hide characters in the main screen, showing only category names. Much like Apple did with albums in the Music app, you can’t view a simple list of categories because symbols will always be shown inline, which makes it hard to scroll the app’s main list if you only want to open a specific category.

Simbol is a good idea, does one thing well, and it’ll save me the time I’d spend looking for HTML codes on Google. It’s free on the App Store.

Brett Terpstra’s New Adventures→

Brett Terpstra is now an independent developer and writer:

Monday will be the start of increased focus on existing projects and attention to new ideas that have been bubbling up. I’ll be writing, including finishing my tagging book and working on the children’s book. I’ll be developing Marked (starting with the App Store version) and adding a couple of smaller apps to the App Store list. I’ll continue blogging, which brings me to a final request.

If you’ve ever played with OS X automation workflows, Automator, scripts, or TextExpander snippets, it’s likely that you used one of Brett’s tools. Brett is the developer behind Marked 2 (one of my must-have Mac apps) and I’m excited to see what he’ll do next.

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Apple Airs New “Your Verse” iPad Air Commercial

Your Verse

Your Verse

Apple has today aired a new iPad Air commercial called “Your Verse Anthem” focused on the capabilities of the iPad as a device to express the creativity of the human race. The ad features voiceover by Robin Williams taken from the movie Dead Poets Society; in the clip that Apple chose, John Keating (Robin Williams) describes why people read and write poetry and how everyone can contribute a verse to the world. Interestingly, as noted by Linus Edwards, this isn’t the first time Apple has been inspired by Dead Poets Society. Read more

Save Photos As Reminders with Fantastical and Launch Center Pro

Fantastical and LCP

Fantastical and LCP

I recently realized that I wanted a way to quickly save photos or screenshots as todos, and being Fantastical 2 my todo manager (with Reminders) and Launch Center Pro the fastest way to take pictures and upload them to Dropbox, I combined them in two workflows.

I made two simple actions that mix the Launch Center Pro and Fantastical URL schemes to save a Dropbox image link as a reminder in Fantastical. You retain the ability to type natural language in a Launch Center Pro prompt, and Fantastical will also automatically recognize the URL and put it in the URL field of a reminder.

Some details worth noting about the actions:

  • The first one lets you take a new photo; the second one grabs any image from the Camera Roll;
  • Both actions will upload an image to Dropbox in the Photos/LCP/ folder; you can change this once you install the action;
  • Fantastical is set to create a reminder for the received text through the reminder=1 flag in the URL scheme.

Getting all the encoding right was a bit tricky at first, but the actions should work without any further configuration on your end. Feel free to modify them: with my basic structure in mind, you can replace Fantastical 2 with Drafts, Dispatch, or any other app that can receive text via URL scheme. I just find it handy to be able to quickly save photos in Fantastical as tappable links, but the workflow is really up to your imagination.

You can download the actions here:

Yahoo News Digest

As someone who both enjoys long form content and sharing what I think others might enjoy, it’s easy to write off Yahoo News Digest as something that feels indifferent. Unlike the Evening Edition, which features important world news summarized by real people, Yahoo boasts its mobile digest as a product of algorithms, whose editors bring together the day’s hot topics into smart summaries from multiple sources. It’s considered to be the result of Yahoo’s $30 million acquisition of Summly, with founder Nick D’Aloisio taking charge behind the company’s initiative into the “news for everyone” space.

It’s not a new endeavor, however, if you consider previous forays like Livestand, which brought news and weather together in a magazine-like format on the iPad. Then there’s Yahoo’s self titled app, which later integrated Summly to create an endless stream of news, entertainment, sports, and lifestyle content. Even Yahoo’s homepage is a landing page for those subscribed to Internet service providers like AT&T, delivering trending topics, stories, local weather, and stocks to anyone who wants to log into their provider’s email accounts. This is unlike Google, whose homepage is barren sans occasional promotions and informational snippets. Needless to say, Yahoo has been dishing out news for a long time.

Yahoo News Digest is their attempt to modernize the thirty minute local or national news segment, re-imagining it for mobile as series of articles covering current events from around the world. Digested down to eighteen articles, nine for the morning and nine for the evening editions, Yahoo shares what they consider to be the most relevant articles of the day, rounding out the day’s news under traditional topics such as US News, World News, Entertainment, Sports, etc. It’s a news service built for the masses.

So… Is it any good?

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Everpix Shares Full Company Dataset→

Everpix:

Building a startup is about taking on a challenge and working countless hours on solving it. Most startups do not make it but rarely do they reveal the story behind, leaving their users often frustrated. Because we wanted the Everpix community to understand some of the dynamics in the startup world and why we had to come to such a painful ending, we worked closely with a reporter from The Verge who chronicled our last couple weeks. The resulting article generated extensive coverage and also some healthy discussions around some of our high-level metrics and financials. There was a lot more internal data we wanted to share but it wasn’t the right time or place.

With the Everpix shutdown behind us, we had the chance to put together a significant dataset covering our business from fundraising to metrics. We hope this rare and uncensored inside look at the internals of a startup will benefit the startup community.

A comprehensive dataset that includes all kinds of metrics: besides user subcriptions, revenue, and monthly costs, you’ll also find metrics for latency between freemium trials and subscription purchases, user engagement, AWS cost breakdowns, and more. It’s sad that Everpix shut down, but the data they have open-sourced will certainly help anyone who’s building out a startup and never had access to this kind of documented data before.

Don’t miss the VC pitch decks and email exchanges. One of the investors’ primary concerns was that Everpix was difficult to explain to mobile users who just want their photos to “work”, and I think they have a point there. Apple needs to get their act together and streamline the way iCloud, Photo Stream, and the Photos app work. Everpix had built an impressive technology (check out their original plans for 2014 in the presentations) and, through the data, you can get a glance at the various reasons why it didn’t work out. Sections about their propretary image analysis tools have been redacted, which makes me even more curious to know who bought the company’s core technology.

[via Bradley Chambers]

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Terminology Workflows For Editorial→

Greg Pierce:

Terminology has always had great direct integration with our own apps, Drafts and Phraseology that allows you to easily lookup and select replacement words and have them directly replaced inline with your editing. You can see that integration in action.

In the latest version (3.0.6) of Terminology, I added a tweak to its URL schemes to allow it to integrate more easily with certain other apps, particularly Editorial, Ole Moritz’s excellent iPad text editor.

Terminology is my favorite dictionary app and I wish Editorial had a popover to replace Apple’s default dictionary, like Instapaper did. The workflows are the best alternative to that for now, and they work well.

It would be nice to have selectable synonyms and antonyms built into the system dictionary in iOS 8.

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