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WIRED & Branch Collaborate to Design a Better Connected Smartwatch and Pair of Glasses→

WIRED & Branch’s smartwatch concept blends classic design with modern technology. Image via WIRED.

For WIRED’s January 2014 issue, the publisher reached out to product-design company Branch to conceptualize wearable gadgets that sensibly brings together fashion and function. WIRED’s Cliff Kuang writes:

The watch and glasses are meant to be fashionable enough that the technology is a bonus rather than the big sell. That’s important. If we’re ever going to want to wear computers on our bodies, they’ll have to be stylish enough that we’d wear them even if they weren’t computers.

That, as my colleague Bill Wasik points out in his essay, is the key thing about fashion that tech companies fail to understand. It’s the difference between glasses so cool you want them even if you don’t have bad eyesight and, well, Google Glass, which you couldn’t pay most people to wear.

Yesterday evening, John Gruber said something similar in regards to the new Pebble Steel.

If Pebble, or any “smartwatch” maker, wants to succeed in the real world, they need to make watches that look good compared to any watch, not just “looks good compared to other even uglier smartwatches”.

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Quick iTunes Affiliate Link Creation with Affiliate for Mac

Developed by Bytesize Apps, Affiliate is a $1.99 utility for Mac that simplifies the process of creating affiliate links for iTunes and Amazon. I was especially interested in checking out Affiliate as, after Apple launched a new affiliate program with PHG in August 2013, we’ve been using affiliate links every day at MacStories, and I’ve been looking for a solution to quickly generate them.

Affiliate lives in the menubar and intercepts iTunes/Amazon links you to copy to the clipboard, adding your affiliate token/tag to them automatically. In the app’s popover, you can configure an affiliate token and campaign tracking code for iTunes (PHG) and an affiliate tag for Amazon links. Every time you copy an iTunes link anywhere on your computer (iTunes, an email message, the browser – anything), Affiliate will see it, append your affiliate data in the proper format, and place the affiliate link in the clipboard for you to paste anywhere you want. The app plays a sound and displays a notification when it generates a URL and the process is simple and immediate.

Unfortunately, in its current version Affiliate doesn’t support international Amazon links (it’ll only work with .com Amazon URLs) and it doesn’t come with an option to choose from multiple campaign tracking codes for iTunes links. We use various tracking codes at MacStories, and I need to choose from multiple ones depending on the link I want to share; for this reason, I still have to use a fill-in snippet created in TextExpander with support for multiple options. I like, however, how Affiliate can detect an iTunes link that’s already an affiliate one and clean it up for you, turning it into an affiliate link for your token.

If you don’t care about the limitations mentioned above (that will likely be fixed soon) and if you generate affiliate links on a daily basis for your blog or Twitter account, I recommend getting Affiliate. It’s fast, it automatically puts affiliate links in the clipboard, it’ll save you time, and it’s $1.99.

App Store Sales Top $10 Billion In 2013, $1 Billion In December Alone→

Apple PR:

Apple today announced that customers spent over $10 billion on the App Store in 2013, including over $1 billion in December alone. App Store customers downloaded almost three billion apps in December making it the most successful month in App Store history. Apple’s incredible developers have now earned $15 billion on the App Store.

In the press release, Eddy Cue calls it “the best year ever for the App Store”. Apple said that developers updated their apps for iOS to bring “content to the forefront while increasing the overall efficiency and performance of their apps” and it notes that several hits of the year were created by developers outside the US. In terms of numbers, Apple confirms that over a million apps are available on the App Store, with 500,000 made for iPad.

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The First App You Open In The Morning→

MG Siegler:

You wake up. You grab your phone. What’s the first app you open?

This sounds like a silly question — or worse, an insulting one. But I find it’s a rather enlightening question. Depending on when the question is asked, the answer can either be telling about the current state of apps or the current state of you.

Like MG, the first app I open every morning is Twitter – well, Tweetbot anyway. It used to be email; then Tweetie; at one point, it was Reeder; for the past year, the first app I’ve always opened in the morning has been Tweetbot. Twitter used to be described as the “water cooler”, and maybe to an extent it still is – but the scope is much larger these days. I can open Twitter and instantly see my mentions about MacStories or The Prompt, direct messages from friends, breaking news, interesting articles, the latest meme – anything. In fact, when in the morning I tell my girlfriend I’m “catching up on the news”, it means I’m scrolling through Tweetbot/Twitter.

In the past few months, I’ve been enjoying the Discover section of the official Twitter app as a “catch up system” too. However, my favorite aspect of the morning Twitter routine remains Tweetbot’s support for background fetching of tweets on iOS 7 – it’s why Tweetbot for iPhone is the first app I use.

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My Photo Management Workflow, Early 2014

Photo Management Workflow, Early 2014

Photo Management Workflow, Early 2014

I listened to the latest episode of Mac Power Users, where David, Katie, and my friend Bradley discussed their photo management workflows, the limitations of iPhoto and iCloud, and shared some tips on how to get the most of modern third-party photo services and Apple’s Photo Stream. It’s a great episode and a solid complement to our photo management episode on The Prompt, always with Bradley (he’s the photo management guru these days, having written a book on the topic). For both follow-up reasons and because it’s the new year and hence a good moment to re-evaluate how technology is supposed to be working for us, I thought I’d give an update on my photo management workflow.

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Backblaze→

My thanks to Backblaze for sponsoring MacStories this week. You need a backup of all the data on your computer, and Backblaze offers unlimited and unthrottled backup at just $5 /month per computer. Backblaze automatically backs up all your files – not just a subset of them – every day, all the time, so you won’t lose any of your data in case of theft, fire, flood, stolen or broken computer.

Backblaze was created by former Apple engineers, and the company understands the needs of Apple users. Backblaze has a native Mac app for Mavericks and it comes with an iOS app to remotely access, view, and share your files. Secure and offsite, Backblaze’s continuous backup ensures you can always view and restore files; once installed, you don’t have to think about complicated options and configurations – if it’s installed, Backblaze will do the rest for you.

Among other features, Backblaze supports external drives, uses military-grade encryption for your files, and it has a free web restore feature that also has file versioning built-in. Backblaze is online backup made easy, and you can check it out and sign up for a plan here.

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Building A Better Evernote→

Evernote CEO Phil Libin:

I got the wrong sort of birthday present yesterday: a sincerely-written post by Jason Kincaid lamenting a perceived decline in the quality of Evernote software over the past few months. I could quibble with the specifics, but reading Jason’s article was a painful and frustrating experience because, in the big picture, he’s right. We’re going to fix this.

Honest and concise. I personally haven’t noticed major issues with Evernote for Mac, but the iOS versions of the app have long been affected by bugs and a general instability that iOS 7 only made worse. It’s refreshing to hear a CEO say the things Libin did.

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MultiMarkdown 4.5→

Fletcher Penney released version 4.5 of MultiMarkdown today, which brings several improvements and some great new features. MultiMarkdown has become the standard for many of the best text editors on iOS and OS X, and Fletcher is constantly updating it (alongside his app, MultiMardown Composer) to keep up with the times.

The new version comes with support for what he calls “File Transclusion”. MultiMarkdown can now include the contents of a file inside another file – think of document hyperlinks, done in plain text. From the docs:

Transclusion is recursive, so the file being inserted will be scanned to see if it references any other files.

Metadata in the file being inserted will be ignored. This means that the file can contain certain metadata when viewed alone that will not be included when the file is transcluded by another file.

This is a powerful addition for writers who have been looking for an easy way to reference files and group their contents together – now Transclusion happens directly before the processing step, with MMD taking care of scanning files and even additional links within those files. The obvious implementation would be to write a book or academic paper in plain text, keeping chapters as separate files in a folder and referencing their file names in the Table of Contents. There are many possibilities and I can’t wait to see this being included in some iOS text editors.

You can download the latest MultiMarkdown here.

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