BugshotKit→

Marco Arment:

I’m starting the Overcast beta soon, and I wanted an easy way for my testers to report (non-crash) bugs and provide UI feedback. I also wanted a way to remind myself of UI or feature ideas easily, and I’ve occasionally needed to view the error console on the device when tracking down difficult bugs.

BugshotKit addresses all of these: it’s an embeddable Bugshot annotation interface and console logger, invoked anywhere in your app by an otherwise unused gesture (e.g. a two-finger swipe up, a three-finger double-tap, pulling out from the right screen edge, etc.), that lets you or your testers quickly email you with helpful details, screenshots, and diagnostic information.

I’ve tried BugshotKit in an app I’m testing, and it’s a fantastic idea: screenshot annotations and logging are available in a single screen that doesn’t require you to switch between apps, save screenshots, copy logs, and put everything together in Mail. If you’re a developer and you’re building an app, consider implementing BugshotKit to have happier, more efficient beta testers.

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MyPhotostream: A Lightweight Photo Stream Viewer for OS X

Myphotostream

Myphotostream

When it works[1], Photo Stream is convenient. The underlying principle is simple enough: you take a picture on one device, it automatically transfers to all other devices with iCloud.

In practice, it’s a convoluted feature. Apple is using quantity and time-based limitations for Photo Stream, which comprises both your Photo Stream (called “My Photo Stream”) and Shared Photo Streams, which are all part of iCloud, but only your Photo Stream counts against storage. I wouldn’t be surprised to know it took Apple more time to come up with Photo Stream rules than to build the actual technology. It’s difficult to explain, and I suggest listening to this Mac Power Users episode to grasp how Photo Stream works and what it can do.

In my workflow, I have new solutions to quickly transfer photos from iOS to OS X or avoid my Mac entirely, but there are still times when I need/want to leave iPhoto running and drag photos out of it and into the Finder or another app[2]. MyPhotostream is a lightweight Photo Stream client that runs on your Mac and provides read-only access to your personal Photo Stream (not the shared ones). Read more

Panels, Popovers And iPad Pro→

Good post by Benjamin Mayo. I don’t think that the idea of snapping sidebars is the best way to handle multitasking on a tablet, but he makes a great point I forgot to cover in my article last week:

Apps should also have the capability to be ‘faceless’, so that other apps can query for data without needing any intermediary UI. This would enable apps like to draw on information available in other apps without pushing additional UI. For example, GarageBand could import sound-clips from apps like djay or Animoog in addition to the Music app. Similarly, a word processor could retrieve definitions from the users’ preferred dictionary app rather than stick to whatever the developer bundled with the app.

In my case, that would be a list of synonyms from Terminology. But imagine if Editorial could provide its workflows as services to other apps, or if you could retrieve files from Dropbox without opening the Dropbox app. Android is far ahead of iOS in this field, and it’s time for iOS to grow up.

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Tapstream→

Our thanks to Tapstream for sponsoring MacStories this week. Tapstream helps app developers earn more from their apps.

For those of you who don’t advertise your app, Tapstream is completely free. You can embed it in your website to understand which referring sites and which landing pages are responsible for the biggest share of installs. Alternatively, use Tapstream’s URL shortener to get this same data from social networks, email or anywhere else on the web. If you decide to spend money on mobile ads, Tapstream is partnered with the best ad networks out there to help you advertise and make sure you’re not double-charged for your users.

Beyond just telling you how your users are getting to your app, Tapstream keeps track of exactly how valuable each channel is. Automatic In-App-Purchase reporting tells you where you get the most of your revenue from. Add to that a bevy of features like device-aware shortlinks (that discriminate between iPhone, iPad and Android visitors to send them to the correct destination), cohort tracking and integrations with HootSuite, KISSmetrics and MixPanel.

Tapstream is already on your iPhone in many of the apps you use today - it should be in your app too.

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Tracking TV Shows with TV Files

TV Files

TV Files

My experiment to add calendar events for TV shows I watch failed miserably. Because of programming schedules that change often and holiday breaks I can’t always predict, I ended up with a calendar full of repeating weekly events for episodes that had been delayed. Therefore, I started looking for a good TV show tracker app for my iPhone and iPad, and lately I’ve been using TV Files, developed by Italian team Whale True. Read more

A History of People Telling Apple What To Do→

Harry McCracken calling out all of this nonsense:

Some wise person — I wish I knew who — once said that everybody has two businesses: their own, and show business. The same is true in the world of technology, except the two businesses people have are their own, and Tim Cook’s.

Everyone, in other words, seems to have strong opinions about what Apple should be doing. And a remarkable percentage of the people who share their thoughts state them not as a suggestion or a preference but as an imperative so absolute that ignoring it could plunge the company into crisis. To emphasize the seriousness of the matter, their headlines usually use the words “Apple must…”

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GoodReader Gets a Big Update for iOS 7

GoodReader is the missing file manager for the iPhone[1]. It virtually eliminates the compromises you have to make on a mobile device by allowing you to download files from the web; view and arrange documents, photos, music, and video into folders; and connect to local servers over Wi-Fi or your Dropbox, SkyDrive, Google Drive, WebDAV, or FTP server on the web. Conveniently, you can connect to GoodReader over your local network to grab files by plugging in an IP address on your Mac or Windows box.

GoodReader’s most immediate change is their update interface, which puts all of the most used tools in a tab bar at the bottom of the display. The two tabs you’ll likely use the most are WiFi and Connect, which starts a WiFi transfer or lets you grab files from the web. Otherwise, a tools button in the top right of the file browser brings up the usual action sheet for selecting files, creating new text documents, creating folders, renaming files, opening files in other apps, etc. In short, everything’s a lot easier to find[2].

Tossing an album onto your iPhone? GoodReader finally lets you listen to audio in the background while you read or do other things on your iPhone.

Images copied in the clipboard can be pasted as a file in GoodReader[3]. Look in the second page of tools for the paste command when an image is copied to the clipboard. The opposite is true as well: you can copy images to the clipboard to paste into other apps like Mail. Images can now also be imported / exported directly into and out of GoodReader, so multiple photos can be saved to your camera roll at once for example. This can be incredibly useful for shuffling files from your iPhone between multiple online services, like Dropbox and a hosted web server.

Various improvements to PDFs have been added across the board, such as faster rendering for certain files and the ability to flatten (embed) annotations as they’re emailed prior to sending. And while GoodReader itself doesn’t require iOS 7, GoodReader will open iWork 2013 files for those that are running Apple’s the latest iOS.

The iPad and iPhone versions can be purchased separately on the App Store, each version costing $4.99. Links below:

  1. What I mainly use GoodReader for: if I purchase an eBook on the go, I can paste the download link into GoodReader, which will usually suck down a ZIP file since all the DRM free formats are there. I can unzip the archive, send the EPUB to iBooks, and send my other files to my computer or to a service. You don’t have to manage much on OS X if you use something like Hazel so MOBI files are automatically dropped into your Kindle the next time you plug it into your Mac. As a nice bonus: iTunes doesn’t mediate anything. And you can apply this system to a lot of things, such as music downloads if you make purchases on anything outside of iTunes or Amazon (i.e. Bandcamp) or even documents a friend might share with you from Dropbox or SendSpace. ↩︎
  2. Remember when you had to visit that red web downloads folder to get files from the web? ↩︎
  3. Part of the problem is that images are often linked to other web pages, and the Copy action in Safari copies the URL the image links to, not the actual image itself. Unless you can get to the root of the image on your iPhone or iPad, getting to images on mobile is not as easy as right clicking and selecting “view image” on a desktop browser. ↩︎

The Prompt: Viticci Seal Of Quality→

This week Myke and Federico explore the possibility of an iPad pro and the different routes Apple could take to build this mythical product. There’s also an ‘after show’ discussing Polygon’s Game of the Year awards and what games they have been playing recently.

We used my article about the rumors of an iPad Pro as a starting point to discuss multitasking in the age of touch and thinking of apps as features instead of windows. Get the episode here.

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MacStories Sponsorship Openings For 2014→

I have updated the Sponsorships page to show openings for the new year. MacStories sponsorships are exclusive and they will help support the work we do for app reviews, editorials, tutorials, and more throughout the year. We have big plans for 2014, including a (long overdue) new design.

If you have an app, service, or product that you’d like to advertise to MacStories’ smart and loyal readership, check out the Sponsorships page for more information or get in touch directly.

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