Capturing The Now with Kennedy

Kennedy

Kennedy

Developed by Brendan Dawes, Kennedy is an interesting new take on mobile journaling focused on “capturing the now” with a $1.99 iPhone app.

Kennedy is a data-oriented journaling app that can save your current location, date and time, weather conditions, what music you’re listening to, and even headlines from the news in individual collections of personal data points called Captures. When you open the app, you’re presented with a beautifully animated “Now” button that, once tapped, will start gathering data from built-in iOS services for location, time, and music; after a few seconds, the “Now” will become a list showing the data points that were captured by the app, such as “Ten past three, on a slighly cloudy Thursday afternoon in Viterbo”. When saved, Captures can be accessed by tapping a list button in the lower portion of the main screen; you can search for specific text in your Captures, as well as edit them at any time.

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The Life Of A Porting House→

They take a popular PC or console game - BioShock Infinite is the latest one - and develop and publish a Mac version, historically released months or years later (though that’s not often the case now), earning ridicule and celebration from a frustrated audience long condemned to second-class treatment.

Except these days they’re actually doing a pretty good job.

Eurogamer has a profile on Aspyr Media, the software house that’s well known for porting Windows games to the Mac (and recently iOS). I had no idea they’ve been around for more than 17 years. It would have been interesting to know more about Feral, too.

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Why Pull-To-Refresh Isn’t Such A Bad Guy→

Nick Arnott:

Carr would like to see more developers experiment with new interactions for swipe down gestures, and I cautiously agree. Pull-to-refresh is one of those ideas that seems so obvious in hindsight, but took a talented engineer to think of it. The brilliance of pull-to-refresh is just how well it fit into the existing design. When users try scrolling past the top of a table cell view, they’re trying to view newer content. Pull-to-refresh intelligently extends that scrolling to have an app refresh the content to load any new data. A perfectly logical and intuitive extension of the existing functionality.

This, in response to an article by Austin Carr from December. I especially agree with Nick when he says that fast, reliable data connections that never fail aren’t a reality yet, though they have gotten better over the years.

Pull-to-refresh may seem simple and obvious today, but it was a great design challenge for its inventor back in 2010. Nick makes a lot of valid points about its existence and evolution.

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Sifttter: An IFTTT To Day One Logger→

Sifttter takes the concept of Slogger and applies it to IFTTT by using Brett’s original TaskPaper script. Though it is essentially limited to current IFTTT channels, there is lots of flexibility through IFTTT itself, as well as the opportunity for individual input and customization. I’ve been using this for several months, and am happy to share it here for those who might be interested.

While I decided to avoid tools like Slogger for my Day One journal, I think that the solution Craig put together is fun and nerdy. Not for me, but a good weekend project.

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Shoots and Leaves Uploads Photos and Sends Links to Other Apps→

Shoots and Leaves, a snap and forget it photo app akin to something like QuickShot, uploads captured photos to services like Imgur, Dropbox, or CloudApp, and then sends the public links to an app like Mail, Reminders, or Safari. Given our focus on productivity apps, an app like this is useful for generating Markdown links that can be pasted into upcoming articles. Inspired by Shoots and Leaves’ Reminders integration, I’d love if Evernote was added as a service, with the ability to send a photo’s link to an Evernote reminder. It’s laser focused, does one thing well, and is $2.99 on the App Store.

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Mophie Announces the Space Pack: An iPhone Battery Case With Local Storage→

At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, Mophie has announced the Space Pack, a backup battery case that comes with 16 or 32 GBs of local storage. Like the Juice Pack Air, the Space Pack has a 1700mAh non-removable battery that Mophie claims will recharge the iPhone to a 100% charge. Through a companion app, the Space Pack can store and retrieve videos, photos, documents, and more from its own internal storage. The 16 GB Space Pack will cost $149.95, while the 32 GB model will cost $179.95, going on sale March 14th.

Update 1/8/14: pre-orders are open.

[via Engadget, Mophie]

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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.