The Powerful Code Editor for iPad and iPhone — Now Free to Try
The Skype apps for iPhone and iPad have been updated this morning to support iOS 7. There aren’t notable new features in the updates, but at least the apps don’t have the iOS 6 keyboard anymore, and they blend better with the iOS 7 status bar (using Skype’s light blue color).
As usual, Skype for iPhone and Skype for iPad are available as two separate apps on the App Store.
Dr. Drang, following our photo management discussion on The Prompt #15:
As the podcast proceded, I soon learned that I wasn’t the only one with a photo mess on his hands. Myke Hurley has apparently never organized his photos. He has gigabytes and gigabytes of photos just sitting on his phone. Backed up to iCloud, yes, if you consider that a backup, but with no structure. Bradley began an intervention.
I agreed with much of what was suggested: bringing the photos onto Myke’s Mac through Image Capture and setting up the year/month folders. But Bradley then suggested Myke move his photos into the folder structure by hand, doing maybe fifty a day for the thousands of photos Myke has. This is madness. It’s using a human to serve the computer rather than the other way around. Like me, Myke needs an automated solution.
So I decided to use Myke’s plight as the kick in the pants to get me to finish the scripts I’d been planning to write. As I suspected, it didn’t take very long. Imagining poor little Myke dragging files for weeks on end was just the motivation I needed to sit down and do it.
Personally, I use Hazel for this, but if you don’t want to buy the app, check out Drang’s scripts.
There was less they could do to make sure the phone calls Jobs planned to make from the stage went through. Grignon and his team could only ensure a good signal, and then pray. They had AT&T, the iPhone’s wireless carrier, bring in a portable cell tower, so they knew reception would be strong. Then, with Jobs’s approval, they preprogrammed the phone’s display to always show five bars of signal strength regardless of its true strength. The chances of the radio’s crashing during the few minutes that Jobs would use it to make a call were small, but the chances of its crashing at some point during the 90-minute presentation were high. “If the radio crashed and restarted, as we suspected it might, we didn’t want people in the audience to see that,” Grignon says. “So we just hard-coded it to always show five bars.”
There are many good stories about the creation of the iPhone, but Fred Vogelstein’s article for The New York Times is something else. Vogelstein, who is working on a book to be released in November, talked to various former Apple engineers such as Andy Grignon and Tony Fadell and assembled a fantastic collection of anecdotes, memories, and details of Steve Jobs’ legendary iPhone keynote at Macworld 2007.
If you read one thing today, make it this one. Personally, I found it more entertaining (and possibly accurate) than several sections of Walter Isaacson’s book. Make sure to read what happened to Forstall’s chief of staff.
Great story by CNN’s Jessica Ravitz, who found, almost by accident, the woman who says she’s “100% sure” she’s the voice of the original Siri (the one that debuted with iOS 5 exactly two years ago).
Behind this groundbreaking technology there is a real woman. While the ever-secretive Apple has never identified her, all signs indicate that the original voice of Siri in the United States is a voiceover actor who laid down recordings for a client eight years ago. She had no idea she’d someday be speaking to more than 100 million people through a not-yet-invented phone.
Her name is Susan Bennett and she lives in suburban Atlanta.
Mattt Thompson:
Combining articles from NSHipster.com with over a dozen new essays, this book is the essential guide for modern iOS and Mac OS X developers.
I am not a developer but I know that, for many, Mattt’s contributions to the developer community are invaluable. Support his work and pre-order his book here.
I love the kind of detail of posts like this, in which Dave Wiskus describes the thought process behind Vesper’s iOS 7 update. Vesper has always been extremely simple on the surface, but taking a look “behind the scenes” makes you appreciate the consideration that goes into every feature and design element.
I’m looking forward to trying sync.
If I had any previous complaint about Pocket, it’s that their website felt too much like a tablet app and wasn’t easy to use on the desktop. Following Pocket’s iOS 7 update, they’ve redesigned their website making it significantly easier to use. Everything has been unified into a single cohesive toolbar, it’s faster, and it’s visually more appealing. If you’re at the office or on the go, Pocket on the web is now just as great as its native iOS and Mac apps.
Sponsorships allow me to run this site and provide our readers with in-depth reviews of iOS and OS X apps, editorials, and tutorials to enhance their workflows and get the most out of their devices.
We’ve updated our sponsorship page with new available dates, information on prices, and an email address to get in touch with me and book a sponsorship. If you want to directly promote your product or service to MacStories readers, there is no better way than the weekly sponsorship.
There’s only one open slot left in October, and four until the end of the year. If you want to book them or get information about 2014 slots because you’re planning ahead, let me know.
This week, Myke and Stephen are joined by David Smith. They talk about App Store pricing and more.
I couldn’t join Myke and Stephen this week because of my ISP. It’s a good episode, and David brings up some solid points about pricing apps on the App Store and diversifying your offer as an independent developer.
Get the episode here.
