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365 Days

Today, when I remembered that exactly one year ago I was hospitalized for 22 days for a series of treatments to save my life, I tweeted about it. And then I opened Day One.

In the app’s Calendar view, I changed the year to “2012” and, sure enough, the “August 1, 2012” entry was there, showing photos of my hospital room; my girlfriend sending a selfie from home; and a note that I wrote about the doctors being “nice”. Bits of life. A combination of old thoughts and visual memories that I still have, in some form, in my brain, but that here, in this app – right now – I can hold and directly look at. It is, indeed, far more powerful than memory alone.

It sounds so trivial because we’re used to it. It’s diary app! Of course it lets you browse old entries in a calendar, and of course it’s got search, and of course it accepts photos as attachments, and, okay, the fact that you can see old weather information is neat – but yes, it’s because of the GPS. Common technology terms for yet another app. But does it have a URL scheme? We often lose track of the magic of software.

Sometimes, on days like today, I like to appreciate the simple things of my job. The fact that somebody out there has made an app that lets me cringe at my mistakes and cherish old moments. The fact that in this very moment I can take these old photos, and send them to my parents with a comment that says, “365 days ago…how things change”.

Isn’t that amazing?

Photowerks Enhances Apple’s Photos App with Smart Albums

Apple’s Photos app is often criticized for its lack of organizational features that go beyond a list of photos and screenshots, and the company will bring some improvements in this area with iOS 7 and a Photos app capable of organizing items in Moments and Collections. Photowerks, free on the App Store, enhances Apple’s default solution with sorting options and smart albums available today to iOS 6 users.

Photowerks comes with two main features: sorting, which is included in the free download, and Smart Albums, which can be unlocked with a $0.99 In-App Purchase. Once you’ve granted Photowerks permission to access your photos, the free version will allow you to load photos from your Camera Roll, show them as thumbnails on a grid or a list, and sort them (in ascending or descending order) by:

  • Date Taken
  • Location > City
  • Location > State
  • Location > Country
  • Camera > Make
  • Camera > Model

Even without unlocking the IAP, these features prove already handy as, in my opinion, they provide a better view of a stream of photos than what Apple has (or, more appropriately, hasn’t) done with the Photos app. Photos can be viewed in full-screen (where the app will display available information at the bottom), shared to Mail, Facebook, and Twitter, and grouped together to create a new album. Alas, there is no Open In support to send photos to other installed apps, like Evernote and Droplr in my case.

The Smart Albums feature is what really sells Photowerks. As the name suggests, they’re similar to iTunes’ smart playlists in that they let you automatically group photos based on pre-defined criteria that work with the sorting options mentioned above. By using a familiar any/all system for matching rules, Photowerks lets you specify attributes such as “date is after/is not/is/is before” or “model is/is not”; these attributes can be combined to create albums that will be populated with items that match your criteria and that you’ll be able to sort using the same sidebar that you’d use in the IAP-free version of Photowerks. On my iPhone, I have created an album that fetches screenshots taken after June 30 (“date is after June 30, model is not iPhone 5”) and photos taken at the beach (“city is Tarquinia” or “city is Montalto” with Match: Any).

I believe that iOS 7 will reduce the need for Photos.app replacements such as Photowerks, which is why I think the developers should focus on improving the feature that Apple won’t replicate in the short term – smart albums. It would be nice to be able to keep albums in sync across devices (Photowerks is a Universal app) and have access to more attributes for dates (like “past two months” or “this week”), image size, source (like Photo Stream) as well as nested conditions for even smarter filtering. I’m a big fan of the idea of having smart albums based on user-defined criteria, and I hope that the developers will keep on supporting and enhancing Photowerks for iOS 7.

Photowerks is free on the App Store.

Photochop for iPhone Chops and Distorts Your Photos

Released last night by Matt Comi of Big Bucket (well known for his work on The Incident), Photochop is an ingenious iPhone app that allows you to break your photos into tiles and distort them to create either artistic or ridiculously funny collages.

I downloaded the app last night, and started playing around with some photos of my friends (they don’t know I’m using their faces to test new apps). The first thing that I noticed is that Photochop, built for iOS 6, uses a clean UI that looks already fine for iOS 7: with clean lines and iconography, translucent bars, and a photo picker button modeled after the new Photos icon of iOS 7, Photochop looks already at home on my iPhone 5 running iOS 7. There are also some distinct choices, though, that give Photochop a unique look.

Photochop lets you work on one photo at a time, and once you’ve picked a photo from your Camera Roll you can choose between three different grid sizes before breaking it up into tiles; to start editing, you simply tap on the grid. The editing screen is fun: there are buttons at the bottom to nudge, scale, rotate, and delete tiles, and controls at the top to switch between tile mode (the “artistic” one) and warp mode. According to the developer, warp mode is meant to make “people’s faces look weird”, and that is a message that I can completely understand because that’s what I’ve been doing in Photochop with my friends’ faces. Once you’re done editing, you can put pictures inside two types of frame (or leave them without a frame) and export them to the Camera Roll, Instagram (with Open In), Twitter, and Facebook.

From a technological standpoint, I’m quite impressed by Photochop’s image distortion and manipulation, which I’m pretty sure has been made possible by Apple’s advancements in APIs offered to developers in recent years (Update: It’s actually a game engine). In using Photochop, you can see how the app will benefit from the new physics engine APIs of iOS 7: right now, the tiles feel “weightless” in how they don’t bounce and slide across the screen, and I wonder if supporting iOS 7 with new effects and physics effects is something that Comi is already working on.

Photochop is a fun little app with some nice technology under the hood. It’s only $0.99 on the App Store.

The Prompt: Senior VP of Selfies→

This week, Myke, Federico and Stephen re-visit the Developer Center outage, then talk about Google’s apps on iOS and Stephen’s Nexus 7. Wrapping up, they move on to discuss tablet usage and some awesome apps.

I loved the discussion about Google’s new approach to building its own ecosystem on iOS through inter-app communication and callbacks, which is something that Apple keeps ignoring. Towards the end, I also explain why I like working from my iPad more than I do on the Mac.

Get the episode here.

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Is Chromecast Worth it if You Already Use AirPlay?→

Josh Centers from TidBITS takes a look at the Chromecast, its setup process, what apps it works with on Macs and iOS devices, and what you can expect from the device compared to AirPlay. This is a very thorough article, especially if you’re considering buying it for yourself or as a stocking stuffer later this year.

I should note here that the Chromecast’s “casting” is different in a key way from AirPlay. While AirPlay sends audio and video directly from your device to the Apple TV, Chromecast-enabled apps send only a URL, which the Chromecast loads through its own built-in Web browser. Also, unlike the Apple TV, the Chromecast does not have a hardware remote. You control the audio or video directly on your device, including volume. The Netflix iOS app even activates a remote mode when it sends video to the Chromecast.

Keep reading because a lot of it is, “And another problem is…” How Chromecast works is important since the quality of what’s shown to you on the TV ends up being inferior to AirPlay.

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Leap Motion and Better Touch Tool→

David Sparks writes about his experience with Leap Motion after pairing it with Better Touch Tool.

As you can tell. I already have a lot of affection for Better Touch Tool and Leap controller functionality is icing on the cake. So I’ve spent some time playing with this new feature and I’ve now got several gestures I can do in the air in front of my Mac. If I put one finger in the air and move it up, it closes the application, just like the gesture in iOS 7. If I put one finger in the air and pull it down, it closes the window just like my gestures I explained earlier on my trackpad. If I put two fingers in the air and swiped the left, I move right one space. Putting two fingers in the air and swiping to the right moves back one space to the left. All of this is a lot of fun. I’m only adding new gestures as I internalize the prior ones.

It’s great that people are at least finding some practical uses for this thing. I just think the Leap Motion is a solution in search of a problem.

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Dialogue: Handsfree Calling Through OS X

Dialogue

Dialogue

During my typical work day, my iPhone 5 is sitting on my desk next to my MacBook Air or iPad, usually locked as I’m focusing on writing or researching topics for MacStories. I don’t receive many phone calls, and when I do I don’t mind picking up my phone and using it for the task that phones were made for in the first place (remember when people used to buy phones to make phone calls?). Dialogue, a new Mac app released today on the Mac App Store, wants to remove the annoyance that some people have with switching devices when a phone call comes in; at $6.99, Dialogue uses Bluetooth to route phone calls through your Mac – employing an unobtrusive menubar popover to find contacts and manage connected devices. Read more

Apple’s Support Document On How To Report iMessage Spam→

A support document by Apple (last modified today, July 30) that I’ve never seen before details how users can report iMessage spam (unwanted messages) directly to Apple (via Beau Giles):

If you’re seeing unwanted iMessages (spam) in Messages app, you can report those to Apple.

To report unwanted iMessage messages to Apple, please send an email with the following details to: [email protected]

I’ve never been the target of iMessage spam, but it’s good to know that Apple has a basic reporting tool in place. Some users experienced iMessage “denial of service” spam messages earlier this year; in the support document, Apple doesn’t explain how they will act against reported spam.

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Byword For iOS Gets Improved URL Scheme→

In a minor update released today, Byword developers Metaclassy have brought an improved URL scheme (based on x-callback-url) to the app, enabling actions for creating, opening documents, and manipulating text. Documentation is available here.

The actions supported by the URL scheme are:

  • new
  • open
  • append
  • prepend
  • replace

With these actions, you can now send text to a specific file in Byword, choosing to either create/open an existing document, insert text at the top (prepend) or bottom (append), or replace the entire contents of a document with new text. When using the Byword URL scheme, you’ll need to percent-encode text, which can be easily done using Launch Center Pro’s encode actions or Drafts’ double curly brackets.

This improved URL scheme creates some new interesting possibilities for iOS automation with Byword. I imagine many will experiment with workflows to append or create text from Mr. Reader’s Services menu, take notes with Drafts, or prepend text from Safari or Chrome using a browser bookmarklet. However, I still think that the URL scheme could be expanded to include support for triggering Publishing actions automatically, optionally supporting x-success to go back to another app after a post has been sent to a service integrated in Byword. With Poster no longer receiving updates, I believe the folks at Metaclassy have a great opportunity to keep Byword the simple and elegant iOS text editor that many love, while also adding advanced functionality that power users will come to rely upon in their daily workflows.

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