With summer here, the boys stay cool with topics ranging from Apple’s “new” iMac, Handoff and the Amazon Fire Phone.
On this week’s episode of The Prompt, we also cover features in the Messages app for iOS 8 that are reminiscent of WhatsApp, and I’m taught a lesson about buying groceries on Amazon. Get the episode here.
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Starting today, you can share and view animated GIFs on http://t.co/wJD8Fp317i, Android and iPhone. http://t.co/XBrAbOm4Ya— Twitter Support (@Support) June 18, 2014
Finally.
Animated GIFs will be shared with the same pic.twitter.com links the service uses for its native image uploads, and they will be animated inline.
Right now, clicking a pic.twitter.com GIF link in Tweetbot doesn’t open the GIF but redirects to the same tweet. It’s not clear at this point whether GIFs are supported in the Twitter API and if third-party developers will be able to display animated GIFs in their Twitter clients soon. Read more
May: 2014, Susan Kare walks us through some key points regarding the design of icons and symbols. Kare is an artist and designer and pioneer of pixel art; she created many of the graphical interface elements for the original Apple Macintosh in the 1980s as a key member of the Mac software design team, and continued to work as Creative Director at NeXT for Steve Jobs.
A great talk by Susan Kare at EG Conference, especially because of how she reflects on limitations and constraints of icon designs that occurr over time in spite of technology becoming more powerful. And I loved the anecdotes and photos of the original Macintosh icons and fonts.
Wikipad, the company behind a gaming-focused Android tablet released last year, has announced Gamevice, an iOS game controller made specifically for the iPad mini. The Gamevice was originally announced for Android and Windows tablets in January but, as noted by TouchArcade, the company has seemingly switched to an iPad-only device, targeting a public release later this year with “additional platforms” following soon.
“We wanted to create a complementary camera app to Camera+ for users who wanted a simple, one-touch app for shooting and sharing on the go”, Lisa Bettany tells me over email. Lisa is the co-founder of Camera+, the popular camera app by Tap Tap Tap that, since 2009, has amassed over 12 million downloads and become a fixture of the App Store’s Top Charts, which can be rare for a paid app with additional In-App Purchases. Today, Tap Tap Tap is launching MagiCam, which, unlike Camera+, does away with professional editing tools and focuses on simple filters and quick sharing.
Apple this morning introduced a new entry level 21.5-inch iMac that sells for US$1,099. The model features a 1.4GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 processor, Intel HD 5000 graphics, 8GB of memory, and a 500GB hard drive. It also retains the same design, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, two Thunderbolt ports and four USB 3.0 ports that are standard on all of the other iMac models.
Cassidee Moser writes about Hopscotch, a coding app for iPad:
Turbine Truck is a small iPad game made up of very basic mechanics. Players guide a cartoon truck across a 2D plane, smashing into as many oncoming cars as possible while evading the police. It lacks complexity and isn’t necessarily a grueling test of skill, but Turbine Truck remains notable for one reason: it was created by a child using Hopscotch, an iOS app with its own visual programming language used to teach kids the basics of coding and programming.
Hopscotch is impressive, and you should check it out on the App Store.
I covered Scanbot in May, calling it a “fast and efficient scanner app for iOS 7” powered by a delightful UI, integration with cloud services, and a user-friendly experience:
Scanbot covers the basics of mobile scanners well: it’s got color schemes for captured scans; it can save PDFs at 200 dpi and automatically send them to a variety of web services (including Dropbox, Evernote, and Google Drive); and, it can handle multiple pages per scan as well as editing features such as manual border cropping and annotations. Scanbot looks fairly obvious on the surface, as it doesn’t reinvent the way a mobile scanner is supposed to work on iOS – the app’s features can be found in other similar apps, while more advanced ones haven’t been added to Scanbot yet.
Scanbot 2.0, released last week, doesn’t add the advanced features that I mentioned in my original review, but it brings a native iPad version and support for QR code scanning, both of which are welcome additions.
Here’s a strategy that you might consider trying: Prepare some tools which can, at the moment you’re ready, put all those tabs exactly where you need them so you can close those tabs. If most of those tabs are really your to-do list, line them up in one window and then get them into your actual to-do list. I’ve found that if your tools are easy to use, you’ll be more likely to make it a part of your routine.
Justin Lancy has created a great collection of tools to export browser tabs on a Mac. These tools include AppleScripts and downloadable Alfred and LaunchBar extensions, and they support apps like Evernote, OmniFocus, and Reminders – for both Safari and Chrome.
I have installed the Alfred extension to export a list of tabs to Evernote, and it works very well. Check out Justin’s tools for browser tabs here.
