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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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Why Are Apps Putting You On A Wait List?→

A good piece by Ellis Hamburger at The Verge, who explains why some recent iOS apps have been putting new users on a “wait list” before they can actually start using an app. This is due to the increasingly cloud-based complex scaling challenges that apps (which are downloaded locally) face when trying to work with online components (remotely) for thousands of users.

I understand the difficulties mentioned by Ellis and the developers he interviewed, but I also see part of Ben’s point when he argues that several of these “wait list apps” are free and don’t seek immediate revenue. Mailbox removed the reservation system after it had been acquired by Dropbox, meaning that Dropbox – a larger company – had the human and financial resources to “throw” at Mailbox’s problem. However, I think that resources aren’t a panacea for new apps that rely heavily on server-side features: if anything, the App Store makes it hard to ship apps that are only available to a subset of users, which is forcing developers to implement ideas such as the aforementioned waiting lists.

A better testing process for App Store developers isn’t a new topic, and I wonder if app testing tools made by Apple with support for thousands (instead of hundreds) of “beta” users would alleviate the issues covered by Ellis.

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Markdown for Keyboard Maestro 2→

One of my favorite tools for more efficient writing was recently updated to version 2, which is available for download on GitHub. As Andreas Zeitler explains, the main focus for version 2 was “speed optimization, interaction, accessibility for non-English speakers, and usability”. There’s also a screencast on YouTube showing the new features.

I use Markdown for Keyboard Maestro on a daily basis to speed up my writing in Sublime Text. In fact, many of the workflows that I’ll share when Editorial for iPad will come out have been inspired by Andreas’ work.

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