Evernote for Mac Gets Direct Skitch Integration

Evernote and Skitch

Evernote and Skitch

With a new version released today, Evernote has updated its Mac app to include a brand new communication layer with Skitch, the company’s image/document annotation and sharing tool.

When Evernote acquired Skitch in the summer of 2011, I wondered how they would manage to deeply integrate the two apps in a way that would make storing a note and annotating it a seamless experience. In the past two years, Evernote focused on revamping its desktop and iOS clients and on launching a new version of Skitch with Evernote integration – meaning that Skitch could sync notes to Evernote, and those notes would show up inside an Evernote notebook with inline previews and changes, but Evernote couldn’t direct plug into Skitch for further editing. Here’s what I wrote in 2011:

According to Evernote, the engineers at the two companies will be working closely in the coming months to deeply integrate Skitch and Evernote with each other, as right now the only way to let the apps communicate on a Mac is by annotating an image in Skitch, and manually drag it into Evernote. It wouldn’t be a surprise if the app gained a feature to push annotations to Evernote’s cloud to avoid drag & drop — considering the app is coming to mobile devices, this has been certainly considered by the Evernote team.

Users could drag and drop images between Evernote and Skitch, but that would result in duplicate files and wasted storage space – an issue that was exacerbated by iOS’ inferior sharing capabilities and limited “Open In” menu. In short, it always struck me as unusual that Evernote couldn’t figure out a way to let its apps “talk” to each other, avoiding manual interaction in favor of simple, intuitive inter-app communication that treated Evernote as a storage space and browser, and Skitch as an editor.

Today’s Evernote 5.2 for Mac does exactly this, and quite admirably as well. I have been testing the new version, which has gained a new Skitch button in the note editor that allows you to send any note – either as text, image, or combination of both – directly to Skitch for editing. When you’re done annotating in Skitch, you can send a file back to Evernote – and not just back to Evernote’s cloud, but back to the Evernote app itself, which will automatically come in the foreground again, showing the new version of an image/document already inside a note. Read more

Watermarker 1.2 with Editable Custom Image Watermarks→

I first looked at Watermarker, developed by my friend and colleague Don Southard, back in January when version 1.1 added batch processing:

Watermarker provides a simple and automated way to add watermarks to images. You can choose between various options including text, your own logo, or even a customizable strikethrough. The app has a clean interface with the “canvas” (the area where you can drop an image) displayed on the left, and watermarking settings on the right. I like how you can save presets (so I can have one for my “large” MacStories watermark, another one for the smaller version), and the fact that an image’s size is reported right below its preview.

Version 1.2 of the app, released today, comes with several enhancements for custom image watermarks, which are now editable. You can resize an image watermark that you want to place on top of other images through a pinch-to-zoom gesture or manual controls. Aside from the default positions, you can also click to drag a watermark around or use the arrow keys for additional precision. I’m happy with the feature because I often end up with watermarks that are either too big for a screenshot/photo, or that I would like to position elsewhere on an image.

You can check out Watermarker here. The app is available at $7.99 on the Mac App Store.

Permalink

CoolIris for iOS Adds Evernote Integration→

Gabe Weatherhead on CoolIris’ latest update:

There is now support for connecting with Evernote. Importantly, it can be configured to show photos for a specific tag as well, searches or all photos. This is a nice option for using Evernote as a photo locker. I’m loving it for the scans of my daughter’s school art I collect in Evernote.

This is an interesting idea – I imagine I could plug CoolIris into Evernote’s “skitch” tag to view a stream of my Skitch notes, or perhaps the “Paperless” notebook to view the most recent receipts and bills I have scanned. I don’t use Evernote as a photo locker (my photos are all backed up to Dropbox, shared through Instagram and backed up with IFTTT, or uploaded to Droplr), so I guess I would only rely on CoolIris for screenshots or documents archived as images.

Permalink

Getting Safari’s Selection on iPad As HTML With A JavaScript Bookmarklet→

I modified this bookmarklet posted by “Tim Down” on StackOverflow to send selected text from Safari to Drafts as HTML. The result is the following code:

javascript:(function(){var%20h="",s,g,c,i;if(window.getSelection){s=window.getSelection();if(s.rangeCount){c=document.createElement("div");for(i=0;i<s.rangeCount;++i){c.appendChild(s.getRangeAt(i).cloneContents());}h=c.innerHTML}}else%20if((s=document.selection)&&s.type=="Text"){h=s.createRange().htmlText;}window.location='drafts://x-callback-url/create?text='+(h);})()

So let’s say you want to grab the first paragraph in this post. Normally, in Safari for iPad you’d end up with the plain text fetched by window.getSelection:

This is a fantastic report with lots of data points for any developer trying to get their apps featured by Apple. Dave Addey’s highly interactive regional graphs and notes are very well done. Be sure to check out Dave Addey’s other works on his main blog.

As you can see, formatting and hyperlinks have been removed. With the bookmarklet above, you’ll receive the HTML version of the selection – which looks like this. But what’s the point?

My idea was that I wanted to be able to automate the process of capturing rich text from iOS’ Safari; I wanted to achieve the same kind of functionality I have on the Mac, where rich text can be dragged from Safari or Chrome and dropped into Evernote, preserving styles, hyperlinks, and images. I thought that combining HTML output with an Evernote Append action (with the “Send as Markdown HTML” option turned on) would let me receive valid HTML content in Evernote starting from an iOS workflow. And, for the most part, I was right, because the workflow does mostly work.

As it turns out, Evernote is extremely cautious with the HTML tags they accept, and the ones that are supported follow the XHTML guidelines as ENML is a superset of XHTML. This means that my bookmarklet will work for something as simple as selecting a single paragraph, but may easily fail with multiple selections, inline images, complex styles, and so forth. When that will happen, Drafts will return an error when trying to append HTML to Evernote; obviously, this will work just fine with Dropbox, which doesn’t care about the kind of text you’re using in your actions. Even better, this should work very well with Textastic’s just-released update that supports x-callback-url.

I guess the solution would be to build a Pythonista-based converter for Evernote-approved XHTML tags and place it between Safari and Drafts, converting HTML tags Evernote won’t like to compatible ones. If you’re interested, my birthday is August 10.

Permalink

The Apps That Get Featured in the App Store→

Over the past few months, I’ve been researching the kinds of apps that get featured on the iOS App Store home page for different countries around the world. I’ve posted my initial findings as an online report with dynamic graphs and analysis.

This is a fantastic report with lots of data points for any developer trying to get their apps featured by Apple. Dave Addey’s highly interactive regional graphs and notes are very well done. Be sure to check out Dave Addey’s other works on his main blog.

The most interesting data point involves free vs. paid apps. It’s not really surprising in hindsight, but there’s a much higher number of apps that were free when they were featured compared to ones that had paid features. The exceptions seem to be books and productivity apps.

Permalink

Some Thoughts on an Entry Level iPhone

This could have been a footnote in my comments on OS X adoption, but I wanted to return to iOS adoption and elaborate on one comment I made about being able to upgrade easily since people likely have a recent iPhone. Apple is seeing some interesting things happening with their most affordable iPhone.

Tim Cook noted that the iPhone 4 was in constraint for the entire quarter during Apple’s first fiscal conference call for 2013. Again, during the second conference call, Tim Cook talked about the popularity of the iPhone 4 in China, Apple’s biggest emerging market with the most potential for revenue.

China has an unusually high number of first time smartphone buyers. We’ve seen significant interest in iPhone 4 there and recently made it even more affordable to make it more attractive to those first time buyers.

It turns out that the free iPhone 4 is still popular. Not only as a free phone on contract, but also as a first phone for customers in emerging markets. In developed markets, it seems that early adopters and people who love their iPhones tend to get the latest new thing, while people who just want a nice phone or can’t justify the upfront expense end up getting an iPhone that’s more affordable, but otherwise still workable and current as it supports the latest version of iOS. How many other phone makers have a free phone that has luxury materials like steel and glass, has the latest operating system, and has a great quality camera? You’re guaranteed a quality product that just works, for free, even though the phone is a few years old. That’s remarkable.

Every year, Apple reduces the price of last year’s entry iPhones by a hundred dollars, meaning that this year’s free iPhone would end up as the iPhone 4S if Apple follows the same pattern. It’s a great phone with a great camera and good all around battery life, and iOS 7 will be available for it. But I wouldn’t be surprised if that wasn’t the case this year.

I don’t know anything about what Apple has in store for their next iPhone announcement, but there’s currently a lot of speculation surrounding a cheap plastic iPhone. I think it’s certainly plausible that Apple would not only release a new flagship iPhone, but a new entry level iPhone as well. But why?

I wouldn’t correlate Apple’s entry level iPhone as cheap, but rather as more affordable, as I imagine it costs significantly less to produce a high quality build not dissimilar from the iPhone 3GS than a phone made of glass. In emerging markets, and even here in the United States, I can’t imagine that the iPhone 4 is a cost effect phone to produce at the prices Apple wants to sell it for. The press talks about there being demand for phones with bigger screens, but there’s clear and evident demand for a free iPhone and Apple wants to capture the attention of the markets that are asking for it. A CIRP survey notes that about half of total worldwide iPhone sales consisted of the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S as of March, thanks in part to the success of the iPhone 4 in China and possibly related to Apple’s 25% price reduction in markets like Brazil.

The iPhone 3GS was a phone that kept receiving the latest iOS updates for a long time, but didn’t always have all of the features. The iPhone 4 and 4S are going to end up in the same boat, where they’ll run iOS 7, but will lack some of its more commendable features since the phones aren’t powerful enough. Part of me thinks that an entry level iPhone will be very much like an iPod touch with an antenna, with hardware that’s capable enough to run all of iOS 7’s features, is better than the any last generation iPhone, but won’t compare to what’s inside Apple’s flagship offering. This is a good thing — it means more and more people will have access to Apple’s latest software and the latest apps from the App Store.

Talking about iPods, it’s a market that’s still there but isn’t as prevalent as it used to be. The iPod isn’t as relevant since more and more people are listening to music on their iPhones and on demand, and I think young people in particular aren’t finding them as attractive or necessary. iPods will stick around, but Apple can better tailor an entry level iPhone to come in fun colors with fun marketing for people who are looking to have the coolest and latest thing that might not be a flagship, but is free[1] compared to an iPod touch and would fit well within a family plan.

Apple is also currently in the process of making three big transitions. The first is the move to the 4-inch Retina display, which started with the iPhone 5. The second is the move to the Lightning port which also started with the iPhone 5, the Lightning cable being skinnier and much easier to use than the previous 30-pin connector found on today’s iPad 2, iPhone 4, and iPhone 4S. The third is the transition to LTE. If Apple is looking to phase in their latest technologies, the best way to do it would be to phase out the glass iPhones by introducing a new entry level model that would give the low end phone the same advantages of the flagship phone. Having a new screen size phased in means good things for developers, and phasing in the Lightning connector at a faster pace means good things for Apple since they only have to produce one cable, and it’s also good for accessory makers targeting the latest iPhone owners. As of right now, the only phone that supports LTE is the iPhone 5. A new flagship phone would have it, but that would leave the iPhone 4S stuck on 3G and HSPDA unless Apple does a quiet internal update.

The press will try to spin the launch of an entry level iPhone as Apple’s way of fighting back against cheaper Android phones, as a way to gain ground over a competitor that’s supposedly winning the smartphone market. I think Apple isn’t interested in this, but rather in making an affordable phone that meets people’s expectations of quality in an Apple product. And if Apple can give you something that’s even better than an iPhone 4 or 4S at the same price, in addition to becoming possibly even more affordable in emerging markets, then that only means good things for consumers.

  1. I would expect the phone to be free, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if you could buy it unsubsidized. The United States is a huge market for Apple, though I don’t know how it’d be an attractive option over a subsidized flagship phone if you were on a carrier that wasn’t T-Mobile. It could be a much more popular option in European markets where it’s more common to buy the phone outright. ↩︎

Twitter for iOS Adds DM Sync, Twitter for Mac Updated with Connect Timeline→

In an update released today, Twitter brought direct message sync to its official iOS app. As explained by the company in the release notes, reading a DM in Twitter for iOS will now automatically mark it as read in Twitter for Mac, the Twitter website (both desktop and mobile versions), TweetDeck, and Twitter for Android.

It’s not clear whether DM sync will ever be made available for third-party developers through the API; right now, it’s a nice plus for users who receive several direct messages on a daily basis and use the official Twitter apps. It’ll also be interesting to see if Twitter will eventually consider syncing timeline position across apps – something that third-party apps like Tweetbot and Twitterrific are capable of using solutions like iCloud or Tweet Marker.

Twitter for Mac has also been updated to version 2.3 today, adding a Connect timeline for viewing tweets that have been retweeted or favorited, as well as new followers. Interactions can be viewed with notifications in real time, and the app also supports DM sync.

Last, in a blog post, Twitter details the search improvements they’ve made to simplify user discovery and retrieve new tweets:

For Android, iPhone, iPad and mobile.twitter.com, we’re making more improvements to search results. Now when you search for people on Twitter, you may see an expanded user result that shows a full bio. This account preview makes it easier and faster to find and learn more about the accounts you’re looking for. And if you swipe the preview to the left, you’ll find similar accounts –– for example, if you search for the MLB, you’ll see suggestions for ESPN, Ken Rosenthal, and other MLB-related accounts. Additionally, a new in-app indicator in search results will show you when there are new Tweets for your query, making it easier for you to stay up to date on the latest Twitter conversation.

Twitter 5.8 is available on the App Store; Twitter for Mac 2.3 is available on the Mac App Store.

Permalink