How I Use Pinboard

For the past year, I’ve been asked on multiple occasions by MacStories readers about Pinboard, and I thought it’d be fun to address that question with a detailed explanation of my usage of the service.

I love Pinboard. I realize that it may be somewhat strange to share such feelings for a web service, therefore allow me to rephrase it: I love what Pinboard’s creator Maciej Cegłowski has been doing with the service and I love Pinboard’s focus and direction.[1]

Pinboard is a bookmaking service purposefully devoid of complicated social features and primarily aimed at personal bookmarks. If you’ve been on the Internet for a few years, you may be familiar with Pinboard as the straightforward alternative to Delicious from the days when Delicious used to be a bookmarking service, and that still holds true. Fundamentally, Pinboard is a service to save links.

In spite of its simplicity and barebones presentation, Pinboard is packed with clever options and settings that you can use to tailor the experience to your needs. There are compatible apps (Pinboard has an API), bookmarklets, RSS feeds, and many other tricks and hidden tips that can considerably improve your usage of Pinboard, and I’m going to cover those, alongside some personal suggestions, in this post.
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Evernote and OneNote→

I was curious to know more about OneNote for Mac, released yesterday on the Mac App Store, from an Evernote user’s perspective, and I’m glad that Justin Williams wrote up his impressions so far.

I’m not switching from Evernote: I need some of the service’s more advanced features (saved searches, shareable notes, web clipper) and, overall, I’m happy with it. I like Evernote as a company – I’m a fan of the business model and the idea of a service that can stick around for many years. I appreciate the work they’ve put into improving the apps and service in 2014: as I wrote in January, there are still things I would like to see, but the iOS app has improved dramatically since September.

I also agree with Justin’s take on the API. In my limited experience with using the Evernote API in Python, I found it painful to simply send HTML to the service to create a new note or to try to retrieve HTML content from a note (Evernote uses a superset of XHTML called ENML, which has its own set of restrictions). Other developers I’ve talked to shared their frustrations with the Evernote API, especially for integration with iOS apps. One of Evernote’s biggest advantages over OneNote is the rich ecosystem of apps they’ve built, but Microsoft’s launch yesterday showed that they’re not kidding with third-party OneNote support either. Perhaps Evernote should add the API to the list of improvements for 2014.

It’ll be interesting to see how Microsoft will continue to support OneNote on iOS and OS X – they have an uphill battle against Evernote’s frequent updates, but they’re off to a seemingly good start with the Mac app.

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UpWord Notes Adds TaskPaper Tweaks→

In my original review of UpWord Notes for iPhone, I noted that the app didn’t support TaskPaper’s syntax in any way, which was surprising considering that UpWord is a todo app that relies on plain text, just like TaskPaper.

In today’s relatively minor 1.0.5 update, UpWord Notes added support for marking notes as complete with “@done” and for quickly adding tabs with a two-finger gestures – both enhancements are aimed at TaskPaper users. While UpWord is still far from being a fully functional TaskPaper client, these additions introduce a first layer of compatibility that makes using UpWord with TaskPaper files a bit more feasible. UpWord has handy reminder and favorite features, which are typically absent from plain text apps and systems, and if I were to switch from my Fantastical/Reminders todo system (not happening any time soon), I’d consider TaskPaper with UpWord.

UpWord Notes is $0.99 on the App Store.

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Apple Launches 8GB iPhone 5c, Replaces iPad 2 with Updated iPad 4

Following speculation from earlier this week, Apple has today launched updated versions of its iPhone 5c and fourth-generation iPad, the latter previously discontinued in October 2013 for the iPad Air.

The return of the 16 GB iPad 4 marks the company’s official discontinuation of the iPad 2, first introduced in March 2011 and sold until today as the most affordable iPad in Apple’s line-up. The relaunched iPad 4 is the same device that Apple unveiled in October 2012 – it comes with an A6X processor, FaceTime camera, and LTE support, but it replaces the iPad 2’s 30-pin connector with Lightning, making it consistent with the rest of Apple’s iPad family.

Now for $399 customers can get iPad with a stunning 9.7-inch Retina display, fast A6X chip, and 5MP iSight camera, offering a dramatic upgrade in power, performance and value compared to the iPad 2 it replaces,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “The iPad line sets the gold-standard in mobile computing and all iPads have access to the largest and best ecosystem of more than 500,000 iPad optimized apps from the App Store.

The 16 GB iPad 4 is available at $399 for the WiFi model and $529 for the WiFi + Cellular version, and it’s shown on Apple’s website as “iPad with Retina display”.

The iPhone 5c has received a new 8 GB storage option today, currently available in Apple’s European stores but expected to become available in the US later today. The new model is £40 cheaper than the 16 GB iPhone 5c in the UK, and it starts at £429, fully unlocked. The 8 GB iPhone 5c hasn’t replaced the 8 GB iPhone 4s, which is still available on Apple’s website.

The iPhone 5c was introduced in September with multiple color options as a slightly upgraded version of the iPhone 5, but its sales have been below Apple’s expectations, as also confirmed by CEO Tim Cook in January.

How Should Dropbox Respond To Google Drive’s Price Cut?→

Bradley Chambers writes about Dropbox and last week’s price cut for Google Drive:

Dropbox has been the king of the folder syncing hill for a few years now. Transporter is doing a end-run around on Dropbox by offering similar functionality with no monthly fees (and using onsite storage). Google is doing a full frontal assault with the price cut. Google is offering 100GB at 75% less than Dropbox at this time.

How does Dropbox respond? One thing they need is a great web presence. Dropbox’s web interface is for viewing, organizing, deleting, and viewing. With Google Drive, you can create and edit spreadsheets, presentations, and documents. Dropbox needs to add this feature, but they also need to provide more. What could they do without matching the price?

I think that Bradley’s proposed solutions make a lot of sense from a productivity standpoint, but I’ll add this: revamp the Photos product on the web and mobile apps. Last year, Dropbox launched a series of enhancements to make it easier to upload photos and share them, but the presentation options and management features still lack behind what dedicated solutions like Picturelife, Flickr, and even Google+ are providing (not to mention the defunct, beloved Everpix).

The Photos view on Dropbox is limited, and while it aggregrates photos from your account and organizes them chronologically, it doesn’t do much else. Dropbox is already storing user files and they’re way past the problem of scaling, so they shouldn’t run into the same issues of a startup like Everpix in terms of costs. If done right, photo backup and management with options to tag people, browse albums and locations, and easily share through Dropbox with family members could become an important part of the Dropbox product, if only because photos are personal, people care about them, and clearly no one has solved the photo problem yet – not Apple, not Flickr, and not Loom or Picturelife yet. Dropbox may not cut prices as much as Google, but a terrific Photos product could add a lot of value to the service.

Could Dropbox “fix” photo backup and management this year, or do they feel like Apple and Google will eventually get it just right (especially Apple, which is in an extremely sorry state of confusing Photo Stream affairs these days). Or does Dropbox prefer focusing on productivity features such as the ones Bradley imagines? Could they do both?

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PhotosPro Displays Photos with Metadata, Date Filters, Photo Stream Support

Apple’s iOS apps often serve as a foundation of ideas and technologies that third-party developers can build upon to create new and more advanced functionalities – this has been the case for years with email clients, todo apps, and, more recently, Camera Roll alternatives. With iOS 7, Apple revamped its Photos app to integrate the Camera Roll with Photo Stream and organize photos in Collections and Moments, but the effort lacked proper tools to view metadata for individual photos or all photos on a single map view. Since last year, a number of apps aimed at offering different features than Apple’s Photos app have come out on the App Store, and I was impressed with Justin Williams’ idea of presenting photos as large thumbnails with metadata visualization for locations and timestamps.

I downloaded PhotosPro when it was on sale earlier this month on the App Store, and find the app, available on both the iPhone and iPad, to have the kind of browsing and viewing options I’d like to see in Apple’s Photos in the future.

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Gameloft To Support Twitch Streaming On iOS with Asphalt 8 Update

Twitch

Twitch

With a press release (via Joystiq), Gameloft today announced that an update to Asphalt 8: Airborne will be one of the first iOS games to support livestreaming through Twitch on iPhones and iPads.

Earlier this month, Twitch announced a mobile SDK to allow developers of smartphone and tablet games to add native broadcasting functionalities to their apps. By partnering with Twitch, Gameloft will showcase features enabled by the Twitch SDK in Asphalt 8, which include live streaming, stream archiving, as well as the possibility to capture player audio and video through the front-facing camera in real-time. In pre-release screenshots shared by Gameloft today, Twitch integration is shown as a separate screen with settings for stream quality (low, medium, high), video and audio capture, and chat logs; during gameplay, chat messages will be displayed at the bottom of the screen in an animated ticker, with picture-in-picture support for live broadcaster commentary. It’s possible that the more powerful CPU and GPU found in the latest iPhone and iPad models will be required to render this kind of video enhancements for iOS games in real-time.

Live broadcasting represents one of the most important shifts in the way people play games,“ said Matthew DiPietro, VP of Marketing, Twitch. ”Twitch has quickly found a home on consoles, so by partnering with Gameloft to launch the first streaming-enabled mobile game brings us one step closer to being everywhere that gamers are. Also, being integrated into Asphalt 8: Airborne, one of the highest rated mobile games, should ensure it resonates with our community.

Twitch integration in Asphalt 8 will also come with discovery features to let players browse other streams from the same game directly within the app, an interesting move that could increase usage of Twitch as a social platform for gamers and not just a video broadcasting service.

The third update to Asphalt 8 will be released “soon” according to Gameloft, and it’ll be optimized for the iPhone 5s, iPad Air, and iPad mini with Retina display. For the Game Developers Conference this week, Gameloft will host a 24-hour livestream on Twitch to showcase Twitch support in Asphalt 8.

iCloud Tabs In Google Chrome For Mac→

Two weeks ago, I covered CloudyTabs, a free Mac app to access Safari’s iCloud Tabs from the OS X menu bar. For those who wished to have a more integrated solution for Google Chrome on the Mac, Thundercloud is a simple extension that, like CloudyTabs, reads Safari’s iCloud Tabs and puts them in a popover. There are a couple of configuration steps to get the extension to work with Chrome, but they’re explained upon installation and they’re easy to follow.

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