We have many great deals for #MacStoriesDeals today. You can find us as @MacStoriesDeals on Twitter.
#MacStoriesDeals - Friday
iPad and MacBook Running Nintendo DS Game with OpenEmu→
Cool demonstration of the capabilities of OpenEmu for OS X using the iPad as a second monitor. (via)
I’m looking forward to OpenEmu, which is still in private beta (though you can compile the source). I haven’t played my old GameBoy and SNES games in years, but, in the light of recent Nintendo announcements, I’d like to play them on a computer today. OpenEmu is promising:
Open Emu is an open source project to bring game emulation to OS X as a first class citizen, leveraging modern OS X technologies such as Cocoa, Core Animation and Quartz, and 3rd party libraries like Sparkle for auto-updating. Open Emu is based on a modular architecture, allowing for game-engine plugins, this means Open Emu can support a host of different emulation engines and back-ends while retaining a familiar OS X native front-end.
From what I’ve seen so far, OpenEmu will support both hardware controllers (with lots of configuration options) and software solutions like Joypad (which we reviewed).
Matt Gemmell had an excellent article a while back on playing Nintendo games on a Mac, with lots of great photos as well.
Update: In case it wasn’t clear enough, we don’t condone piracy here at MacStories. Either for apps or games, don’t be greedy. Support developers and buy original games. As Matt also says, most second-hand consoles and games are cheap on eBay these days.
Iconic Bites by Susan Kare→
Recognizable to almost anyone who has used a computer, Susan’s art helped make early computers user-friendly and fun and bridged the divide between humans and modern technology. Here she talks to us about how her rich experience as an illustrator has colored her designs for the Path Shop.
I don’t use Path, I don’t get the appeal of this recent “stickers” trend in social networking apps, but these show that Susan Kare’s still got it.
For more Susan Kare-related reading, I recommend this article from late 2011 and this page on Susan’s website. I’ve always liked this quote from a 1996 interview with The New York Times:
I tend to think of icons more like traffic signs than as illustrations. It’s much more successful if it is simple.
The Floating-Over-Everything Button→
Dan Frommer:
And it feels a bit more futuristic than the old nav-bars-of-square-buttons, in a Minority Report/Google Glass sort of way. Eventually, there might be a bunch of buttons hovering over our field of vision, on our car windshields, eyeglasses, wherever. This simulates that heads-up display effect.
Design trends come and go: some of them stick around, others are popular for a while but then slowly disappear as designers figure out better solutions. Remember when, after Instagram 1.0, dozens of apps started using large buttons in the middle of a toolbar? Or when pull-to-refresh could be seen in all sorts of designs?
Trends subside with time: new ones come out and gain traction, old ones re-surface with refreshed implementations. In the past few months, there seems to be a comeback of fun, entertaining pull-to-refresh animations after Apple’s default take with iOS 6. Two examples: Twitterrific 5 and the just-released Twitter Music.
The iOS ecosystem is now mature enough that we can recognize specific design patterns evolving and changing with time. I agree with Dan’s conclusion.
Slugline→
New screenwriting app for OS X by Stu Maschwitz. I like how Jonathan Poritsky briefly describes it:
Slugline allows you to write in Fountain while making your script look like a formatted screenplay. It’s like Final Draft without all the headaches. It’s magic. And since your documents are always in plain text, you can take them with you anywhere.
Fountain is, of course, the plain text syntax for writing screenplays inspired by John Gruber’s Markdown. I don’t write screenplays, but I’m aware of the alternatives that already exist on the market (namely, Final Draft). Slugline, from what I see, looks like a mix of FoldingText and traditional screenwriting software: it’s got automatic formatting of plain text for screenplay documents, deep OS X integrations, and a rich preview that, however, is still based on a plain text file. I also like the Outline view, which more Mac text editors should support. Plus, even John August seems to like this app.
Slugline is available for $39.99 on the Mac App Store. You can watch the promo video below.
Sublpress - Sublime Text WordPress Plugin→
Interesting work by Nicolas Dienstbier:
Sublpress is a Sublime Text WordPress Plugin that allows you to remotely manage many WordPress 3.5 installations from within Sublime Text. The mostly quick panel based system allows for managing settings, posts(and custom post types), pages and taxonomy terms of a WordPress blog.
I use Sublime Text 2 as a Markdown text editor every day, and I’m intrigued by this plugin. Once I’m done with a post in Sublime, I fire up Marked, hit CMD+Shift+C to copy the HTML code, and go to WordPress to post it. With Sublpress, I could do the posting directly from Sublime, so I’ll make sure to check it out.
Sublpress works with both Sublime Text 2 and 3. You can find it on GitHub (via Brett on Pinboard).
Facebook SDK 3.5 for iOS→
Some nice updates for developers who integrate Facebook functionality in their iOS apps. A new native Share Dialog, with support for photos like the iOS 6 Share Sheet, will be available in beta today:
The native Share Dialog is simple to integrate and significantly improves people’s sharing experiences from your native mobile app. It has built-in support for publishing Open Graph actions. In addition, people now have the option to share activity from apps through this dialog without needing to login to Facebook first. This makes it faster and easier for people to share.
The data and publishing permission dialogs look good as well. Facebook says they’re 20% faster, too.
Thoughts On Twitter #music
Earlier today, Twitter released its official #music app.[1] This first release, like Vine before, is iPhone-only with a web counterpart. I believe that Music, more than Vine, can give an indication of the direction Twitter may take in regards to its media strategy. But first, I’d like to highlight two excerpts from Twitter’s blog post announcing Music:
Twitter and music go great together. People share and discover new songs and albums every day. Many of the most-followed accounts on Twitter are musicians, and half of all users follow at least one musician. This is why artists turn to Twitter first to connect with their fans — and why we wanted to find a way to surface songs people are tweeting about.
Today, we’re releasing Twitter #music, a new service that will change the way people find music, based on Twitter. It uses Twitter activity, including Tweets and engagement, to detect and surface the most popular tracks and emerging artists. It also brings artists’ music-related Twitter activity front and center: go to their profiles to see which music artists they follow and listen to songs by those artists. And, of course, you can tweet songs right from the app.
“Tweets and engagement” are key factors of the algorithm Twitter is using to “detect and surface” tracks, both popular and emerging. The fact that half of all users (active or not) follow at least one musician on Twitter is an important metric to keep in mind. Read more
Cloak VPN Service Adds $1.99 Mini Plan: 5 GB per Month Across All of Your Devices→
Cloak is an easy-to-use VPN service that safeguards the flow of information to and from your computer on public networks (like a Wi-Fi hotspot at Starbucks). Cloak’s plans have always been inexpensive at less than $15 a month for their top tier 60 GB plan, but their new $1.99 Mini Plan for 5 GB is absolutely killer. It’s incredibly affordable, offering just the right amount of data you’d likely use on the road.