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Instagram Launches Feeds On The Web→

Instagram Launches Feeds On The Web

Following the launch of profiles back in November 2012, Instagram today announced the public availability of “feeds on the web” – that is, the possibility to browse your Instagram feed (of people you follow) from any web browser.

Your Instagram Feed on the web functions much like it does on your mobile phone. You can browse through the latest photos of people whom you follow with updates as people post new photos. Like photos by double clicking on them or pressing the like button. Or, engage in a conversation around a photo with inline commenting. Browse through pages of the most recent images to keep up on what’s happening with the people you follow in realtime. And shrink your browser down to a single column for your feed to look more like your mobile feed. Simply put, we’ve brought a simple, powerful, and beautiful Instagram browsing experience to the web.

I like how the new web feeds maintain Instagram’s focus on simplicity. Photos in your stream are centered and the website is responsive if you resize your browser’s window, meaning that iPad owners will finally have a way to view their feeds without using a third-party app. Instagram has translated the popular “double-tap to like” command into a double-click, but that doesn’t work on the iPad’s Safari browser for now. However, it’s also possible to like a photo by hitting the dedicated “heart” icon above the comments.

There are subtle and elegant animations both when you like a photo with a double-click or through the heart icon. From the main feed, you can follow links to users’ profiles or single photos; when you reach the bottom of the feed, you can press “Load More” to continue viewing older photos.

You can read more about web feeds on Instagram’s blog.

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Control YouTube Videos with Your Mac’s Media Keys with Tube Controller

Out of habit I tend to reach for my media keys when playing music and videos. While Rdio has certainly spoiled me with its compatibility I’ve yet to learn that the rest of the world, the web mainly, doesn’t work with the three most useful keys on my keyboard. While trying to pause YouTube videos with the play / pause key can lead to some egregious overdubs, it’s always a little frustrating when it doesn’t just work.

Enter Tube Controller, a free app from the Mac App Store for anyone running Snow Leopard and beyond. Interfacing with Chrome and Safari, Tube Controller sits in the menubar and enables your Mac’s media keys to fast forward, rewind, and pause videos on YouTube. It’s simple and convenient. You can’t hide the menubar icon, but you can tuck it away with Bartender if you’d like.

Tube Controller does a few clever things. Rewinding and fast forwarding YouTube videos is interesting because it always feels like it works perfectly. That is to say in just the right increments. It isn’t an exact amount, but Tube Controller seems rewind and fast forward in roughly 3.5-percent increments based on some quick math and plentiful watching of various length videos. Some more complicated algorithm looks at the duration of the video and slightly adjusts where needed.

The app is also aware of iTunes and what it’s doing. If it’s in the background, Tube Controller will keep eyes on YouTube, letting you play and pause the video even when you’re browsing other tabs or jumping into different apps. Once iTunes comes into the foreground or you close whatever tab your YouTube video is playing in, Tube Controller directs the media keys to control iTunes instead. Apps that implement their own media key solutions like Rdio will override the controls.

Without the Flash Player installed, I’ve found Tube Controller doesn’t work with the YouTube 5 extension I have enabled on Safari. Others, in the app’s review section and on Twitter, have noted that Tube Controller also doesn’t work in a full screen view. I’ve personally had success with Chrome and both its full screen and presentation modes, as well as YouTube’s full screen video player in that browser.

I don’t know why you would watch two YouTube videos at once, but if you do, Tube Controller handles it pretty well. The last video you viewed takes precedence over the other. It doesn’t work on web pages with embedded YouTube videos, however.

Tube Controller offers to launch when you log on and there’s a few other settings such as keeping your Mac awake while YouTube is playing (although I don’t think my Mac has ever gone to sleep while YouTube is playing) and changing the color of the menubar icon from black to red. You can enable and disable its functionality manually if you’d like.

I’m keeping Tube Controller running in the background (it uses up a measly amount of memory) for the convenience of using my media keys with YouTube. It’s certainly recommended if your play / pause reflexes are anything like mine. Download it from the Mac App Store.

Side note: The developer doesn’t have a personal site or a landing page up, but you can check out some of his other work on Bipolar (a game also available on the MAS).

Integrating OmniFocus and Reminders On OS X→

Integrating OmniFocus and Reminders On OS X

Daniel Jalkut and Sean Korzdorfer have been working on two aspects of the same problem: bridging the gap between OmniFocus and Reminders on OS X.

Sean put together a series of AppleScripts to send tasks from OmniFocus to Apple’s Reminders app for Mac. Daniel created (and open-sourced) an app to check Reminders for newly added items, transfer them to OmniFocus while keeping due dates, and deleting them from their original location in Reminders.

I love OmniFocus for both Mac and iOS, but it turns out that because I lean so heavily on using Siri to add items, I tend not to open OmniFocus while I’m on the go. When I come home and get to work on my Mac, I notice that OmniFocus doesn’t contain any of my recently added items, so I have to go through the cumbersome steps of opening my iPhone and launching OmniFocus just to get this theoretically time-saving trick to work right.

I have tried to get into using OmniFocus’ iCloud capture feature on iOS, but because I don’t use Siri on a daily basis, that didn’t turn into a habit. I know many rely on OmniFocus-Reminders integration, and I think these are nice solutions for the desktop.

I, however, have become a big fan of The Omni Group’s Mail Drop service. Using Drafts, I can write down a task, send it to Mail Drop, and have it in my OmniFocus inbox after a few minutes; if I want to save a link to a webpage, I can use a bookmarklet that sends a website to Drafts and then to Mail Drop. Rather than further integrating OmniFocus and Reminders, I’d like to open OmniFocus on iOS and find it already synced with all other copies of the app and Mail Drop. Right now developers have to resort to location-tricks to update information in the background, and I wish Apple will allow more background options in the future.

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TED 2.0→

TED 2.0

The official TED app for iPhone and iPad has been updated to version 2.0. I’ve been watching a few videos with it and it’s been a solid update so far.

The app is generally faster on 3G and videos load faster than the previous version. Living in a town where 3G is actually faster than my home DSL connection, I can confirm video buffering starts quickly. I’m a fan of TED’s video player controls that sport the same metallic elements of Apple’s Music app.

The big new feature in this update is the addition of subtitles and translations. Subtitles are available in over 90 languages and they can be enabled from the video player and they persist over AirPlay (useful if you’re going to stream TED to an Apple TV or Mac running Reflector). Languages are available in a dedicated section in the All Talks tab; localized talks come with descriptions, title, and subtitles in your native language.

TED 2.0 is available on the App Store.

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Sponsor: Today Weather

My thanks to Savvy Apps for sponsoring MacStories this week with Today Weather.

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Today Weather is a clean, elegant, and intuitive weather app for the iPhone. From the creators of Agenda, Today Weather sports the same amount of care and attention to simple and fast touch interactions: you can tap on a location to enter its detail view, swipe left to get a hourly forecast of the next few days, and swipe right to see a beautiful graph for each day’s average temperature and conditions. If you live in the US, you’ll also get a radar view with storms, showing rain and snow. The Forecast view is based on NOAA gradients and the data presented is fast and accurate.

I personally keep Today Weather on my Home screen and I’ve been using it every day since its release. My two favorite features are the Today view – which gives me a quick overview of the current day – and the Forecast, as it lets me visually understand what my week will be like in terms of temperature and weather conditions. I’m a big fan of Today Weather’s design and animations, and I’m looking forward to an iPad version of the app, coming soon.

Find out more about Today Weather here.

Tweetbot Adds Support For Chrome and 1Password Browsers, Vine and Flick Inline Previews

Tweetbot 2.7, released today for the iPhone and iPad, comes with a new Browser setting to specify an external app for opening links. I have been testing the feature and I’m a big fan of this update.

In the Settings, you can now choose to open links directly in Safari, Google Chrome, or 1Password. There are two ways to do this: you can choose to keep opening links in Tweetbot’s own web view and then forward them to your browser of choice; or you can skip Tweetbot’s web view altogether and go directly to a different browser upon tapping a link.

Opening links in Safari and 1Password doesn’t have anything special to it aside from the fact that you’ll be taken out of Tweetbot and into another browser. The 1Password integration is particularly useful as it is, essentially, the same idea behind my bookmarklet, only available inside Tweetbot: if you see a link for a website that you also want to log into, you can use 1Password’s built-in browser to access it.

Using Chrome alongside Tweetbot is my new favorite option, as it leverages Chrome’s support for x-callback-url to enable a completely automated workflow to open Chrome and go back to Tweetbot. If you open a link in Google Chrome, a new tab will open showing a back button labeled “Tweetbot”; once you’re done reading, you can hit that button to automatically close the tab and be taken back to your position in the Tweetbot timeline. Chrome is smart in hiding the back button if you navigate to other pages from the Tweetbot-created tab; the browser also remembers the “special” tab if you switch to other tabs and then go back to the one created by Tweetbot. There’s a minor bug in this version that will redirect to the Tweetbot’s Timeline when you open a link from Mentions, but Tapbots is aware of it. For me, this is a very welcome addition to Tweetbot as it allows my two most-used iOS apps to better communicate with each other without requiring me to manually move between apps. I can get all the benefits of using an external browser (Facebook sharing, using bookmarklets) while still being able to go back to Tweetbot seamlessly.

For Flickr and Vine users, Tweetbot 2.7 also adds inline previews. Vine’s short videos are shown with a standard iOS video player that has a play/pause button.

Tweetbot 2.7 is a minor, yet useful update for Chrome and 1Password users who have been wishing the app could open links in other browsers. You can find the update on the App Store (iPhone, iPad).

Interview: The Omni Group’s Ken Case On OmniFocus 2, OmniOutliner 4, And More

Omni

Omni

In the midst of The Omni Group’s hectic schedule of debuting exciting new Mac versions of some of their most popular software, including the highly anticipated OmniFocus 2, CEO Ken Case sat down with MacStories from the 2013 Macworld/iWorld event to tell us about some of the new products releasing this year.

Ken and I discussed the upcoming versions of OmniFocus, OmniOutliner, their new OmniPresence technology, and also some great new iPad specific features coming to OmniGraffle and OmniPlan this year.

Read more

Pinbook 1.3

Pinbook is my favorite app to create and manage Pinboard bookmarks on iOS. Developer Collin Donnell released version 1.3 of the app today, which includes support for Google Chrome, x-callback-url, more editing options, and browsing tags.

Tag browsing is probably the biggest new feature in this update. You can tap on a new button in the bottom toolbar to bring up a Filter menu containing a search bar, shortcuts for Private/Public/Unread/Untagged bookmarks, and an alphabetical list of all your Pinboard tags. Each tag shows the number of existing bookmarks assigned to it in your account and can be tapped to view them in the main screen. To go back to viewing all bookmarks without browsing by tag, you can enter the screen again and select Clear Filter. You can also tap & hold a tag to share its Pinboard URL.

I like how you can select multiple tags, but I wish the app was capable of showing me results that matched all criteria, rather than any of them; for instance, I often browse a page that contains bookmarks tagged with “python” and “pythonista”, while Pinbook will show it as “python” or “pythonista”. It’s a minor difference that I’m sure Collin will consider.

Bookmarks can now be edited from the Bookmarks screen. Hitting Edit will open an editing interface to modify single bookmarks or multiple ones at once if you want to delete them or make them as read. You can now also tap & hold a bookmark to quickly show an Edit/Mark as Read/Share menu.

My favorite new feature of version 1.3 is the addition of x-callback-url and support for opening links in Chrome. Thanks to x-callback-url, a link opened in Chrome will show a “Pinbook” button to go back to the app (shown above); with x-callback-url built-in, you can also construct URLs that will take you back to other apps after a bookmark has been added. Therefore, I update my Safari and Chrome bookmarklets to take advantage of the new functionality.

Safari

javascript:window.location='pinbook://x-callback-url/add?url='+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+'&title='+encodeURIComponent(document.title)+'&x-source=Safari&x-success='+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+'&x-cancel='+encodeURIComponent(location.href)

Chrome

javascript:window.location='pinbook://x-callback-url/add?url='+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+'&title='+encodeURIComponent(document.title)+'&x-source=Chrome&x-success=googlechrome://&x-cancel=googlechrome://'

You can imagine the sort of workflows that are made possible by x-callback-url. Just to name two: you could create a Mr. Reader service that sends selected text from an article to Pinbook as description (alongside title and URL) and then goes back to Mr. Reader; or, you could create a Launch Center Pro action that sends a URL in the clipboard to Pinbook and then launches the Pinboard website in Safari or Google Chrome.

Pinbook continues to be one of my most used iOS apps. Version 1.3 is available on the App Store.

Gmail for iOS URL Scheme→

Gmail for iOS URL Scheme

Tom Scogland figured out the complete URL scheme for Gmail 2.0, Google’s official Gmail app for the iPhone and iPad. As documented on his blog, the Gmail app allows you to compose an entire message using the following template:

googlegmail:///co?subject=<subject text>&body=<body text>

As I’ve also found out, you can add a to= parameter to pass a URL-encoded email address to which an email will be sent to. Unfortunately, my tests also confirmed that a similar from= parameter isn’t supported, and that this undocumented URL scheme doesn’t support x-callback-url, unlike Chrome. So, it’s not possible to return to a “calling” app after an email has been sent or the compose screen dismissed. I’ve also noticed how this URL scheme isn’t particularly reliable at bringing up the compose screen if the app wasn’t paused in the background (such as in a cold start); this is probably the reason Google isn’t publicizing this URL scheme – it’s not ready yet.

I’ve still made some stuff for it, though. Here’s a JavaScript bookmarklet that will open Gmail using a webpage’s title as Subject and URL as body:

javascript:window.location='googlegmail:///co?subject='+encodeURIComponent(document.title)+'&body='+encodeURIComponent(location.href);

Here’s an action for Launch Center Pro:

googlegmail:///co?subject=[prompt]&body=[prompt]

And an action for Drafts:

googlegmail:///co?subject=[[title]]&body=[[body]]

Keep in mind that the URL scheme may fail if Gmail wasn’t paused in the background (it’ll show a splash screen when loading again). I’m looking forward to improvements to the URL scheme, as Google has been doing a great job with these lately.

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