Chris Herbert

730 posts on MacStories since September 2010

Vector & pixel trafficker for Seymour Midwest LLC, regular MacStories contributor, Hip-Hop junkie all day long; Apple addict circa 1976.

[email protected]

Kickstarter: Pebble, an E-Paper Watch for the iPhone

People love to fit their iPod nanos with a super sweet watch band. With its nice watch face and music on the fly, it’s a very attractive piece to add to your Apple nerdware. The Nano “iWatch” could be improved when it comes to its wrist functionality though. Pebble Technology from Palo Alto, California, is not only improving wrist technology but incorporating our smartphones with the Pebble watch, “it’s infinitely customizable, with beautiful downloadable watch faces and useful internet-connected apps.” Pebble connects to our iPhones via Bluetooth and sends information through silent vibrations for incoming calls, emails, messages, and more.

Pebble can easily be customized by adding apps (via the iPhone Pebble app) to be used for cyclists, runners, controlling music, a golf rangefinder and infinitely more apps via the SDK that they have also developed. The Pebble also has customizeable watch faces (much like the iPod nano) to fit each owner’s unique style. The watch will also come in 4 colors - arctic white, jet black, cherry red and one to be voted on my Kickstarter backers.

Video after the break. Read more

MacStories & Everyme Giveaway: Win an iPod touch

Yesterday we posted a review of Everyme, a new social app that aims at allowing users to communicate with friends and family through Circles. Everyme wants to help people keep in touch with friends, co-workers, family members, or high-school friends they actually care about. The developers want its users to be able to easily share with a private group of people, without all of the manual effort it takes in the way that Google+ does it. They are leveraging data from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and the address book.

Everyme wants to give one lucky MacStories reader a way to keep in touch with their Circles. To enter, simply follow the rules below and if you haven’t downloaded Everyme yet, give it a whirl after reading our review. Check out the giveaway rules below.

Giveaway

Thanks to Everyme, we’re able to give away to one lucky MacStories reader a shiny new black 8GB iPod touch. Contestants must be a US citizen (we’re not shipping outside the US).

To enter the giveaway, tweet the following message before 11.59 AM PDT (April  13th):

Win an iPod touch on MacStories: http://mcstr.net/HxJ3WP

We will search Twitter.com for tweets and retweets and randomly pick up the winners.

Make sure to follow @macstoriesnet on Twitter so we can get in touch with you once the giveaway is over. If you want to increase your odds of winning, you can also leave a comment to this post.

Winners will be announced on Saturday (April 14th).

 

UPDATE! The winner of a black 8GB iPod touch is Emily Caffrey. Congrats!

Slicy Reinvents Slicing Photoshop PSDs

“Save for Web” – not everyone’s favorite thing to do as a designer, but it’s part of the job. It’s monotonous but not a difficult task to do, it simply takes time. MacRabbit, who created Espresso, has released a new Mac app called Slicy. Its sole purpose is to turn PSD files into images for the web and applications. Slicy examines your .psd files for Layer Groups that are named like a file (.png, .jpg, .tif, .icns) and auto-exports them, no “Save for Web” dialog boxes necessary. “Name layer groups like the files you want to create, and Slicy will extract them individually. Enjoy complete freedom to move, obscure and even hide these named layer groups without affecting the extracted images.”

I can admit that my layers and layer groups are not always properly named; I think all designers can attest to this, so Slicy will also help you do a better job with naming objects within your PSD files. Once your naming is done and file is saved, drag the .psd into the apps’s window and Slicy will do the work for you. If you make changes to the .psd after you run Slicy, the app has an option to auto-export the images when they are re-saved. Delicious! If you want to repeat a job you already did, Slicy saves your previous exports under the “clockwise” icon in the upper right. Slicy, however, cannot guarantee a perfect replica for every .psd – the CMYK color space and some advanced filters are not supported.

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