This Week's Sponsor:

Washing Machine X9

Spring Clean Your Mac Effortlessly

Posts in iOS

Markdown and Automation Experiments with 1Writer

In preparing my reviews of iOS 9 and the iPad Pro, I noticed that my writing process was being slowed down by the lack of multitasking support in my text editor of choice, Editorial. For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been trying to move some of my Editorial scripts and workflows to 1Writer, with interesting results and potential for the future.

I have written about Editorial at length on MacStories, and I still find Ole Zorn’s text editor to provide the most powerful combination of Markdown and plain text automation that’s ever been created on iOS. Over the years, I’ve put together hundreds of workflows thanks to Editorial’s visual actions and Python scripting; while some of them were made for fun and intellectual curiosity, the majority of them helped me save time when doing actual work for this website, Relay FM, and Club MacStories. There is no other app with the same feature set and rich Markdown support of Editorial.

Since iOS 9, however, I’ve been wondering whether part of Editorial’s automation could be taken somewhere else, possibly in another app that offered full integration with iOS 9 multitasking. I may have several workflows in Editorial, but I only use a tiny fraction of them on a daily basis for regular work on this website. I’d rather use a text editor that excels at a subset of Markdown workflows and integrates with iOS 9 than a single text editor with every imaginable workflow without proper iOS 9 integration.

It was this realization that pushed me to give 1Writer another look. I first bought the app years ago, but because I had no excuse to explore the world outside of Editorial, I didn’t try to recreate any workflows in it. This time around, I was motivated to rebuild the core of my setup in 1Writer, so I took a deep dive into the app’s automation engine.

Things will likely change again once Editorial supports iOS 9, but in the meantime I’ve developed an appreciation for 1Writer’s design and features that helped me understand the app better.

Read more

WhatsApp Adds Rich Previews for Web Links

A link preview in the new WhatsApp for iPhone.

A link preview in the new WhatsApp for iPhone.

With an update released today on the App Store, WhatsApp has brought a functionality I’ve long wished was also available in Apple’s Messages app: rich previews for links shared in conversations.

Similar to existing implementations in Facebook’s iOS apps and other services such as Slack, the new option lets you include a rich snippet for each link pasted in a chat. Instead of sharing a simple tappable URL that opens Safari, these previews can show a webpage’s title and lead image alongside the link in a conversation, adding context that can be useful to see what a link is about before tapping it. Link previews aren’t sent by default: after pasting a URL, a preview is automatically generated and displayed above WhatsApp’s text field, so you can choose to add it or dismiss it by tapping a close button.

As I argued in the Notes section of my iOS 9 review, I’d like to see Apple make Notes’ link previews (which are very similar to WhatsApp’s) a system-feature of iOS, bringing them to Messages, Mail, Reminders, and other apps with a consistent design, perhaps even offering a developer API to enable link previews in third-party apps.

WhatsApp’s latest update – which also includes a redesigned Settings screen and more 3D Touch quick actions to preview chats – is available on the App Store.

Castro for iPhone Goes Free, Adopts Patronage Model

Supertop is releasing Castro 1.5 today, and, in preparation for a major Castro 2.0 update scheduled in a few months, they are making the app free with a patronage model.

From the Supertop blog:

If you like Castro, please consider becoming a patron by contributing $1/month. You will support the work of a small indie app studio in a way that the standard App Store model never can. Yesterday, Supertop needed an endless stream of thousands of new customers to sustain our business. From today, we can be successful with a far smaller number of much happier customers. We can offer better support. We can add new features more often, instead of holding them back for splashy major releases. In other words, we can do the things that indies do best.

The patronage options are 3, 6 or 12 month bundles that don’t auto-renew. We know that this model will only work out for us if you love the app enough to voluntarily choose to pay, so there will be no sales-y notifications or nag screens. Castro 1.5 adds a small note at the bottom of the two main screens and a button in settings to invite users to become patrons.

With this model, the entire app has gone free – no features have to be purchased separately, and patronage is tastefully advertised at the bottom of the main podcast list. There are no annoying alerts or nagging prompts to sign up.

In addition to patronage, Castro 1.5 has been updated with 3D Touch support, Safari View Controller, and Spotlight search. The latter is a nice addition as a lot of podcast apps don’t support it, but I wish Castro could also index titles of links from show notes (at least it doesn’t for Relay FM shows ). As you can imagine, Safari View Controller for in-app web views is pretty great in a podcast client.

Like with Overcast and other patronage-based products, I hope that users who love and depend upon Castro will consider signing up. Making money on today’s App Store isn’t easy for an indie studio, and we need to support developers who try something different to remain sustainable thanks to their audience. I hope this works out and I’m curious to see what Supertop does with Castro 2.0.

Castro 1.5 is available on the App Store.

Alive Is a Full-Featured Live Photo Manager and Exporting Tool

As I’ve written before, I love Live Photos. They can capture the fleeting nature of a moment like nothing else can, and the integration with the well-known Camera UI is seamless. Unless I’m taking product shots for reviews, I always keep Live Photos enabled.

Apple doesn’t provide a lot of options to manage and export Live Photos from the Photos app, which is why third-party developers have stepped up to the challenge with dozens of utilities to export Live Photos as GIFs, clean up their videos, and more.

Alive, developed by Clean Shaven Apps (Dispatch, Due, Clips), is a new full-featured solution that combines management functionalities with handy exporting and stitching tools for Live Photos and traditional videos.

Read more

Browsecurely Brings Safari View Controller Anywhere with an Action Extension

Typically, you wouldn't be able to do this in the Twitter app for iOS.

Typically, you wouldn’t be able to do this in the Twitter app for iOS.

One of the best details of Peace, Marco Arment’s original Ghostery-based Content Blocker for iOS 9, was the ability to summon Safari View Controller anywhere with an extension. As I wrote in my review:

Open Unrestricted and Open in Peace are interesting, as they leverage Safari View Controller to temporarily disable (Unrestricted) or use Peace for a link passed to the extension. This means that, besides Safari and apps that support Safari View Controller, you can enjoy the benefits of Peace from the system share sheet. Even if an app doesn’t integrate with Safari View Controller – such as Twitter, but there will be many others – as long as they can share a URL with native extensions, you’ll be able to use Peace’s Content Blocker and Safari View Controller. This is a genius way to circumvent apps that don’t support the superior Safari View Controller experience in iOS 9, and I bet that other developers will be “inspired” by it once they see it.

Developed by Martin Gordon, Browsecurely is a new app for iPhone and iPad that lets you open Safari-based web views in every app that supports the iOS share sheet.

The idea is extremely simple: in spite of the many advantages of Safari View Controller (which include privacy features, performance gains, Content Blockers, and an experience consistent with the system browser), there are still some apps –like Twitter’s official client – that prefer not to implement it, using their own web views independent from Safari. Browsecurely offers a way out from those web views: as long as you can share a webpage’s URL with native extensions, you’ll be able to open the selected webpage with Safari View Controller using the Browsecurely action extension. By doing this, you’ll simply be opening a URL in Safari View Controller without leaving the app you’re using; current Content Blocker, Reader, and other Safari settings will carry over from the browser automatically.

I was waiting for someone to replicate Peace’s Safari View Controller extension in a dedicated app, and it doesn’t surprise me that this basic functionality is available for free with an optional In-App Purchase to support the developer. Browsecurely has no additional features – it’s just a way to open links in Safari View Controller with an extension.

I have to wonder if, eventually, Apple will make a Safari extension themselves, allowing users to always open links with Safari View Controller as a system-level option available in every app. In the meantime, Browsecurely comes in handy to quickly view webpages in Safari View Controller from the share sheet, and it’s available for free on the App Store.

Giphy 2.0 Makes It Easy to Find and Share GIFs

I was familiar with Giphy’s iPhone app, but today’s 2.0 update makes it something worth keeping on my device for the sheer utility of finding any GIF I want quickly.

Giphy is, quite possibly, the leading destination for GIFs on the Internet. The service is integrated with a variety of third-party apps and it’s become a staple of our Slack conversations thanks to the often perplexing, sometimes amazing /giphy slash command. In many ways, Giphy is the GIF backend sating our daily appetite for stupid Internet memes and reactions. Especially when I’m on Slack, I expect Giphy to be my worthy GIF assistant in times of need.

The Giphy app for iPhone now has a revamped interface that simplifies the process of finding GIFs. In the main screen, you can view the newest and most trending GIFs on the Internet for the current day. Auto-play can be turned off on slow connections, and I’d like to point out the delightful animation of the back button (top left corner) when navigating back and forth between the initial screen and individual GIFs.

At the bottom of the screen, a list button next to the omnipresent search box lets you view categories of GIFs so you can continue browsing specific subsets of GIFs. These include smiles, LOLs, crying, cats, Taylor Swift, One Direction, and a whole range of other pets and human emotions. The Giphy database doesn’t disappoint here, with some of the most absurd, creepy, and hilarious collections of GIFs I’ve seen around.

Finally, GIFs can now be shared with built-in shortcuts for Messages, Mail, Messenger, and Twitter, as well as the iOS share sheet. If you’ve ever dreamed of automating doge GIFs with Workflow, now you can. Or, you can use the excellent Linky for iOS to share animated GIFs on Twitter with a tweet sheet that is vastly superior to Twitter’s one.

As a huge fan of stupid GIFs (with a hard G), Giphy 2.0 for iPhone is easily my favorite surprise this week. The share sheet integration is a good addition to share GIFs with any app on iOS, and, for me, it removes the need for a dedicated GIF keyboard (which are typically slow to load and don’t return as many results as Giphy). You can download the app for free on the App Store.

Sunrise Becomes Part of Outlook for iOS

Big news from Microsoft today: Sunrise, the calendar platform they acquired earlier this year, will merge with the Outlook mobile app, providing the calendar backend for the app.

From the Microsoft blog:

The Sunrise team is now officially a part of the broader Outlook product team, bringing a fresh approach to calendaring and combining it with Microsoft’s deep expertise in both email and calendar. Better Outlook calendaring gives you more ability to manage your personal and professional life from a single, powerful app. Over the coming months, you’ll see richer calendar experiences come to Outlook from Sunrise—including Interesting Calendars and connections to your favorite apps and services. You will also see improvements to Outlook’s ability to create meetings while on the go and handle meetings across time zones. All of this means Outlook will eventually replace the current Sunrise app.

And here’s from the Sunrise blog:

All the features you love in Sunrise are coming to Outlook soon
We are currently working on integrating all the extra features that made Sunrise so delightful to use in Outlook for iOS and Android. Expect features like Interesting Calendars, Connected Apps and our 3-day view to show up before the end of the year.

Until then, the Sunrise app will stay on the App Store, though it won’t likely receive any updates.

After the acquisition news in February, I wrote:

It seems fair to assume that Microsoft will add more cloud integrations from their own ecosystem (OneNote, Exchange, perhaps Skype?), but I’m curious to see if and how Sunrise will work with Outlook, which comes with an embedded Calendar view.

Microsoft’s answer eight months later is that they want to build an all-in-one email and calendar app that also supports connections to external apps and services. For context, Sunrise currently works with data from Todoist, Evernote, Songkick, Asana, and more. In theory, all these integrations could also be coming to Outlook, which would make it the most “open” calendar and email client on the App Store in terms of third-party (cloud) integrations.

I have mixed feelings about the all-in-one approach, at least for now. Today’s update to Outlook for iOS (which I have been using as my go-to client for the past month) brings a cleaner look and native Watch app, but the Sunrise integration is half-baked and there’s a lot of work to do. The Calendar view of Outlook has been refreshed with a more polished UI and a new monthly view, but none of the features that made Sunrise great – event icons, integrations, the keyboard, and the fantastic date picker – are available yet. Basically, Microsoft has announced their intention to bring Sunrise to Outlook, without any deep Sunrise integration in the actual app yet.

When the transition from Sunrise to Outlook is complete, will it be too much for a single app? Are we really going to get the real Sunrise alongside our email, or a watered-down version lacking the many small touches which made Sunrise an elegant and powerful standalone calendar app? On the other hand, if anyone can make email smarter thanks to integrations and fresh ideas, that’s the Sunrise team. I want to be optimistic.

Also, don’t forget about Wunderlist, which Microsoft also acquired this year. Currently, support for “tasks” in Outlook is marked as planned in the app’s community section where users can vote and suggest new features. I wonder what’s going to happen there.

Tweeting Multiple Pictures from iOS’ Photos App with Linky

Ever since Twitter rolled out the ability to include multiple pictures in a tweet, I’ve been annoyed by the lack of such option in iOS’ tweet sheet. There are times when I’d rather not open my Twitter client to tweet some pictures or screenshots – maybe I don’t want to get distracted by news happening on Twitter, or maybe I just want to share from the Photos app without seeing mentions that I want to reply to.

Twitter’s (or Apple’s?) decision not to support the feature with the native iOS extension is baffling, but, thankfully, the latest update to Linky for iPhone and iPad offers an elegant (and obvious) solution to the problem.

Read more