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PayPal Launches Digital Gifts Store Featuring iTunes Gift Cards→

From PayPal Forward (via setteBIT, iMore):

Beginning today, just in time for the holidays, PayPal will be opening the doors (or the URL) to the PayPal Digital Gifts store.

What is PayPal Digital Gifts? It is a store that will give people the chance to purchase digital gift cards from a host of our partner merchants. We have one marquee merchant in the store today and will be adding more very soon!

Right now, the new store is limited to iTunes codes for the US iTunes Store. It’s nice that Apple is making it easier to buy iTunes credit online, but the regional restrictions are curious (an euphemism for awful): unless your PayPal account (not just the iTunes one) is a US one, you can’t send an iTunes code as a gift to someone else – not even if your account is configured with USD. PayPal’s Digital Gifts store would be very convenient to me and I hope that these restrictions will be removed soon.

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Realmac Releases Free Ember App for iOS

Ember

Ember

In July, Realmac Software released Ember, the successor to LittleSnapper that allows you to organize images in a digital scrapbook for OS X. From our review:

Ember is a very polished app with a fantastic UI, slick animations, full-screen mode and it’s simply a fun app to use and organize images with. If you’re a digital creative person and want to organize your screenshots, inspirational images and reference files, Ember could be what you need.

Today, Realmac is back with Ember for iOS, a free companion app for the iPhone and iPad that lets you manage and organize your library but that doesn’t come with editing features yet. Realmac decided to start with a free app as a foundation for all Ember customers; annotations will be added in a future update with In-App Purchases – a trend that’s making several indepedent developers and small software shops, such as Realmac, experiment with different business models than the traditional paid app approach. Read more

GIFs for Documentation→

You could accomplish many of the goals of the way I use GIFs with inline videos or links to Youtube/Vimeo. However, I find that in many cases the result of a simple focused GIF is far better than a video. Firstly, they don’t require fancy hosting or embed codes to work. Any modern browser can display them inline. Their short, looping nature also make it really easy to immediately get the gist of what the video is trying to communicate. They also take far less time to create than a polished video.

I have the same setup as David Smith, only I use Reflector to capture videos of iOS devices.

GIFs are typically used for Internet memes and jokes (or wars), but they have been working well in my reviews, especially for iOS 7 apps. Creating GIFs of iOS apps is one of the few things that I still can’t do on iOS.

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Apple Buys Topsy→

The Wall Street Journal:

Apple Inc. has acquired social-media analytics firm Topsy Labs Inc. for more than $200 million, according to people familiar with the matter.

Of all the acquisitions that Apple did in 2013, this is one of the most interesting ones to me. Topsy was capable of analyzing trends in tweets and it was one of the few official Twitter partners with access to the full Twitter firehose (including all tweets starting from 2006).

There are many possibilities opened by this kind of access and technology. At TechCrunch, Matthew Panzarino imagines that Topsy’s technology could be useful to improve Twitter search tools built into Siri:

There is also a slim possibility that Apple may want to use Topsy’s stored trends data and firehose access to improve Siri search. It could provide Siri with a reliable way to present people with trending topics and search results according to Twitter when queried.

As Panzarino also speculates, however, I believe that there’s real potential in Twitter analysis algorithms used to augment iTunes and App Store discovery for media, and especially apps. Imagine being able to determine in (almost) real-time the kind of buzz that an app is getting by analyzing tweets sent by humans (not bots or websites) about a new app release. I’ve written about this before, and smaller third-party companies have already tried to provide their own layer of App Store discovery tools by triangulating signals from App Store charts, online reviews, and social networks.

And, of course, there’s the TV rumor: Twitter has become the de-facto destination for real-time TV commentary by millions of watchers, with the company going as far as surveying a subset of users about live TV viewing habits in their latest iOS app update. Topsy’s firehose access and algorithms could have endless potential for Apple’s rumored television plans.

As John Gruber notes, it is a curious acquisition. Apple may have bought Topsy for its team or technology or patents, but the fact that Topsy was highly specialized in Twitter tools and that Apple already has native Twitter integration in iOS and OS X creates several interesting scenarios. Although, as we’ve seen with the Chomp acquisition, this kind of changes can take a long time.

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Auto-Renewable Subscriptions On iOS→

Marco Arment:

I recently wrote that I wouldn’t use auto-renewable subscriptions again after extensive experience with both non-renewing in Instapaper and auto-renewing in The Magazine. A lot of developers have asked me to elaborate, especially as Apple has gradually allowed some apps to use them outside of Newsstand.

As a user, I can only agree with Marco’s take. I’ve only signed up to 3 or 4 reneweable subscriptions on iOS over the years, and every time I wanted to access the management screen (which is tucked away in the Settings) I found it incredibly slow and hard to use. The entire Apple ID panel (Settings > iTunes & App Store > Apple ID) has poor navigation and is slow and unchanged from iOS 6. I’ve always ended up canceling iOS subscriptions and subscribing through the web (whenever possible).

The solution that Marco proposes at the end is a good compromise, but Apple should really improve many aspects of this – both for developers and users.

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TextExpander touch 2.3 Released With New SDK→

Following the news that TextExpander touch had to be “revised significantly” in order to receive an update on the App Store, Smile has today released version 2.3 of the app, which includes a new SDK for developers to integrate in their apps. The app no longer uses the Reminders database to store snippet data and it requires manual user intervention to set up snippets in compatible apps.

From Smile’s blog:

We have come up with an alternative to using Reminders, which will require you to take action to update your snippets and keep them updated. This will have to be done via apps you use with TextExpander integration. There will probably be a “Get Snippet Data” button in the app’s settings, but that depends on how the developer chooses to handle this.

And an important note on developers:

We have also provided an updated TextExpander touch SDK to third party developers so that they can revise their apps. As developers ourselves, we know this sort of unexpected and unscheduled change is difficult to accommodate even under normal circumstances. At this time of year, with impending holidays and year-end obligations, it’s even more difficult. You might want to let the developers of your favorite apps know that you would like to see updated TextExpander support, but please be patient with them as they work out how to fit that into their development schedules.

As a result of this change, apps that used to work with TextExpander touch 2.2 won’t expand snippets with TextExpander touch 2.3 unless they update to support the new system. Looking at the SDK documentation on GitHub, it appears that Smile is now using x-callback-url to handle the initial setup of snippets between TextExpander and compatible apps which, as Smile initially suggested, shouldn’t allow for constant sync of snippets – i.e. if you change a snippet in TextExpander, you’ll have to run the snippet setup again in a third-party app.

It’s unclear how developers will settle on this new implementation and I wouldn’t be surprised to see an open-source solution for TextExpander snippet setup appearing soon. I’m not aware of apps compatible with TextExpander touch 2.3 at the moment and Smile also reset the list on their website.

TextExpander touch 2.3 is available on the App Store; for more on TextExpander touch and iOS limitations, check out episode 24 of The Prompt.

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Developing for the M7→

Conrad Stoll has an interesting article on developing for the M7 chip in the latest iOS devices and adapting an app to the motion information returned by the API:

I was already well into developing Runtime when the iPhone 5s was announced and we learned about the new M7 “motion co-processor” from Apple. There have already been a few good articles talking about what the M7 does and how we believe it works, but essentially from a developer’s perspective the M7 provides a great way to track a user’s steps and type of activity while they are moving. Instead of writing about what the M7 is or how it works, I wanted to write about what its like to use as a developer.

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#MacStoriesDeals – Cyber Monday 2013

MacStories Deals

MacStories Deals

#MacStoriesDeals is the best place to find great deals for Mac and iOS apps and games, Apple hardware deals, and some great book and audio specials. We’ve collected the best app deals for Cyber Monday, so get them before they’re gone!

There are thousands of software and hardware deals online. We carefully pick the best ones and collect them in a single post with links to buy or share discounted products. You don’t need to be overwhelmed by online deals because we take care of finding the best stuff for you.

You can find us as @MacStoriesDeals on Twitter.
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