Quick Unit Conversions With Measures and Launch Center Pro→

Quick Unit Conversions With Measures and Launch Center Pro

Measures by Michael Neuwert is one of the iPhone apps I’ve been following here on MacStories since I started the site in 2009. I’ve later reviewed (and became a fan) of the iPad version of the app, Measures HD. The latest update to Measures for iPhone, version 2.3, adds more units, iPhone 5 support, and a URL scheme. As you know, automation and URL schemes for iOS apps is something I’ve been focusing on lately, so I was curious to try out the Measures implementation.

A basic Measures URL looks like this: x-measures://convert?from=USD&to=EUR&value=100 – but it’s also possible to simply launch a specific category without starting a conversion by using something like: x-measures://convert?category=Mass. The convert action may also contain a category parameter to avoid ambiguities, and it’s possible to search as well using: x-measures://search?q=Watt.

Being based in Italy but working (remotely) in a US environment, I do a lot of conversions on a daily basis. Primarily currency (EUR to USD and vice versa) and temperature conversions to understand what my colleagues are talking about when they say “it’s cold over here”.

It was very easy to set up a Launch Center Pro action (Measures isn’t listed in the officially supported apps in App Cubby’s launcher yet) to start a Dollar to Euro conversion in Measures using input from Launch Center Pro. Using the first example URL I showed above, replace the numeric value parameter with [prompt-num] in Launch Center Pro. This will ensure that a URL-encoded numeric string will be sent from Launch Center Pro’s number pad to Measures, directly displaying the conversion. In this way, I can keep Measures inside a folder, and create shortcuts for my most-used unit conversions that I’ll launch with a single tap from Launch Center Pro. Thanks to URL schemes, the conversion process will take two seconds and I’ll be shown the final result without having to tap or select anything else.

Currently, there’s no official documentation for Measures’ URL scheme and I’m not sure Michael is using the x-callback-url protocol (though it certainly looks like it). If you’re looking for a quick unit converter you can launch from Launch Center Pro (I was looking for a way to send a browser selection as well, but alas), check out Measures 2.3.

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ReadKit: Instapaper, Pocket, and Readability Client For OS X

After Michael Schneider, creator of Read Later, joined the Pocket team to release the official Pocket app for Mac, I wondered if there was a real need for a “read later” (lowercase) application for the desktop:

I’m still not completely sold on the overall concept of a desktop read-later app. I’ve got used to thinking of “read later” as a inherently mobile state of mind. I “catch up” on articles and videos with my iPhone and iPad. The Mac is were I discover stuff. I guess a desktop app can be seen as an add-on, a companion to the main experience.

Looking around for alternatives that would work with the service I use on a daily basis for text articles, Marco Arment’s Instapaper, I was not impressed with Words:

Unfortunately, while promising, Words isn’t there yet. Words looks decent when it’s focused on text (generated by the Instapaper parser) in full-screen mode, but everything else is pretty buggy, unstable, and unfinished.

ReadKit, a new app by Webin released today, is – finally – a solid piece of software for those who have been looking for a desktop version of their favorite read later service. ReadKit, in fact, works with Instapaper, Pocket, and Readability, therefore covering the most popular third-party read later services. The app costs $1.99, and if you want to use it with Instapaper, you’ll need the $1 monthly subscription. Read more

Apple Announces 40 Billion App Store Downloads, Almost 20 Billion In 2012 Alone

With a press release published today, Apple announced the App Store has reached 40 billion unique App Store downloads (excluding re-downloads and updates), with almost 20 billion of them happened in 2012. Apple says the App Store has now 500 million accounts, with 2 billion downloads happened during December 2012. The App Store has also reached the number of 775,000 apps available for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, with seven billion dollars paid to developers so far.

It has been an incredible year for the iOS developer community,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services. “Developers have made over seven billion dollars on the App Store, and we continue to invest in providing them with the best ecosystem so they can create the most innovative apps in the world.

The press release includes additional facts, numbers, and quotes from third-party iOS developers who were successful in 2012. For instance, Temple Run, a game developed by “husband and wife team” at Imangi Studios, saw over 75 million downloads; development studios Backflip and Supercell “brought in over $100 million combined” for freemium games DragonVale and Cash of Clans; and Autodesk is now offering 20 apps to iOS users, with over 50 million downloads thanks to the App Store. You can read all the third-party experiences and numbers in Apple’s press release here.

The revolutionary App Store offers more than 775,000 apps to iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users in 155 countries around the world, with more than 300,000 native iPad apps available. App Store customers can choose from an incredible range of apps in 23 categories, including newspapers and magazines offered in Newsstand, games, business, news, sports, health & fitness and travel.

In the press release, Apple also stressed the importance of the tools they make available to developers to release and promote their apps on the App Store. Apple specifically mentioned “great ways to monetize apps” including in-app purchase, subscriptions, and advertising.

For context, Apple announced 10 billion App Store downloads in January 2011; 15 billion downloads in July 2011; and 25 billion downloads in March 2012. It took the App Store 1642 days to go from 0 downloads on July 10, 2008 to 40 billion today, with an average of 24 million downloads per day; however, it took 310 days to go from 25 billion downloads to 40 billion, with an average of 80 million downloads per day in the past 310 days.

To give a graphical visualization of the App Store’s growth, here’s a chart by Horace Dediu showing iTunes total downloads by medium (Horace also notes average revenue per app download is 25c).

And above, our charts showing the growth of the total number of apps, and the apps availability per platform (iPhone, iPad) months after the App Store’s launch, based on Apple’s official data (click images for full size).

Mac App Store: Year Two

Today, the Mac App Store turns 2.

Last year, I concluded my retrospective of one year of Mac App Store wondering whether 2012 would see more developers struggling to get their Mac apps approved for sale.

The Mac App Store is not without its flaws, and questions loom ahead as to whether Apple will lock down the system eventually — allowing customers to only install apps from the Mac App Store (as also recently suggested by Adam Engst on Macworld) — and cause a general confusion among developers and consumers as sandboxing is enforced and apps will need to comply to a stricter set of rules to be accepted on the Mac App Store.

A full year after that post, I believe it’s safe to say one word epitomizes Apple’s 2012 with the Mac App Store: uncertainity. Read more

Retina Favicons with Icon Slate→

Retina Favicons with Icon Slate

This post by John Gruber prompted me to fix a longstanding annoyance of MacStories that, for some reason, we had forgotten about: making the favicon Retina-ready.

Old (non-retina) favicons are 16 × 16 px; a retina favicon is thus 32 × 32 px. The lazy way to support retina is to replace your old 16 px favicon.ico file with a 32 px file, and allow non-retina browsers to scale the image. The proper solution, however, is create a single favicon.ico file containing two icon resources: one 16 × 16, the other 32 × 32. ICO files support other resolutions as well, but I see no practical utility in doing so.

Gruber goes on to detail how he used Icon Slate to produce a single .ico file containing both resolutions of the icon file. I have been using Icon Slate for quite some time now, and I highly recommend the app. It is, essentially, a more powerful, modern Icon Composer that makes it easy to package icons containing files at multiple resolutions (I’ve been using iconutil to package .icns file, and I’ve also tried this automated method by Jono Hunt). If you’re a designer (or developer dealing with icon files), I don’t know why you wouldn’t want to try Icon Slate.

Thanks to Gruber’s reminder (and the good work of @aylys), our site’s favicon – the little red bookmark icon in the address bar – is now updated for Retina displays. If you, like me, use Google Chrome on iOS, you can see the updated favicon on a Retina device by switching to tab view in the browser.

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SketchParty TV→

SketchParty TV

I don’t usually write about games here at MacStories, but SketchParty TV is a real gem that I’ve enjoyed playing with my friends a few days ago.

To properly celebrate the end of 2012 and the arrival of a new year, we organized a dinner with a few good friends at my place on December 31st. As we waited for midnight with the company of good Italian food and wine, we took a couple of photos, shot some videos for future memory, and eventually got past midnight, unable to go out because of the aforementioned overwhelming quantity of food that forced us to sit down and rethink our New Year’s Eve strategy. Out of curiosity, I took my iPad mini and decided to try SketchParty TV, a Pictionary-like drawing game that uses AirPlay Mirroring to split the gameplay between the device (where words you have to draw appear) and the big screen (where drawings are shown alongside scores and team information).

We ended up playing SketchParty TV until 6 AM. At one point, I was laughing so hard at my friend’s attempt to guess a platypus (I’m terrible at drawing) that I dropped wine all over my elegant New Year’s Eve outfit (I’m also terrible at laughing without causing things to fall off desks and/or tables).

Because I don’t have an Apple TV connected to my living room’s old CRT television, I used Reflector for AirPlay Mirroring on my MacBook Air. With Reflector and my local WiFi network, SketchParty streaming quality was great, but we had to restart Reflector a couple of times. The app is extremely simple and, for that reason, insanely fun: you just need to set up two teams and start drawing. The app has a built-in timer for turns, and it correctly hides the word your teammates have to guess on the mirroring screen (so only you can see it). There are colors to choose from, three brush sizes, and Undo buttons; there’s also a Clear Page button to erase an entire page when your attempt to draw a woman’s stylized figure are backfiring. The app automatically keeps track of scores and saves an archive of games that you can re-watch at any time from the main screen.

SketchParty is a good example of how modern devices and software can make our lives even slightly better. It’s a simple and fun game, but I didn’t have to waste any paper to play it with my friends; furthermore, we now have an archive of our platypus drawings to go through for a serious amount of quality mocking. SketchParty TV is Universal and available at $4.99 on the App Store.

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NextDraft by Dave Pell→

NextDraft by Dave Pell

Speaking of how I discover great non-fiction on the web, I have been a subscriber of Dave Pell’s NextDraft for months now, and it’s become a daily appointment that I’m always looking forward to.

At first, I didn’t “get” NextDraft at all and I couldn’t understand why people were making such a big deal about it. After all, NextDraft is a daily newsletter, and the last thing I wanted was another email requiring my attention in my inbox.

A few weeks in, I was hooked. Dave Pell, who also writes Tweetage Wasteland, sits down every day and collects “the day’s most fascinating news” in the form of (usually) 1o “blurbs” containing links. That’s it. There are no photos or videos or slideshows infesting what is, essentially, a human-curated list of links I wouldn’t have time to collect personally. NextDraft arrives in my inbox on a daily basis with a collection of insightful articles, news items, and subtle humor that offers an enjoyable combination of Pell’s distinct humor and Internet research skills. In fact, aside from the occasional jokes and witty remarks, I always get the feeling that Pell cares about providing a collection of links – not necessarily “breaking news” – that offer context and perspective to the reader. Case in point: yesterday, Dave collected four links on the fiscal cliff to explain what it is, what it means, what are its consequences, and why politics has become the new reality TV.

Or, to better get Dave’s style, here’s the typical Apple rumor you’d find in the “Bottom of the News” section:

It’s another year so here’s another useless Apple rumor: The company is reportedly testing the iPhone 6 and iOS 7. Seriously, what the hell else would they be doing, re-examining the Mac SE?

NextDraft is also available as a Universal iOS app with push notifications and an archive of the most recent newsletters. I use the app on my iPad, and I like how it breaks the blurbs in pages you can swipe through to reach The Bottom of the News. The app lets you use your Instapaper, Pocket, and Readability accounts to “read later”, and it uses native Twitter and Facebook integration on iOS to let you share blurbs; if you want to “read before you share”, there’s an in-app browser (with a text mode) to preview articles without leaving NextDraft.

I didn’t believe I could look forward to receiving a newsletter every day, but it happened with NextDraft. Dave Pell does an exceptional job in bringing quality news to me with a style that’s informative and friendly. More importantly, NextDraft is uniquely human, with no robots involved in link aggregation. Subscribe here.

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Longform for iPad→

Longform for iPad

I’ve recently tweeted about how I re-discovered Longform and their iPad app, and I thought the app deserved a mention here as well. Like the name implies, Longform is a service that curates “new and classic non-fiction from around the web” in the form of direct links to articles you can read in your browser. While there are many services like it, I prefer the clean look of Longform’s website and the human aspect of their curation: for instance, the summaries Longform provides feel like they’re written by humans rather than automated scrapers. The format of the website, Twitter account, and “Best Of” lists feel like they’re managed by people who actually read the links they curate. Even their About page is simple and elegant.

The iPad app (soon to be joined by an iPhone version) has become my go-to app for discovering articles I want to read. Even better: while I discover a lot of articles about tech via Twitter and RSS, Longform allows me to read great pieces of non-fiction out of my “geek comfort zone”, such as this story about Apollo Robbins or this terrific story by Eric Puchner. The iPad app comes with the standard stream of Longform-curated links, but it also lets you add “subscriptions” to specific sites, so you can, for example, view only articles from The New Yorker or GQ.

Longform doesn’t care about read-later drama and nerd gossip: it’s service-agnostic in the way it supports Instapaper, Pocket, and Readability – so you’ll be able to easily send articles to your app of choice. A subtle touch that I really appreciate is that, while the app comes with its own text-only “Read mode”, it defaults to a standard Web view when opening links, so I’m sure the website owner gets a page view from me before I send the article to Instapaper. If you do want to read within Longform, there are settings to adjust fonts and sharing options, but, overall, I prefer the presentation and feature set of Instapaper for these tasks.

More than an anonymous web service, Longform is a group of human editors whom I trust to bring me content I wouldn’t discover otherwise. The iPad app is only $0.99 on the App Store.

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