In my tireless efforts to inform and entertain you, I find myself wrangling a lot of pictures for posts here on CoM. And now that many people are coming at us from Retina-screened devices, we try to use big pictures whenever we can. But how big is a picture?
Clicking the image and tapping the spacebar will give you a preview, but it won’t give you the image’s pixel dimensions. Not unless you install QuickLook plugin qlImageSize.
Got goals? Me too: Get up before 10 a.m. at least once a week; increase the number of cheeses I eat; and learn how to use semicolons. If you too have such pressing, life-altering plans in mind, you might like the keep track of them with Full, an iPhone app which not only tracks pretty much anything, but looks amazing while it does it.
Using Facebook is usually one of the quickest ways to log in to apps and other services without creating an account, but there’s nothing more annoying on Facebook than giving an app access to your account only to have them post spam on your wall without permission.
Facebook announced today that it has finally come up with a solution by updating Facebook Login for mobile so that apps have to ask you separately for permission to post on your behalf.
The update should result in 31% faster load up times, too. And if you decide later that you really want to share all your progress from Kitchen Scramble, or any other apps, you can do that too.
Source: Facebook
Via: The Verge
MyFlavors for the iPad is a clever recipe app which auto-rips recipes from the web and separates out the various components, tidily parsing out and filing directions, ingredients, photos, the description and the cook time. The app is free, but requires a $5 in-app purchase to actually do more than try it out.
Great news for automatic fanatics: Twitter is back on If This Then That (IFTTT). The Twitter channel was pulled from the service some months back thanks to authorization issues, but now it’s back, and ready to trigger and be triggered.
Phlo is a handy little Universal iOS app which lets you search a bunch of different search engines simultaneously. Just tap in your search term and then hop between various sites using the popover sidebar list.
If you use Luxogram, or Webstagram, or any other Instagram compatible app, prepare yourself for the possibility of some change. Instagram has started approaching app developers and services, telling them that if they have “Insta-” or “-gram” in their names that they can expect to have their access to the Instagram stream cut off.
Brett Terpstra’s SearchLink is a System Service for OS X which automatically generates links from your text, without you having to bother to look anything up on Google first. It’s like having an unpaid intern inside your Mac.
And Editorial is that fancy new iPad text editor that incorporates workflows that you can roll yourself.
Now the two have been combined into one amazing iPad ball of goodness.
Paperback is a minimal read-later service that uses your Pinboard account as a source for articles. Any time you check the “Read Later” box when saving bookmarks to your Pinboard account, these items are added to a rudimentary queue. Paperback uses this list to provide you with a nice, clean, Instapaper-like web view of these links.
You’re going to college, which means plenty of sleepless nights, lots of good memories, and maybe a little studying on the side. The truth is that college can be stressful, so it never hurts to be too prepared.
Luckily, there are tons of excellent apps out there on both the Mac and iOS to help you survive. Here are 10 of the best:
Alzheimer’s is a debilitating cognitive disease that currently affects an estimated 5.2 million people in the U.S. alone, a number that’s expected to triple in the next 40 years, according to a recent study. There is no known cure.
Clevermind, then, is a new iOS app that has been designed to help seniors, family members, and caregivers to better deal with the effects associated with Alzheimer’s. The app is available now in the App Store, and it’s free for a limited time.
The most you can charge for an app on the iOS App Store is $999.99. In the early days of the App Store, a number of novelty apps came out, trying to make a quick buck by convincing gullible plutocrats to part with their money in the form of a $1,000 app download. The most notable example is I Am Rich, an iPhone app that literally did nothing except proclaim your affluence.
These days, though, the $999.99 club is made up of legitimate apps. Well, mostly.
This post is as much for our Dear Leader Leander Kahney as much as it is for you, our wonderful and ever-curious reader. It solves a problem Leander struggled with for a full thirty seconds before tossing it to us minions in the Cult of Mac HipChat room.
The problem: How to get all the photos snapped by Leander’s twelve or so children into the same Photo Stream on the main family iMac.
For the solution, read on. Hint: it doesn’t need Photo Stream, and it uses a great feature of PhotoSync v2.0.
Bulk editing photos? There are a few ways to do it. You could rent Photoshop every month and create some automated Actions (actually a totally sweet and powerful way to do things); you could use the command-line tool ImageMagick and wrap it in various OS X System Services; or you could just spend $10 and buy PhotoBulk.
Mind Maps are a great way to brainstorm and visualize ideas. And plain text is a great way to hammer out lists. And Markdown is a perfect tool for quickly adding hierarchy to those lists as you write them. If only there were a way to combine these three things…
And guess what? The fairy godfather of Internet tinkering, Brett Terpstra, has already done it for you. It’s an OS X System Service that takes the messiest of Markdown lists and turns them into a format suitable for most mind-mapping apps.
If ever proof were needed that pixel art’s deceptive simplicity requires a huge amount of work and skill, it’s here in the form of Belowrez, an iPhone camera app that measures its pixels not in the millions but in the tens.
Editorial might just make you ditch your computer altogether as a writing machine. It’s a new iPad text editor from Ole Zorn, the man behind the incredible Pythonista app (Editorial actually features a built-in Python editor). Editorial could just be used as a really polished, really well-designed text editor, but it also has customizable, Automator-style workflows that let you do pretty much anything with the text you have in the app.
PhotoSync is one of the most used apps on my iDevices. It lets you share photos between iOS devices, as well as from iOS-to-Mac (and PC), and it’ll do so over your Wi-Fi network, or automatically over Bluetooth (with no configuration).
v2 has jsut been released as a free update to existing users. I’ve been using the beta for a month or so, and it is awesome.
When Ryan Orbuch and Michael Hansen set out to make a task manager for the iPhone, they were both 16 years old. Now they’ve won a 2013 Apple Design Award for Finish, their app that specializes in combating procrastination.
Today, version 2.0 of Finish landed in the App Store, and among a design refresh, the update packs a ton of new features.
Do you love animated GIFs? Hey, who doesn’t? We certainly do, and as it turns out, Flipboard does too. The personally curated magazine for iOS has just introduced a new update that allows you to check out animated GIFs, right within the app.
Dots is a ridiculously fun, simple game that has taken iPhone and iPad owners by storm (and reduced my fingertips down to bleeding little nubs). In fact, the game has been downloaded more than 5 million times and played almost a billion times in less than four months.
Wouldn’t you like to get that on Android and Kindle Fire? Sure you would. Good news! It’s coming to Google Play today. And a new game mode is coming to all devices, including iPhones.
You’ve been waiting for months and months, and it’s finally time. Plants vs. Zombies 2 is finally available in the U.S. App Store after a soft launch last month in Australia and New Zealand.
The download is free, but there are in-app purchases for certain upgrades and power-ups. But it’s not the annoying kind of freemium like Real Racing; you can play through the whole game just fine without having to buy anything. We’ll have a full review up soon.
So what are you waiting for? The sequel to one of the best iOS games in history just came out. Get downloading!
Source: App Store
Google Play has made up a lot of ground on the App Store over the past couple months in terms of downloads and revenue, but the latest mobile marketplace report shows that Apple is still king of the castle when it comes to revenue.
Remember the hands-free Leap Motion Controller for Mac that everyone went on and on about how cool it was going to be? The one that got delayed until July?
Well, it’s been three weeks since it actually started shipping, and the team behind the 3-D motion controller is reporting some significant numbers, including 25,000 downloads of its software developer kit (which allows developers to include code for the device in their own apps), and 1 million downloads of apps that work with the hardware.
That’s pretty fantastic, right?
If Abbyy’s upcoming new Textgrabber+Translator app came in a tin, then the app would do exactly what it said on that tin. And the tin—to stretch the metaphor—would be a beautiful, iOS 7-styled container.
The updated app, which now comes in an iPad-shaped tin to match the iPhone-shaped one, uses the iPad/iPhone’s camera to scan text, turn it into actual editable text and—if you like—translate it into any of 40 languages.