And this is how you explain your mistakes and apologize on the Internet.

Mike Isaac, reporting on Twitter’s new stance on third-party apps and “consistency” in the ecosystem:

The problem is, there are far more clients than the official ones: Tweetbot, Echofon, Osfoora, all are popular alternatives among many others. And right now, the tweets that use Twitter’s shiny new Card technology don’t show up in their rich new form inside of these third-party clients.

For Twitter, this is awful: The company needs its new, media-rich tweets to appear the same to everyone, not just to those using the official Twitter apps.
This could mean death for those third-party clients.

According to multiple sources, when Twitter decides to finally drop the hammer and introduce the new set of API guidelines, the days of these apps are likely numbered.

What I don’t understand from the article is: will Twitter let developers use Cards? Because I’m fairly certain several...

Reporting on rumors on speculation is hard, but someone’s gotta do it. And when it comes to Apple rumors and speculation, there’s so much new material to choose from every day that following new rumors and quick retractions has become a job by itself.

One does not simply “follow” Apple rumors.

I want to give back to the community of Apple reporters, industry analysts, Digitimes editors and content scrapers by releasing a handy Keyboard Maestro macro that makes it extremely easy to build headlines for the next unreleased Apple product with a few keystrokes. In my opinion, this macro is a work of beauty – several beta testers chimed in saying it looked better than the teardrop iPhone 5. So that’s something.

The macro in itself is fairly simple. Sharing the same underlying foundation of the Keyboard Maestro Markdown Library, it takes into account four variables: Product Name, Release...

Lex Friedman makes the case for a more social Instapaper:

But I tap that heart icon within the app fairly often on content I believe is worth sharing, and I don’t know if I’m doing that for essentially no reason. If I knew who were following me, or how many people were following me, I could have a better sense of whether it’s even worth it for me to recommend articles, or if I’m just whistling in the wind. I feel like Instapaper empowers me and my friends to become mini curators in our own right, and I like that.

Personally, I wouldn’t want to manage (or at least look at) yet another following count on the Internet, but I believe that Instapaper could leverage some of the data at its disposal (people names and relationships, most saved URLs, related items based on people, likes, or other patterns) to make its Friends feature just a little deeper.

I, for one, think it’d be great to...

I’m fickle. I’m not committed to a single application if it’s not the best. It’s easy to configure a new editor to use the same shortcuts and color schemes. I enjoy learning about new ways to do old things better. Better is better.

I’m at a point in my life where I actually enjoy trying out new things, and I love the sense of discovery that I get out of it every day.

Being committed to an app doesn’t mean you can’t be curious.

Today, we have published our first eBook. It’s a PDF, and it’s a collection of our articles (including my review) about Mountain Lion.

It’s available at $6.99 here.

Why did we do this? Firstly, many people over the past year asked us if there was any way to directly support MacStories. We have never asked for donations – fortunately, our ad-based business model has been working fine so far – as I don’t feel completely comfortable in taking money without giving something extra in return; but I do understand that some (awesome) readers would like to show their appreciation for the site even without that extra.

Second, I have always wanted to experiment with eBooks. I believe that longform writing is a great fit for portable, digital books, and with PDF, not only do you get to read the document with the app you prefer, you can also enjoy the perks of a DRM-free, portable file format that...

You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, “Look at that, you son of a bitch.”

– Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut

[via Reddit]

I am no programmer, but I like to fiddle around with HTML and AppleScript every once in a while. In writing my Mountain Lion coverage in the past weeks, I have relied on a number of tools to speed up my writing and be more efficient.

The most tedious part of writing in Markdown, for me, is inserting links. More specifically, I use inline links, and I like to have both a webpage’s URL and title when I am linking to it, so that the converted HTML will have proper location and title attributes. For this reason, I have modified a number of existing Keyboard Maestro macros and bookmarklets to suit the process of inserting inline links to my tastes.

The Keyboard Maestro macro I use is a modification of the “Link New” one found in the Keyboard Maestro Markdown Library. With the addition of two simple AppleScripts, it automatically grabs the URL and title from the frontmost Safari window (and...

Via Shawn Blanc:

I was shown how fragile life was on Saturday. I saw the terror on bystanders’ faces. I saw the victims of a senseless crime. I saw lives change. I was reminded that we don’t know when or where our time on Earth will end. When or where we will breathe our last breath. For one man, it was in the middle of a busy food court on a Saturday evening.

Jessica was killed at the midnight screening in Aurora.

Too often we take what we have for granted. Our house. Our car. Our cellphones. Our friends. Our loved ones. The sushi Jessica wanted to eat.

To me, it’s not about politics, religion, or a combination of both. If there’s one thing battling cancer has taught me, it’s that what I have can be taken away in a second. That I should fight for it. Cherish it. Try to make it better.

Every damn minute I’m given on this little planet of ours.

Life is fragile. But it’s a fragility...

Trevor Johns:

That’s why we’re adding the ability for Google Play developers to respond to reviews from the Google Play Android Developer Console. Developers can gather additional information, provide guidance, and — perhaps most importantly — let users know when their feature requests have been implemented.

We’ll also notify the user who wrote the review via email that the developer has responded. Users can then contact the developer directly if additional followup is needed or update their review.

In my look at four years of App Store, I left out the part about developer replies to user reviews, as it’s a feature request that has come up several times over the years, and I wanted to focus on different issues. But almost every developer I contacted included the possibility of getting in touch with App Store customers in the “wish list” of improvements Apple should consider.

Good...