Launch Center Pro
Launch Center Pro became available earlier today. I have been using the app for the past weeks, and I like it a lot.
Here’s my review. Lex Friedman and Ellis Hamburger had positive thoughts about the app as well.
Launch Center Pro became available earlier today. I have been using the app for the past weeks, and I like it a lot.
Here’s my review. Lex Friedman and Ellis Hamburger had positive thoughts about the app as well.
Is there any doubt that Tweetbot will become the Twitter client for Mac? Currently, the app is 2 Top Paid for iPhone, 3 for iPad.
Twitter missed the opportunity to keep its official client (which used to be great) up to date with the latest OS X features. It last received an update in June 2011.
And the sad part is, so many Mac users are still relying on Twitter for Mac only because they are used to it (and because of streaming), but that will change when Tweetbot comes out.
Soon.
Good piece by Lex Friedman at Macworld. He proposes an implementation of the Mac’s Services menu through iOS 6’s updated Action Sheet look.
Let’s use perennial Macworld favorite Instapaper for a quick example. Right now, if you want to save an article you come across in Mobile Safari on your iPhone for later reading in Instapaper, it’s kind of a hassle. First, you need to install the Instapaper bookmarklet on iOS, which is an annoying process—you can’t drag a bookmarklet to install it on iOS the way you can on your Mac.
Once it’s installed, you need to tap to access your bookmarks and then tap again on the Instapaper bookmarklet. If Instapaper could register as a service for that sharing sheet, however, it may make the process simpler. You wouldn’t need to deal with the hassle of installing a bookmarklet, and you could use an easier-to-access iOS function for saving articles to...
Opening on June 22nd, Woody Allen’s upcoming film is looking great. Based in Rome, it features both American and Italian actors (such as Roberto Benigni) “and the romances and adventures and predicaments they get into”. I can’t wait.
Here’s a NYT interview with Allen published today.
From the Readability blog:
Two things needed to happen for the publisher payment plan to be a lasting success. One, a large group of readers needed to support writing through Readability. Two, a large group of publishers needed to accept that support.
The first part went well. Thousands of you agreed to spend $5 a month (and sometimes more). But the second part proved difficult. Reading behavior on the Web is incredibly fragmented. Nobody reads from just 15 or 20 sites a month. People read from hundreds of sites a month, creating a vast long tail of publishers.
And the great majority of those publishers never registered. Out of the millions—yes, millions—of domains that flowed through Readability, just over 2,000 registered to claim their money. As a result, most of the money we collected—over 90%—has gone unclaimed. As of today there’s nearly $150,000 in earmarked money sitting in a...
Matt Alexander, writing for The Loop:
Perhaps link bait is a short-term solution for advertising revenue and attention, but I daresay that treating readers with deserved respect is a much better avenue to a sustainable audience.
Joshua Topolsky:
Now you probably haven’t seen much of the real Ari, but you’re likely familiar with the character of Ari Gold (played by Jeremy Piven) from HBO’s bro-fest, Entourage. That Ari is a raging, expletive-spewing egomaniac whom I always thought was a broad exaggeration of the real thing. On Wednesday night, I learned that was not the case.
Even the Entourage version seems like a nicer guy than D10’s Ari.
The Apple Lounge Google Translation goes in-depth on a recurring, yet somewhat successful scam run by elusive iOS “developer” Shahla Ghrhchori with apps to stream TV content illegally in the UK, Italy, and Russia.
As The Apple Lounge notes, the problem isn’t just the developer himself – it’s that Apple is letting these scam apps rise the charts again and again, misleading customers, ruining the App Store’s reputation, and ultimately hurting the business of legitimate developers who truly care about building great products.
Technology Review:
Mobile health devices and software could change medicine profoundly, allowing people to continuously monitor vital signs and better track and modify behavior. That’s important because chronic diseases like obesity and diabetes are on the rise. “We’re seeing an infusion of mobile technologies into people’s lives,” says Susannah Fox, who studies technology and health care for the Pew Internet & American Life Project. “And we’re seeing a very rainy forecast in terms of people’s health.”
From my interview with Matt Alexander in April:
In the future, for example, people won’t “find out” they have cancer. In the same way you can monitor a server’s downtime and crashes, people will be able to monitor their bodies’ condition through nanotechnologies connected with mobile apps and a personal cloud. Local institutions will have instant access to our “status” and they will be...
Nice update to the best web app for editing text files in Dropbox. Here’s a video showing the new features in version 3.5. [via MacDrifter]