Category: Apps

An unnamed writer, publishing as Instapaper on Tumblr: ¹

On January 28, 2008, Marco Arment announced a new side project called Instapaper. Ten years and billions of articles later, we’re thrilled to be helping our readers learn, research and experience the Internet removed from the typical distractions.

First, we want to thank all of our users. Whether you’ve been around since the Marco days, joined us when betaworks took over the development or signed up after our acquisition by Pinterest, thank you! We wouldn’t be anywhere without you, and we look forward to incorporating your requests into our 2018 updates.

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Chris Welch:

The new “Show Activity Status” option is enabled by default inside of Instagram’s settings. You can choose to toggle it off if you don’t think anyone really needs to be that up-to-date on what you’re doing. But if you disable activity status for yourself, you won’t be able to see that info for anyone else.

Gross. Thankfully, it can be turned off.

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Alex Barinka at Bloomberg is reporting that Dropbox has filed confidentially for IPO. Unlike other tech companies that have filed in the recent past — ahem, Snap — Dropbox has sales over $1 billion a year. It will be interesting to watch this one.

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Cabel Sasser at Panic, announcing that their FTP client for iOS is coming to an end:

Transmit iOS made about $35k in revenue in the last year, representing a minuscule fraction of our overall 2017 app revenue. That’s not enough to cover even a half-time developer working on the app. And the app needs full-time work — we’d love to be adding all of the new protocols we added in Transmit 5, as well as some dream features, but the low revenue would render that effort a guaranteed money-loser. Also, paid upgrades are still a matter of great debate and discomfort in the iOS universe, so the normally logical idea of a paid “Transmit 2 for iOS” would be unlikely to help. Finally, the new Files app in iOS 10 overlaps a lot of file-management functionality Transmit provides, and feels like a more natural place for that functionality. It all leads to one hecka murky situation.

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James Thomson:

25 years sounds like a really long time. A quarter of a century sounds even longer. Yet, that is how long it has been since PCalc 1.0 was released.

I sent an email to the Info-Mac archive moderators that evening, and it turned up on FTP mirror sites around the world a few days later.

It normally travelled on floppy disks. The web did not yet exist.

PCalc was my first ever application. I started writing in the summer of 1992 and it took me around six months to get it into a state where I was happy to show it to the world. Some of that code still runs today, deep at the heart of the machine.

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On this week’s episode of Under the Radar, Marco Arment and _David Smith discussed the rumor of Apple moving to a universal app platform across macOS and iOS.

Their conversation has changed my thinking on the topic. It’s easy for people like me to view the Mac in an idealistic way, not a pragmatic one. I want my Mac apps to be fully native and rich, integrating with system features smoothly. The reality is, sadly, that quite a few of the apps in my Dock aren’t native, but are either wrappers around websites or Electron monstrosities.

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MiniCast is a new iOS and watchOS app that can send a podcast file from Apple Podcasts, Overcast or Pocket Casts to your Apple Watch. Here’s a bit from its launch blog post:

After many many many hours of prototyping, building proof-of-concepts and experimenting with watchOS’ (and iOS’) limitations, we found a way to achieve a “companion-ness” that felt right. On iOS, all features of MiniCast are contained in a single Action Extension. If we could have shipped an Action Extension without a container app, we probably would have. But that’s not possible on the App Store. So there is a container app which guides you through the first steps, how to enable the extension and how to transfer the first test episode. The primary interaction happens directly in the Action Extension in your favorite podcast app.

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John Voorhees, in his review of the new update:

Workouts++ has come up with a solution that works surprisingly well given the audio API limitations of watchOS. It has a dedicated tab in the iOS app where you can subscribe to your favorite podcasts, which show up in the ‘All’ section of the tab. If you tap on an episode, it downloads and is transferred to your Apple Watch, a process which can take a while. The advantage of downloaded episodes is that there’s a little button on the Watch’s playback screen to skip ahead and back 30 seconds or one minute at a time depending on the length of the episode.

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Apple:

You can now make your new apps available for pre-order on the App Store on all Apple Platforms. Customers can see your product page and order your app before it’s released for download. Once your app is released, customers will be notified and it will automatically download to their device. Let your customers know your app is coming by using the pre-order badges in your marketing materials.

This will be great for developers who want to build hype for their new apps. I like it.

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Ingrid Lunden at TechCrunch:

As Spotify continues to inch towards a public listing, Apple is making a move of its own to step up its game in music services. Sources tell us that the company is close to acquiring Shazam, the popular app that lets people identify any song, TV show, film or advert in seconds, by listening to an audio clip or (in the case of, say, an ad) a visual fragment, and then takes you to content relevant to that search.

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I use Daniel Jalkut’s MarsEdit everyday to publish articles, update pages and fix typos here on 512 Pixels. It’s the best WordPress client I’ve ever used, including the WordPress web dashboard.

Version 4 comes with an updated design that looks much more at home in our post-Yosemite world. WordPress users can now set the featured image for posts, set the Post Format and change the author of published posts. The app can now download the entire history of published posts and pages locally and preview Markdown, MultiMarkdown and “Convert Line Breaks” content before publishing.

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If you need a full-featured image editor and Photoshop isn’t your thing, Pixelmator Pro looks like a fantastic alternative.

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