Category: Apps

I often create records in Contacts.app on my Mac from those blocks of text every adult has at the bottom of their emails. It involves a lot of copying and pasting back and forth, as I’ve found Data Detectors in Mail don’t often get things the way I want them.

Now there’s a Mac app that makes this common task a lot faster: Interact Scratchpad. Made by developer and part-time wizardry camp Agile Tortoise, its a menubar app that includes a text field. Copy that block of contact info into it, and it sorts out what’s what then allows you to add a new contact to your database quickly. Greg’s video shows it off nicely.

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Pierre Lorenzi has built something wonderful:

HyperCardPreview is an Mac OS X application that can display HyperCard stacks, with an look very faithful to the original. It makes the stack files alive again in the Finder with their real icons, so they don’t appear as “binaries”, and provides a QuickLook plug-in.

It can only visualize the stacks: it can’t modify them, and it can’t execute them. But it lets the user inspect the stacks, backgrounds, cards, buttons and fields, see theirs scripts and get their text contents.

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Casey Newton at The Verge:

Mozilla has acquired Pocket, a kind of DVR for the internet, for an undisclosed sum. The 9-year-old company, which makes tools for saving articles and videos to view them later, is Mozilla’s first acquisition. It represents a homecoming of sorts for Pocket, which began life as a Firefox extension before eventually expanding its team and building a suite of apps for every major platform. Pocket has been Firefox’s default read-it-later service since 2015.

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Currently, there’s a Kickstarter page to fund a Girl Scouts San Diego project:

You may be wondering, “Why marshmallows?” and our answer would have to be, “Because they make it easy to be creative and learn how to program!” We provide the initial idea for the core group of characters and the game platforms - and then just let our scouts just take these and run with them. The idea of a bunch of marshmallows hanging out with chocolate, graham crackers and other friends makes it fun and easy for participants of any age to engage and come up with stories and scenarios for the characters, and in the process, learn the math and science of programming

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It may have been here for a bit, but I just noticed that the beta versions of Chrome had added support for Apple’s new Touch Bar:

Personally, I like Google’s approach here. Safari’s implementation is more complex, but I’m not sure it is better.

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I came across this 1Password blog post in the Mac Power Users Facebook group:

As a result of an expired provisioning profile and format change in the developer certificate, customers who downloaded 1Password for Mac directly from our site will need to manually update to the latest version. Those using 1Password from the Mac App Store are not affected.

AgileBits’ blog post goes into the details of what happened. Like with the recent Instapaper outage, the honesty makes me feel better about the issue.

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Michael Cohen at TidBits, after outlining a myriad of problems with Apple’s iBooks apps:

I cannot see into the heart of Apple to judge the depth of its love for iBooks, but, from external appearances, whatever affection it has seems to become ever more shallow with each passing release. And, for an ebook lover like me, that is heartbreaking.

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TWiM is a new (free) iPhone app that turns Twitter direct messages into an instant messaging service.

It comes with an iMessage-like interface, support for rich links, interactive notifications, 3D Touch and even SiriKit. Simply say “Send a message to Craig with TwIM,” and Siri will ask what you want to tell Craig about your busted-ass Mac Pro.

I don’t know about other people, but I rarely use Twitter DMs. iMessage and Slack are how I communicate with most people, but TWiM is so well done, I’m keeping it around and have turned off DM notifications in Tweetbot.

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Last week, Instapaper experienced a big outage that left users without access to the service for more than a day. They were able to get the service back up and running within 31 hours, with a full recovery taking place just this morning.

I — like many other Instapaper users — were worried over this. The service has changed hands a few times, and I wondered if it was time to look for another read-it-later service.

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The Iconfactory has launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund development of a new version of its Mac Twitter client:

Twitterrific for Mac was first released 10 years ago way back in 2007 and had regular updates until 2013. Development of Twitterrific has continued exclusively on iOS since then, but many of us still use Twitterrific on the desktop - despite it missing many recent Twitter features and Twitterrific for iOS refinements. It is time we fixed this, but we need your help!

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Greg Scown:

When we first looked at launching an app for Windows we thought it was just that, the launch of an app for Windows to go with our apps for Mac, iPad and iPhone. But, the more we spoke with our customers and saw how they were using TextExpander, the more we thought about it, the more we came to realize it’s bigger than that.

Today, we launch TextExpander for Windows 1.0, and today, we open up TextExpander to the computing world.

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I’m not a big game player, but I’ve been enjoying Stagehand a lot over the last few days.

Made by the unstoppable duo of Matt Comi and Neven Mrgan, who also created The Incident and Space Age, Stagehand takes the standard scrolling platformer game mechanic and turns it on its head, as Federico Viticci writes:

You don’t maneuver a character with meticulously timed jumps across retro-styled stages filled with floating platforms and spikes; rather, you sloppily modify the stage itself with touch, dragging platforms to accommodate the hero’s run and making sure he doesn’t run headfirst into cliffs, fall into pits, or get eaten by the inexorable advance of the left side of the stage.

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