On November 8th it will have been eight years since my first app went live in the App Store. Back when I started I would have been gobsmacked to hear that eight years later I’d still be making my living solely from apps.
The App Store ecosystem today is wildly different from what it was back then. I launched my first app into a store of around 90k apps, today we have well over 2 million. Back then we didn’t have advertising networks, in-app purchases or subscriptions. You were free or paid, and if you wanted to make a living you pretty much had to be paid.
Category: Apps
Pastebot for Mac Public Beta⇢
Pastebot is a versatile clipboard manager for your Mac that stores what you recently copied so you can quickly retrieve them later. Create custom pasteboards for frequently used clippings. Build powerful filters that you can apply as you paste.
While I’m using Alfred’s built-in clipboard manager, this looks very promising. I’ll be giving it a go.
Even with GPS on the Watch, I Won’t Be Leaving My iPhone Behind
Rumor has it that the next Apple Watch will include a GPS chipset. Assumedly, this would allow apps like Map My Run, Strava and others to track walks, runs and bike rides without relying on the iPhone for location data. With Apple Watch 2, people could just go for a run and have complete stats about it afterwards, all with their iPhone safe and sound back home on the kitchen table.
I do a fair amount of bike riding, on and off of paved streets. I use my Apple Watch to keep tabs on things like speed or distance mid-ride without needing to dig my iPhone out of the back pocket of my jersey.
Remembering MECC⇢
This month in my column on iMore, I revisited MECC, the company behind some great software titles like Oregon Trail and Number Munchers:
My earliest memories of technology came from my first year of grade school: It was 1992, and our teacher had installed some variant of an Apple II in the classroom. The students were only able to use it a few times, but each time I got to put a disk in the machine, I was able to escape to another world.
Instapaper Sold to Pinterest⇢
Today, we’re excited to announce that Instapaper is joining Pinterest. In the three years since betaworks acquired Instapaper from Marco Arment, we’ve completely rewritten our backend, overhauled our mobile and web clients, improved parsing and search, and introduced tons of great features like highlights, text-to-speech, and speed reading to the product.
All of these features and developments revolved around the core mission of Instapaper, which is allowing our users to discover, save, and experience interesting web content. In that respect, there is a lot of overlap between Pinterest and Instapaper. Joining Pinterest provides us with the additional resources and experience necessary to achieve that shared mission on a much larger scale.
Note App Vesper Shuttered⇢
Brent Simmons, announcing the end of Vesper:
Sync will be turned off Aug. 30 at 8pm Pacific. We’ll destroy all the data, and neither we nor anyone else will be able to recover it.
The app will be removed from the App Store on Sep. 15. Until then, starting now, it’s free — since you can’t create new sync accounts, and it wouldn’t be fair to charge new users if they can’t sync.
Feed Hawk⇢
I use Unread coupled to Feedbin to read RSS items on my iPhone and iPad.
As great as Unread is, it can’t be used to add a subscription to my Feedbin account. If I come across a website that I want to add to my RSS feeds, I have to log in to Feedbin to do so.
Feed Hawk is a new app that makes this easy. It sits in the share sheet and can be used to find and subscribe to a site’s RSS feed from right within Safari. It works with a bunch of services: BazQux Reader, Feed Wrangler, Feedbin, FeedHQ, Inoreader, Minimal Reader, NewsBlur, or The Old Reader.
Mojician⇢
One of the best parts of Slack is the ability to load custom emojis for people on your team to use. In the Relay FM slack, we have a whole bunch:
Most of these have come for art people happened to have around. Will Duffy has launched a new service named Mojician to make it easy to find new custom emoji, upload your favorites and more:
Mojician is an emoji search engine that lets you search (obvi), upload, and curate your own custom emoji collections. Now you’ll always have the best emoji reactions for every situation. Your only problem will be deciding the best one to use.
Castro 2⇢
My buddies at Supertop have released Castro 2, a new podcast client for the iPhone that brings something new to the landscape: the ability to triage shows and episodes.
Castro is the first app that is designed to help you track a broad range of shows and pick out the episodes that appeal to you. Subscribing to a podcast doesn’t have to be a commitment to listen to every episode. You don’t have to choose a narrow few shows and miss out on the rest.
Google Docs, Sheets Updated for iPad Multitasking⇢
Quip purchased by Salesforce⇢
We’re committed to growing and expanding Quip’s productivity platform as part of Salesforce. If you’re a Quip customer, please know that we’ll continue to provide you with the exceptional service and extraordinary products you’ve come to expect from us, and once the transaction closes, we’ll do so as part of the world’s #1 CRM company. If you’re not yet a customer, sign your team up today!
Adding weather info to Calendar.app⇢
BusyCal and other calendar apps add weather right into your calendar view, but Apple’s built-in Calendar.app on iOS and macOS doesn’t offer that feature.
Turns out, Weather Underground serves .ics files that can be imported to Calendar, as Chris Short explains:
Recently, I discovered Weather Underground provides ICS files for use in any calendar application you can think of (Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook, and Apple’s Calendar.app). These ICS URLs do not appear to be documented by Weather Underground specifically but here are some examples to get you started.