Instagram Gets Video, Vine Gets Scared

Today, we’re thrilled to introduce Video on Instagram and bring you another way to share your stories. When you go to take a photo on Instagram, you’ll now see a movie camera icon. Tap it to enter video mode, where you can take up to fifteen seconds of video through the Instagram camera.

A move that was bound to come sooner or later, and it seems to be implemented quite well. The implementation also seems to put Instagram in direct competition with Vine. Videos are filmed in the same manner: tap and hold to record, let go to stop, tap and hold again to record again. Instagram, however, has chosen a maximum video length of 15 seconds, more than double Vine's cap of only 6 seconds. Whether or not that is a good decision remains to be seen, but the biggest reason that Vine should be afraid is that Instagram already has a huge user base. When Vine came out it was a new thing. They created a service for video on a UI very similar to what was already in use (by Instagram) for a service for photos. When Vine first came out, many average iPhone users thought it was a terrible idea. A common phrase I heard Vine referred to as was "Instagram for video", but it did not take long for that mindset to change. At this point Vine is finally starting to catch on, I'm seeing more of my friends from Facebook and Twitter join almost every day. So it makes sense that Instagram would choose now to introduce video. Vine has already done the hard work breaking down the barrier to short video services, now Instagram can strike and use their far larger user base to huge advantage. No longer do people have to go to the less popular Vine to post their short videos, they can instead do it in a place where all their friends will see.

Write like Apple designs.

After observing the recent developments from Apple, I've noticed they share some ideas consistent with what I think of as good writing. Here's how to write like Apple designs.

Simple writing is powerful. If an idea is obscure, make it clear. Ask yourself "how can I do more with less?"

Apple's adherence to simplicity makes its software accessible. Simplicity can, however, alienate those who look for complexity and customization, and blunt your ideas if used carelessly.

Take ideas and inspiration from great works. Great writers observe (and more often than you'd think, steal and adapt) the work of their predecessors, building on their backs, making it different and better.

1Password, Missionboard Pro, and a comparison of Google's mobile browser design to Safari.

Offer a new perspective. Here's a tacky GIF (that's JIF, apparently).

Be persuasive. There are no technology groups who do it better: Apple has legions of adoring fans and a hilariously bogus term to describe the effect of its charismatic leaders' keynote speeches.

View what you make in the context of the lives it influences.

Don't apologize for your work or your views.

Thanks for reading! I hope you've enjoyed something a little different than what's normally posted here. If you liked what you read or want to talk to me about what I wrote, you can reach me on App.net.

- Evan Mayer

Departing for a Mission Trip

Today I depart on an in-city "Close to Home" mission trip in South Tucson with my youth group from St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church. The trip goes from today (Sunday) until this Friday. I'm not sure of every activity we will be doing, as our leaders don't reveal them all until during the trip, but among other things we will be serving food and giving hygene bags to the homeless at Southside Presbyterian Church, a small church in a bad district of Tucson which opens itself as a feeding lot once or twice a week to serve at least a few hundred homeless and poor people in the area. Another day we will be taking a group of disabled children (patients of my mom, who is a physical therapist here in Tucson) to a place called Pump It Up, a large gym filled with various inflatable slides and obstacle courses and such. One of my favorite activities from that last Close to Home mission trip two years ago were the "random acts of kindness," in which we split our team into small groups and each group recieved $500 to go out and spend in any way they wished, as long as it's on other people. Last time my group spent our money in a variety of ways, from buying randomly selected people's groceries and gas to going to fast food restaurants and buying food for people who appeared to be in need. Call it luck or call it God, but every person we approached last time turned out to be in great need and had amazing stories, and they were all flabbergasted by the sudden kindness shown to them by complete strangers. The experience was very fullfilling and I cannot wait to see who's lives we touch this time around.

All in all I'm very excited for the trip, however, while I will be bringing my laptop along (because I am the official videographer for the mission!), I'm not at all sure if I will have any time to keep up with the week's news and/or write any posts. If anything big happens, I will try to at least write up something quick and maybe link to another site which had more time to cover the subject. Since I'm unsure of how much I'll be able to post, I've asked my good friend Evan Mayer to guest post for the week in my stead. This is his first time doing anything of the sort, but I can assure you that he is an excellent writer, and a very interesting person. I've given Evan no direction on what to post about except that it should probably be technology related, but I have full confidence that whatever he chooses to discuss will be interesting, and worth a read. I encourage you to give him a follow on App.net from the link above (he doesn't have a Twitter), but if my voucher isn't enough for you to do that, wait and read his posts throughout the week, I'm confident they will change your mind.

If time allows, I will post quick updates myself about the happenings in my trip during the week too, but if time does not allow, I'll be back next week with a recap of the whole thing, then things will return to business as usual. I hope you all have a great week, thanks for reading The Axx!

@axx

Microsoft Office for iPhone

Tony Bradley, writing for Macworld:

It’s here. Finally. Microsoft is now offering Office Mobile for iPhone. This is huge news for Microsoft Office, huge news for the iPhone, and a game changer for productivity on the go.

Why? What exactly makes this such huge news? The iPhone has already managed to garner massive success without ever having Microsoft Office. I'm not downplaying the fact that this is great news for iPhone users, who now, similarly to the end result of the Googe vs Apple Maps situation, have access to the best productivity apps of both tech giants. Of course it's great to have a different option from Apple's Pages, but is it "a game changer for productivity on the go"? Hell no. Has anyone, ever, decided not to purchase an iPhone because it didn't have Microsoft Office apps? No way. If the argument was about iPads, then I could certainly see the merit behind asserting that a new Microsoft Office app could be a game changer. I don't particularly agree, I think that the glory days of Office are over, and for the most part the world has moved on from holding Office as an absolute necessity for any computing device, but there are probably still many people who would disagree, and who hold out from buying iPads because they don't have Office. iPhones, however, have in no way been affected by the lack of Office. People don't purchase mobile phones, of any sort, solely for their word processing capabilities. Now that Office is on the iPhone, some people will certainly see it as a plus, but it's not a game changer, by any means.

Starting today, Office Mobile for iPhone is available in the Apple App Store, and it’s free for Office 365 subscribers.

Now this move really disproves Bradley's assertions from the sentence directly before this one in his article. Office for iPhone is not even available to anyone unless they already subscribe to Office 365. So the app is listed as free in the App Store, but you cannot actually use it until you prove that you are paying $10/month for the desktop version of Office. I think that this, along with the fact that there are no plans to have an iPad version and that the announcement was quietly made on a Friday morning (an odd time to announce an app you expect to change everything), all go to show that Microsoft is really not even intending Office to be a game changer in mobile productivity. Rather, I think all that Office for iPhone is intended to do is give an extra perk to users who already subscribe to Office 365, and maybe push some potential subscribers over the line and get them to pull the trigger. I don't think Microsoft is expecting Office to fly to the tip of the top charts on the App Store, but maybe it can draw in more subscribers to their Office 365 suite.

Apple's Pages, Numbers and Keynote all run at a one time payment of $9.99. This is the price you must pay to use Office for iPhone for one month. No one is going to do that unless they also really need Office 365 on their desktop computers, and most people who use Office on their desktop computers are still running an older version, which they paid for once and now own forever, and many of these people likely feel no need to upgrade to a newer version which they then have to pay for on a monthly basis forever. I'm sure that as time progresses, more and more people will move to the subscription based Office 365, and these people will be happy to gain access to Office on their iPhones when they do. However, until Microsoft either prices Office for iPhone like other normal iPhone productivity apps, or builds a native version of Office for iPad which is also included in your Office 365 subscription, I highly doubt this will be much news in the world of average iPhone users, and there's no way it will create any huge changes to the field of iPhone productivity apps.

Insightful Thoughts on iOS 7

Rene Ritchie:

iOS 7 is turbulence. It's change. That scares some people, and makes others hungry. It divides sentiment and reaction, and creates as much fear and noise as it does thoughtful analysis and future thinking. That iOS 7 in its current form had to be realized in under 8 months, that it involved designers at Apple outside the usual interactive team, and that the beta came in so hot the iPad version wasn't even ready, adds to the turbulence, and to the uneasy feeling that we're still in the midst of change rather than comfortably through it.

The whole article is excellent and worth a read.

Facebook Rolling Out Hashtag Support

Via The Verge

Starting today, Facebook users will be able to search for and click on hashtags — as represented by the traditional # symbol — to see a stream of images, posts, and links all tagged with a given phrase.

A move that is late in coming. I'll be interested to see if hashtags are able to really take root in the Facebook ecosystem. As it is right now, I actually see many Facebook users displaying extreme annoyance for hashtags. Some even going as far as calling out people's posts who include hashtags and ridiculing them. I wonder if this is simply bitterness that Facebook didn't support the hashtag, and will therefore fade away now that they are supported, or if there will actually continue to be opposition to the feature.

Viticci's Thoughts on iOS 7

It's probably expected of any Apple blogger to write their thoughts on the new iOS 7, but with such a deluge, I don't feel that my own musings will add enough to the discussion to be worth the time of writing them. Rather, I'll simply link you to Federico Viticci's fantastic reflections on the new OS. They are very well thought out and balanced, and absolutely worth the read.

Fertile Ground

Marco Arment:

Apple has set fire to iOS. Everything’s in flux. Those with the least to lose have the most to gain, because this fall, hundreds of millions of people will start demanding apps for a platform with thousands of old, stale players and not many new, nimble alternatives. If you want to enter a category that’s crowded on iOS 6, and you’re one of the few that exclusively targets iOS 7, your app can look better, work better, and be faster and cheaper to develop than most competing apps.

An incredible insight. The radical changes to iOS do indeed create an insane, practically unheard of opportunity to usurp the powerhouse apps currently controlling each category of the App Store. Think about how long it took many apps just to add a few millimeters of extra height into their app when the iPhone 5 came out. For some of the big apps, it took weeks, or even months after the release. That, of course, wasn't really that huge of a deal if you already had an established app, but with iOS 7 old apps may need not just an addition, but in many cases, a complete redesign. The space between the release of iOS 7 and the time it may take some of these hugely popular apps to update is an amazing opportunity for new, smaller apps to slip in and grab a foothold. An opportunity like this does not come very often.

No Loyalty Among Teens

A few weeks ago, the Pew Research Center released a new study on teens and social media. The study showed significant changes on many levels from their previous surveys on the subject since 2006. As a teen myself, and one who, until just a few weeks ago, had been immersed in the high school experience for four whole years, I think I can expand upon their conclusions based on my experiences and some of their findings. Lets start with these data points and observations from the survey:

Teen Twitter use has grown significantly: 24% of online teens use Twitter, up from 16% in 2011.

When asked where they maintain profiles or accounts, some 94% of teen social media users say they have a Facebook profile, and 81% say that Facebook is the profile they use most often. One in four (26%) teen social media users say that they have a profile or account on Twitter (with 7% saying that Twitter is the profile they use most often)

By comparison, only 7% of teen social media users say they maintain a Myspace account, and none of the survey respondents said MySpace is the account they used most often. That is in stark contrast to the 85% of teens who said in 2006 that MySpace was their most frequently used profile.

Focus group discussions with teens show that they have waning enthusiasm for Facebook, disliking the increasing adult presence, people sharing excessively, and stressful “drama,” but they keep using it because participation is an important part of overall teenage socializing.

When the study came out, many tech blogs and news sites highlighted the data point regarding the 94% of teen social media users who have Facebook profiles. It's true, this data point is rather astounding. However, everything I'm seeing and hearing in the teen spectrum, and everything I know about teen culture, leads me to feel great doubt in the future of Facebook's stronghold in this population.

It is the last two points in particular, which I feel should frighten Facebook. In 2006, 85% of teens said MySpace was their most frequently used profile. A mere seven years later, that number has been reduced to zero percent. And let's keep in mind that while it may have taken six or seven years for MySpace to drain all the way to zero, it has quite clearly been dead in the water for four or five years less than that. When I entered high school in 2009, all the pressure I was getting to join a social media network was pointing me to Facebook. I was not once encouraged to get a Myspace. That's three years after 85% of teens used MySpace as their primary social network. Now refer to the second point I quoted. Only 81% of teens today say that Facebook is their primary social network. That is less than MySpace had at its peak, and its hold was completely broken only two or three years later. Within seven, completely gone. Now, finally, recall my final quoted point: the enthusiasm for Facebook is already waning. Call it increasing adult presence. Call it too much drama. Call it people sharing too excessively. Sure, all of these factors and more are aiding in the waning enthusiasm teens have for Facebook, but if you boil it all down, it's quite simple: Facebook has lost the cool factor. And in the world of teenagers, where there is no loyalty to anything, when something loses the cool factor, and the next Big Thing picks it up, the exodus is rapid, and fatal.

So what is this next Big Thing? When MySpace reined supreme, Facebook was the usurper, but now that Facebook holds the crown, the challenger is Twitter. Just look at the data: teen use of Twitter since 2011 has almost doubled. Since 2009, it has more than tripled. Still, I don't even need these impressive data points to see the momentum changing. All I need to do is tip an ear to the pipeline of gossip and information which inherently echoes through any teenage ecosystem. The same pipeline that told me I needed to get a Facebook as soon as possible when I entered high school, is now sending newcomers to Twitter. I'm a middle school leader at my church, so I know a lot of incoming high school freshmen. Almost every graduated 8th grader I know who will be entering high school next year already has a Twitter account. More interestingly, some of them actually do not have Facebook accounts as well, or if they do, many don't use it at all. Even amongst older high school teens, the majority of which still seem to prefer Facebook, the minority "popular" crowd has already migrated to Twitter. This group may not be enough to tip current percentages, but they probably have more influence over what is "cool" to teenagers than all the other groups put together. Facebook may not know it, but it already appears to have a teen death sentence on it. If incoming freshmen in high school prefer Twitter over Facebook, the ranks of teens who join after them will be sent to Twitter too. Twitter has successfully stolen the cool factor, and I am seriously doubtful about Facebook's ability to steal it back.

The biggest mistake that Facebook could make at this point is assuming it holds a single speck of loyalty in the teen population. There is no loyalty among teens. How can you expect a population of kids who are well known for constantly and brutally backstabbing their friends, cheating on their significant others, breaking the law and at all times following the booming knell of what is "cool" and what is "uncool" of having any sort of loyalty to their social network of choice? Facebook may be king right now, but if it assumes its huge lead is a given and doesn't try anything drastic to steal back the retreating cool factor it once had, then I will be stunned if it is still maintaining its massive lead over Twitter in the teen population three or four years from now. Twitter is trending in the places that matter: with the younger teens and with the "popular" teens. As the current, Facebook-centric population of teenagers "ages out" into different categories, Facebook is going to have a very hard time avoiding going the direction of its predecessor MySpace. Unless it does manage that drastic change, and regains the spotlight and attention of teenagers which is currently shining onto Twitter, that 94% is going nowhere but down.

Vesper

You've probably already heard, but a new app hit the App Store today by a quite remarkable team: John Gruber, Brent Simmons, and Dave Wiskus. The app is called Vesper, and it is an almost ridiculously simple note taking app.

I'be only had a day to delve into the app, but it's so simple I already feel ready to give my preliminary thoughts on it, which you will find below. If it's a review from someone who's been beta testing for months that you're looking for, I suggest this one by Federico Viticci, this one by Marco Arment, or this one by Jason Snell.

The first thing you should consider before purchasing is that the feature set is bare, to say the least. There is no iPad app, no syncing, no URL scheme, very few export options and no text expander supprt. At first thought, this sounds like the kind of app that I would hate, particularly with my great interest in inter-app communication and chaining together simple tasks to increase the speed of my workflows. All those things rely on the text that I generate in Drafts, another note taking app. However, while Vesper and Drafts may both be in the category of note taking apps, they are not competitors. Drafts is built for productivity and sending out text, Vesper is built for intuitive note management and keeping text inside.

Anything you write in Vesper is likely to be something that you want to keep in Vesper. To me, this seems like a very iOS-y approach. In iOS, everything is sandboxed and meant to stay that way. Unlike the file system that we're used to from PCs, in iOS you go to the place where your file was created to find it. Take Apple's Pages for example. I keep any large documents I write on my iPad in Pages, and I look for them in Pages. It's not what I'm used to from computers, but it's simple and makes sense. Vesper, in my preliminary opinion, is supposed to be similar to this, but for short notes or lists instead of large documents. When I write my large documents in Pages, I don't expect to move them around through all my social networks, send them to Dropbox, Evernote, or other similar services, or use them to create calendar events or reminders lists. All I may do with them is email them to a few people or maybe print them out. With many short notes, it's really the same idea. I'm not going to post my grocery list to Twitter, App.net and Facebook. I'm not going to require access to an important phone number I want to remember on my iPad, iPhone, iPad mini, Mac, MacBook, Mac Mini, and anywhere else I ever access data. But what do I want to do with these short pieces of digital information? I want to have them somewhere where I know I can access them extremely quickly and with no issues or errors or possibilities of accidentally deleting them. Vesper is potentially the perfect place for this kind of data, and while syncing with at least an iPad version of the app would certainly be welcome, I don't believe it is necessary, as the type of data I'm talking about would be accessed on the go, and via my most mobile device: my iPhone.

So why is Vesper any better for this kind of single access point, non distributed data than any of the other hundreds of note taking apps on the App Store? Why should you add a whole new app to your repertoire when you could just as easily save $5 and put these notes in Drafts or Notes.app like you have always done? The answer is organization. For the purposes of this post, I will only compare the organization in Vesper with the organization in Drafts and the default Apple Notes app, the two other note taking apps I have the most experience with. Previously, I have used both of these apps to store data like ID numbers, phone numbers, lists of words to play in a certain Letterpress game, grocery lists, Spanish notes, and many other items. Throughout all my experiences trying to store these types of data in these two apps, I have constantly, again and again, become frustrated trying to find the info later. Drafts has a pinned section now, which is far better than its old method of lumping every draft together in one list, but what if I jot down the info and forget to add it to the pinned section? Now it's lost in a sea of other random drafts stuffed in my inbox. And even when I do add it to the pinned section I often forget it's there and search through the inbox before going to find it, or I find that the pinned section itself is beginning to become just as crowded. In Notes.app, all I have is a single huge list which grabs the first line as the title and sorts in order of date created. I have so many notes that scrolling through them is no different than scrolling through the Drafts inbox, except now I have to try to remember the exact date at which I created the note and put down the info, or exactly what I used for the title line if I even bothered to put one. Both of these processes, in Drafts and in Notes.app, can be huge pains when I'm trying to access a specific item of information rapidly and on the go.

Vesper takes a completely different approach at organization. Instead of the only method of organizing being a giant list of every note stored, or even three slightly less giant lists (Drafts), which can be just as confusing, everything in Vesper is organized through tags. Opening the app brings you to your "All Notes" list, which is organized by date and is similar to the old Drafts inbox or the Notes.app main section. If you have a lot of notes, and want to find an older one, this organization makes it dismally hard to find anything. However, swipe to the right (or press the hamburger button), and a side menu is revealed with a list of tags that you have added to each note you make. You are not meant to have endless tags, or else that menu can become as confusing as the main notes screen, but if you come up with a concise system of a relatively small number of tags which fit the great majority of your note taking purposes, the organization system could, and should, work amazingly for you. I've only had my hands on the app for a day, but I'm finding that adding a quick tag to the end of each note makes it incredibly easy to find and eliminates almost all of the annoyances I've previously faced. I obviously have not yet had a chance to add a note, forget about it for a few days or weeks, then be required to quickly find it again, and see if Vesper helps with this, but I feel very confident that it will. At the very least it is undeniably more efficient than Drafts or Notes.app would be for the same tasks. This method reminds me of a system of labeling folders in iOS which I read about and adopted a year or so ago. The system has me label folders with the action that I perform using each app within instead of just vague group labels such as "productivity" or "lifestyle," which are huge categories that you could probably find a reason to fit almost any app on your device into. Since I've adopted this system, I have found it incredibly more intuitive and easy to locate apps in folders when my labels are "purchase," "connect," "remember," "watch," etc. The tag system in Vesper seems very similar in its intuitiveness. Instead of stuffing all my notes into nondescript categories like "inbox" or "pinned," I can now search them out by tags like "numbers," "links," "movies," "errands," etc. This makes the process of finding my past notes almost exponentially simpler. Particularly if I were to have a list of notes as big as the list of drafts I often collect in my Drafts inbox. From what I've read from beta testers and what I've seen so far myself, this is the biggest differentiator between Vesper and apps like Drafts. Vesper is not meant to replace Drafts (if you use Drafts as a text distribution app like I do), but rather it is meant to be used in tandem. It will take a little getting used to at first, but I believe my workflow will eventually settle with me typing any text that I plan to eventually distribute to various places (blog posts, events, social network posts, emails, etc.) in Drafts, but typing any text that I'm going to want to keep solely to myself, and want to be able to find at any given time at short notice, in Vesper. The app is lightning fast, beautiful in every aspect, and extremely good at the one simple task that it is meant for: organizing notes. As an added bonus, Vesper supports adding photos into your notes, too.

While I do hope for a future in which a URL scheme is added to Vesper, as well as an iPad app being released with syncing between devices, for now Vesper is really good at the one thing it's trying to be good at, and for a 1.0 release, that's a heck of a lot better than most apps out there can say. Gruber, Simmons and Wiskus have, in my opinion, managed to produce the first note taking app since Drafts which I have found to really stand out from the crowd in a unique yet useful way. I can't wait to see what's coming next for Vesper, or if anything else makes its way out of Q Branch.

You can pick up Vesper for $4.99 in the App Store. Please don't shy away from the $5 price tag. Think about it, it's really not that much.

OS X 10.8.4

A new software update for OS X today finally fixes the Messages bug. According to Apple, the update includes "A fix for an issue that may cause iMessages to display out of order in Messages."

This won't completely solve all the problems with Apple's Messages app, but hopefully it will at least take strides to make the app actually useable.

You can get the update through the App Store on your Mac, detailed info on the update is here.

A New Chapter.

I am now a high school graduate. This is a fact that I have still not quite managed to get my head around, but I am certainly excited by it. It means that I am standing at the beginning of a whole new chapter of my life, facing the most radical change that I have yet encountered. This is challenge that I’m nervous about, but ready to meet. I’m excited to see what awaits me in the next chapter after high school.

I apologize for my absence the last few weeks, when senior year ended things got a bit crazy. Among other things, I started a part time job working as a paid youth intern for my church, started another part time job working with my grandfather to write his memoirs, received a brand new Retina MacBook Pro and spent hours preparing it and tweaking it to my liking, and I went to freshman orientation for the University of Arizona, where I will be studying next fall. My major, which shouldn’t surprise most of you, will be computer science. I’ve also debated minoring in a variety of fields, from writing to media arts to ISTA. (ISTA stands for Information, Science, Technology and the Arts. It is a fairly new major at the U of A which focuses not only on learning to program and such, but also on taking your programming skills and putting them to use in a field of your choice.) For the major at least, I’m extremely excited. I have dabbled in teaching myself programming languages, and from it have a basic knowledge of Java, Javascript and Python, as well as a fairly advanced knowledge of HTML5 and CSS3. My strongest area is in URL schemes, but I’m not quite sure whether that is really considered a programming language. However, I am very excited by the thought of being able to learn in a structured environment, where I am far less likely to miss certain areas and, most of all, forced to actually buckle down and get the studying done rather than being distracted by various other activities, something I’ve found very difficult to avoid when I sit down to teach myself a programming language. I can’t wait to gain the knowledge necessary to begin not just writing about apps, but actually writing apps myself. For that matter, I’m hoping my experiences here at The Axx critiquing apps and my experiences beta testing apps, as well as the high standards to which I hold any app I use on a a regular basis, will enable me to create apps of my own which are of similar calibre. I don’t know what I’ll create yet, but I have plenty of time to figure that out.

As for The Axx, now that summer is settling in and my schedule is becoming less volatile, my plan is to return to posting here as much as possible. This summer is looking to be a very busy one, in stark contrast to the boredom and monotony of my previous summer experiences, but I will try to post at least a link and comments to the site as close to once a day as possible, if not more, and also get out longer posts as often as I can manage. I apologize again for me recent unheralded hiatus, it should not occur again.

I do have one week long church trip I’ll be going on, and while electronics are allowed, cell phone service is nonexistent in the mountains where we’ll be staying. I’m going to attempt to get a guest writer to post during that week so the site won’t be dormant. Feel free to contact me if you’re interested, but no promises on first come first serve or anything like that, I will choose at my discretion.

Thanks so much to all of my readers. This site has been a dream for me for a long time, but I never actually expected it to be as successful as it already is. You guys are great, and I really appreciate your appreciation of what I have to say. I hope you keep reading, and as long as you do, I’ll keep writing.

@axx

The Sweethome

The Sweethome is an awesome new site from the people behind The Wirecutter. These guys have done tons of research in order to write exhaustive reviews of "The Best" items in a ton of different product categories which you will have around your house. From simple nail clippers to dishwashers and dryers, the reviews are incredibly detailed and well researched. Even if you don't think you're in the market for any household items, you should check it out, it just might change your mind.

I particularly enjoyed their razor review, which includes all the best products you should use for a wet shave, something I've been interested in, but unsure exactly what to buy for, since reading Lex Friedman's excellent article in The Magazine on the topic.

"Chopping" a Draft.

My new method for using Drafts to automatically repeat an action on a series of drafts pulled one by one from a list. If you're interested in iOS automation, check it out at the title link above.

The Drafts 3.0 Stress Test

I designed a new sequence of Drafts and URL actions chaining together 25 actions across 7 apps and 8 services to stress test the maximum abilities of Drafts 3.0. Check it out if you're interested at the title link above.

Betaworks Acquires Instapaper

Marco Arment:

I’m happy to announce that I’ve sold a majority stake in Instapaper to Betaworks. We’ve structured the deal with Instapaper’s health and longevity as the top priority, with incentives to keep it going well into the future. I will continue advising the project indefinitely, while Betaworks will take over its operations, expand its staff, and develop it further.

Sounds like a great move for Instapaper, especially with Marco having to split his time between it and The Magazine these days. Hopefully under Betaworks the seeming stagnation of new features and updates for Instapaper will come to an end. Presumably this will also free up Marco so he'll have have more time to develop something new that we can all love and benefit from.

Drafts 3.0

As many of you probably know, I am an avid user of Agile Tortoise's text input and export app, Drafts. Drafts has reshaped the way I use my iPhone and iPad with its powerful abilities to call and handle a huge variety of URL actions, allowing a new level of inter-app communication never before seen on iOS. Due to all this, I'm very pleased to have had the chance to use and review the new Drafts 3.0 update throughout its alpha and beta stages. Each big update to this app in the past have been amazing, and Drafts 3.0 is no exception. This update is packed with new features and nice tweaks that make an already incredible app even better.

Draft and Action Management

Kicking off the new update are new methods of draft and action management. The action menu, previously a single list of every action you had (except the hidden ones), is now splintered into four different panes into which you can separate all of your actions. This, along with the new "snap to fullscreen" feature, which causes the action list to automatically jump to full screen when tapped on iPhone, do a great deal to improve the usability of long action lists, and make the process of sending text out to other apps and services a lot quicker and more pleasant. You can edit which actions are in which pane in the Action Management tab in settings, and you may find, like I have, that messing with the layout and order of your actions to try to find the perfect combination is a bit addicting, similar to building a layout in Launch Center Pro.

For the actual text you type into drafts, the old inbox view has also been split into four new views. The inbox is still there and is still the landing spot for all newly created drafts, but now you can swipe on a draft in the inbox and reveal options to send it to the "Archive" pane, the "Pinned" pane, or just delete it. I always hated how cluttered my inbox became, so these new options are great. I don't use the archive pane much, as I tend to delete most of my drafts when I'm done with them, but the pinned pane has become an integral part of my workflow. I now store all posts that are in progress, notes for classes, or other important items of information that I need to keep around for an extended period of time in my pinned section. As soon as I finish the post, use the information, or finish needing the notes, I then remove the corresponding drafts from the pane to keep it uncluttered. Since I've been using this pane, the old problem I had with losing drafts within the vast bounds of my inbox has been completely nonexistent for me.

On iPhone, I find these new management techniques perfect and haven't a single qualm about them. On iPad they work great too, but the one thing that I find bothersome is that actions and drafts lists are only accessible at the very top corners of the screen. It then requires another tap to switch panes. I find it awkward to have to keep tapping around so far from where my hands naturally rest while typing. If Drafts were to implement some sort of swipe feature so that you only had to tap the top corner once and then could swipe between action panes or draft lists, I think that would greatly increase the natural feel of then new management system. (This wouldn't bother anything else either, I don't think, because the panels slide out from the side of the screen, but still leave a huge portion of the screen open next to them. That space could provide a swiping area while a simple tap still takes you back to typing.) Of course, this is just another way that an already great solution could get even better. As it is now the navigation of drafts and action lists on iPad are still leaps and bounds ahead of the old methods in Drafts 2.5.

Action Backup and Restore

If you've used Drafts on multiple devices in the past, I'm sure you've at some point become annoyed that your action list does not sync back and forth between them. I certainly have, but luckily before I became too fed up with going deep into settings to copy action URLs and then emailing or messaging them to myself, Drafts 3.0 added the Backup and Restore feature. This wonderful addition finally makes it possible to sync your action lists across devices with Dropbox. At any point you can go into the Backup and Restore tab in settings in Drafts on any device and choose to either backup your current setup to Dropbox or restore from a different one. It isn't the perfect method, as all of this has to be done manually at this point, but it's ten times better than any of the old solutions I had to use to do it myself. If you add actions or change the layout of your action panes on your iPad, now you can back those changes up to Dropbox, then open Drafts on your iPhone and restore to the new layout there as well. (Works in the other direction too, of course.)

Due to an error on my part, I was unable to have access to the beta version of Drafts on my iPad, so it didn't receive this feature until today. Obviously, it was greatly outdated from the Drafts list on my iPhone, but when I went into settings and restored from my latest action list backup from my iPhone, everything was instantly and perfectly changed to my iPhone setup. The only thing you may worry about upon your first backup is that this is not a "sync" as you may be used to with other apps, it's a restore. In other words, if you have new actions on both devices and haven't been backing them up together, whichever file you restore from will remove the not backed up actions that you may have on the current device. Keeping your devices backed up and restoring to each one after you back up a change on another is important.

One interesting possibility that is only available because this is a restore and not a sync, is that you could maintain multiple action lists for different purposes. I personally have not used the feature in this way, but I could see how that could be interesting to some people. Perhaps at work you want an action list which makes it easy to reach all of your custom email, Dropbox and Evernote actions, but when you leave to go home you want to switch to a layout that gets those out of the way and instead highlights your Twitter, App.net, and messaging actions. Drafts 3.0 could handle a situation like this with ease.

Evernote and Messaging Actions

New in Drafts 3.0 are also two new custom action categories. Previously you could build custom URL, email, and Dropbox actions. URL actions are anything you want based on app URL schemes, but email and Dropbox actions are more structured and allow you to fill in more info. For email you can predefine the To, CC, and Subject fields, as well as a template with various Drafts supported variables. For Dropbox you could predefine the path, filename, extension, whether to create a new file or append or prepend to an old one, and also create the same type of template with support for Drafts variables. In Drafts 3.0 there are now categories to create custom Messaging actions, in which you can predefine recipients and template, and Evernote actions, in which you can predefine title, notebook, tags, whether to create a new note or prepend or append to an old one, whether to send the text as Markdown HTML, and the format of the template to use.

The Messaging actions are useful, but fairly simple and self explanatory. The Evernote actions, if I understand correctly, are quite powerful if you are an Evernote user. However, I am not an Evernote user, so I can't say much on the subject and have not had much of a chance to use the Evernote actions. If you're interested in that though, Federico Viticci has an excellent in depth review of the possibilities of these new Evernote Actions over at Macstories.

Reminders Integration

I don't use Reminders much as I much prefer Omnifocus, but the new tighter integration of Drafts with Reminders has some very useful implications whether you use Reminders or not. First and foremost, in a bit of a hack that various other apps have used as well, you can now use Siri to create new Drafts by creating a Reminders list called "Drafts," and then telling Siri to add reminders into that list. As soon as Drafts is opened, it will pull any items from the Drafts Reminders list into Drafts itself as new drafts.

A new action within Drafts also now allows you to list your draft in Reminders. If your Draft starts with a #, @ or ! then the first line will be used as a title for the new list and all subsequent lines will be split up into list items. (If the title is of a list that already exists, the new list items will be added into that list.)

Extended Keyboard

I'm a huge fan of the old extended keyboard on the iPad, and now that feature has been brought to iPhone in Drafts 3.0. In a beautifully elegant solution to the problem of adding an extended keyboard without losing screen real estate, you can now swipe left or right on the toolbar above the standard keyboard in Drafts for iPhone and the extended one slides over on top of it. The first row (when swiping to the left) has undo/redo keys as well as a set of four arrow keys which will jump you one character or a whole word to the left or the right of where you are typing. I've always loved these keys on iPad, and they are just as great to have on the iPhone. If you swipe left again it brings you to the next row of keys, which are all the standard punctuation keys (@#"'.,?!-). It's the third swipe left though (or a single swipe to the right from the main toolbar) that is my favorite. This row displays a list of the most important keys to the process of typing in Markdown (()[]*_->=). I type in Markdown on my iPhone very frequently when typing posts (my iPad is not always readily available or appropriate in environments like public high school or community collage classrooms, so my iPhone allows me to stay productive when I would otherwise be sitting there doing nothing.), so this Markdown keyboard has been hugely advantageous for me. Each row of extra keys also includes a small down pointing arrow on the far right, and tapping it will dismiss the keyboard and return you to the toolbar. (You can also swipe the keyboard away the opposite direction you swiped to open it, or swipe all the way through the three rows to return to the toolbar.)

As today is the first day I have gotten my hands on Drafts for iPad, I must say that the new extended keyboard there is a bit of a disappointment to me. For some reason which I cannot understand, the "-" key, which is present not only once, but twice on the iPhone extended keyboard (once in the punctuation row and once in the Markdown row) is not present at all on either row of the extended keyboard on iPad. I'm not quite sure if this is on purpose or an oversight, because the key did used to be present on the original smaller extended keyboard for iPad. I use this key constantly for typing Markdown as well as for building URL actions, so its seemingly pointless removal from the extended keyboard is frustrating. Even ignoring the lack of the "-" key, the new iPad extended keyboard seems a bit unfinished to me. The beautiful implementation of the iPhone extended keyboard has blasted ahead of the iPad version, despite the greater screen real estate on iPad and its advantage of being around longer. The keys on the iPad keyboard provide no feedback that they have been touched, while those on the iPhone keyboard do (and those on the old iPad keyboard did too). Also, rather than a solid line, the entire row is see-through. This made sense on the old implementation because there was a large gap in the middle which allowed you to see text through it, but the new row covers the whole width of the screen, so now if you scroll up so text is underneath, it all jumbles together and you can't read much of anything, much less actually use the keyboard easily. I think the background should definitely be filled in.

Ultimately I'm just being a bit nit picky, as the fact that an extended keyboard exists in the first place is really great. Despite that it seems a bit unfinished compared to the polish on the rest of the app and on the iPhone version, the iPad extended keyboard is still very useful, and its expansion from the old version is great. I guess I'm just bitter about the loss of my "-" key. Hopefully it will be replaced in a subsequent update.

Action Improvments

More exciting new improvements for those of us who are interested in URL schemes begin with the addition of a new [[clipboard]] variable. Now you can add that anywhere into your URL actions and it will be expanded into whatever text you have on your clipboard. This is useful for a variety of obvious reasons, but one that is perhaps less obvious is that Drafts can now technically handle three different text variables in a single URL action or action sequence. Before the [[clipboard]] tag you could only handle variables in the form of [[title]], the first line of your draft, and [[body]], everything after the first line. (This of course not counting the standard [[draft]] tag, which expands into the entire draft. I'm only talking about the maximum amount of text variables possible.) Now, if necessary, you can copy something to the clipboard before calling an action, and then send that text too. For simple actions this isn't very useful, but for complicated actions this opens up a ton of new possibilities. I don't have any actions prepared to release quite yet, although I will soon, but here's an example that adds to one of my existing actions: let's say you want to use the URL Event Action to create an event in Fantastical and then add an action URL to launch at the time of the event using Due. The addition of the [[clipboard]] tag creates multiple new possibilities to add to this action. Previously, if the action you wanted to launch was a tweet or other post or some type of text that you wanted to send out, you had to manually type out the content of the text, then URL encode it so that it could be understood, then paste it into your action in the body of your draft. Now you can just type it manually, cut it out of the draft, and include the [[clipboard]] tag in your action. URL encoding, which can be a nightmare to try to understand and do correctly, or if you use a converter is still simply hard to read, is no longer necessary. Another direction you could go is to use the clipboard tag to also add notes to the Fantastical event, something that there was previously not enough variables to do in the same action. More advanced techniques like these and countless others have the potential to make the already extremely powerful Drafts even stronger.

More improvements with somewhat smaller implications include the new ability to use text expander snippets in custom action fields and have them expand dynamically, email actions now supporting multiple recipients in To and CC fields, the ability to select recipients from your contacts list, and a "Tag Help" screen, which is useful if you're new to building Drafts actions, or even just as a nice way to remember some of the more complicated variable tags like those for strftime formats for date stamps. Another nice addition is a new "After Success" option, which allows you to set a default behavior for what to do with drafts after you have performed actions upon them. You can set them to delete, be sent to the archive, or just stay in your inbox as always. This setting can be overrode in the settings for each individual action on your action list, or manually via the URL of an action itself with a new "afterSuccess=" parameter

The Little Things

Drafts 3.0 also adds a great deal of polish and nice touches to the old Drafts interface. On iPhone, the settings and appearance windows, which used to be stuffed into the bottom of the action list, are now consolidated into one window and accessible via a new gear icon in the toolbar. Appearance is now a tab in settings, which makes a lot more sense, I think.

One thing that always annoyed me in Drafts 2.5 was that the scroll position on the draft list was never saved. If I closed the drafts list to edit a draft, then reopened it, it would be showing a different position on the list than I had closed it from. This has been fixed in Drafts 3.0, and scroll position is now properly saved.

The new icon annoyed me at first as the bolder D makes Drafts a bit more obtrusive on my home screen, but once I got over the initial disruption of the change, I can say with confidence that I actually much prefer the new icon over the old. It just seems nicer. I never really liked the old one much anyway, and this does a lot to improve that.

The fonts Adobe Source Sans and Source Code, as well as a new custom version of Courier Prime are great additions to the Drafts font options, although I personally will be sticking with my favorite font, Avenir Next.

A very small thing here, but the version number for Drafts for iPad has been increased to match that of Drafts for iPhone. It did always annoy me that they were different. (Yes, I know I'm annoyed by some of the smallest and most negligible issues, forgive me.)

Final Words

All in all, Drafts 3.0 is an incredible update. I'm legitimately surprised that an app I already loved so much could manage to become this much better from a single update. Other than my protest about the iPad extended keyboard and the few nit picks and frivolities I mentioned, which most people would probably never even notice, Drafts 3.0 is practically perfect. I'm hard pressed to think of any other feature requests I could even ask for. The new action categories, the fantastic implementation of draft and action list management, the backup and restore functions, the beautiful iPhone extended keyboard, the new [[clipboard]] variable, and all the other little polishes and novelties make Drafts 3.0 an amazingly solid and feature rich update. I cannot recommend this app any more, it is an essential for any iOS user, no matter their level of knowledge or expertise.

Last but not least, a grateful shout out to Greg Pierce, the developer of Drafts, for his amazing work and for giving me the opportunity to beta test such a great app. I can't wait to see what he has planned next for Drafts.

Questions? Comments? Requests for new actions utilizing the awesome new features in Drafts 3.0? Send them all to me from the Contact Page.

@axx

Tweetbot 2.8

A beautiful update to Tweetbot, my favorite Twitter app, this morning.

The biggest new feature is a new "Media Timeline," which displays only videos and photos posted by those you follow on Twitter. The layout is really nice. Rather than the normal format for posts with media, where the photo or video is only displayed as a tiny thumbnail in the corner, the Media Timeline blows them up to almost reach the sides of the screen, producing a not so subtly Instagram-like appearance. It's a really nice way to view media from your Twitter timeline. I do have a few issues with the feature, but they are fairly minor: in order to blow up the media, Tweetbot minimizes the text associated with it, thus making it so you can only read a little bit of the actual tweet without opening the standard tweet view and leaving the timeline. Another annoyance is that you can only access this timeline from the very top of the normal timeline. In other words, if you are not caught up to the current tweets, you can't switch your timeline view. I often fall quite a few tweets behind and it takes me a while to catch back up. In the current implementation this means that I have no way to access the new timeline until I have finished catching up. On a side not, the search bar is also located here, so you can't search until you're at the top of your timeline, something that has also annoyed me in the past.

Beyond the big new feature there are just a few noticeable tweaks and polishes. One that I particularly like is that Tweetbot now supports showing retweet and favorite counts on the standard tweet view of all tweets. Before the retweet list was hidden deep into some submenus and favorites were only accessible by leaving Tweetbot to view them in Favestar.

Another nice change is that pictures no longer bring up the in-app browser to be displayed, they just pop up themselves like they are springing out of the timeline. Best of all with this is that when you tap a picture (or video) it no longer obstructs your view of your timeline with a blank screen until the media loads. Rather, a small circle (the same kind used in Tweetbot for Mac) appears on top of the image or video showing the load status, and the media doesn't pop up until it has finished loading so you can see it. While you wait you are free to continue scrolling through your timeline. For anyone using a slow Internet connection, this could add up to saving minutes of time staring at a blank screen waiting for the media to load.

A final addition I will mention is that you no longer must tap the back button in the top left corner to dismiss images or videos. Now you can swipe down in the same way that you swipe down on images in the Facebook app, and the media is dismissed. Tapping anywhere on images performs the same function.

Overall Tweetbot 2.8 is a very solid update. I think it's really nice to see some new innovation coming in the Twitter app area in the form of this new approach to viewing your timeline. With the Media Timeline along with retweet and favorite indicators and the new timesaving and intuitive ways of interacting with images in the normal timeline, I have never been able to recommend Tweetbot more.

You can pick Tweetbot 2.8 up in the App Store right here for iPad and right here for iPhone.

Facebook Home Foolishness

Jordan Crook for Tech Crunch:

[...] the app has garnered over 100,000 downloads a day since launch. Still, these aren’t blow-out numbers. Remember when Instagram launched on Android and hit over 1 million downloads in a day? And then hit over 5 million downloads in six days? Yeah. Those were blow-out numbers.

You also have to consider that Facebook has over a billion users, so 500K doesn’t really move the needle.

Is he seriously trying to make this comparison? Facebook Home is not just a new app to add to you phone, it's an entirely new concept. Installing Facebook Home will completely change the way that you use your phone. Many people don't want that kind of change, or if they might, they will be wary of it until it is more proven and hype about it increases and reaches the average Android user. At this point, the vast majority of Android users probably don't even know what Facebook Home is, and even if they did their phone probably can't run it because only a handful of the newest models can.

Instagram, on the other hand, launched on almost every model of Android phone after it was already a massive success on iOS. Almost every average Android user had probably already heard of or even used Instagram from their iPhone owning friends. When Instagram launched, people rushed to get it by the millions because it was already proven and already popular. More so, it was just a simple app. If they ended up not liking it, they could just delete it because normal apps do not effect your OS as a whole.

Facebook Home is not meant to hit millions of users in the first few days. No one expected it to and no one is surprised that it didn't. It's ridiculous to be pessimistic about Facebook Home's launch and future simply because it didn't manage to hit an insanely high download rate that it was never meant to compete with this early.