I've loved Quotebook on my iPhone since its debut. It's a well-designed app for capturing, organizing, and sharing memorable quotes. I've used it to capture both famous quotes and even profound things friends have said.
Today, Lickability (love their logo) released Quotebook 2. After nearly nine months of work, Quotebook has come to the iPad and supports iCloud sync. It is absolutely gorgeous, and if you have a penchant for quotes, you need Quotebook in your arsenal.
There’s been a lot of talk about the next iPhone going to a 4-inch screen, which could very well still happen, but I thought this bit from Tim Cook at the D10 Conference tonight, caught by John Siracusa, was interesting:
Tim Cook, minutes ago: “We have one phone with one screen size and one resolution, and so it’s pretty simple if you’re a developer.”
— John Siracusa (@siracusa) May 30, 2012
Hm.
Late last week, Apple started a free App of the Week promotion in the App Store, much like their long-running free Song of the Week for the iTunes Music Store.
They kicked off with a game, Cut the Rope: Experiments(App Store link). I grabbed it because I had remembered a friend speaking highly of the original Cut the Rope.
Later, when on my iPad, I saw Cut the Rope: Experiments HD(App Store Link) was being offered as the free app for iPad. I almost passed on downloading it because I didn’t want to maintain two levels of progress on different devices.
Then I noticed both versions featured iCloud sync. Bingo. This is how gaming should be done on iOS. Now, I can casually play a couple levels on my iPhone, and later pick up on my iPad, with all my scores and progress synced via iCloud.
Another perk of iCloud integration? Should I ever need to delete the app (let’s say if a serious bug crept up), I could choose to leave the save data in iCloud. Reinstall the app and all my progress is still there.
I’ve greatly enjoyed Apple’s inaugural picks for the section of the App Store. And they’ve made me realize how games should start integrating iCloud for saving progress.
Let’s take the original iPod. Looking at it now, it was big. However, at the time, with the technology available to them, Apple released what they felt was the best product they could make.
Then Apple came out with the iPod mini, which later became the iPod nano, capturing another segment of the market. That release was followed up by the iPod shuffle, again capturing another segment of the market.
It was changes in technologies that allowed these products to be released, but I believe Apple had planned the releases all along.
When you look at a 7-inch iPad, or any other Apple product, don’t look at how it affects its competitors, but rather how it fits into Apple’s product strategy. Doing that will make things a lot clearer.
I shared my thoughts on a 7-inch Apple device last month. At the time, I was thinking such a device could be a good place to reposition the iPod touch. Jim’s thoughts on how Apple has historically acted has me reconsidering. The iPad is a runaway hit, and it would be foolish not to expand that product line.
The iPod’s time to reign has come and gone. Now it is the iPad’s. That’s the household name these days, and that’s what Apple will stick with.
Just saw on Twitter (insert irony here) that Facebook just launched Facebook Camera on the iPhone. It features filters and such like this other little app called Instagram — which Facebook recently acquired for $1 billion.
Incredibly bizarre.
Panic has released the long-awaited update to Coda on the Mac — Coda 2, and an all new iPad companion cleverly named Diet Coda. Both apps are 50% off today only. If you get Coda from the Mac App Store, iCloud will keep your projects in sync (highly recommended). If you do any coding for a site, Coda 2 and Diet Coda should be in your utility belt.
Ben Brooks, on Readability’s new service, Readlists:
As you can see, on a Readlists page, you can publicly share the page, as well as download a packaged eBook with all of the content in it. At first glance this doesn’t look different than what Instapaper does, by allowing users to download articles to a Kindle — but it is actually very different.
With Readlists you are essentially publicly sharing an eBook that contains a writer’s content — content that was never granted permission to be redistributed.
[…]
Readlists is a service to allow people to completely avoid reading a content producers site, allowing them to repackage and redistribute their content all without permission.
Shameful.
The teaser trailer for 007’s latest adventure is here.
Aaron Mahnke has launched a new project called Frictionless. His goal is to help you and me remove frictional stresses from our lives. It’s inspiring and encouraging.
I recommend that if you are reading this, you go download Aaron’s PDF of The Frictionless Manifesto. It requires signing up for his newsletter (for now), but I think that newsletter will be worth it. It’s always easy to unsubscribe if necessary. It took me about ten minutes to read the manifesto, and it is truly great. I’m already starting to rethink some of my daily routines and processes.
I have a lot of friction to remove, and a lot of work to do so. I’m sure you do, too.
Speaking of neat Terminal tricks for OS X, i was reminded of this project at Github by Mathias Bynens called dotfiles. In particular, I’d like to call attention to his .osx file as it is a great list of sensible defaults commands for OS X. I copied the list into a text file that I aptly named os x defaults.txt on my Mac.
Have fun.
