oramata (visions in Greek) is an iOS app developed by Panagiotis Michalatos to apply customizable effects to a live video stream on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. The real time effects feel smooth as they are applied to your device's video stream, straight from your camera. You can get it for $2.99 on the App Store.
First of all, I want to congratulate the iA team for the incredible improvements in both iOS and OS X versions of iA Writer 3.0—’it just works.’
I firmly believe that, if you use these apps on a daily basis, paying a total of $30 is a fair amount. The app costs $9.99 for iOS, $19.99 for OS X, and $4.99 for Android.
iA Writer, A Sublime Text for Writing.
The usability has improve a lot. The user interface is so much more intuitive an has been simplified a lot. Still, what was interesting to me is how they have adopted functionality which was present in other programs and seems to have been proved valid after a wide use.
For instance, I remember typing a couple years ago with Mou for OS X—which currently seems to be in an eternal state of free beta—where the split view with a live preview was one of the core features. Nevertheless, it seems like iA Writer has learned some of its core new functionality from Sublime Text.
One of the key successes of iA Writer 3.0 is the Library and its integration with iCloud and Dropbox. It syncs really well, and it caches the path of all your Dropbox text files at once, so it is really fluid when browsing files—unlike previous versions where every touch on a folder would fetch its contents from the Dropbox API.
These feature was one the most comfortable ones inside Sublime Text, where you are allowed to open a whole project folder and navigate through it with ease.
As I said, Mou and other Markdown apps had a Preview function built in from the very beginning, but Writer always had this feature separate—its Preview would open a popup with the pre-visualization of your rendered Markdown.
From 3.0, Writer joins the split view game, starting at a really small size that—I adventure to say—mimics the way Sublime Text works. It allows you to easily navigate your writings. If the small scheme is not what you are looking for, you can always click and drag to resize the Preview window, even up to the point where the writing window disappears and the Preview covers the whole screen.
There are many other features which where already available inside iA Writer Pro, but have been polished in order to make the experience even better.
I am in no way related to iA Writer, and the only reason why I share it is because it makes my life so much easier every single day—and it may also make yours easier. It is simple, gorgeous, functional, and—most important—completely focuses on writing.
After a few months without updating, I decided it was time to tweak Everfocus a bit in order to fix problems and incorporate new features.
Version 1.4 brings bug fixes, theme updates, and more:
If you want to be notified when Everfocus goes free, you can join this mailing list — and I'll notify you.
Facebook just launched a web version of their chat client. Messenger, previously available on Facebook.com's chat and on mobile devices (such as iOS or Android), is now available through a clean domain: messenger.com.
I had been waiting for something like this since I joined Facebook. The fact that you can access through the web to Facebook chat without having to see all of your friends updates — plus tons of useless notifications — is really good news.
Funnily enough, the whole web application displays in pure iOS style. The entire user interface uses icons, colors, and layouts of Apple's mobile operative system.
Once again, Stanford University has released a great iOS development course on iTunes University completely for free.
This time, the course teaches the basics of Apple’s new programming language [Swift] and presents an incredible opportunity if you are still coding everything with Objective-C.
The course, titled Developing iOS Apps with Swift, can be accessed through this link of iTunes U. It is currently happening in Stanford, and they have already uploaded the three first classes with their respective presentations. As in previous courses, the teacher [that you may already know] is Paul Hegarty—a good friend of Steve Jobs.
Face to face conversations aren't saved
Why should text messages be?We're making history, by erasing your history.
Skim for iOS is marketed as the Snapchat of text. The app is offered for free for a limited time on the App Store.
We wanted something better. We wanted a text messaging app that was beautiful, easy to use, fun, and most importantly, safe. So we built it.
Source | @calebd
