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iOS App Giveaway: WriteUp

Brett — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 14:00:45 +0000

As part of my Thanksgiving holiday giveaways, I have five promo codes for the iOS Markdown editor, WriteUp. It’s a slick Dropbox-powered editor for both iPhone and iPad that I recently reviewed. It’s definitely worth a look if you want to edit Markdown files on the go.

Leave a comment for a chance to win one of five WriteUp promo codes ($3.99). Winners will be drawn on Tuesday, November 29th at noon!

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at iOS App Giveaway: WriteUp

iOS App Giveaway: Reading List

Brett — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 19:02:58 +0000

I hate Black Friday. I hate the whole idea, what with the crowds and the rushing and my internal instinct to avoid both. Instead of leaving my house, I’ll be posting a series of app giveaways, starting today with Reading List (my review here). Watch for a couple more over the Thanksgiving holiday.

Leave a comment on this post for a chance to win a promo code for Reading List for iPhone ($2.99), a great app for tracking the books you’re reading, have read, plan to read and are wishing for. Ten winners will be drawn at random on Monday, November 28th and notified by email!

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at iOS App Giveaway: Reading List

iOS App Review: WriteUp

Brett — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 18:30:32 +0000

If you’re still looking for a slick Markdown editor for iOS, there’s a new candidate up for your vote. WriteUp is a polished editor that covers the basics well. With Dropbox support and available as a universal app for both iPad and iPhone, it makes a nice addition to your all-around writing workflow.

WriteUp comes with a few color styles (including Solarized light and dark), which work well in its full-screen editing mode. Some of the colors clash a little with the default chrome of the app, so I do wish that the brown menubars and such changed with the editor style, but the options are great to have. You can control the font and font size as well.

One very nice feature that just showed up in the latest release is versioning. You can time travel between revisions of your piece and restore a version from any point in its history. You get a full preview of the text of the document in the versions window (available from the box/arrow icon), and it’s easy to traverse.

Dropbox support is a must these days, and WriteUp supports subfolders for organization. You can show multi-line previews in the document list, and subfolders have indicators to show how many documents they contain.

You can export or email both text and HTML versions just by swiping the document in the left-hand list. My workflow generally involves post-processing a document, so exporting text is ideal for me. Being able to email HTML, though, is also a requirement as it allows me to generate better-looking emails than the default email client can.

The auxiliary keyboard above the normal keys offers hashmarks (for headlines), asterisk (for bullet lists), hyphens, underscores and square brackets. There’s also a tab key for quick indentation. Notably, it’s missing parentheses, which would be quite helpful, but the basic tools of Markdown writing are available without having to go to a nested keyboard layout.

Overall, WriteUp is a great editor. It exists in a growing field with a lot of competition, so I’m hoping that new features are consistently added to help differentiate it from the competition. WriteUp is $3.99 on the App Store.

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at iOS App Review: WriteUp

iOS App Review: Reading List

Brett — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 01:01:15 +0000

Reading List for iPhone is a polished app that does one thing, and does it well: track your books. It helps keep track of the books you want, the books you have, the books you’re reading and the books you’ve read. If you still enjoy the rustle of paper pages in this era of the E-Reader, this is a handy app to have.

The app serves as a database of books. You can add a book by entering relevant details and a picture, or just scan the ISBN code on the book and have Reading List automatically look up and add all the details, plus a cover image. The scanner is great for cataloging your own books, but even handier at the book store when you want to add a book to your wish list.

Once a book is added, it’s just a couple of taps to move it to different parts of the database; Reading Now, Saved For Later (which includes books on your wish list) or Finished Reading. Books in the Saved For Later category can be marked as Wish List items with another tap. Once you’ve obtained the book, just remove the Wish List category and it goes to Saved For Later, or put it straight into Reading Now.

Even if you’re reading your books digitally, Reading List offers a great way to track your current reads and your plan-to-reads. Check it out on the App Store ($2.99). Watch here for a chance at some free promo codes soon, too!

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at iOS App Review: Reading List

iOS app review: Listary

Brett — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 17:00:38 +0000

The developers of Listary contacted me about working on some nvALT integration of their Simplenote-compatible iPhone app for creating lists that sync across any device or machine. I found the app cool enough that it’s definitely worth a mention here.

It’s a simple concept: you create lists and sync them as plain text with Simplenote. It works similarly to TaskPaper; there’s a plain-text format for creating and checking off list items, but within the app you have a full GUI. You can use it for task lists, grocery lists, tracking movies you want to watch… whatever you’d normally keep in a list. Then it gets tagged as “Listary” and synced to Simplenote.

When using Listary on the iPhone, you get features for adding and deleting items, manipulating order and checking off list items. Grab your list with nvALT or any Simplenote client (including the web app) and you can edit it as plain text, and your changes show up back in Listary. Nice.

Listary is built for the iPhone, costs $2.99 and is available in the iTunes App Store.

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at iOS app review: Listary

PromptDown for iOS: Mobile Markdown Teleprompter

Brett — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 01:10:07 +0000

I recently wrote a tiny web app called PromptDown to let me drop in some Markdown (or plain text) and use it as a teleprompter for screencast voiceovers. I wasn’t going to put any more time into it, as it did what I needed. Then it started to bug me that it didn’t work on my iPad, which could actually be really handy. So my lunch break—fine, and an extra half an hour—went to making it work a little more smoothly as an iPhone/iPad app. It’s also ready to install as a web app, so you can go full-screen with it.

The concept is exactly the same: tap the main text field to clear it, type or paste your text, then tap the prompt button to open the prompt view. A single tap will start scrolling, a double tap will exit, and dragging up or down will allow you to fast forward or rewind. On the iPhone, it actually works best in landscape mode, allowing the words to be big enough to see while still fitting enough on the screen that it’s not ridiculously slow. I haven’t added any speed controls to it, which I may do at some point. For now, it’s on and off.

Point your mobile browser to http://brettterpstra.com/share/promptdown/mobile.html and give it a try. Tap the plus button (on the iPhone) or the “send to” icon (on the iPad) to add the app to your homescreen and be able to use it full-screen. This version actually works well in Safari and Firefox on the desktop, too.

Neat.

Prompt screen on iPad

Edit screen on iPhone 4

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at PromptDown for iOS: Mobile Markdown Teleprompter

HomeControl: Local Mac control for iPhone

Brett — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 02:31:37 +0000

I tried out a tip recently for controlling a Mac via Mobile Safari on your iPhone, and it got me thinking, which is often dangerous. I put together this little web app today as a proof of concept (that got a little out of hand). It basically provides a full interface for volume control, application starting and stopping and many iTunes functions, including volume and EQ. All features provide interface feedback and update you with current info from your Mac.

Video preview

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTcISVU4Nf4

YouTube Link…

Setting up your web server

To run it, you need to run your local web server as your own user. This is, of course, a major security risk and completely inadvisable if your local web server is open to outsiders in any way. Mine’s not, so I didn’t put too much time into figuring out a more secure way to do this. If you have any clues in that area, let me know and I’ll post them.

To run your local web server as a different user, you need to edit /etc/apache2/httpd.conf. You’ll need to edit it as root, so use sudo to launch your text editor of choice (e.g. sudo vi /etc/apache2/httpd.conf). If you, like me, just use TextMate’s mate command, you’ll be prompted for a password when you save.

Locate the lines:

User _www
Group _www

Change them to:

User yourusername
Group staff

You’ll also need to enable PHP, if you haven’t already. If you haven’t, locate the line that starts with:

#LoadModule php5_module

Just remove the hashmark at the beginning (#) to turn PHP on.

Now, at the command line, type sudo apachectl graceful to restart the server under the new user. If everything is in place, you’ll be able to run HomeControl without a hitch now. Turn on Web Sharing in System Preferences > Sharing to keep the web server running through reboots and logouts.

Installing HomeControl

Just download the zip file at the end of this post and unzip it into your ~/Sites folder. If you prefer to have it elsewhere, or have a custom folder set up for Apache, it will run just fine in any folder, as long as you can access it from a web browser on the local network.

Next, point your web browser to the folder. If you put the ‘homecontrol’ folder directly in ~/Sites, you should be able to reach it at the url http://computer_name.local/~Username/homecontrol. You need to know the name of the computer it’s on (set in System Preferences > Sharing, at the top), and your username on that system, substituting each in the appropriate place in the url.

Once you’ve loaded the page and tested it out, use the “+” icon at the bottom of Mobile Safari’s web browser to add an icon to your home screen which will take you directly there in the future, and will run the app full-screen.

Customizing HomeControl

Since I know not everybody who wants to try this out is going to be ready to hack into the jQuery and PHP, I made quite a few bits of the app modifiable with simple HTML edits. If you’re comfortable with that, you can change the list of applications and add iTunes features quite easily.

Application launcher

Locate the div with the id “apps”
Find the unordered list (
- Edit or copy and edit existing lines by changing only the name of the application in the first span
- Use the exact displayed name of the application you want to control, and HomeControl will pass it to the PHP exec function
iTunes functions
- Locate the div with the id “itunes”
- Find the unordered list inside of it with the id “itunescmd”
- Add new features by copying an existing line and changing the rel attribute and the text of the link
  - The rel attribute passes the actual iTunes AppleScript command, which will be appended to a ‘tell application "iTunes" to’ line and passed to osascript
  - The text of the link is the title which will appear in the menu
iTunes EQ Presets
- Locate the div with the id “ituneseq”
- Find the unordered list inside of it
- Edit the text of the links in the list with the exact title of the preset you want to control
- Add or remove list items as desired
Startup screen and icon
- Edit homecontrolicon.png in the homecontrol folder to customize the app’s icon on the homescreen.
- Edit hc_startup.png in the homecontrol folder to customize the startup screen.
- If you’ve installed the web app, delete the icon and reinstall from Mobile Safari to see the new images.
Advanced customization

If you’re handy with the jQuery, the PHP and the HTML, you can do a lot with the examples in the code. It’s very much a proof-of-concept, and intended to be a jumping point for more experimentation, so have at it.

The app currently uses the jQTouch library, but mostly for the CSS. It has very few dependencies on the API, so it should be a relatively trivial matter to switch to a different library. It does rely quite heavily on jQuery, though.

The main PHP/osascript calls are in functions.php. All functions are called using jQuery’s $.get function, which makes Ajax calls to the functions.php file in the background and receives updates on completion.

Have fun, hopefully my horrible waste of time will be someone else’s inspiration…

Main Screen

Applications Screen

iTunes controls

Download

Download
HomeControl — A web app—designed to run on a local server and be accessed over the local network—which provides control over volume, iTunes features and application launching. This is a skeleton for further experimentation. More Info

Related posts:
Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at HomeControl: Local Mac control for iPhone

Clippable updated, goes mobile

Brett — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 16:01:12 +0000

I’ve pushed out an update to Clippable, for better or worse. In addition to the previously added line number removal for code blocks, it removes spans used in TextMate formatted code and adds some keyboard shortcuts:

Left arrow: switch to light on dark
Right arrow: switch to black on white
Delete key: return to normal formatting
Escape key: return to original page

These features are added without modifying the original bookmarklet, so if you’ve got it installed, you’ve got the goodies already. Otherwise, head over to the Clippable bookmarklet page and try it out.

The big news, though, is the introduction of Clippable Mobile. It’s a work in progress, but installs on an iPhone and makes use of the special formatting options available in Mobile Safari. It shrinks images, cuts off code blocks, etc., making every attempt to provide a readable page that doesn’t scroll horizontally. There are occasions where it fails on first attempt, but running it again right away fixes everything. I’m still working on figuring out why that happens… a little sleep will probably help. Head over to the Clippable Mobile page on your iPhone and follow the instructions to install it. Bug reports are welcome!

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Clippable updated, goes mobile

Designing Draw

Brett — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 04:21:21 +0000

Erica Sadun recently released her latest app, Draw (iTunes link), into the wilds of the App Store. I take a special interest in this release because I designed the interface for it from the ground up. Erica, of course, made all of the magic happen; she’d take my photoshop sketches and send them back as amazing working interfaces. In the end, it was a really fun process to go through and Erica was great to work with. Here’s a quick walk-through of the design process.

I started with a choice between a chalkboard motif and something more pencil-and-paper based. Erica made that decision pretty easy, and we moved forward with a “sketchbook” look. The pencil picker was an interesting challenge, I needed to make them small and compact and Erica needed to make them, um, work. A little back and forth and she had a working model using my tiny little pencils that even the largest-fingered user would be able to use.

At first, I was mixing hand drawn elements and photorealistic icons, which I ditched in favor of a more congruous hand-drawn aesthetic overall. This included redesigning the more traditional “HUD” slider to be a piece of paper as well. The nub of translucent black originally used to pull the HUD up turned into a paperclip, attached to a slightly discolored piece of paper which slid over the main panel to reveal additional options. Whereas the HUD would have been suited by a typical exponential tween, the paper aesthetic required a little more cartoonish animation, which Erica accomplished adeptly with a nice bounce.

The icons went through quite a few permutations before I gave up on finding the right brush in Illustrator. Eventually, I drew the icon elements (on the same sketchpad I scanned to make the final paper textures) and scanned them in, cleaned them up and turned them into icons. As the sliding elements and icons became less “modern,” the paper textures and hand-drawn elements became less “antique,” and soon they met in the middle in a more harmonic interface.

The color changed over the course of the mockups, eventually ending up on a more neutral blue-grey. It looks dull and dead next to the more “antiqued” previous generations, but it’s much easier to create your own drawings on a neutral page, so I decided to keep things grey. I think it works well for the end user.

The best part of working with Erica is that she could make any of my little visual ideas “work.” In programming my own apps, I often pull some punches because I don’t have the chops to pull them off quickly. It makes a big difference working with someone who knows the iPhone SDK inside and out. I think the finished 1.0 version of Draw is a slick, easy-to-use app that will be fun for all ages.

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at Designing Draw