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Friday Favorite: Handbrake bridges the gap between DVDs and my iPad
Fact: It is often ridiculously cheaper to buy physical DVDs off Amazon than to purchase the same material in an existing digital format from your vendor of choice, like iTunes. Case in point, a friend of mine and I recently started watching Conviction, a one-season series that broadcast a few years ago. Shipped via Amazon Prime (unfortunately not Amazon Prime Air), the three-disc set cost all of US$3-7 depending on which day you shopped for it. Amazon prices jump around a lot day by day. The same series would have cost $20 at iTunes. Ripping DVDs does take extra time -- both for shipping the product as well as performing the rips, but the results are satisfying. One of our TUAW staffers adds, "I always get a Blu-ray/DVD combo pack. I rip the DVD and keep the Blu-ray for when I care about the quality of picture." Enter Handbrake, our Friday Favorite of the week. From disc, it takes just a few steps in Handbrake (donationware see this, thanks evcjackson) to transform episodes to iPad-ready formats. You start by scanning the contents of a DVD, a process which takes a few minutes, and can sometimes be the most frustrating part of the sequence. Once scanned, you select which episodes you wish to rip (typically the items that are 40-odd minutes long), and add them to a processing queue. Click Start and let Handbrake do its work. Handbrake's presets simplify the process of converting files, ensuring that the ripped files are perfect for iPad viewing, as an example. Built-in presets also include iPhone and Apple TV. Handbrake will never win awards for interface beauty or simple GUIs. If you're willing to work with the presets on offer, however, and have the patience to Google up some basic how-to instructions, Handbrake provides a terrific solution for quick, easy, effective DVD rips. It's a reliable, time-proved tool with great utility, which is why we made it today's Friday Favorite. Got a favorite app of your own? Suggest it in the comments. Maybe we'll cover it in an upcoming Friday Favorite column.
Friday Favorite: Jimdo
Back in the "good old days," Apple had a nice little app called iWeb that was part of the iLife suite. It was designed to let anyone easily design and publish a website, and despite some failings, it did a pretty good job. iWeb has been ignored by Apple for some years now, and the demise of MobileMe meant that hosting of those sites disappeared unless you knew the secret of moving the site code to another host. Other easy website creators are around and I've probably tried all of them. Lately my attention was drawn to a service called Jimdo, mainly because they offer a free hosting option and also because they have a new free iOS app for creating and editing content. It's this service (free to $240/year) and the accompanying app that are my Friday Favorite this week. The Service I teach a basic website/blogging class at the nearby community college on a regular basis, so I like to get an idea of what tools are available to the general public for creating websites. I've demoed everything from Wordpress.com and Blogger to Squarespace and Barley, and now I think it's time to introduce my students to Jimdo as well. Anyone with a Mac, PC or even "just an iPad or iPhone" can get to work with Jimdo almost immediately. Like many of the "website builder" genre, Jimdo is a website on which you sign up for an account and are presented with a variety of templates that you can then customize. For many site builders, customization means that you can change the name of the site and perhaps choose a color scheme. Jimdo offers more than that, providing a number of layouts with each template, as well as the ability to customize text attributes and colors. But that's not all – if you have the ability and desire, you can even get in and create templates -- CSS and HTML editors are at your fingertips. How did I get interested in Jimdo? I am setting up a simple website with tips on how to set up and use a particular model of amateur radio handheld transceiver, and I didn't want any costs associated with it -- at least not yet. Jimdo had just released the iOS app, so I thought I'd give it a workout. Setting up the free account took no time at all, and then I went in and selected a template that wasn't too offensive (at least to my eyes). From that point, adding content is quite simple. You add elements to any page to contain content, and there are a wide variety of elements to choose from: headings, photos, text, text with embedded photos, columns, vertical spacing, tables, photo galleries, file download links, forms, horizontal lines, a guest book, a "blog display," video, Flickr and Google Maps embeds, HTML widgets, store items and catalogs, and a handful of social media plugins. Like iWeb, if you can't find a built-in tool to enhance your website, you can always use the HTML widgets to add features. There's a web commerce piece that's available to any user -- the total number of possible products in your virtual store is limited to five with PayPal payments only for the free accounts, but with the more expensive accounts, the stores can have unlimited products and take almost any form of payment. One very nice feature is that all of the site templates also include mobile equivalents, so your site is easy to view on any sort of smartphone. Each template has a variety of mobile templates to choose from, so it's easy to find one that expresses the look and feel of your site on a mobile device. So, if you have a Jimdo site set up and running, what can you do with the new iOS app? The App The Jimdo app is definitely 1.0 material, but it shows a tremendous amount of promise. My biggest complaint at this point is that it doesn't support all of the elements, so adding a blog entry -- as an example -- cannot be done from the app. Unfortunately, this can't be done from a mobile browser like Safari or Chrome for iOS, either. So what does the app actually let you do? At this time, the elements that are accessible with the tap of a plus sign are headings, text, photos, text with photos, and photo galleries. The latter element is perfect if you're setting up a photography or travel website, since adding photos from the iPhone/iPad photo library is a snap. For websites that are rather simple in layout and only contain text, headings, and images, the tools in the app are sufficient to let you design and maintain a website. It's just if you're planning on adding those other elements that you're going to have to resort to using your big boy computer and put the iPad or iPhone away. The Bottom Line There are a lot of website creation tools and sites out there. If you're interested in building anything from a free blog to an online commerce empire, Jimdo has something for you. The template designs are a good start, the ability to customize adds polish to your site, and the limited ability to make changes from anywhere with the iOS app is a bonus as well. I'm hopeful that future versions of the app will add all of the capabilities that are available from a desktop web browser.
Friday Favorite: RadarScope for iOS provides detailed weather insight
TUAW fans know that I'm a big weather fanatic, and my home state -- Colorado -- offers a wide range of weather conditions to keep residents on their toes. One app that has become a favorite of mine very quickly is RadarScope (US$9.99). The app was created by Base Velocity LLC, which also offers the RadarScope TV app ($499.99) for TV meteorologists to use for professional broadcast use. RadarScope is definitely aimed at a much broader audience, but does a lot of the same things that its professional counterpart does. RadarScope is described as "a specialized display utility for weather enthusiasts and meteorologists that allows you to view NEXRAD Level 3 and super-resolution radar data along with Tornado, Severe Thunderstorm, Flash Flood Warnings and predicted storm tracks issued by the National Weather Service." %Gallery-195761% The app has been getting a workout over the past week, since the state has seen tornadoes, severe thunderstorms and flash floods in just a handful of days! The information that is viewable on-screen on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch include reflectivity, velocity, dual-polarization and other products from the Next-Generation Radar (NEXRAD) or TDWR (Terminal Doppler Weather Radar) sites in the US, Guam and Puerto Rico. RadarScope provides a list of weather alerts for the entire US in a notification bubble on the screen; I wish that there was a setting for limiting that to just a state or region. When launched for the first time, the app displays a full US map; one can either tap on the familiar Location Services button in the lower-left corner of the display, or manually tap and drag to center the display on your locale. You then select local NEXRAD sites; in my state, there are two that cover the region in which I live (KFTG, KPUX) as well as a TDWR site at Denver International Airport. The initial display shows the popular "SuperRes Reflectivity" Doppler Radar product, which can be extremely useful in determining where severe weather is likely to occur. During a series of storms last weekend, I was able to see the classic "hook echo" of two tornadoes that touched down in other parts of the Colorado Front Range. Last night, we had strong storms that brought torrential rains to the Denver area, and I was able to tell from several of the radar products provided by RadarScope that my neighborhood was going to be spared from the flash flooding that occurred elsewhere. To see how weather is developing, you can tap a play button (also in the lower-left corner of the screen) to show an animation of the last six images from the NEXRAD site. Warnings for any severe weather are outlined on the map -- red for tornado warnings, yellow for severe thunderstorms and green for flash floods. One of my favorite features for showing details to others (my long-suffering wife, since the cat doesn't care...) is the annotation pencil. Need to point out something? Just draw a light blue line or arrow on the image with your finger. Another handy tool found on the radar selection bar near the top of the screen provides a measuring tool. This was useful during last weekend's tornadoes, when I was measuring just how far the storm tracks were from major population centers. In addition to the NOAA weather products, RadarScope also offers content from iMapWeather. Subscribers to AllisonHouse severe weather products can also log into their accounts to view those products. If you're a member of Spotter Network, you can log into the app to report your location and see where other spotters are currently stationed. For those who are interested in learning more about how to read NEXRAD images, there are a number of websites that provide detailed information on how to decipher what you're viewing. Advanced amateur meteorologists, storm spotters and weather buffs alike can find a lot to like about RadarScope.
Friday Favorite: Using Zapier to automate my workflow (Updated)
Recently, the TUAW staff talked about their workflow, and the tools they use to keep their day moving smoothly. One detail that didn't come out in my contribution is my growing usage of automation tools to help me get things done. I'm an avid IFTTT user, using the web service to send tasks to my children's iPad or mood updates to my Jawbone Up. Recently, though, I found myself needing to do a complex task that fell outside the capability of IFTT. That's when I discovered Zapier, a web-automation service very similar to IFTTT. Zapier is an online tool that taps into the APIs of over 200 different web services. It includes major services like Evernote and Dropbox as well as niche ones like Campfire, Freshbooks and Github. You can create a "zap" that pulls data from one service and then performs a task based on that data. These zaps run automatically every 15 minutes and can be turned on or off as needed. In my case, I needed a quick and efficient way to take the contents of an email in Gmail and send it to a shared Google spreadsheet. For a while, I tried copy and paste to move the subject, body and other details into my Google spreadsheet one cell of data at a time, but that task was extremely tedious and time consuming. I looked to Google to see if it had some built-in tools that would let me easily and automatically send data between the two services, but I found none. It was only after hours of searching through other email task-management solutions that I stumbled upon Zapier. Zapier supports the major Google services, which means it can plumb data from Gmail and then send it to Google Docs. The granularity of control available to you in Zapier is fantastic. I was able to set up a zap that would scan my Gmail account for emails with the label "app review" and then add those emails as new rows to a Google spreadsheet. I could pick the timestamp as column one in the spreadsheet row, the subject as column two and the body as column three. All I have to do now is label an email and wait for my zap to run. It is such an elegant and easy solution to a problem that had been plaguing me for weeks. This only scratches the surface of what you can do with Zapier. Zapier is available for you to try for free for 14 days. Once your trial is over, you can choose a free plan, which provides you with five zaps that perform a task every 15 minutes. You get up to 100 tasks per month for free. You can purchase additional zaps and tasks starting at US$15 per month for the basic plan which includes 20 zaps and 3,000 tasks. If you want zaps to run faster than every 15 minutes, you can purchase a business plan for $49/month. This plan gives you 15,000 tasks and 50 zaps that run every five minutes. Update: As pointed out by Rohan Sharma, this same automation can be accomplished with a Google Apps scripting macro in the Google spreadsheet. The script uses Google's API to read your Gmail messages and enter that data in the spreadsheet. This is more or less what Zapier does for you when you set up your zaps, which is why I chose the service. I started down the path of scripting, but it was much more involved and time consuming than I wanted. As mentioned above, I wanted something easy to implement. It's worth mentioning the macro option as those with experience in this type of scripting may want to forgo Zapier and venture out with their own code. For the rest of us who prefer to let others do the heavy work of scripting, Zapier is an excellent tool.
Decompress with The Unarchiver
When I was asked to review The Unarchiver 2.7, a free decompression utility from Dag Ågren/WAHa, I thought "Who needs this program, when Mac OS X opens most common archive formats?" I quickly found out that thousands of people rely on The Unarchiver to do tasks that lie beyond the scope of built-in Archive Utility.app found in OS X. First I spoke to a loyal user, Barry Porter, an Apple Consultants Network member from Delray Beach, Fla. He said, "I use it everyday. It's great. I haven't found an archive it can't open. I use it because the built-in program is very limited in what it can create and open. You never need to open the program, it just works in the background unarchiving stuff." That's a glowing recommendation, so I put The Unarchiver to my own test. Back in the old days, it was common practice to archive files by compressing them so that they fit on a floppy disk or CD. If you happen to have saved those files onto a hard drive socked away for safekeeping, today you are hard-pressed to open those files. The Unarchiver can decompress many file types, so rejoice, because you can actually open DiskDoubler, Compact Pro and PackIt files now. I dug up some seriously old files to test The Unarchiver. I found some .sit files from 1994 and The Unarchiver opened them. Oh joy! Anyone need an Macintosh FTP list from 1995? (Curiously though, my search for files created before 1999 found over 1000 files created in 1969. I'm pretty sure that's not right! Must be a backup from a crashed drive... but I digress...) If you use more current formats and various download sites, you may encounter RAR or Tar files. No problem for The Unarchiver there either. If you find bugs or have a problem, Dag Ågren maintains an old-school support board on which you can ask questions. Also included is support for over 29 languages and DOS and Windows formats. To install, you only need to download it from the App Store. The program runs in the background. When you double-click on the application, all you see is the Preferences window. The only time you have to interact with the program is to give it permission to write to a folder, if you want to extract an archive into the same folder in which it lives. If you're curious and want to know exactly how many different archive formats exist, first look at The Unarchiver Supported formats page. Second, take a gander at Wikipedia's "List of archive formats." This handy page explains all of the file extensions used on various platforms for archived and compressed formats. In short, if you need to open archives of any flavor, you can't go wrong installing The Unarchiver. If you like it, you can donate to help Dag Ågren's development efforts for other programs too. Requirements: OS X 10.6.0 or later
Friday Favorite: Type2Phone
Type2Phone (US$4.99) is one of the most practical tools in my development toolbox. It emulates a Bluetooth keyboard from your Mac. With it, you type to your iOS device using your normal desktop keyboard. While this may not sound like a big thing for many iOS users -- after all, the onboard keyboards and new dictation features streamline text entry -- it is a huge deal for devs and IT coordinators who have to keep typing similar things into apps and settings, over and over again. For example, take Game Center development. You usually work with many different accounts, testing to see how access works for new users, for those with a good history of application use or for those who have unlocked certain achievements. In a normal debug session, you may sign out and sign in with various credentials dozens of times. Type2Phone makes that a practical exercise in testing instead of torment. Or, take today. I was trying to set up a SOCKS proxy system and had to keep typing addresses for various configurations. Once again Type2Phone came to the rescue. It's so much more practical to type or paste longwinded URLs like http://10.0.0.1:8888/Public/socks.pac from my home desktop than to laboriously tip-tip-tap it on the phone or iPad. Type2Phone was designed smartly, with re-use in mind. I long ago synced it to my primary dev units. Now, I just select each unit from the in-app pop-up list, and I'm ready to type right away. To be fair, there are a few unhappy reviews over at the Mac App Store, but they describe situations (primarily beachballs) that I have not encountered, and I'm a pretty heavy user of the product. For me, Type2Phone is an essential software component. My development life would be way harder without it. And that's why I consider it my Friday favorite for this week.
Friday Favorite: CommandQ for Mac
CommandQ is a Mac utility that stops you from accidentally quitting apps when using the keyboard shortcut "⌘" (or command) and "Q". Unfortunately, we are all susceptible to moments of human error. This means, with the ⌘ + Q shortcut, we sometimes quit apps we don't mean to. Perhaps when we're meaning to hit ⌘ and W or ⌘ and the TAB key. I know I've done it too many times to count! Thankfully, there's an app for that! CommandQ is a Mac utility app that stops apps from quitting unless you press and hold down the ⌘ + Q shortcut for a short period of time. This gives you a moment to catchup with your mistake and let go before the app quits. It's a straightforward concept, but has the potential to save you a lot of frustration and stress. CommandQ lets you customize the period of time it takes for ⌘ + Q to take effect, from half a second to two seconds. You can also specify which apps CommandQ works with, so it's only the important apps which require a longer ⌘ + Q press to quit. CommandQ is a simple, well-designed app that will go largely unnoticed until it saves you from an unfortunate mistake. It costs US$3.99 or is available as a free trial for 30 days. It's not available on the Mac App Store, but you can get it from the CommandQ website here.
Friday Favorite: Sock Puppets
Sock Puppets allows just about anyone to quickly and easily create short animated movies using not only sock puppet characters, but (via in-app purchases) aliens, politicians and Halloween characters. The adorable app is from a software company Smith Micro -- not exactly known for its consumer wares. Sock Puppets is powered by Anime Studio, however, and some time ago the company bought up applications like Poser, and now offers some cool specialized visual artist tools. As for Sock Puppets, I can tell you the app is a lot of fun. My kids have already created a number of short films with it. The free version comes with a few basic sock puppets, but for about $5 you can unlock all the added characters, plus extended recording and the ability to save to your camera roll. There's also a fully unlocked version of the app for $4. It's well worth it. Basic recording time is 30 seconds, but extended is 90 -- just enough time for kids to get in enough story. Creating animated puppet shows To create a video you select your puppets, a background, some props and tap the record button. The app detects voice, and attempts to move the mouth of the puppet along with the vocals. The puppet animations are well-done although more than once the audio clipped, causing a small glitch in some movies. Since this isn't a pro app, you're not going to see extensive support for phonemes or the ability to separate vocals from music -- it's just mostly going with the overall sound. Still, it's quite good and looks fluid and natural. Combined with the animations used when moving a character around, it's a lot of fun to see. While recording you can move your puppet around, not just side to side, but in a pseudo-3D which scales the puppets up or down, depending. Not all puppets can do this, as the sock puppets are locked into sideways motion only. In-app purchased puppets like the aliens and Halloween characters can move all over and can be resized during the animation. My kids enjoyed scaling a creature up or down as if they were shrinking or growing. What's cool is you can just tap and move any character at any time, and pinch to scale them. Sock Puppets alters your voice as well on a per-puppet basis. You can tweak the settings of the voice changes, customizing them to your liking. I found the defaults to be quite pleasing and well-done. They matched the look of the characters, especially (my favorite) the aliens. Recording is easy enough, as there's a record button available while you move stuff around, but saving your masterpiece to the camera roll will require an in-app purchase. You can share your video to YouTube without this, although the export can take a while. Conclusion While there are a lot of apps to distract kids out there, I found Sock Puppets easy to use and a lot of fun. My kids agree -- they created over a dozen short movies within a few days, and all of them looked excellent. If you're willing to spend $4 you can buy the "complete" version with all characters, sets and utilities unlocked. I'm hopeful Smith Micro will expand Sock Puppets with more characters in the future, but it also has me more intrigued with their pro apps (which was perhaps the goal as well). We'll keep an eye on the consumer efforts from the company going forward, especially if Sock Puppets is an indication that the company is looking to provide more of these fun tools.
Friday Favorite: Due
Yesterday around the TUAW water cooler a number of us expressed our love of Due, an app for Mac and iOS that is basically a simple timer/reminder application (my original review here). After trying dozens of timer apps, I think Due wins for a number of features that make it stand out from a very crowded field. After all, your iDevice comes with a timer in the Clock app, and there's Apple's Reminders app. While Reminders syncs with iCloud, your alarms in the Clock app do not. Due can help you stay focused and never overcook a boiling egg again. Due's interface is simple as can be. There are three views: Reminders, Timers and Logged Reminders. You can quickly set a reminder for later in the day, or whenever. Due accepts natural language instructions, so you could say "next Thursday at 1 PM" and it'll set a reminder alarm for just that. Note that Due doesn't integrate with the built-in Reminders app, so I'm only referring to reminders (lower case) within Due itself. Once a reminder has gone off or you check it off manually, those go into Logged Reminders. This is handy if you need to recall what you did or if you need to remind yourself of the same thing again, later. I tend to use the timer function more frequently (as I use my calendar for appointments and OmniFocus for repeating tasks and "to do" items). I have a 25-minute timer for Pomodoros, a 5-minute timer for breaks and a couple of others for things I need to do at some point in the day, but things which require me to focus on just that thing for an allotted amount of time. By doing this, I help my squirrel-like brain stay focused on some critical tasks throughout the day, but it also helps me be flexible enough to not dread going out of being flexible in my daily schedule (more on this in next week's Productivity Tip). Best of all, Due has just the right number of preferences. From changing sounds to setting a snooze time, Due can be as intrusive or quiet as you like. You can even change the alarms to use Notification Center or Growl -- handy especially if you use something like Prowl. I particularly like the option to "suppress alerts on launch and wake" because I hate opening my Mac to have 30 alarms from past events going off all at once. Is it just me or is that "throw a million notifications at me on wake" thing seem a very obtrusive, Windows 98-like behavior? But I digress. Due is a rock-solid, beautifully designed app. iCloud sync works flawlessly (you can also use Dropbox) across my Macs and iDevices, meaning I always have what I need where I need it. Most importantly, Due keeps me focused on doing things, and not setting myself up to do things, which is precisely what technology should be doing. You can get the Mac app here or the iOS version here.
Friday Favorite: Using AppleScript to work with tasks in Things 2
A few weeks ago I purchased Things 2 when it was on sale in the Mac App Store. I've used the demo before and have always enjoyed the simplicity of the Things interface and the power of its tagging system. One difficulty that I faced with Things is its closed environment, which keeps all your tasks inside the app. That's great if you work only with Things, but not so convenient if you want to share your tasks with other apps or other people. You can drag and drop your tasks individually to other apps like OS X Calendar, but the easiest way to export your tasks is to use AppleScript and transfer them in bulk. One script I regularly use is this export Things to text script from Dexter Ang (thepoch) on github. This script exports the Things database to the desktop as Things Backup.txt. You can tweak the script to export certain parts of the Things database like your Today tasks or Next tasks. This is very handy as you can then edit the text file and upload it to Google Docs or any other app that'll import and format a text document. Another one of my favorite scripts is this Reminder export script from NightLion.net. This script lets you export all the tasks in your Today list and import them into the OS X Reminders app. I've been using this script each morning to pull my tasks down into Reminders, which I then use to set flexible notifications for the tasks. The last script that I've adopted is this Mail To Things script posted by marekz on the Cultured Code forums. This script lets you select a message in your OS X Mail inbox and send it quickly to Things. The task will appear in your Things Inbox with the subject as the name of the task and a link to the email in the notes. These are just a few scripts that I have found during my initial weeks with Things. If you have any favorite scripts, please share them in the comments. If you want to create your own scripts, you should check out Cultured Code's PDF guide to using AppleScript with Things as well as our growing list of AppleScripts for OS X.
Friday Favorite: Use Instashare to easily share files between your Mac and iPhone
Instashare recently landed in the iOS App Store and it addresses a common problem encountered by many Apple users -- how do you transfer a file quickly and easily between your iOS devices and your Mac? Instashare is as easy to setup as it is to use. All you have to do is install the iOS app on your iPhone and the OS X app on your Mac. The OS X version sits in your menu bar and lets you drag and drop files you want to transfer to your iPhone. As soon as you drop a file, an alert appears on your iPhone asking you if you want to accept the file. Once you receive a file on your iOS device, you can preview it in the Instashare app or open it with a third-party app. On the reverse side, you can use the Instashare app to select a photo from your camera roll or a file on your iPhone and send it to your Mac. Transferred files are automatically saved to the Downloads folder, but you can select a different folder in the settings. You can transfer images, PDFs, MP3 files and more. Instashre isn't just an iPhone to Mac transfer tool. You can also send files between other local iPhones or iPod touches. It'll also work on the iPad, but you have to install it as an iPhone-native app and then scale it up. Instashare is available for free from the iOS App Store. There is a US$0.99 in-app purchase that'll remove the ads from the app. The OS X version is available for free from Instashare's website.
Friday Favorite: Timehop traces your digital footsteps through the past
Human brains are funny things when it comes to time. We spend a lot of our mental energy thinking about the future -- where to vacation, what to eat, when to quit and who to marry -- but what really fires our synapses is a little taste of the past. The future may be awesome and mysterious, but we can't remember things that haven't happened yet; memory is just as powerful as imagination, and more emotionally charged. Whole industries have grown up around our innate desire to remember more, longer and with higher fidelity than we could in the absence of a technological assist. That's what makes an app like Timehop so interesting; it hitches itself to our deep affinity for nostalgia while delivering a clever dose of spontaneous discovery. If an app's MO is to send me a daily notification, I usually delete it in short order; the daily reminder from Timehop, in contrast, has helped it work its way into my frequent rotation. Timehop's feature set is magically minimal. Sign in with Facebook, then point the app at your image-centric social media feeds (currently supported: Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram and Flickr) and your phone's camera roll. Wait a day. After that, every morning Timehop will crawl back into the mists and pull out what you were doing, or what you photographed, on the same day one/two/three or more years before. Within the Timehop app, you can re-share that moment with Timehop friends, flag as a favorite, comment or re-publish the status update or photo to Facebook or Twitter. It seems so simple, but it's surprisingly engaging -- almost-forgotten moments taking you by surprise, whether adorable or bittersweet. The service originally kicked off in February 2011 as 4SquareAnd7YearsAgo, an email-based rewind that shadowed your Foursquare history and told you where you'd been. Since January of last year, Timehop has centered on the app experience exclusively and let the email piece fade away. With leadership from Jonathan Wegener (who created one of my favorite transit apps, the NYC subway where-to-stand guide Exit Strategy) and venture backing from several NYC tech elites (OATV, Spark Capital, TechStars, Foursquare co-founders Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai, and shiny new MIT Media Lab faculty member Kevin Slavin), Timehop has the pedigree and the resources to shine. Even if you don't think the idea of reliving your past posts and snapshots sounds particularly appealing, give Timehop a try. You may discover something unexpected. Timehop is a free download in the iOS App Store for iOS 5 or higher.
Friday Favorite: Exif Everywhere reveals the data that's hidden in photos
Everyone enjoys a good photography-driven website, but folks with a technical eye can't look at an image without wondering what camera took that shot, what settings were used and where it was taken. Exif Everywhere from MyLove Company is a browser extension and desktop app that provides those details and more. Exif Everywhere operates either as a standalone desktop app or a browser extension in Firefox, Safari or Chrome. When browsing, all you have to do is place your cursor over an image and hit the Control key to reveal the EXIF data in another window. It worked with most websites that I tested. The biggest exceptions were the photo hosting websites like Flickr and SmugMug, which hide that information from the browser. The browser extension also shows different information depending on how images were processed. Some images had their EXIF data stripped during post-production and Exif Everywhere showed only the dimensions, file format and the app used in processing. Other images, uploaded with minimal processing, were filled with details like the f-stop, exposure time and the ISO. The OS X app is similar to the browser extension in that it shows you all the EXIF data contained in a photo. These details mirror the information you can see when you select "Get Info" from the contextual menu in Finder. Exif Everywhere not only shows the EXIF information; it also allows you to strip it from your images. With a simple click of a button, you can remove either the EXIF data or the GPS data from your photos. There's no bulk tool built into the app, so you will have strip your photo library one image at a time. Exif Everywhere is a handy utility for users who want to find out more about the images they see on the web or have stored on their hard drive. The app is packaged into a standalone OS X app that is installed separately from the browser extensions. This is useful as customers have the option to install one or both tools. Exif Everywhere is available for US$14.99. You can download it from the app's website or from the Mac App Store. There's also a 20-day free trial so you can try it, before you buy it.
Friday Favorite: Voila captures your screen with ease, on sale now
Given the issues with my former screen-capture app-of-choice Skitch, I recently went on the hunt for a replacement that can grab screenshots and handle video capture. I've finally landed on Voila. While it isn't perfect, Voila offers plenty of functionality and does almost everything I need. As is pretty standard for a screen-capture app, Voila lets you grab whatever is on your screen however you need it, either in a full-screen grab, from a specific window or from a drag-and-drop selection. You can grab videos in almost any configuration. I mostly use it for snapping rectangular pictures, but you can grab circular or polygonal pics as well. Voila even has an in-app browser and a connection to your webcam, for even more options. Once the picture has been captured, you can add annotations, blur or adjust it as you like and then export the file using an in-depth "Save As...". Unfortunately, this process isn't as simple as I'd like. You must hunt to find some functions, and while hotkeys can be set up, the Re-size function doesn't have a clear one. There's a re-size option on the save screen, so even when Voila doesn't have exactly what I'm looking for, it does have some fairly smart shortcuts. There are a few bugs in the app as well. One bug I'm getting recently has my pictures being saved as just a white screen rather than whatever I captured, but the support team has been more than ready to help with any problems or concerns. As for video capture, I think that's where Voila really shines. It's got a very powerful and steady video-capture functionality. You can select a window or draw a selection on the screen, and you can choose to use an external mic for audio, grab your computer's audio or use your Mac's internal mic as needed. Again, there are some small issues: The included YouTube connection won't accept videos if you've used a strange ratio when drawing a selection on the screen. But that's only a minor issue. I've still been able to just drag the videos out of the app, and then upload separately to YouTube. Voila isn't without its problems, but an app like this is designed for so many different use cases that it's not surprising there are a few hiccups. Plus, Voila is right in the middle of an awesome sale. It's only US$4.99 on the Mac App Store. If, like me, you were looking for a Skitch replacement with a little more functionality, Voila might be just what you need.
Friday Favorite: Haiku Deck for iPad concocts instant presentations
If long-suffering Dunkin' Donuts franchise owner Fred the Baker had decided to get an office job, chances are his early morning grumble would have been "Time to make the PowerPoint." Doing decks is part of every organization, from the military to not-for-profits to businesses of all sizes; even if you make the chore easier with Keynote, it's still a chore. Creating something that doesn't look like every other presentation is possible, but if you aren't gifted with design acumen it might not turn out like you hope. PowerPoint's automatic templating helps somewhat, but how about using your iPad to spice up a slide or two? Giant Thinkwell's free iPad app Haiku Deck may prove to be the spice rack for your flavorless decks. The idea is straightforward: use one of Haiku Deck's provided two-line templates for your slides and the app will search Creative Commons-licensed photos to provide a fitting visual complement to your verbiage. You can swap in your own local photos from the iPad or ones from social services; to share, upload your deck to the Haiku Deck site or export it to a PowerPoint file. The app is beautifully designed and easy to use; some of the free supplied templates are lovely, and there's a $14.99 optional pack of additional looks (or $1.99 per template, bought solo) if you're not thrilled with the built-in options. Yes, you can only use two lines of text per slide, so it's not ideal for bullet-heavy fiscal briefings. Yes, the results have a tendency to wander into Demotivators territory. But you can certainly use Haiku Deck to inspire a theme for a longer presentation built in a desktop app, or pull one or two key concept slides into a presentation that's begging for some creative zing. [hat tip AllThingsD]
Friday Favorite: Bartender
There comes a time in a power user's life when the number of his menu bar applications exceeds the amount of real estate in the menu bar, a condition made worse by primary applications with a lot of menus. The cure for this? A handy little app, which is still undergoing testing, called Bartender. Bartender will roll up menu bar items into one little drop-down menu bar item. That's pretty much it! You can have Bartender hide something entirely, or just pop it under the Bartender menu bar icon. Keep in mind this is still in beta, so many of my TUAW colleagues weren't able to put system icons into Bartender, but I was. Your mileage may vary, but while the app is in beta it is basically free. You can also choose to buy it now for $7.50, which is half what it will cost when it is out of beta. If, like me, your menu bar has exceeded the width of what your screen can handle, try Bartender. It's just what you were looking for.
Friday Favorite: Desktop Tidy
Part of my blogging workflow uses Skitch for screenshots. As a result, I wind up with images all over my desktop at the end of the day like, well, a messy desktop after a busy day. If you find yourself with files constantly cluttering your desktop as well, check out Desktop Tidy on the Mac App Store. It'll hide those files clogging up your workspace at intervals you set, from every few seconds to every few days. But wait, there's more! Desktop Tidy includes a ton of customization features. Sure, it stashes your files away in your Library folder where Spotlight won't index them (and Finder likes to hide the Library folder by default these days), but that's part of the beauty of the app. Using the menu bar, you'll easily see what files were sent over, make them come back, or search and organize them on the fly. Here's a neat trick: Ctrl-clicking an item in the menu will restore it to your desktop. There are filters for filetypes which will allow you to easily spot the files you may typically save to the desktop. In my case these are image files, and Desktop Tidy comes already configured to show a filter of images, easily accessed from the menu bar. In a way, this is easier than mucking about on the desktop itself. Yes there are other tools and ways to do this, but I think Tidy gives the user a ton of options and ease of use for a decent price (currently US$4.99). Check out Desktop Tidy if you just can't stand having all those files littering your desktop, no matter how tiny you make them.
Friday Favorite: PollEverywhere Mac Presenter grows up
When your job (or schoolwork) involves giving presentations to rooms full of more-or-less interested parties, you know how hard it can be to maintain a constructive level of audience attention. The economical cloud audience response system (ARS) provided by the mad scientists at PollEverywhere is a great way to spice up a session with quick, engaging multiple choice and full-text questions. PollEverywhere's polls display wonderfully on the web (if you've got the Flash player) and do well in Windows versions of PowerPoint, where the appropriate ActiveX control to embed the remote Flash animation is available. For Mac presentation apps, however, the path is not so smooth. Prior versions of the company's Mac Presenter app used a QuickTime workaround to display polls, but it was somewhat clunky and did not automatically cue up when the polling slide appeared on screen. Time for an improved approach. With the December 2011 release of the all-new Mac Presenter application, the polling experience is now hands-free and incredibly simple. The Mac Presenter app connects to your PollEverywhere hosted account and lets you embed polling references into Keynote or PowerPoint slides with a single click -- the poll identifiers end up as a block of XML code in the slide notes, so you can easily move polling slides from deck to deck. The rest is easy: you just draw a solid color box on your slide where you want the poll to show up. Like magic, when you present that slide, the Mac Presenter app will scale the poll display to cover just that placeholder box. True, it's a smidge more effort than the Windows PowerPoint configuration, but it's definitely worth it. PollEverywhere offers a free plan that allows up to 40 responses per poll, and business pricing for higher service levels starts at $15 per month. K-12 and higher-ed discounts are also available. Do you have a favorite Mac app, peripheral/accessory, cloud service or iOS app that you think deserves to be featured as a Friday Favorite? Be sure to let us know.
Friday Favorite: A bushel of educational apps for learning fun
A friend on Twitter asked me the other day if I had a list of the educational apps I have on my iPad. With all the reviews I have done, I was ashamed to admit that I've never taken the time to list those apps that I use on a regular basis with my children. I reached out to the other writers at TUAW and asked them the same question. Together, we compiled a list of our favorite learning apps for children, and wow, what a list. The apps are presented below in no particular order. NXTapp ($0.99) Khan Academy (Free) Elmo Loves ABCs ($4.99) Where's my water? ($0.99) Simple Physics ($0.99) Simply Find It ($1.99) SparkleFish ($0.99, 99-cent in-app purchases) My First Wood Puzzles: Dinosaurs (Free, $1.99 in-app purchase) Zoo Sounds ($1.99) Paper by FiftyThree (Free, in-app purchases of $2.99 for tools and $7.99 for everything) Plants HD for the iPad ($1.99) Discovery Kids Sharks ($4.99) Minecraft-Pocket Edition ($6.99; more game-ish, but building with blocks is learning, no?) Articulation Station (Free; sound packs are $2.99 to $5.99, full app is $49) Letter of the Day Interactive Activities ($1.99) AniMatch ($0.99) iBuildABCs ($0.99) Junior Bingo ($0.99) Rocket Speller (Free) Wood Puzzle USA Map ($1.99) Word Bingo ($0.99) Math Bingo ($0.99) Beginning Sounds Interactive Game ($0.99) Motion Math Hungry Fish (Free, in-app purchases from $2.99 up to $8.99) Letter Quiz ($1.99) Phonics Tic Tac Toe Interactive Game (Free) Sentence Maker (Free) Flashcards+ (Free, in-app purchases to get new voices) Word Jigsaw (Free, in-app purchases to get extra hints and unlock all the levels) Monster Coloring Book ($2.99) Math Tables ($1.99) Word Search + (Free, in-purchase of $1.99 for premium version) Missing Link (Free, in-app purchases for hints and extra levels) Bookworm ($2.99) If you have any educational apps you enjoy, please share them with us in the comments.
Friday Favorite: Satechi 12-port USB Hub
It's rare to come up with a Friday Favorite for something as seemingly ho-hum as a USB hub, but this particular model caught my eye a while ago when a colleague brought it with him on a project. "What is that?" I asked, wonderingly. The blue glow of the ports was so hypnotic that I nearly missed his explanation, "It's my favorite USB hub; I bring it with me everywhere." The Satechi 12-port hub wouldn't look out of place on the control deck of the Death Star. It comes in one color -- black -- and features two banks of ports that glow enticingly when switched on for power via the twin rocker switches at the back end of the unit. One bank includes six ports atop the hub; the second bank has five on top and one front-facing port. You can use the hub with or without the power adapter, but with it connected you can support self-powered devices; you can charge an iPhone (or multiple iPhones) with ease. iPads will trickle-charge ("No Charging" indicator on screen) but, like most hubs, the Satechi unit doesn't support the double-wattage port spec that the iPads need for rapid charge. You may not think you need twelve USB ports, but if you're dealing with flash drives or other peripherals, or if you have a MacBook Air and want to maximize your expansion options, the Satechi hub is a perfect fit. The hub currently retails for US$27.99 and comes with a power adapter and a one-meter extension cable. You can check out our other Friday Favorites, hardware and software alike, here.
