iphonehistory

[iphonehistory]

Launch Center Pro / Drafts / Buffer / TextExpander Touch Hack

I use Launch Center Pro all the time, mostly because I have more apps on my phone than is good for me and because LCP makes it so easy to perform specific actions in many of them from one central location.

The awesomeness of Drafts

Quite a few of the actions I have set up are to send text to Drafts, another app I use approximately a bajillion times every day.

I could just use the default ‘New Post to Drafts with text’ option within Launch Center Pro and then action the text from within the Drafts app. And I certainly wouldn’t be short of choices for ways to use, manipulate or save that text. I could even use one of the additional options from the Drafts Action Directory.

But because Drafts is made completely of win, and has its own extensive URL scheme, I can create an action in Launch Center Pro which will send the text to Drafts with a pre-defined action to be triggered and then have Drafts return me to Launch Center Pro.

It looks a little something like this:

drafts://x-callback-url/create?text=[prompt]&action=Buffer&x-success=launchpro%3A

[Federico Viticci over at MacStories has several examples of how you can chain actions with Drafts.]

My specified action, Buffer, uses an email action to send the text to my Buffer account to be posted as a Tweet later in the day. The benefit of the email approach, rather than the built-in 'Post to Buffer’ action in Drafts, is that the text gets sent in the background without needing to open a third app (ie Buffer).

Setting up Email to Buffer

This bit is easy. All you need is your super-secret Buffer email address. Buffer has an excellent guide to using email and the various short codes they offer.

In Drafts, you choose new email action.

Name: Buffer (or something awesome and personal to you)

To: Your super-secret Buffer email address

Subject: Select 'First Line’

Send in Background: On

To email to Buffer, you put the text of your post in the Subject of your email and the first link found in the body of your email gets appended to your Tweet/FB post.

While typing in Drafts itself, this is not a problem. You simply type two separate lines:

> This is the first line of my Draft, which will be the main text of my tweet. > http://2ndline.link/

This is all fine and well in Drafts, which has a full typing keyboard. There is, however, no 'return’ button on the LCP keyboard view; it’s replaced by 'Go’ (see pic).

Enter TextExpander Touch

Here, I use a tiny hack which relies on the fact that Launch Center Pro has full TextExpander Touch integration.

For this, the link you wish to append must be in your clipboard.

Simply set up a snippet in TextExpander Touch—I use /lk—which expands to:

> ↩ > %clipboard

Where ↩ is a blank line in which you’ve only typed a carriage return.

Bringing it all together

With your link already in your clipboard, fire up the Launch Center Pro action in the window above and type the text of your Tweet, followed by your TextExpander snippet.

So, I would type:

> This is the first line of my Draft, which will be the main text of my tweet./lk

which expands to:

> This is the first line of my Draft, which will be the main text of my tweet. > http://2ndline.link/

Launch Center Pro sends this to Drafts, which then sends it to Buffer in the background, and then returns me to Launch Center Pro.

Simples!

Why not just open Buffer and add a Tweet there, without all this malarkey?

Killjoy! Where’s the fun in that?

[iphonehistory]

[iphonehistory]

See if you can spot where "we" completely lost touch of reality.

[iphonehistory]

Apple Unveils Mac OS X

Next Generation OS Features New “Aqua” User Interface

MACWORLD EXPO, SAN FRANCISCO

January 5, 2000

Reasserting its leadership in personal computer operating systems, Apple® today unveiled Mac® OS X, the next generation Macintosh® operating system. Steve Jobs demonstrated Mac OS X to an audience of over 4,000 people during his Macworld Expo keynote today, and over 100 developers have pledged their support for the new operating system, including Adobe and Microsoft. Pre-release versions of Mac OS X will be delivered to Macintosh software developers by the end of this month, and will be commercially released this summer.

“Mac OS X will delight consumers with its simplicity and amaze professionals with its power,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s iCEO. “Apple’s innovation is leading the way in personal computer operating systems once again.”

The new technology Aqua, created by Apple, is a major advancement in personal computer user interfaces. Aqua features the “Dock” — a revolutionary new way to organize everything from applications and documents to web sites and streaming video. Aqua also features a completely new Finder which dramatically simplifies the storing, organizing and retrieving of files—and unifies these functions on the host computer and across local area networks and the Internet. Aqua offers a stunning new visual appearance, with luminous and semi-transparent elements such as buttons, scroll bars and windows, and features fluid animation to enhance the user’s experience. Aqua is a major advancement in personal computer user interfaces, from the same company that started it all in 1984 with the original Macintosh.

Aqua is made possible by Mac OS X’s new graphics system, which features all-new 2D, 3D and multimedia graphics. 2D graphics are performed by Apple’s new “Quartz” graphics system which is based on the PDF Internet standard and features on-the-fly PDF rendering, anti-aliasing and compositing—a first for any operating system. 3D graphics are based on OpenGL, the industry’s most-widely supported 3D graphics technology, and multimedia is based on the QuickTime™ industry standard for digital multimedia.

At the core of Mac OS X is Darwin, Apple’s advanced operating system kernel. Darwin is Linux-like, featuring the same Free BSD Unix support and open-source model. Darwin brings an entirely new foundation to the Mac OS, offering Mac users true memory protection for higher reliability, preemptive multitasking for smoother operation among multiple applications and fully Internet-standard TCP/IP networking. As a result, Mac OS X is the most reliable and robust Apple operating system ever.

Gentle Migration

Apple has designed Mac OS X to enable a gentle migration for its customers and developers from their current installed base of Macintosh operating systems. Mac OS X can run most of the over 13,000 existing Macintosh applications without modification. However, to take full advantage of Mac OS X’s new features, developers must “tune-up” their applications to use “Carbon”, the updated version of APIs (Application Program Interfaces) used to program Macintosh computers. Apple expects most of the popular Macintosh applications to be available in “Carbonized” versions this summer.

Developer Support

Apple today also announced that more than 100 leading developers have pledged their support for the new operating system, including Adobe, Agfa, Connectix, id, Macromedia, Metrowerks, Microsoft, Palm Computing, Quark, SPSS and Wolfram (see related supporting quote sheet).

Availability

Mac OS X will be rolled out over a 12 month period. Macintosh developers have already received two pre-releases of the software, and they will receive another pre-release later this month—the first to incorporate Aqua. Developers will receive the final “beta” pre-release this spring. Mac OS X will go on sale as a shrink-wrapped software product this summer, and will be pre-loaded as the standard operating system on all Macintosh computers beginning in early 2001. Mac OS X is designed to run on all Apple Macintosh computers using PowerPC G3 and G4 processor chips, and requires a minimum of 64 MB of memory.

[iphonehistory]

Writing from November, 2018:

Seven years ago, the fourth generation of Apple’s iPhone instigated a change in our perception of digital photography. Now – thanks to Google Photos – I’d like to reflect on my favorite shots of mine.

When iPhone 4 handsets began shipping in the Summer of 2010, I’d been carrying my first generation for three solid years – since its now history-stricken release, in fact – and its age started to become a problem. I’d drop it screen-down on a rock in the airport parking lot just before going back to school for my Junior year, splitting a crack in the screen that wouldn’t quite kill it – it was the demands of iOS 4 on its 412 MHz CPU and meager 128 MB of RAM that would ultimately cease its usability.

The single 2 megapixel rear-facing camera would surprise one at times, but was never lauded as anything but what it was – a mobile phone-bound sensor capturing very cellular-looking* images, but Steve Jobs wasn’t three minutes in to his iPhone 4 presentation at the June 2010 Worldwide Developer’s Conference before he pronounced the design’s closest possible “kin” to be “an old Leica camera,” associating his device with photography in its first impression. The equivalent of the first generation’s rear-facing camera could now be found facing you, and the fourth’s primary sensor now shot at 5 megapixels (2592 x 1936) with autofocus and 5x digital zoom, setting a fundamental smartphone sensor configuration standard that’s still adhered to by the industry.

After unleashing Google Photos upon the ~15,000 images on my home machine’s hard drive last year, I have been constantly reminded of my own photographic history – for better or worse – and regularly shown five, six, seven-year old snaps in a manner that wouldn’t have been possible (or have made any sense) before. Recently, I was astounded to find that I took many of the better shots with my iPhone 4, so I thought I’d share a few from my high-school days in loving memory of my trusty little rectangular companion.

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You’ve graduated high school, and the iPhone 6 Plus is blowing everyone’s minds with how big it is. You’re taking a semester off before college, which conveniently gives you time to focus on developing GBA4iOS. The past several months are a blur, but the response to GBA4iOS has been far better than you could have ever imagined; they even wrote about you in Time Magazine!

Love you, Riley.

[iphonehistory]

Join SpaceHey - the retro Social Network! Add me: spacehey.com/extratone

[iphonehistory]

The Three Genders

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Captured (via jailbreak) on my first generation iPhone some 4+ years into its life.

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An intimate conversation with - and using - my iPhone 4S demonstrating the losslessest possible audio capture example.

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remember last year when I discovered that an MU student launched a whole social service in the oughts that was actually prolific (locally) for at least two or three years?

well… iOS decided it was time to dwell on the memories.

[iphonehistory]

Tumblr for iPhone 3.0: Now available on the App Store

iPhone users rejoice! We’ve redesigned and rewritten the app from the ground up, so get ready for an even better Tumblr experience:

Sleeker Dashboard: High-res images, Spotify support, improved photosets, and more.

New post forms: Faster uploads and handy shortcuts (swipe the compose button up for camera, swipe left for text)!

Offline support: Post, like, reply, and reblog even when you’re not connected!

Speed: Faster, super-responsive interface.

Tag search and Radar!

Enjoy all these amazing features and much more! Download the app now.