A blog about life amidst technology.

Instacast for Mac Beta

May 1, 2013 by

I use Insta­cast on my iPhone to lis­ten to pod­casts (Insta­cast 3 in the App Store) and as nice as it is to have pod­casts on the go, I spend a good por­tion of my day at my lap­top play­ing a pod­cast on my iPhone which sits on my desk. Not a big deal but it does use my iPhone’s bat­tery while play­ing and so I often end up hav­ing my iPhone plugged in and charging.

Or as Stephen Hack­ett put it:

Finally, our long national night­mare of lis­ten­ing to our iPhones at our desks is com­ing to an end.

The Insta­cast for Mac beta is now avail­able to try out and I’m excited to give it a spin.

Gallery

I’ve been hang­ing on to Insta­cast 2 on my iPhone but it looks like I might finally have to take the plunge and upgrade to get Insta­cast Cloud sup­port for sync­ing of playlists and pod­casts between the Mac and iOS.

Filed Under: Apple, Podcasting Tagged With: , , ,

Marco Arment Sells a Majority Stake in Instapaper

April 25, 2013 by

Given the suc­cess of The Mag­a­zine, hard not to see this hap­pen­ing soon. From the post on Marco’s blog:

I’m happy to announce that I’ve sold a major­ity stake in Instapa­per to Beta­works. We’ve struc­tured the deal with Instapaper’s health and longevity as the top pri­or­ity, with incen­tives to keep it going well into the future. I will con­tinue advis­ing the project indef­i­nitely, while Beta­works will take over its oper­a­tions, expand its staff, and develop it further.

I was actu­ally think­ing about where Instapa­per was headed a lit­tle while ago and recently had tried out Pocket, which is an Instapa­per competitor/​clone. I really like Instapa­per but it has felt like the iOS app (Instapa­per in the App Store) hasn’t seen the design love that some­thing like The Mag­a­zine has gotten.

I’ll keep using Instapa­per until there’s some­thing about it that either pushes me away or a fea­ture in another app that draws me in. For now I don’t feel like there’s any rea­son to change and I trust Marco’s judge­ment in who he has sold Instapa­per to that they won’t destroy what he’s built any time soon.

Filed Under: iOS Apps Tagged With: , ,

Drafts v3

April 24, 2013 by

My favorite app that I just barely scratch the sur­face of using got a shiny new update. (App Store links: Drafts for iPhone, Drafts for iPad)

Ver­sion 3.0 includes:

  • Drafts Man­age­ment
  • Action Man­age­ment and Backup
  • Ever­note and Mes­sage Actions
  • Reminders Inte­gra­tion
  • Extended Key­board

Check out the ver­sion 3 blog post on agile​tor​toise​.com for full details and screen­casts or read the Mac­Sto­ries review.

Filed Under: Apple, iOS Apps, Nerds Tagged With: , ,

Audience Quality > Audience Quantity

April 22, 2013 by

Myke Hur­ley, on guest-​​posting duties over at 512pix​els​.net, wrote a great arti­cle titled Why I Stopped Car­ing About the Num­bers worth read­ing if you’re attempt­ing to cre­ate some­thing online where attract­ing and build­ing an audi­ence is an impor­tant part of what you have to do to have some sort of com­mer­cial success:

I have spo­ken with a hand­ful of peo­ple that oper­ate in the pod­cast­ing world about this and they all seem to agree with me — even though they all came to this con­clu­sion long before me — it is impor­tant to cre­ate work you are proud of and if you are con­sis­tent and you keep work­ing hard at it, you’ll get the out­come it deserves.

In my expe­ri­ence it’s one of the hard­est lessons to learn and remem­ber in the online world: con­sis­tently cre­at­ing great con­tent while you wait for your audi­ence to find you.

Filed Under: Blogging, Technology Tagged With: , , ,

Paperless on Sale for Earth Day

April 22, 2013 by

Award-​​winning iBook Paper­less by David Sparks is on sale for Earth Day:

I’ve never really prop­erly cel­e­brated Paper­less win­ning one of Apple’s Best of 2012 awards last Decem­ber. Earth Day seems like the right time to do so. Through this Sat­ur­day, Paper­less is $6.99. If you know some­one that that could use some Paper­less help, send them along.

I’m pretty close to telling any­one who asks me for iPad help that this book is required read­ing before we can talk.

I don’t think they’re on sale, but you should also check out Mark­down and 60 Moun­tain Lion Tips for some more great Mac nerdery on the iBookstore.

Filed Under: Apple, Books, iOS Apps Tagged With: , , , ,

Day One Templates for Book or Movie Reviews

April 15, 2013 by

Neat idea com­bin­ing Tex­tEx­pander and Day One to build tem­plates for book or movie reviews.

These tem­plates would work for any appli­ca­tion but it’s a neat idea for a great jour­nal­ing app like Day One.

Related App Store Links

Filed Under: Apple, Books, iOS Apps, Movies, Nerds Tagged With: , , ,
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