Twitter seems to have an uncommon knack of not understanding how people use their service. In an effort to control more of the material published by users, they occasionally crap all over URLs and especially animated GIFs. They will convert animated GIFs to mp4 files which ruins the entire point of an animated image format.
If you want to save an animated GIF that Twitter has “optimized”, it’s really a pain.
Now that I have a convenient way to manage my various FTP locations, I can keep ready-to-snark images on a server I control. I can share out an animated GIF using a URL that I own. From iOS or my Mac I can copy the URL directly from Transmit.
But I wanted to make it even easier to access my URLs. The first step is getting all of the URLs for the GIFS.
David Sparks makes some of the best eBooks and now he’s branching out into video. His first video-only Field Guide is pretty fantastic if you use OmniFocus or you’re considering it. $10 is a deal for 2 hours of professional level training for an app as complicated as OmniFocus.
Here’s a sample on Vimeo.
Calca is a Mac app for mixing calculations with Markdown.1 You write in plain text but Calca understands equations and calculations as you work. It supports simple math as well as complex functions. Even variable names can be intermingled through the text and used in calculations elsewhere.
Writing something as simple this is all it takes to do a calculation in the middle of taking notes:
:::text widgets = 23+7 widgets per month = widgets*12 => 360 Ending with the => automatically outputs the results.
Monument Valley is right up my alley (they’ll just have to run with that as a slogan). The puzzles are quick but challenging and it’s easy to drop in and out.
I was surprised that their Project Red update for the App Store provided an option to purchase more puzzles for only $1. Sure, 100% of the purchase price goes to the Project Red charity. Equally important it’s new Monument Valley.
Dead batteries in the middle of a flight sure make the trip feel longer. Here’s the stuff I suggest to my friends and family to make batteries last as long as possible.
It’s not rocket science.
Macbook Reduce the fricking screen brightness! They even put shortcuts on the keyboard to do this. They’re trying to give you a hint. Lowering the screen brightness is the single biggest change to cut power consumption.
Ok, this is kind of cool. It’s a custom keyboard for chemical formulas that makes a lot of sense. I like the quick slide down for subscript. You don’t need to slide all the way over to the sub- or superscript key, just slide up or down to select.
$3 in the App Store. I bought it just to be able to paste proper molecular formulas in emails. The Wikipedia search is cute but not terribly useful.
Eddie Smith and Yuvi echo my sentiments on phone size. I really enjoyed typing on the 6 Plus but I much prefer the 6 for everyday use. At home on the couch, I still long for the 6 Plus.
Continuing my celebration of a $1000 device that holds hard drives, here’s a little something about the DS Video app for iOS.
I mostly use Plex for streaming video to things like my iPhone and Roku, but the DS Video app is an alternative that’s actually a pretty good option if you’re not into the Plex applications.
The DS Video app uses the built-in Synology media indexing service to serve up any video content on the NAS.
My love affair with my Synology continues to get more serious every week. It’s a great NAS but I also really like the iOS apps.1 I figured it might be a nice to highlight what’s so nice about them, starting with DS File and DS Cloud.
DS File DS File is like a file navigator on my phone. I can browse all of the content on my Synology from anywhere. I can access the files and add new files right from my phone.
