Color palettes can be hard for tasteless amateur like myself. Luckily technology continues to make me look better than I am. Spectrum is an iOS and Mac app for generating and syncing color palettes and I think it’s great.
There are two primary ways to get started with creating a new color palette. First there is the Harmony system where you decide on the number of colors and then adjust them across a color wheel.
ClouDrop for iOS received a big redesign for iOS 7 and it looks harmonious with other iOS 7 apps.
ClouDrop also added a clever new feature. If you store music files on CloudApp, the app looks up album cover art. This isn’t something I’d use but I like seeing creativity in seemingly mundane tool like link sharing apps.
ClouDrop for CloudApp | $1.99 | Universal
There’s also ClouDrop for Dropbox for $1.
Cloudie is a new iOS App for using the CloudApp sharing service. It’s attractive and fast with an interesting design. It has all of the core CloudApp features.
$1 | iPhone
This may be the single greatest improvement in the iOS TextExpander experience in years.
That’s not sarcastic. There is a distinct difference between the snippets I use on my Mac and those I use on my phone. This also gets to a useful recommendation: Organize your TextExpander snippets.
I have three categories I use for snippet folders. I have global snippets organized by general function. My “Time” folder contains snippets that have to do with generating date and time text.
Fantastical for iPad is a nice upgrade from the standard Apple calendar app and a great speed improvement over Readdle’s Calendar app.1 But with all versions of Fantastical, the gestures aren’t obvious and most of the utility is hidden to anyone not willing to accost their iOS screen.2 Here are some things I find useful.
Jump to Date To jump to a specific date, tap and hold on the date in the header.
I wrote a few days ago that the Nebulous Notes redesign also removed TextExpander support. Well, today that comes back. You have to love developers that listen to user requests so closely and make changes so quickly.
Get Nebulous Notes on the iOS App Store for $5. It’s really good.
One of my long time favorite iOS text editors for iOS, Nebulous Notes, just received a design refresh. It’s nice to see it getting updates. It’s been around for over 3 years now and was my app of choice for a long time. The macro system is great and it’s one of the few Dropbox-centric text editors with full text search in folders as well as search within the current open document.
Phillip is pretty clever with URL schemes on iOS. He’s probably the best person to explain URL encoding with actions:
I’ll explain each one of the elements with analogies that would make Scott Forstall proud. First, there is the CALL, which can be interpreted as a phone number. One app calls the other, in the previous example we’re calling Drafts in the create extension.
URL actions can be really powerful but one of the most common hurdles is getting the URL encoding right.
Shawn Blanc’s lovely write-up for the new Day One service mentioned his coffee journal. On Twitter he linked to Josiah Wiebe’s post about Launch Center Pro actions for journaling with Day One. I like the use of the table layout in Day One.
It reminds me of Ken’s post about logging his beers, which is more about automated logging.
The Reminders app on Mac and iOS are one of the bright spots at the cross section of function and design. But I really like Fantastical 2 for managing calendars. It’s not the central focus, but Fantastical is also a great companion for managing reminders on the iPhone.
The quick entry in Fantastical is more efficient for adding new reminders, but the real beauty is how Fantastical presents reminders at the top of the list view AND provides one-tap access to the entire list of reminder lists.
