Geektastic Mac, iPhone & Web notes from Mike, the creator of Newsie
Las Vegas, NV & Seattle, WA
Mike is an iPhone App Creator, and you can find him in these other places.
Hey folks, I’ve been working on an iOS version of namechk.com for a while and it’s just gone live on the app store! Check it out and if you like it please leave a review! If you don’t like it, send me a message and I’ll get to fixing it ;)
Anyway, enjoy!
Available for your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch.
Tumblr blogging from the iPad is difficult because of the limitations imposed by the Safari web browser. Uploading images is impossible, and the iPad’s limited memory renders Safari dangerous for composing anything but short posts—you might switch to a new tab, come back, and find all of your work gone because Safari flushed its memory and reloaded the page.
The apps available on the App Store aren’t much better. Either they’re specialized applications for extracting photos from Tumblr, or they’re geared toward reading posts—the one Tumblr-related task that’s already easily done from Safari. You can imagine my excitement when I ran across Highball, a Tumblr app that’s currently in development, while browsing John Dascola’s design portfolio.
I’d been following John on Twitter for a while, so I tweeted him about it. I asked if Highball could possibly be the app that would finally make Tumblr more accessible for iPad users like me. His response:
[…] we’re thinking of now focusing entirely on content creation rather than consumption.The right focus, and good looks to boot. You can bet I’ll be downloading it the minute it’s released.
She plays Frenzic on an iPad sometimes for hours.
With all the buzz about Flipboard going around, I got to wondering if there weren’t other apps that did something similar. After hunting around the webosphere, I found Paper.li. Paper.li generates newspapers from the links in your Twitter stream. You can create a newspaper from any tweeter’s stream, not just yours. Also, you can create a newspaper from a specified hash tag or twitter list. The newspapers that Paper.li produces are beautiful:
Paper.li also makes sure to properly attribute news articles. Along the bottom of each news panel is an attribution section:
The left side shows who tweeted the article, and the right side shows the article’s source. If you hover over the tweeter, a pop-up window displays the actual tweet:
The generated newspaper isn’t live, but instead updates on a 24-hour cycle. You can sign up to be notified via email when a new issue is generated by clicking on a small “Alert me” button in the header area:
If you’re like me, you use your Twitter stream to get news throughout the day. Paper.li is a great way to catch up on news that you might have missed. And of course, it looks great on an iPad:
Mashable recently posted an article entitled “Developers More Interested in Android than iPad”. If you actually read the article, you come across this little tidbit:
For this study (which you can download as a PDF) Appcelerator, a company that lets web developers create native mobile applications using a cross-platform toolkit, polled its developers to gage interest in developing on the various mobile platforms when the iPad was first announced and again last week.
(Emphasis mine)
Generalizing a limited subset of developers into the set of all developers, which is essentially what the article’s title does, is disingenuous at best. It’s a lie by omission. Unlike the title of this post, I don’t think theirs is intended as a joke.
