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Posts tagged with "iOS"

Screencast and GIF iOS apps→

David Chartier details his workflow for iOS screencasts and GIF generation. I have exactly the same setup, especially when it comes to GIFs:

After you open or drag a video into GIF Brewery, you can select a small portion of the timeline to GIF; it’s really pretty simple. You have some control over how colors are squashed for the GIF format (it only handles 256 colors, so you might have to fiddle a bit here) and the GIF frame rate. You also get an overall file size meter and warning if you get close to or over 1MB; a number of of services (like Tumblr) and web hosts seem to not like anything over that, so GIFer beware.

I love GIF Brewery ; I’ve used it for several GIFs here on the site, and I’ve always liked its simplicity (and icon).

In addition to ScreenFlow, I would also suggest ffmpeg2theora, a simple converter for Ogg Theora video files. It’s a command line utility, and I use it every time I want to embed an HTML5 video on MacStories with MP4 and Ogg source files.

Obviously, Reflector is still the must-have for iOS screencasts.

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Chrome For iOS and “Save To PDF”→

Chrome for iOS was updated yesterday with a couple of new features, and considering it’s become my daily browser on all my devices, I thought I should try them out.

The most notable addition is full-screen viewing for the iPhone version. As you scroll down a page, the Omnibox gets hidden; to view it again, simply swipe down anywhere on a webpage. I like the implementation, and I think Google is doing full-screen browsing better than Apple on iOS. More importantly, the status bar remains visible even with full-screen activated (I wish Rdio would do the same). I hope this initial iPhone-only full-screen mode will evolve into Google finally enabling a bookmarks bar on the iPad.

The other addition of version 26.0.1410.50 (I know, don’t ask) is printing. From the Print menu, you can now print webpages using AirPrint or Google Cloud Print. The changelog also mentions the possibility to save PDFs to Google Drive, and I find it curious that this functionality is hidden inside Google Cloud Print’s menu. MacStories readers know about my preference for PDFs and workflows to archive PDFs of webpages. Unfortunately, Chrome’s Drive integration leaves much to be desired: it kept timing out on my devices, and when it worked, a PDF was considerably reduced in quality (screenshot). I’ll keep using my own scripts to archive PDFs.

For a detailed overview of the update, I recommend reading Dan Moren’s piece for Macworld linked above.

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Apple Releases iOS 6.1.3 With Passcode Bypass Fix

iOS 6.1.3 Update

iOS 6.1.3 Update

Today Apple released iOS 6.1.3. It is an incremental improvement to iOS that includes a security patch for the previously publicized vulnerability that allowed access to the Phone app even when the screen was locked. The release notes also mention improvements to the Maps app for users in Japan. Perhaps some of our kind Japanese readers can give us some insight in to the changes Apple might have made to the Maps app. Finally The Next Web is reporting that some of the vulnerabilities required to jailbreak iOS devices have in fact been patched which means that the cat and mouse game between Apple and the jailbreak community continues.

The update is now available through iTunes and iOS’ Software Update panel and it is assumed that the update will ship to all iOS devices that are iOS 6 compatible.