Pastel is a Fantastic App for Working with Colors

Steve Troughton-Smith has just released his new app ‘Pastel‘ on the App Store. Available for iPhone and iPad, with a Mac app coming later, Pastel lets you create your very own library of colors and color palettes. It’s a fantastic app for anyone working with colors and I highly recommend you try it out.

I have been relying on sites like Coolors and Color Hunt for inspiration, but having something native and handy is so much better.

Pastel App

Pastel is a modern iOS app, meaning it supports many of the new features of iOS. You can drag & drop any color from Pastel onto any iPad app that supports dropped colors, which makes it super easy to quickly use a particular color in your work.

All your colors in the library seamlessly sync over iCloud across all your devices, so your favorite colors are always handy.

Pastel is available for Free on the App Store and you can add up to 20 of your own colors. To unlock unlimited colors, there’s a simple $4.99 IAP.

Get Pastel from the App Store →

June 10, 2020 ✚ Permalink

Ipsita Dasgupta Hired to Lead Apple India's Streaming Services

Writankar Mukherjee, writing for ETtech:

Apple has roped in Ipsita Dasgupta as India country manager for its streaming services like Apple TV+, Apple Music and the App Store.

Dasgupta has joined the iPhone maker from Hotstar where she was president of strategy and new ventures.

She has succeeded Khushboo Ponwar who had last year moved on as head of business development for Apple in India, Middle East, Turkey and Africa. Dasgupta, who is an MBA from Harvard, took charge this month.

Apple needs to focus heavily on some good content in the coming months if it’s serious about Apple TV+ here in India. But I also hope that there’s a good developer evangelism plan for the apps coming out of India. There’s no dearth of shitty apps here with suboptimal experiences.

June 3, 2020 ✚ Permalink

Telegram Instructured to Provide Info on Users Pirating E-Papers

Aroon Deep, writing for MediaNama:

In a case filed by Jagran Prakashan group, the Delhi High Court ordered messaging service Telegram to remove several channels distributing the Dainik Jagran newspaper’s PDF versions. The order also instructs Telegram to reveal the identity of the individual(s) distributing the paper illegally.

Telegram has far bigger issues than users sharing just e-papers, and I just hope the Indian government doesn’t choose the WeTransfer route to handle this.

June 1, 2020 ✚ Permalink

WeTransfer Blocked in India

Sameer Desai, writing for Mumbai Mirror:

In an order dated May 18, the telecom department directed internet service providers (ISP) to ban three specific website URLs. The first two are specific pages of WeTransfer, while the third is the entire website. It is unclear as to what is contained in the first two URLs as the website is currently banned by several ISPs, but banning WeTransfer entirely is a perplexing decision.

What a bunch of morons.

May 30, 2020 ✚ Permalink

Graphing the Evolution of Smaller & Lighter Mac Laptops

Jason Snell, writing on the Six Colors blog:

The trend in laptop design, since the very beginning, has been toward lighter and thinner laptops. In 2001 Steve Jobs boasted about the mind-blowing one-inch thickness of the Titanium PowerBook G4; 19 years later the average Mac laptop is half that thickness.

But it’s one thing to know that laptops trend toward thinness and lightness. It’s another to see a chart that lets you visualize it. So I dug through the specs of past Mac systems at EveryMac.comand averaged the weight and thickness of the Mac laptop product line for every year since the first Mac laptop, the hilariously heavy Mac Portable, hit the scene.

Fascinating graphs. The dive in 2008 in both the graphs is my favorite.

May 30, 2020 ✚ Permalink

Mumbai, Engulfed by Coronavirus

Jeffrey Gettleman, writing for The New York Times:

As the coronavirus gnaws its way across India, Mumbai has suffered the worst. This city of 20 million is now responsible for 20 percent of India’s coronavirus infections and nearly 25 percent of the deaths.

Hospitals are overflowing with the sick. Police officers are exhausted enforcing a stay-at-home curfew. Doctors say the biggest enemy is Mumbai’s density.

Particularly in the city’s vast slum districts, social distancing is impossible. People live eight to a room across miles and miles of informal settlements made of concrete blocks and topped with sheets of rusted iron. As the temperatures climb toward 100 degrees Fahrenheit, many can’t stand to be cooped up anymore and spill into the streets.

I have lived in Mumbai all my life and the city is currently in a terribly sorry state. These heart-wrenching photos by documentary photographer Atul Loke paint a solid picture of the hardships that many people have to face in the city.

Check out some more photos on Atul’s Instagram profile.

May 29, 2020 ✚ Permalink

Email is Good for Remote Productivity

Bron Gondwana, CEO of FastMail, explains on the company blog why “Now more than ever, it’s time for email.“

He says,

Through all the interruptions and turmoil in your life, email is a constant. Everyone has email, and every email system can email every other. It lets us stay connected, but doesn’t demand an immediate response. You can read it in your own time, and have the space to craft a thoughtful reply.

The beauty of Email is that you can use it in your own way. While it’s a great form of asynchronous communication, it’s also a fantastic tool for collaborating with your team and getting work done much faster. At Readdle, we have been working on some exceptional new things for Spark that we can’t wait to show you.

I have been using FastMail as my primary email service provider for several years now, and it is worth every $$. It’s great to see an email service so focused on privacy and core email experience. FastMail has been rock solid over the years and I urge you to consider it. If you sign up using this link, you’ll get 10% off.

May 23, 2020 ✚ Permalink

Manton Reece's Archive of App.net

How cool is this? Manton Reece, creator extraordinaire and the man behind the awesome microblogging service Micro.blog, has created an archive of all posts from the now defunct microblogging platform App.net

In the final week before App.net shut down, I whipped up a few scripts to download every post on the platform via the API. After that finished, I also attempted to download small versions of many of the photos, but ran out of time. This data has been sitting on one of my servers for the last 3 years.

Why did I bother? At a high level, see my post from 2012 called Permanence. I also hoped to build a tool that would let anyone export their personal archive, or even migrate it to a blogging platform like Micro.blog.

Here are all my posts, with my first post created on December 16, 2012 and the last one on February 01, 2017, totaling 3320 posts.

The internet needs more things like App..net, and definitely more people like Manton Reece.

May 12, 2020 ✚ Permalink