My thanks to Shoots & Leaves by Smart Goat for sponsoring the Very Nice Web Site RSS feed this week. A clever title for a clever app.

Some pictures are worth a thousand words. Shoots & Leaves is for the rest.

Don’t let your iPhone’s camera roll get cluttered with to-do items. Take a picture with Shoots & Leaves, and it gets uploaded to the cloud. Which cloud, you ask? Shoots & Leaves supports uploading to Dropbox, CloudApp, Evernote, and Imgur, with more on the way.

Whichever cloud you choose, the app gets a link to the photo and does something with it. You decide what that something is: Create a reminder, send a text, add a task to Omnifocus. Shoots & Leaves supports a growing list of built-in and third-party apps. You can format what’s sent and send different photos to different actions. It’s great for photos that are to-do items and don’t need to be saved forever.

Find out more at our website and download it now on the App Store.

Shoot, then leave. Easy as that.

Sponsored via Syndicate Ads

Benj Edwards, writing for Macworld:

Just before the Internet’s meteoric rise in the public consciousness, large centralized dial-up services like America Online, Prodigy, and CompuServe dominated the online landscape. In this competitive climate 20 years ago, Apple introduced eWorld, a subscription-based information service available to Mac and Newton users.

It was like a safe house for Apple fans. It’s nice we don’t need a safe house anymore.

On a recent episode of the Talk Show, John Gruber called the Beats deal a “blank canvas” that people are projecting their preconceived notions about the company onto. Subsequently, Jean-Louise Gassée made the same point as Gruber, based off a tweet by Benedict Evans:

As Benedict Evans’ felicitous tweet put it, Apple’s $3B acquisition of Beats, the headphone maker and music streaming company, is a veritable Rorschach blot…

As I said to Gruber on that episode of the Talk Show, I maintain that everything the company does is a blank canvas, what I’ve previously called a Rorschach’s cat: the cat is either dead or alive depending on your preconception. We like to think that the big announcements like the iPod, iPhone and iPad were met with near universal acclaim because, in retrospect, they were such successes. But, really, they weren’t. No matter what Apple announces, people will line up to tell you how lame it is. The Beats deal is just another iteration of that same law of pundit quantum mechanics and now we can throw WWDC onto this bonfire of the banalities.

Pundits are comparing it unfavorably to Microsoft’s recent announcements which, while nice, aren’t really the same as the firehose-of-goodies-in-developers-faces that happened at WWDC. And, of course, pundits are lamenting the fact that Apple didn’t announce any new product lines, as if the company’s competitors are churning out category-defining products and leaving Apple in the dust. Yes, Google shows us prototypes and might even sell a few of them, but they don’t make a real market for them. This double standard is never acknowledged in these pieces. None of Apple’s competitors has redefined and vitalized a market in the way the iPod, iPhone and iPad did. If anything it seems that the “wearables” market is bumbling around in giant clown shoes waiting for Apple to set the standard.

Sometimes the actors are different, but we’re still watching the same stupid play.

I joined host Phil Michaels and fellow pundits Roman Loyola, Jim Dalrymple and Peter Cohen to discuss the announcements of WWDC 2014 in the least informative way possible.

Ben Thompson explains Apple’s growth strategy: it’s all connected.

Craig Hockenberry:

Apple has a newfound confidence in itself. It’s at the top of its game, and it knows it.

I’d quibble that there’s a difference between Craig Federighi becoming an amazing presenter (to my eye, he’s the best executive currently in the game from any technology company) and the company having confidence. I don’t think the company ever really lost it. But Monday’s keynote hit on all cylinders in a way I don’t think we’ve seen since maybe even the iPhone introduction.

It only took 21 episodes for us to have a Turning This Car Around that went off the rails. That’s pretty good, right?

Not surprising that the iPhone 4 is dropped off the compatibility list.

To show how many things Apple had to announce today (like extensions, custom keyboards and the Health app), they didn’t even touch on the fact that the photo app adds time-lapse videos (hat tip to Jay Moltz).

Flatter but not iOS 7 flat and with more transparency.

As someone who used Windows 7 I am not a huge fan of the wide use of transparency. Fortunately, this appears to be more understated than the “filmed in Glaucomavision” of Windows 7. Also, unlike our iOS 7 complaints last year, the icons in Yosemite look terrific.

So much to dig into here from things that were fixed (Airdrop between OS X and iOS) to things that are new (connected states with iOS devices). Apple’s platform is taking it up a notch.

My thanks to Doxie Go for sponsoring the Very Nice Web Site RSS feed this week. Short but true story: we own a Doxie Go and my wife and I fight over who gets to keep it in their office. Boom. You don’t need to know anything else.

If you’re looking for a fantastic way to scan and organize all your paper, consider Doxie Go, a portable document scanner that works anywhere without a computer. Doxie stores up to 400 scans in memory, then syncs to your Mac, then makes it easy to organize and create multi-page PDFs on your desktop or in the cloud.

Here’s a particularly clever workflow: use Hazel to create OCR workflows that automatically sort your Doxie searchable PDFs. By simply creating a rule that looks for, for example, your electric company account number, Hazel will automatically file all your scans at once. It’s like magic. You can store them on your local drive, or in Dropbox for instant access anywhere. Check out Shawn Blanc’s article on how to set it up.

And: this week, Doxie Go is on sale for $164.67 on Amazon (about $35 off).

Via the Syndicate.