Chris Hannah Chris Hannah

Chris Hannah

Adding a Touch Bar Icon to Your Website

With the MacBook Pro’s new Touch Bar, you can now create your own favicon that will appear there when a user sets it as a bookmark. The same file is also use to create an alpha mask when adding your website as a Pinned Tab.

It’s a small bit of code, that you add to your <HEAD> section, just by your other favicons.

Just specify that it is a “mask-icon”, add the location for the file (has to be SVG), and then specify a colour to be used. The colour is the background on the Touch Bar icon, and it’s also the colour used in the Pinned Tab mask.

Code:

<link
    rel="mask-icon"
    href="safari-pinned-tab.svg"
    color="#dc7604"
>

As an example, you can see the new touch bar icon I made for Radical Thinker.

If you haven’t already, you can also set an icon for when a user adds your website to their home screen on iOS. This is done similarly, but doesn’t have to be an SVG.

Code:

<link
    rel="apple-touch-icon"
    sizes="180x180"
    href="apple-touch-icon.png"
>

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MacStories Weekly - My Home Screen

A few weeks back in issue #56 of the Club MacStories Weekly newsletter, I wrote about my current home screen, and what I changed when moving to my iPhone 7 Plus.

With the iPhone 7 being released, I took that as my chance to join the infamous Plus Club. And with that, I thought I would look at a different way to organise my Home screen as my previous 5S was just one page of well categorised folders. With this new shiny toy, I started fresh with a Home screen of my most used apps.

If you want to see the whole thing, or just want to check out Club MacStories (It’s great!), check it out here.

Once your a member, you can find my home screen in the archive, and it’s "MacStories Weekly: Issue 56".

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Squash 2

The developers of RapidWeaver, Realmac, have just launched Squash 2 for Mac! As they put it, it is “The Easiest Way to Compress and Optimise Images for the Web.”, I completely agree with that statement.

It has a really simplistic and clean UI, which I’m a big fan of. And also it has a few very smart features.

How To Use Squash

You can either drag and drop images (or even whole folders), onto the application window or icon to compress the files. Or you can of course navigate to File, Open.

Then you get to see the animation, which has a nice sound effect to it, while it’s compressing the images. And after that it tells you how much space it saved, and then completes the specific output option you have set in your preferences. It’s as simple as that.

What Can It Do?

Squash can compress JPG, PNG, and GIF images without losing any image quality. So there’s really no drawbacks!

It can also convert PSD, RAW, and TIFF files into compressed JPG files as well. Which can be a huge lifesaver if you don’t fancy opening up Photoshop or Lightroom for example to simply export an image.

Then with the output of images, you can choose to either have it replace the original images with the compressed versions, or you can save separate copies. This is managed in the Preferences window, and it also let’s you choose a specific folder to save them into.

Another little extra is the ability to add a custom suffix to the image name, so for example you could be compressing a bunch of images, and you want to clearly know which ones have compressed versions. Just add something like “-compressed”, and then “Photo_0123.png” would get compressed, and saved as “Photo_0123-compressed.png”.

Finer Adjustments

If you want to refine the compression even more, you can select the JPEG quality you want to compress to. And there is also an option to have a slightly more compressed PNG format, but this will take a longer time to complete.

Why Should I Compress?

There are a bunch of reasons why you should compress your images, but here are a few:

  • It saves space on your drive, or even cloud storage where space may not be hugely available.
  • You can upload your files to places like Facebook and Twitter much faster.
  • If your app uses a lot of images, then having all of these compressed, it will be faster to download, which means less bandwidth is being used.
  • Your email attachments will be smaller, so they will load and send faster, and who wants huge emails anyway?
  • Websites will load much faster with smaller images!

Examples

I had to do a few benchmarks on some images, to see what sort of compression I could get. So here is what I got:

Download

Now that I’m sure you want to check out Squash 2 for yourself, you can find more information on the RapidWeaver website, and buy Squash 2 from the Mac App Store!

And if you get there before the 28th November, you’ll benefit from their whopping 60% Off Launch deal.

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Qwiki Discount!

Between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Qwiki will be a whopping 50% off!

So if you’re unsure whether you want to try it out, or maybe you like a bit of a discount. Then this is your chance to get Qwiki, and bring Wikipedia to your Menu Bar! (and Touch Bar soon).

Check out the Qwiki website, and you can buy Qwiki on the Mac App Store.

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My New "Wrathion"

My new MacBook Pro has arrived! So this is a sort of preliminary post, before my actual write up on what I think of it.

Spec

For starters, this is the configuration of my new Mac:

  • 13″ MacBook Pro with Touch Bar
  • 3.1GHz Dual-core Intel Core i5
  • 8GB 2133MHz LPDDR3 SDRAM
  • Intel Iris Graphics 550
  • 256GB PCIe-based SSD

Name

The name you may of guessed already, is “Wrathion”. I started this very recently, in which all of my devices are named after Dragons in WoW. For a bit of back story, the Black Dragonflight were my favourite, until they became corrupted, until one little egg was rescued and is now the only uncorrupted Black Dragon. He is still a whelp (like my 13″ Mac), and is Black (sort of like my Space Grey Mac), so it sort of fitted!

Stickers

Yes, I’ve already put stickers on my Mac. Eight to be exact. I do plan on covering it even more, but I didn’t want to rush into anything!

Anyway, here’s a little GIF I made of my sticker situation:

Thoughts So Far

This MacBook is amazing, and actually a lot better than I thought. Also, something which may be unique, I love the new keyboard.

I’ll get on using my Mac, and pretty soon I’ll be writing a better piece on what I think about it.

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iA Writer 4

iA Writer has just become version 4! It coms with some really impressive features, that definitely makes it more than just a basic text editor.

There’s better way to add images (with support for better captions), stress free tables with .csv file embeds, embedded text files, and all of these "content blocks" can be chained together! Which means you can have a book outline document, with references to the title page, individual chapters, etc. But within those chapters you could have references to images, or maybe even more text! The possibilities are endless, and I’m really impressed.

I was going to write a big article about this update, but I saw on the iA blog they have a super helpful video that explains everything!

Read the full article about iA Writer 4 on the iA Blog.

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The In-Between Macs

Stephen Hackett begins his monthly column on MacStories, with a really interesting article about where the been MacBook Pro fits in.

The current MacBook Pro line is a little bit of a mess. Even after brushing aside the last-generation machines that are still for sale, the current offerings are confusing. Both 15-inch models come with the Touch Bar, but only two of the three 13-inch models offered do.

That $1,499 non-Touch-Bar-but-still-in-the-new-skinny-case 13-inch MacBook Pro is what I’m typing on right now. It’s a great little laptop. The screen is gorgeous, battery life is great and it’s more than fast enough for what I need when I’m not in front of my 5K iMac.

You can clearly see Stephen has left his mark already, by quoting a piece from 2006.

Read the full post.

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Qwiki Got Even Better!

My app Qwiki received it’s second update the other day, and I’m really happy with the progress it’s making!

Here are the release notes for 1.2:

In the latest update there are things that make Qwiki a bit more of a polished product.

Including things like being able to set Qwiki to launch on startup (Which was a lot harder than expected), a slightly more "lit" icon (Brighter colours, bigger stroke, and a gradient), some extra accessibility support, and also some behind the scenes efficiency work (But we all know you don’t care about that).

One More Thing

Qwiki now supports every language Wikipedia does! Just select it in the Preferences window, and you’ll be reading articles in whatever language you select. I recommend trying out "Scots", that’s pretty funny!

P.S. TouchBar support coming in the next update!

As I said above, I’m working on adding some form of functionality for the TouchBar in the new MacBook Pro’s. Mine should arrive soon, so I can fully test that out and ship it to everyone! I also redesigned the website, which you can check out.

For now, you can buy Qwiki on the Mac App Store for £2.99.

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