There’s yet another update to Text Case, and it brings with it three new formats, theme syncing, and an action extension for the macOS version!

New Formats

Smart Quotes – This changes any straight single of double quotation marks, into their curly equivalents, all based on your localisation.

Small Caps – ᴛᴜʀɴ ʏᴏᴜʀ ᴛᴇxᴛ ɪɴᴛᴏ sᴏᴍᴇᴛʜɪɴɢ ʟɪᴋᴇ ᴛʜɪs!

Upside Down – Just another fun one, this attempts to flip the characters upside down.

These new formats are available on all versions of Text Case, iOS, iPadOS, and macOS.

Automatic Theme Syncing

Text Case has support for themes, but previously you would have to manually switch between them. With this version, you can select “Automatic” to have the Text Case theme sync with the light/dark mode of your system. This works on both iOS, iPadOS, and macOS!

Format Text Action Extension for macOS

On the iOS/iPadOS version of Text Case, there’s an Action Extension that lets you select text anywhere, and then get direct access to the different formats in Text Case. This is now coming to the macOS version, with essentially the same behaviour.

Now you can select a portion of text anywhere in macOS, right-click, and under “Share”, there should be a “Convert Text” action. (If it doesn’t appear, you will have to go to System Preferences, Extensions, Actions, etc enable it.)

That will bring up the Text Case UI, and selecting a format will result in the formatted text being copied to your clipboard!

Links

Text Case on the App Store

Text Case on the Mac App Store

Text Case Website

I’ve been slowly working on this for quite a few months now, but I think it’s finally time to release Text Case for Mac.

With it comes all 32 formats that are currently supported in the iOS app, and the same customisation options (except custom app icons).

To recap all of those:

• Title Case (AP, APA, CMOS, MLA)
• URL Encoded/Decoded
• Uppercase
• Lowercase
• Capitalise
• Capitalise Words
• Sentence Case
• Reversed
• Strip HTML
• Strip/Trim Whitespace
• Markdown Blockquote
• Markdown Code Block
• Markdown Ordered/Unordered List
• Markdown to HTML
• Camel Case
• Snake Case
• Pascal Case
• Kebab Case
• Hashtags
• Mocking Spongebob
• Emoji
• Base64 Encoded/Decoded
• Rot13
• Clap Case
• Shuffled

In fact the macOS version is 2.4.4, and the iOS version is sitting at just 2.4.3. The only differences being some improvements to the Emoji format, where some localisations could cause the format to not work at all (it now defaults to English if it doesn’t support the language). And also some macOS specific changes, which are mainly to remove parts of the app that won’t work such as Siri Shortcuts support, and also fine tuning the macOS experience.

There are things that I’m already planning on adding the Mac version, such as an Extension so you can format text from outside the app, similar to how the Action Extension works in IOS, and also other automation support such as URL schemes. However, I feel that it’s much more beneficial for people to have Text Case for Mac now, rather than waiting even longer to get it into peoples hands. Because just like the iOS app, I really like to adapt the app to users feedback, and I already have a few extra formats (such as small caps) that I plan on adding soon. I also want to see what I can do with the Touch Bar!

Have a look at the Mac version:

Find Text Case on the Mac App Store.

I came across a fun app recently on Twitter, called Rewound. It’s a Music app that simply acts as an interface to your music library, but it comes with a rather interesting quirk, it looks like an old iPod. And you can even go back to a click wheel.

.

The control layout can be changed within the app, however to apply a matching skin you have to download them from Twitter/Weibo (You can find them with the #rewoundskins hashtag) or add custom photos from your device.

Depending on the skin you add, it automatically assigns a layout based on the size. And if you use one with a click wheel, you will actually be able to use the circular gestures to navigate through your music collection.

It’s a bit of fun, and I’m sure some nostalgic people will love to see it. I can’t quite say I see this as a long term product though!

Download Rewound for free on the App Store

---

Update: 18th December 2019

It turns out that Apple have now rejected Rewound, and it’s no longer available to download. (via Michael Tsai)

John Bull (@garius) posted a great story on Twitter, about one of the announcements at Embankment tube station, and a voice that suddenly went unheard.

It is election season. The world is busy and rubbish.

But it is also Christmas.

So take a breather and let me tell you a story about London, trains, love and loss, and how small acts of kindness matter.

I’m going to tell you about the voice at Embankment Tube station.

— John Bull (@garius) 11 December 2019

Just before Christmas 2012, staff at Embankment Tube station were approached by a woman who was very upset.

She kept asking them where the voice had gone. They weren’t sure what she meant.

The Voice?

The voice, she said. The man who says ‘Mind the Gap’

— John Bull (@garius) 11 December 2019

Don’t worry, the staff at Embankment said. The announcement still happens, but they’ve all been updated. New digital system. New voices. More variety.

The staff asked her if she was okay.

“That voice,” she explained, “was my husband.”

— John Bull (@garius) 11 December 2019

The woman, a GP called Dr Margaret McCollum, explained that her husband was an actor called Oswald Laurence. Oswald had never become famous, but he HAD been the chap who had recorded all the Northern Line announcements back in the seventies.

And Oswald had died in 2007.

— John Bull (@garius) 11 December 2019

Oswald’s death had left a hole in Margaret’s heart. But one thing had helped. Every day, on her way to work, she got to hear his voice.

Sometimes, when it hurt too much, she explained, she’d just sit on the platform at Embankment and listen to the announcements for a bit longer.

— John Bull (@garius) 11 December 2019

For five years, this had become her routine. She knew he wasn’t really there but his voice – the memory of him – was.

To everyone else, it had just been another announcement. To HER it had been the ghost of the man she still loved.

And now even that had gone.

— John Bull (@garius) 11 December 2019

The staff at Embankment were apologetic, but the whole Underground had this new digital system, it just had to be done. They promised, though, that if the old recordings existed, they’d try and find a copy for her.

Margaret knew this was unlikely, but thanked them anyway.

— John Bull (@garius) 11 December 2019

In the New Year, Margaret McCollum sat on Embankment Station, on her way to work.

And over the speakers she heard a familiar voice. The voice of a man she had loved so much, and never thought she’d hear again.

“Mind the Gap” Said Oswald Laurence.

— John Bull (@garius) 11 December 2019

Because it turned out a LOT of people at Embankment, within London Underground, within @TfL and beyond had lost loved ones and wished they could hear them again.

And they’d all realised that with luck, just this once, for one person, they might be able to make that happen.

— John Bull (@garius) 11 December 2019

Archives were searched, old tapes found and restored. More people had worked to digitize them. Others had waded through the code of the announcement system to alter it while still more had sorted out the paperwork and got exemptions.

And together they made Oswald talk again.

— John Bull (@garius) 11 December 2019

And that is why today, even in 2019, if you go down to Embankment station in London, and sit on the northbound platform on Northern Line, you will here a COMPLETELY different voice say Mind the Gap to ANYWHERE else on the Underground.

It’s Oswald.

Merry Christmas everyone.

— John Bull (@garius) 11 December 2019

When I started to read this story, I was thinking that maybe the archived recording would be found and then a copy sent to Dr McCollum. I never expected the voice to be digitised, restored, and then put back in use.

The fact that it’s only used in the Embankment tube station on the Northern Line makes it even better. It’s amazing that people went the extra mile and put in the work to make it happen.

John Wilander, writing at the WebKit blog:

Any kind of tracking prevention or content blocking that treats web content differently based on its origin or URL risks being abused itself for tracking purposes if the set of origins or URLs provide some uniqueness to the browser and webpages can detect the differing treatment.

To combat this, tracking prevention features must make it hard or impossible to detect which web content and website data is treated as capable of tracking. We have devised three ITP enhancements that not only fight detection of differing treatment but also improve tracking prevention in general.

You would have thought that simply preventing tracking would stop trackers. Well it turns out that if websites can see if you are using prevention tools, then you can still be singled out. John lists a few ways in which enhancements are being made to Intelligent Tracking Prevention in WebKit to combat this.

Diane Meyer has come up with an incredible series, where she has taken photos around the previously split city, and used hand embroidery to obscure different sections.

Diane Meyer:

The embroidery is made to resemble pixels and borrows the visual language of digital imaging in an analog, handmade process. The images were taken in the city center as well as in the suburbs where I followed the former path of the wall through the outskirts of the city. I was interested in the psychological weight of these sites and the ways in which past history remains very much in the present. In many images, the embroidered sections represent the exact scale and location of the former Wall offering a pixelated view of what lies behind. In this way, the embroidery appears as a translucent trace in the landscape of something that no longer exists but is a weight on history and memory.

There are 21 photographs in total, and my favourite three would have to be these:

(via Kottke)

After four short years, Twitter have added support for Live Photos. A feature that was announced alongside the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus, in 2015.

Give the gift of GIFs. You can now upload your iOS Live Photos as GIFs anywhere you upload photos on Twitter. pic.twitter.com/D8TIfsBwyd

— Twitter (@Twitter) 11 December 2019

If you ignore the strangely huge delay, I do think that it’s a very welcome addition. A lot of people including myself take Live Photos all the time. So I can see this being quite popular.

It doesn’t literally keep them as Live Photos though, they are converted to GIF format. That’s not exactly a bad thing though, as I’m sure there’s quite a few benefits of storing them as a GIF rather than the raw video from the Live Photo.

One thing I didn’t like about the video alongside their very brief announcement, was the attitude towards the newly added support. They talk about how millions of Live Photos are taken every day, but how they go unshared and forgotten about. But “Today is a new day”. Sure, today is a new day and it’s a pretty cool feature, but I think it easily could have been done a number of years ago. The only blocker for adding this support earlier was Twitter themselves.

John Morrissey, writing at Phys.org:

Historians often trace the dawn of human civilization back 10,000 years, when Neolithic tribes first settled and began farming in the Fertile Crescent, which stretches through much of what we now call the Middle East. Prehistoric peoples domesticated plants to create the cereal crops we still grow today, and in the Zagros mountains of Iran, Iraq and Turkey, sheep, goats and cows were bred from their wild relatives to ensure a steady supply of meat and milk. But around the same time as plants and animals were tamed for agriculture, long before anyone even knew of microscopic life, early humans were domesticating microbes too.

In a paper published in Current Biology, we discovered how “milk yeast”—the handy microorganism that can decompose lactose in milk to create dairy products like cheese and yogurt—originated from a chance encounter between a fruit fly and a pail of milk around 5,500 years ago. This happy accident allowed prehistoric people to domesticate yeast in much the same way they domesticated crop plants and livestock animals, and produce the cheeses and yogurts billions of people enjoy today.

Well this sounds a bit interesting, let’s learn more:

Kluyveromyces lactis, or milk yeast, is found in French and Italian cheeses made from unpasteurized milk, and in natural fermented dairy drinks like kefir. But the ancestor of this microbe was originally associated with the fruit fly, so how did it end up making many of the dairy products that people eat today? We believe milk yeast owes its very existence to a fly landing in fermenting milk and starting an unusual sexual liaison. The fly in question was the common fruit fly, Drosophila, and it carried with it the ancestor of K. lactis. Although the fly died, the yeast lived, but with a problem—it could not use the lactose in milk as a food source. Instead, it found an unconventional solution—sex with its cousin.

Okay, I think I’m finished with the internet for tonight.

Natasha Daly, writing for National Geographic:

Why would an apex ocean predator eat gloves? Or rope? Or plastic cups? How does a whale end up with more than 200 pounds of waste in its stomach?

Last week, a ten-year-old whale was found dead on a beach in Scotland. A necropsy revealed 220 pounds of plastic and other trash congealed in clumps in his digestive system. The tragedy grabbed headlines—the sheer quantity of debris eclipsed that found in a growing number of similar cases: large whales discovered dead on beaches around the world with stomachs full of garbage.

I thought this would end up being quite a simple answer, but it turns out animals eat plastic for a whole host of reasons.

Greg, on the How To Drink YouTube channel, made a great video about making Butterbeer that’s regularly referenced/drunk in the Harry Potter series:

There’s something so darn Chistmassy about the Harry Potter films, particularly the first few, that I always thought of them as Christmas Movies, even though maybe they’re not. Well I’m kicking off this holiday season with a hot mug of cheer with this 1588 recipe for Butterbeer. I know there’s a ton of nonalcoholic recipes out there for Butterbeer and those are fine, but honestly, I think this is more in line with what J.K. Rowling had in mind when she wrote the books. For starters, the kids need to grow up from Pumpkin Juice to Butterbeer, implying there’s something more mature about it. Secondly Europe and the U.K. are a bit more lax in regards legal drinking ages, and I’d imagine wizards even more so. Thirdly, Butterbeer is an actual real thing, found in a Tudor cookbook from 1588. Was J.K. Rowling specifically referencing this recipe? I can’t say for sure (unless she wants to answer!) but I CAN say that I was shocked to discover that Nicolas Flamel was a real person, who wrote a book on alchemy and the creation of the Philosophers Stone. They have copies of it at the NY Public Libary reference branch, rare books section. So, she wasn’t strictly making things up with these books. So, this Butterbeer as the official Wizards Butterbeer? Maybe.

I’ve tried the “Butterbeer” that is served at the Harry Potter Studio Tour multiple times, but I assume that it doesn’t compare at all. So I’m definitely going to try and make this recipe soon. I guess I’ll have to order a wooden tankard to drink it from too.