YOKOHAMA (Señor Tomato) – If you have ever submitted your software product to Apple’s App Store or Mac App Store, you probably know how difficult those reviewers are. Your submission might go through the review process under normal circumstances. But if it ends in the hands of a difficult reviewer, it might not. In a sense, it is the Russian roulette.

I know what I can do when I’m stressed. Submit more and more software titles to them. And Super Patterns 3, which I just submitted to Mac App Store, is just one of them.

Super Patterns 3 is a desktop application that lets you design a wallpaper pattern by repeating the same symbols horizontally and vertically. Super Patterns 3 is No. 3 of this series with many improvements. One major update is the full stack support of undo and redo actions. Once you navigate to the Canvas screen, whether you add a symbol to the canvas or just change its size or its background color, you can undo almost any action.

Super Patterns 3 supports two different types of patterns. You can use SF symbols to design a pattern. The SF symbol drop-down menu gives you quick access to 80 symbols. Yet, you don’t have to pick one from this drop-down. You can refer to SF Symbols.app for one by entering its name in the symbol name field. You can also repeat an image you select to make a pattern.

When you finish designing a pattern, you are just one click away from saving the entire canvas as an image to disk. Super Patterns 3 supports HEIC, JPEG, PDF, PNG, TIFF as export formats.

Super Patterns 3 lets you share your projects with different Macs sharing the same iCloud account. All you have to do is log into your iCloud account and select a project to share. Then just click on the Push button. You can then use a different Mac to fetch these projects by just clicking on the Fetch button. So you don’t have to worry about losing projects after buying a new Mac.   Continue reading →

YOKOHAMA (Señor Tomato) – It’s been rainy for the past several days. I was not able to go outside to run on Tuesday and Thursday. I’m not so sure if I can make it today. I guess I’ll find out that in half an hours. It looks like a typhoon is near the Tokyo-Yokohoma area.

Well, here comes the fourth software release of the month. It’s called Oh My Gradient 3.

The Oh My Gradient series has been around for almost 12 years. Its objective is to let you design a reproducible gradient pattern with multiple color stops. The followings are the steps as to how to use it.

1. Use the drop-down menu at the top-right corner to to select one of four gradient types (Linear, Radial, Elliptical, Angular).
2. Name a project.
3. Select on a project in the list and then click on the corresponding Edit button to navigate to the Gradient screen.
4. Click on the color button to set a color.
5. Click on the Add button to create a marker.
6. Select and move a marker left and right.
7. After you place one or more markers, click on the Export button to save the current gradient pattern as an image file.
8. Finally, click on the Save toolbar button to save progress.
9. Additionally, you can click on the SwiftUI code button to generate SwiftUI code for the current gradient pattern.

Oh My Gradient 3 lets you share gradient patterns with other Macs sharing the same iCloud account. So you can select a project in the list and then click on the Push button to send it to iCloud. You can download gradient patterns that have been pushed by other Macs by clicking on the Fetch button. All gradient projects you have downloaded have the Cloud tag while other projects have the Local tag.   Continue reading →

YOKOHAMA (Señor Tomato) – It’s August. So it shouldn’t be surprised for you to hear that it’s scorching hot in this Tokyo-Yokohoma metropolitan area during the daytime. Yet, it’s been quite cool at dawn for the past several days.

Well, I’m ready to annouce a new software release. It’s the second and the third software release of the month. Yes, I’m releasing two software titles, one for macOS and the other for iPad. The desktop version is called Scrapboard 4.

The history of Scrapboard series goes back by almost 12 years. The original idea is to have the user paste notes and pictures on a multi-page virtual bulletin board just like the door of a refrigerator at every household. This version now supports six different layer types: Text, Picture, SF Symbol, Appointment, Web, Map. Scrapboard 4 works along with its iOS counterpart (Scrapboard Cloud 4) so that you can share projects between different devices and OSes. As far as this application is concerned, you cannot just share projects with iPads but also with other Macs provided that they all share the same iCloud account.

Previously, the last version Scrapboard was just a multi-page virtual bulletin board. Scrapboard 4 goes one step further. Now, you can create multiple projects locally, each of which is a multi-page virtual bulletin board. In order to share a local project between devices, all you have to do is select one in the project list and then click on the Push button. If you want to fetch projects from other devices, simply click on the Fetch button, and Scrapboard 4 will pull all existing projects under your current iCloud account and download them for you. Furthermore, you can subscribe to project changes made by other devices. And you will receive a notification every time you push a project on a different Mac or on an iPad.

Speaking of different types of layers, the followings are their brief descriptions.

1. Text: It’s a note layer where you can select a font family, a text size, a text color and a background color.
2. Picture: You can select a picture from your disk or from Photos Library.
3. SF Symbol: This layer type displays a symbol. You need to use SF Symbol.app, which is freely distributed by Apple, Inc., to get symbol names.
4. Appointment: You select the day of the month and the time of an appointment. And Scrapboard 4 will count down the remaining time until an event takes place. You have options of receiving or not receiving a notification.
5. Web: You can show the web content corresponding to the URL you specify.
6. Map: It’s used to show the map of the GPS coordinates you specify. And you can run a search with a landmark name to get coordinates.

  Continue reading →

YOKOHAMA (Señor Tomato) – The scorching summer is on hold for the past few days. The highest temperature is expected to be 30° C today in the Tokyo-Yokohama metropolitan area. That’s not terribly bad, is it?

These days, I often go to a free website for checking English sentences for spelling and grammar mistakes. I don’t have a problem to see on-site ads. But there are a few things that I definitely don’t like.

1. If you end a sentence with two white space characters, they will correct it with one white space character.
2. In the English grammar, use of a comma is followed by one white space character. But they place this white space character before the comma.
3. If you have ‘And’ at the beginning of a sentence, they’ll remove it.

If you are a typewriter generation, you know that each English sentence must be followed by two white space characters, not one. For me, that’s not something that I could compromise. But they’ll correct it without user options, and I find it quite disturbing.

So I’ve decided to develop a new desktop application free of this unnecessary grammar correction. Well, if you are ready to hear it, this new release is called Textriptor.

Textriptor is a desktop application that allows you correct your sentences spelling and grammar-wise. It’s powered by LanguageTool, an open-source, AI-powered writing assistant. Textriptor displays your original text string under the left pane. You click on the toolbar button, and it will then show the correction result under the right pane. Furthermore, Textriptor will highlight corrected words in different colors. If a word is highlighted in red, that means it’s a spelling correction. Currently, Textriptor supports nearly two dozen languages including English, French, and Spanish. Note that use of this application requires Internet connection.

The spelling and grammar correction performance of Textriptor is up to LanguageTool. It definitely doesn’t do an exceptional job. We may offer an add-on feature for use of GPT-5.5 API, which should increase Textriptor drastically. But this add-on will not be available as free distribution. Somebody has to pay the bill, and it will not be us. And it won’t be cheap. One rough idea is a non-consumable (one-time payment) IAP with some limitations like 10 calls max per hour. Another path is a non-consumable IAP with Use Your Own Key expansion for about $4.99 where you need to use your own ChatGPT key. If you are interested in this add-on, let us know with a comment below.   Continue reading →