Introducing TapMeasure – Occipital’s new measurement / room CAD generation tool

TapMeasure is a whole new way to build a 3D model of any room in a few seconds. It works with Apple’s new ARKit framework, and adds Occipital’s special sauce to provide artwork alignment, quick measurements, and the aforementioned generation of (SketchUp-compatible) CAD files. It’s free, and will ship as soon as iOS 11 drops later today.

See the website at tapmeasure.io.

For my part, I got to push some iOS code to this one! As well as helping out with some of the graphic design and UX, I was also able to design and edit the tutorial videos and the launch trailer embedded above. We have the luxury of one of the most seasoned computer vision teams in the world here, and I think it shows.

Knock

Knock twice on your iPhone to unlock your Mac. $3.99 on the App Store, and a really nice site that commits one major sin: Hijacking the user’s scroll momentum to guide them through the sections. This is happening a lot these days.

We did some demos of this at Occipital for the Structure Sensor website, based (as I assume Knock’s is) on Apple’s animation-heavy Mac Pro site. It looked really cool, but in the end it never “felt” right. After demoing it to a friend of mine his only feedback was “Just let me scroll.” It’s good advice.

Introducing Twitov

Twitov is a generative text bot that takes your Twitter history file and uses it to make new Tweets based on your own personality. It’s free, all you need is your Twitter history file.

Twitov is an Extra Future 6-hour project that ballooned into a week-long one. Whoops. Previous ExFu 6-hour Projects include Kove (a community-editable Choose Your Own Adventure Game), Liblr (Something like Mad Libs for Twitter), and Kreskin (An app that generates album covers for fictional bands based on real Flickr images, Wikipedia, and famous quotes).

Instapaper for Android

“Finally.”

I use a fairly cheap Android phone, because I don’t want to give ATT or Verizon any of my money, and I hate cell phone contracts. Instapaper was one of the apps I use everyday that was really hampered by the lack of a native client. Looks like that’s fixed, now.

The interesting thing here is that Marco Arment, Instapaper’s founder/developer, didn’t code the Android app himself. He hired an Android development house to do it. I wouldn’t be surprised to see more iOS-only apps go this way if it works out for him.