I love seeing what small independent developers put together for iOS and Mac OS X. Often, the apps are the best of their type because of all of the love and attention that’s poured into their development. That’s the case with Teeny Tokyo ($9.99, $4.99 launch price), a new Mac OS X app from indie dev John Saddington.
Saddington’s previous app Desk was awarded the Best App of 2014 award by Apple, and he definitely knows how to write apps that are easy to use and productive. Desk is the app that I use to blog on WordPress sites, providing a minimalist interface for writing and publishing to blogs. Teeny Tokyo? It’s a nice companion piece for Desk, as it is used to do bulk edits of groups of photos to be use in blogs.
Let’s say that I have a pile of screenshots from a Retina display MacBook that are destined for Desk and then on to The Rocket Yard. I know that every image I place in my blog post needs to be a specific width and that I want the file size of each picture to be as small as possible in order to load quickly.
In Teeny Tokyo’s interface (see image above), I can set a max width for the images, choose to rotate them, rename the images, select the output quality and file format, and also select a folder in which to store the edited images. Once that’s done, those settings can be saved as a preset:
The resulting preset user interface is amazingly lightweight: just 398 pixels wide and 226 pixels high. Now I can drag and drop one or many image files for conversion to the correct maximum width and file type.
Teeny Tokyo’s mascot is an adorable smiling Godzilla, towering over Tokyo with a photo he’s about to munch. Fittingly, dropping images onto the app (either through the app UI or the little monster that appears in the menu bar) produces a quick munching sound that’s positive feedback that the image has been processed.
Like Desk, Teeny Tokyo does away with complicated user interface design and just concentrates on getting the job done quickly and with a minimum of fuss. For easy blogging, the tag team of Teeny Tokyo and Desk can’t be beat.
