What struck me almost instantly was that this app is clearly aimed at being a PDF creation tool, it isn’t like ReaddleDocs or PDF Expert which are more focused as being document management and PDF annotation apps. Remarks may have those same annotation tools but it wants you to create PDF documents, whether it be a handwritten note, drawing or diagram that you want to send to a colleague or perhaps a study note.

In its current form, PDF annotation may be useful but it’s a bit of a pain to get a PDF into Remarks, unlike PDF Expert and ReaddleDocs it doesn’t (yet) have support for cloud services such as Dropbox or SugarSync. Fortunately, this will only be a short-lived annoyance, Readdle plans to have an update ready within two weeks that adds support for cloud services.

Once you do get a PDF into Remarks, you won’t be disappointed – the same powerful annotation functionality that is in Readdle’s other apps is also available in Remarks. So you’ll get the tools to add text, draw shapes and write or draw in freehand on those PDFs, and as usual it is all editable in Preview on the Mac or any other PDF reader such as Adobe Acrobat.

I think for me, this app will come in handy when I need to take down study notes that also require diagrams or illustrations. Things that I can’t do in Evernote, which is very much a text focused note-taking app. In the past I have sketched them down in an exercise book and then for the most important ones I have subsequently drawn them up in Photoshop, OmniGraffle or OmniGraphSketcher, importing those into Evernote. Now I could just use Remarks to make an electronic copy of all my study notes, not just those that are in plain text. I’ll probably still use Photoshop or one of the Omni apps for some of my diagrams that are super important so they are a little neater – but its no longer a requirement.

Before I wrap up, I just wanted to make a quick mention of using a stylus with the iPad. The app does recommend using one and I must admit using a stylus in the context of drawing diagrams and general notes does make a lot of sense – using my finger wasn’t as effective as I had hoped and it soon got tiring. So I foresee myself picking up a stylus in the near future, to make sure I can take full advantage of what Remarks offers.

If you are just looking for an app to annotate PDF documents it might be a better idea to go for PDF Expert or ReaddleDocs. But if you want to do more freeform note-taking, drawing diagrams or creating your own simple PDFs, Remarks is the way to go. Remarks is available in the App Store for $4.99.

With Dropzone 2.0, released today on the Mac App Store, Aptonic has been inspired by Path’s radial menu (introduced in version 2.0 of the app) and created a new drag & drop interface based on Circles, which as the name suggests are circular icons that sport pretty much the same animation seen in Path 2.0 for iPhone. I don’t know if the new Circles system is more intuitive than the old dock/menubar-based grid of icons (as a Dropzone user myself, I’ll have to see how Circles works in daily usage and if the feature doesn’t get in the way), but it sure looks very nice. Aptonic has also put together an HTML5 demo of Circles, available here.

Dropzone 2.0 comes with other features and improvements as well:

• New improved Amazon S3 support
• New task completion sound
• Added an option to choose whether to intall applications in the user or main application folder

Like I said, I’ll have to keep on using the new Dropzone to see whether the new Circles interface can grow on me. I love the custom sharing menu in Path, but I don’t know yet if the same approach can work for file management and the various shortcuts I have set up in Dropzone. To celebrate the launch of version 2.0, Dropzone will be available at $9.99 until February 5th.

In spite of Mr. Reader gaining a well-deserved spot on my Home screen, I’m always looking for new apps that offer a fresh take on the (much discussed) subject of RSS and Google Reader. Such app is Reader X, released today on the App Store, which brings a minimal yet highly visual approach to RSS that shouldn’t disappoint those who are looking for a new and easy way to quickly scan headlines.

Reader X, in fact, doesn’t let you browse feeds by folder, or manage subscriptions, or scroll unread items vertically as you would expect from a standard RSS client such as Mr. Reader. Well, technically you can sort by folder and scroll vertically, but the implementation of Reader X is entirely different: the app displays feeds as a “mosaic” of news, a list of articles organized in horizontal stripes that represent the websites they belong to. This huge “wallpaper of news” syncs with your existing Google Reader account, and is capable of fetching unread and starred items, folders and all items from a single subscription. Upon firing up the app for the first time, the software will sync with Google Reader and get the latest entries for every subscription in your account; you can tell the app to pre-fetch webpages in the background, and show a badge on the Home screen.

The way news are visualized on screen is functional to what Reader X tries to achieve — that is, trying to offer a more scannable interface for items you’d have to manually scroll with your mouse (or fingers) in a list. Items in the wallpaper are color-coded: unread items are blue, starred entries are yellow, everything else is gray. Newer items have a more saturated color, whilst older entries are gradually fainted as you scroll back in time. Recent headlines are displayed on the left next to a website’s name, and you can also choose to “zoom in” a single subscription (such as MacStories) to browse the most recent articles from that source.

Holding true to its premise of quickly peeking into your RSS items, when you tap on an article headline in Reader X you’re not immediately taken to a full-screen web view. Instead, the app loads webpages in a popover window that, however, still allows you to enter full-screen mode and share a link on Twitter, Pinboard, Instapaper, Tumblr and ReadItLater. You can also share via email, or forward links to Safari.

I like the super-simple and straightforward interface design of Reader X, but I can’t help but wonder how this thing would look like with a bit more polish, especially in the popover and sharing menu design. I’m all for avoiding complex interfaces and over-designed applications, but Reader X feels like it could use some extra pixel love in some areas, so I am looking forward to future updates. I would also like to be able to change the default font of the list, though the one the app currently ships with isn’t too bad.

Reader X won’t replace my main Google Reader client. I do believe, however, that there is room in my workflow for a different take on RSS consumption — a companion app — that allows me to quickly skim through headlines in a visual way that doesn’t get in the way and can make me save precious time when going through RSS feels like a chore. Reader X isn’t perfect, but it sure takes advantage of the iPad’s screen and it’s a promising 1.0 version. You can get the app at $1.99 on the App Store.

For those who are not familiar with Launch Center already, as we detailed in our previous reviews this utility allows you to set up custom shortcuts on your iPhone to launch common actions or often-used applications with a single tap. Upon firing up Launch Center, you’ll be able to create and manage shortcuts for, say, calling your wife or texting a coworker; you can create a quick action to activate the iPhone’s flashlight, launch a website in Safari, tweet, email someone, or Google your clipboard. As I’ve written before, Launch Center has replaced a bunch of existing apps in my dock thanks to its super-simple approach to aggregating default apps and functionalities that can be triggered through the popular URL schemes you can find documented on websites such as HandleOpenURL. And it’s from this idea of hidden URLs that only a few people know about that App Cubby decided to make Launch Center 1.2 all about app detection and integration.

Launch Center 1.2 leverages your apps’ internal URL schemes to simplify the process of discovering new shortcuts and speeding up your workflow. Launch Center comes with a new section called “Supported Apps” inside the Launch App menu, which lists third-party apps that can work with Launch Center through a URL. Launch Center organizes this list in Installed Apps (the ones you already have on your device) and Featured Apps (which you don’t have installed, and you can get from the App Store). This list of support apps, it turns out, has been built directly by App Cubby and it is hosted on the developers’ servers alongside links to the icons that, as you can see from the screenshots, are served directly to the iPhone and look great on the Retina Display. The reason behind App Cubby’s decision to keep the list of supported apps on their servers is to encourage more developers to get in touch and ask for integration in Launch Center which, ultimately, has a chance of becoming the de-facto solution for quickly accessing apps’ settings/sections/menus using a technology Apple is (seemingly) okay with.

App Cubby writes:

We’d also appreciate help in spreading the word about URL schemes. It’s surprising how few apps support them, and those that do don’t always go very deep with supported actions. If you have an idea for an app and/or action that would make sense in Launch Center, please contact the developer of that app directly and point them to this page.

Launching an app is great, but the true power of Launch Center is in the ability to trigger specific actions deep within an app. For example, while using Tweetbot, you may leave the app buried deep within a search. To launch the app and tweet might take quite a few taps as you have to back out of the search, tap the compose button, select an account, paste text, etc. Launch Center can make that a reliable 2 taps. 1 to open Launch Center and 1 to trigger the action.

In my Launch Center, I was pleased to see many of my most-used apps were already supported. I have set up shortcuts for 1Password, Instagram’s camera and Facebook; I tweaked Tweetbot’s shortcut to jump directly to my Favorites, and created an OmniFocus launch to create a new task “using clipboard for note”. Other apps I see as supported (and installed on my device) include Agenda, Evernote, Consume, Flipboard, Delivery Status Touch, Camera+, Instapaper, Skype, and Reeder. Hopefully a lot more will be coming soon thanks to App Cubby’s decision to make their iOS App URLs page public.

As I said above, Launch Center has become one of my favorite new apps for iPhone. It speeds up my workflow and looks neat, and I look forward to seeing how many developers will get in touch with App Cubby to formally introduce support for Launch Center in their apps (I also would like to see App Cubby figure out a way to fetch icons for any app).

You can find Launch Center 1.2 in the App Store.

As you fire up RankIt for the first time, you’re asked to add an app from the App Store you’d like to check rankings for. You can choose between iPhone, iPad, Universal and Mac apps, and change from United States to 9 other markets with available charts. In Settings.app, you can further tweak RankIt to adjust the number of maximum ranks returned (from 50 up to 400), set a default country, and refresh on launch. Once you’ve entered an app to monitor, RankIt will quickly refresh its ranking to check on freshly updated charts. RankIt will display an app’s position in the Top Paid/Free charts, as well as its ranking in the category’s charts. Universal apps will show iPhone and iPad icons next to them; with one tap, you can open a single app view that displays rankings in multiple countries. You can refresh at any time, with RankIt taking only a few seconds to get updated charts from the App Store.

In spite of its simplicity, I believe RankIt can be a worthy addition to any iOS or Mac developer’s workflow. In fact, the app’s focus on “quick stats” might just be its biggest selling point when compared to more in-depth tools that can’t just be refreshed every 10 minutes, whereas RankIt seems to be meant exactly for this — quickly checking on the App Store’s charts. I’ll make sure to test RankIt again during one of the big app launches next week, and see how it handles updates in real-life usage scenarios.

RankIt is $1.99 on the App Store.

With Witness 2.0, released today, Orbicule has supercharged its home alarm system technology adding a series of functionalities that give more control to users away from their computers, and more issues to (possible) burglars looking to steal your Mac without being seen (or really, just people who want to mess around with your Mac without telling you). Aside from motion detection, which has been improved, Witness 2.0 comes with face detection, allowing you to be notified only when an actual person is sitting in front of your computer’s camera. There are settings to adjust motion sensitivity, and, overall, this feature can really come in handy if you have pets running around the house when you’re not there. I have tried this with my two dogs, and it worked remarkably well with motion sensitivity set to “Normal”: Witness didn’t detect anything with my dogs normally walking around, and I was only sent a notification when I held my dog right in front of the FaceTime camera. Similarly, Witness’ alarm didn’t fire off when I asked my girlfriend to simply walk around the living room, but I did get a notification as she approached my computer.

Next up: multiple cameras and sneak peek. Whereas Witness 1.0 allowed you to set up one camera (the built-in one) and watch images and videos sent after a successfully triggered alarm, Witness 2.0 lets you connect up to 3 cameras (USB or FireWire) and check upon your room from multiple angles. Combined with a new feature called Sneak Peek that lets you load an image from your camera at any time, Witness 2.0 offers a good combination of real-time capturing and multiple angles — I imagine this can be particularly useful for large rooms and office areas.

Last, Witness 2.0 has AppleScript support and auto-activation. You can ask Witness 2.0 to run an AppleScript when an alarm is activated, deactivated, or motion is detected, thus creating a whole new range of possibilities for remote automation. Someone’s using your Mac? Why don’t you tell iTunes to start playing this at the highest volume? Or perhaps open a totally creepy video in the default browser? With AppleScript support, you have endless possibilities for customization and it’s really up to you to find something that might be useful when executed automatically by the system. Even better, with Witness 2.0 you’re given the option to forget about activating your alarm as the iOS app now uses geo-location to see when you’re not near your Mac anymore, and activate the alarm for you. Obviously I still recommend manually activating alarms (especially if you’re working with multiple Macs in different locations) as geo-location can’t always be 100% reliable, but in my tests Witness managed to activate an alarm roughly 2 minutes after I left my house, so I’d say it worked fairly well.

With these new features and optimizations, I highly recommend existing Witness users to upgrade to version 2.o and check it out by themselves today. If you haven’t tried Witness yet, a single user license is available through Orbicule’s website at $39 with a student discount available.

Exclusive offer for MacStories readers: Using this link, you can purchase Witness 2 (single user license) with a 20% discount. The coupon code is directly applied, and it will be valid until February 6.

NewsFlash is basically an RSS aggregator for the major news sources in the world — that is, some sort of “Techmeme for Italy only” for more countries, with “big media” websites aggregated by default and no relevance algorithm in the backend. In Italy, you can have news from the likes of Il Corriere Della Sera or Ansa; in the U.S. you’ll both find Reuters and Msnbc alongside TechCrunch and MacRumors. The app, in fact, is organized in sections that range from News and Politics to Sports, Technology and Gossip, providing a way to quickly change the topic you’re looking and get the facts, or at least what’s been written, about the latest news. It’s like Techmeme meets MacHash meets Tech News Tube meets Google Reader, only in a clean, intuitive app for iPhone and iPad.

The app obviously allows you to share stories via Facebook, Twitter (iOS 5 integration is supported), email and text message. NewsFlash doesn’t always load a website’s mobile view when jumping to stories (and that can actually be a good thing), but it offers font size controls and options to block ads and links to third-parties. News can be updated with the typical pull-to-refresh gesture, whilst a top toolbar is used to switch between countries and sections through a single swipe. Currently, NewsFlash comes with support for the following countries: Italy, UK, US, Germany (both in Deutsche and English), Japan, France (both French and English) and Israeli. The app’s preferences allow you to hide certain sections and add custom feeds (you can add literally anything that supports RSS, turning NewsFlash into a simple RSS reader), adjust fonts and change the app’s background. I like how the app automatically looks at your device’s language and tries to load news from that country.

NewsFlash is free, but you can disable iAd with a $1.99 in-app purchase. Give it a try if you’ve been looking for a nice app that aggregates “general” news, whilst keeping your real RSS subscriptions in a standalone Google Reader app.

Obviously, the contents of an application are subject to copyright, and upon first launch Crunch will warn you that you shouldn’t share or copy images from someone else. Taking a look, however, is not a crime, and Crunch absolutely delivers on its promise to enhance the way you can explore an app’s resources on your Mac. I believe any developer or designer who tries Crunch will never go back to old Finder hacks and scripts to extract and preview iOS resources.

Crunch is capable of automatically detecting apps from your iTunes library and filtering them by platform — iPhone, iPad, or Universal. Crunch will also install a QuickLook plugin, so you’ll be able to see each app’s icon overlaying the standard .ipa file preview in the Finder and QuickLook windows. Once you’ve selected an app, you can hit Export, and Crunch will ask you where you’d like to save an app’s resources, and if you’d like to keep all files with their existing folder hierarchy, or only Retina-ready @2x image files. The latter option can be particularly useful to pinpoint images ready for the rumored iPad 3′s Retina Display found inside several Apple apps for iOS.

As I mentioned above, images will be normalized when exported — but you’ll need to have Xcode installed as Crunch uses a tool provided by Xcode to revert the optimization and make a .png Mac-ready.

Crunch does one thing very well, and I’m sure it can become an invaluable tool for anyone who designs and develops for iOS and wants to “know more” about apps and how they’re created, at least from a graphical standpoint. Crunch is only $9 via Pragmatic Code’s website.

I have played with PDFpen for a few hours, and I have to say I am impressed by the amount of polish and options that went into this first release. Whilst you obviously won’t find all the tools and menus from apps like Readdle’s PDF Expert in version 1.0 of PDFpen for iPad (PDF Expert reached version 3.2 yesterday), Smile’s latest app shows a promising future because of features it already comes with, such as iCloud storage across iOS and OS X or native Dropbox and Evernote integration via APIs.

I’ll start with the exporting options. Unlike several PDF management apps, PDFpen doesn’t stop at offering a standard “Open In…” menu that simply forwards a local document to other installed iOS apps; the app does that, too( and quite cleverly I might add, as upon exporting PDFpen asks you if you want to save a “document” with annotations editable by other apps, or a flattened copy), but it also directly integrates with Dropbox, Evernote, iDisk, Google Docs, webDAV and FTP. If you choose to export PDFs to Dropbox or Evernote, PDFpen will let you log in and pick a destination folder — personally, I’d recommend storing regular PDF docs in Dropbox, and those that you want to OCR in Evernote, as the service provides great search functionalities for this.

Sharing options can be accessed on a per-document basis from the upper toolbar’s sharing menu; alternatively, you can select multiple documents from the main screen and share them online (or locally, through WiFi Transfer and iTunes Copy). Overall, also considering PDFpen’s support for iCloud from day one, if you put strong emphasis on sharing options for your documents, I’d say you should strongly consider a PDFpen setup on your Mac and iOS devices.

When it comes to editing a PDF, as I said earlier PDFpen doesn’t sport all the options of a popular competitor such as PDF Expert yet, but credit where credit’s due — Smile has been supporting PDFpen for years and I’m sure features will come over time. Plus, it’s not like the app is underpowered in this first release — PDF Expert simply offers more because it’s been around longer. As with the Mac version, PDFpen lets you annotate documents with notes (which you can export separately), various shapes and arrows, images from the iPad’s Camera Roll and your own text. Images can be freely moved and resized on screen, whilst text can be entered with the keyboard, or through direct touch input. As you can see from the screenshots, the app supports different types of highlights and colors, with a toolbar allowing you to modify colors and font sizes, among other things. Personally, I’d like the developers to reconsider the organization of the toolbar menus, as I’ve sometimes struggled to find a particular option because it was too buried inside a popover menu with multiple choices. Perhaps contextual menus or a taller toolbar could help in this regard.

Text can be manipulated, too, either through boxes you can move on screen, or by dragging your scribbles around. What’s cool about PDFpen is that it lets you tweak the opacity/fill color/width parameters of any shape, as well as re-arrange any element in the back/front of other annotations on screen. And, obviously, if you need to digitally sign PDFs, PDFpen will let you do that as well by letting you save any annotation as a template you can reuse later.

PDF Expert’s editing toolbar and popup menu (above) Vs. PDFpen (below).

You may be wondering — how do PDFpen’s annotations compare to the competition? Pretty well, I’d say, except for some issues with compatibility across apps that, I assume, could also be due to different implementation techniques between developers. Highlights, notes and colors work fairly well, with colors and text styles accessible from a bottom toolbar or popover menus. What I’ve noticed is that PDF Expert is much more intuitive in editing annotations and highlights thanks to an enhanced iOS popup menu, whereas PDFpen can feel a little clunky in relying exclusively on the popover metaphor. Moreover, PDF Expert generally accepts any kind of PDF edited from other applications you throw at it, while I had PDFpen not properly recognizing highlights and shapes from some third-party PDF apps. Both solutions, however, exported PDFs (editable or flattened) to Preview and Acrobat just fine. I would say that PDFpen offers smoother animations and transitions (the sidebar with thumbnail previews is a personal favorite of mine) with an overall simpler approach to controls and annotations tools, whereas PDF Expert is obviously more mature because of its longer development cycle. I can’t comment on other apps, as PDF Expert is the only PDF editing app I’ve used regularly until today.

As far as my workflow is concerned, in spite of PDF Expert offering more features with an editing toolbar that I prefer, I think I’ll stick with PDFpen, for a couple of reasons. First is iCloud support, which I regard as a must-have these days for people serious about keeping the same set of documents always in sync between devices. Second, I like the idea of getting used to the same group of apps on my Mac and iOS devices — in case you don’t know, PDFpen is available on the Mac as well and it’s a really powerful app. PDF Expert doesn’t offer a Mac client, but it’s got an iPhone version; I, however, don’t read or edit PDFs on my iPhone. Last, PDFpen’s excellent export capabilities allow me to considerably streamline my iPad workflow when it comes to importing PDFs (from Dropbox, Papers, or PDF Converter), annotating them, and saving them for long-term storage either in Evernote or Dropbox. I’ve also recently bought a Doxie Go portable scanner from Amazon, and I can’t wait to test PDFpen with the Camera Connection Kit and direct Evernote uploads alongside Doxie’s software. This experiment will also prove how PDFpen can handle large libraries of files and how well the renaming/combining features can work when handling a lot of files.

At $9.99, PDFpen for iPad is a fantastic first version and I look forward to seeing what future updates will bring. Get the app here.

Priced at $0.99, Chrome Sync Pro runs as a universal app on the iPhone and iPad (the latter doesn’t support landscape mode for some reason), and has three sections at the bottom to switch between your bookmarks, open tabs and history. When I first heard about Chrome Sync Pro my first concern was security — it turns out, the app gets your Chrome information through an extension that doesn’t communicate with third-party servers, but copies your browser’s data into a Google doc in your account. The data in Google Docs is encrypted in some sort of way, I believe, so that only Chrome Sync Pro for iOS can read it and display properly on your device. I’d like the developers to explain this process better, for sure, but I’m not deeply concerned about security and privacy as long as my Chrome data is passed along through OAuth to Google Docs.

On iOS, the app is very simple and functional. When you open it, it’ll refresh with the latest data from your Chrome browser and allow you to tap on links. Chrome Sync Pro supports different third-party iOS browsers instead of just Safari, although some personal favorites of mine like Grazing and iCab aren’t supported yet. There is a refresh button to update the sync results from your desktop computer, but I’ve found the extension to be stable and fast at syncing back tabs and history to Google Docs.

Chrome Sync Pro is a simple utility that could use a prettier interface and more third-party browser integration; for now, it gets the job done. If you’re looking for a way to make your Google Chrome data portable, Chrome Sync Pro is only $0.99 on the App Store.

I love the start of a new year because it is a great time to revamp your productivity workflow. You can re-evaluate what tools you use and even buy new apps completely free of guilt. It is no secret that the cornerstone of any good system is the calendar but it can be difficult to force yourself to create calendar events on a regular basis. Well, the folks behind QuickCal have just released a great update to get you back in the routine of managing your calendar.

One major improvement in QuickCal 3.1 is the re-written recognition engine that the app uses to understand natural language input. QuickCal has no structured syntax for adding events and reminders which actually makes adding items extremely flexible. When typing in the event you no longer have to start with the event title, you actually have the option of starting with a time, duration, location, or title and QuickCal will almost always get it right. I have also noticed a dramatic improvement in QuickCal’s ability to correctly parse out event locations which is something I have had trouble with in previous versions. Regardless of the order in which you type out the information, QuickCal does an excellent job figuring out the details for you. Adding events to your calendar without worrying about correct syntax is incredibly powerful. The only way QuickCal could get any faster at creating calendar events is if it actually finished sentences for you.

oh, wait…

Have I mentioned their new autocomplete feature? Autocomplete does exactly what you expect it to do. As you are typing common words, QuickCal gives you suggestions of words it thinks you might be typing. To accept the autocompletion you can just hit the tab key and continue on typing. It will even pickup on your most frequently used words and auto-suggest them in the future. After only 3 or 4 reminders relating to my wife Leslie, QuickCal was finishing her name for me. It is awesome. In fact, I am finding it so useful that I am not sure how I had ever used QuickCal without this feature.

Perhaps the greatest improvement to QuickCal is its integration with iCloud Reminders. A reminder is now added to your default Reminders list and shows up in the iOS 5 Reminders app. If the reminder has a date or time then an alarm is also created. This alone is a neat feature but it wasn’t enough to pry me away from the Alfred extension I had created to quickly add simple iOS 5 Reminders. Although as I continued to use the new version of QuickCal, I realized that I could also add items to other lists by simply typing the name of the list. For example, my wife and I share a Groceries list. If I just start typing Gro… it suggests switching to my Groceries list so I can add an item to it. In true QuickCal fashion it does so very intuitively and without effort. It is a great feature that truly increases my dependency on QuickCal. The only drawback is still having to open iCal to trigger an iCloud sync. When CalDAV is supported and I no longer need that extra step, QuickCal will be my ideal iCal replacement.

Check out QuickCal 3.1 and all of its new features on the Mac App Store.

Normally, I wouldn’t have much to say about a keyboard except for “it’s comfortable” or “I can’t type anything on this”. Fortunately, the Logitech keyboard for iPad fits into the former category, with a sturdy plastic design that feels “premium” when compared to other keyboards available on the market, a good keyboard layout, and a carrying case that’s not as premium as the device but certainly gets its job done. Below, the Italian layout of my Logitech Tablet Keyboard:

As you can see, the keyboard isn’t necessarily “standard” as it’s been designed to include iOS-specific keys like shortcuts for Spotlight search, Home button, volume controls, slideshows, media playback and screen lock/unlock controls. The basic layout is the one of a Mac keyboard, and the function keys can be activated by holding fn. Obviously, this isn’t as intuitive as simply reaching out to the screen with your finger to adjust volume, but if you’re going to work with your iPad using the keyboard, you’ll want to know it’s possible to do more than just type.

Which brings me to this: why would you want a physical keyboard for your iPad when the system one is more than acceptable? I don’t know about you, but I’ve been working mainly from my iPad in the past month, and I found a physical keyboard to be a must-have if you’re serious about getting real, regular writing done in a text editor or word processor. iOS’ multitouch keyboard is fine to fire off quick email replies and tweets (and iOS 5′s new split keyboard helps a lot for “general typing” in every day usage), but I still can’t give up on the allure of plastic QWERTY for long-form content and serious email time. Logitech’s iPad offering fits nicely in my workflow (and Tom Bihn Ristretto Bag): I can get it out of its case, turn it on, wait a few seconds for the iPad to connect (once paired, the Bluetooth connection process is very fast on iPad 2) and start writing. Read More

Any designer will tell you how important image sizes and spacing are to their craft — graphics, the web, etc.. Measuring each element can take tedious time unless you have all the right tools. There are ‘measuring’ and ‘location’ tools out there, but none work better or have more bells and whistles than Iconfactory’s (and Artis Software) xScope. xScope 3.0 is out today and it brings over 70 new features to its already complete pixel toolkit.

xScope 3.0 (Mac 10.6 and higher) is a huge update to version 2.x with two components: a Mac side and an iOS side for the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. If you feel a little bewildered at first with all these new features, be sure to use the useful in-app help, as it outlines everything and answers many questions. I’ll cover some of the great new highlights of version 3.0.

The most notable feature of xScope 3.0 is the Mirror tool. Remote viewing lets you easily view the contents of any Mac desktop window on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch with the accompanying iOS app (via iTunes, Free). Once xScope for Mac is open, launch the iOS app and it will find your Mac over Wi-Fi and ask you to pair them together.

Once paired, the Pin & Lock tool lets you move the Mac window anywhere, always staying in focus on iOS. The iOS app has a chromeless UI: there’s no overlaid chrome to get in the way while you’re working. Multiple iOS devices can connect and view the same window on a single Mac, which is great for demos or meetings. Read More

Yoink is a drag & drop assistant for Lion, in that it provides you with a virtual “safe zone” to temporarily store files — or rather, links to them — you want to move from one location (say your desktop) to another space or full-screen app. Yoink doesn’t “copy” a file, or multiple ones, to its shelf: it only acts as a bridge between the original file, and the destination of the drop.

In its first version, Yoink was primarily meant to provide a better way to move files from the Finder to full-screen apps — that is the reason the app was built with Lion APIs from the ground up. Yoink 1.0 undoubtedly offered a quick and elegant way to move files around apps and desktops in an intuitive manner; Yoink 2.0, released today, is a huge step forward that now allows the app to accept almost any kind of input from OS X, from text to images and web clippings from any app.

In accessing content from apps, Yoink has become more than a simple tool to temporarily store files that need to be moved around full-screen apps — think of  Yoink 2.0 as a secondary, visual clipboard that can accept almost any kind of file you throw at it. In my tests, besides dropping content from apps into Yoink’s shelf, I’ve copied links, text and images from Safari and Chrome, and successfully watched Yoink create text clippings and full copies of the images ready to be pasted anywhere on my Mac, both in the Finder and other apps. Rich text from a web browser is converted to .textclipping once imported in Yoink, and you can easily re-export everything to the Finder, or into another app that accepts text, such as TextEdit or Twitter’s compose window. Want to tweet a famous quote by The Beatles? Drag text into Yoink’s shelf, open your client of choice, and drop your previously copied text. How about quoting someone else’s words on your blog (and this is something I’ve been looking forward to)? Drag text into Yoink, fire up your blog’s editor window, drop text.

Yoink’s new drag & drop system works with almost any app  and any kind of content — you won’t be able to preserve the exact formatting of a rich text document when copying, but it surely works very well as a lightweight solution to quickly save plain text files.

Yoink 2.0 brings a couple more interesting additions besides improved drag & drop. The interface has been redesigned to have more linen and the app can be assigned a keyboard shortcut; more positions for Yoink’s window have been added and files shouldn’t be lost anymore if they’re moved from their original location. One issue I had (and already reported to the developer) was with an alias I moved from Dropbox to my Desktop, which didn’t resolve correctly in Yoink and displayed a permission error. The error is likely happening because of some restrictions from Apple’s sandboxing technology or the fact that the alias came from Dropbox — Yoink 2.0 is capable of resolving aliases and, in fact, it worked fine with a file that was originally stored on my Desktop.

Last, Yoink now comes with File Stacks, a neat way to drag and drop multiple files into Yoink’s window and have the app combine them into one item in the shelf. This can be very handy if you’re dealing with multiple images and PDFs and you want to get them quickly out of the way.

At $2.99 on the Mac App Store, Yoink remains a fantastic way to enhance Lion’s drag & drop with an app that acts as a temporary scratchpad/visual clipboard for content that you want to copy, move elsewhere, or simple save for later. Highly recommended, you can get Yoink here.

Aside from jokes about a name that sounds like a Tapbots app, I’ve been using Wikibot, a Wikipedia client by Avocado Hills, on my iPhone, iPad and Mac regularly, earning a spot on my Mac’s dock as well. Whilst Wikipedia’s website is mostly fine to quickly check on something you don’t know (albeit I’d refrain from lacking particular amounts of knowledge on January 18) and desktop launchers like Alfred made it extremely easy to query the service for anything you need, Wikibot stood out to me because of its clean interface and integrated approach to languages, history and bookmarks.

On the Mac, Wikibot starts up as a minimal window onto Wikipedia’s database with a button in the upper toolbar to display the app through Lion’s full-screen mode, one to load a random article, and a search bar. Search is where you’ll be entering your keywords and there is an option to visualize results as text (title + preview) or just title. You can open multiple tabs (CMD+T), change your preferred language from the menubar item, and “copy link” or “open in browser” via a keyboard shortcut.

The nicest features of Wikibot on the Mac, however, are Favorites, History, Read Later and the overall page design, which as I mentioned above is very uncluttered and clean. Not Articles-clean, but still very readable. As for the other functionalities, you can tell Wikibot to add a page to your favorite items, or access your entire history for all the things you looked up. These options are located in a sidebar, which can also display contents of an article (such as sections and references) and categories (as you can see in Instapaper’s case, “iPad” and “iPhone software”). Favorites can be organized in folders, and it’s easy to add a page to your bookmarks using a keyboard shortcut or drag & drop. If you, however, don’t feel like building a permanent database of bookmarks while you’re using Wikibot, but just want to quickly save a link for later inside the app, you can use the local queue functionality.

At $2.99, Wikibot for Mac is a fine desktop app for Wikipedia meant for those who don’t want to keep lots of tabs open in their default web browsers.

I, however, very much prefer the iOS versions of Wikibot, which work like their Mac counterpart but add iCloud sync for History, Favorites and Settings across devices, intuitive font size controls, visual history, gallery for images, sharing options for Twitter and Facebook and offline caching. Wikibot for iOS is a powerful Wikipedia client with a simple interface, and I’m told iCloud sync will soon come to the desktop as well. I especially like the app on my iPad, where visual search and image galleries have more room to shine and “it just feels right” to spend hours augmenting your knowledge.

Plus, Wikibot for iOS is $0.99 right now, which is a great price. Get it here.

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We often cover Dropbox-enabled text editors and word processors here at MacStories, but we’ve been keeping an eye on handwriting apps as well, a category of software that has seen a huge rise in popularity and user adoption since the release of the iPad. Two personal favorites of mine in this space (and admittedly the biggest players on the App Store, too), Penultimate and Noteshelf, have been recently updated with major new functionalities that dramatically improve the usability and performances of these apps.

Penultimate, which we have covered quite a few times in the past, reached version 3.3 adding direct Dropbox and Evernote integration, Dropbox backups and an “Open In” menu to send notebooks to other installed iOS applications. Penultimate can now send notebooks or individual pages to Dropbox or Evernote; in Evernote, the service’s OCR capabilities for images will make sure your notes will also be fully searchable (that is, unless you really have bad handwriting that OCR can’t analyze). The Dropbox backup option, available in Settings, allows you to always keep the most recent versions of your notes backed up the cloud.

Other improvements in Penultimate 3.3 include bug fixes and possibility of pasting ink copied from other apps (I couldn’t get this to work with either Noteshelf or Bamboo Paper). Overall, Penultimate remains a fantastic iPad handwriting app with one of the finest inks I’ve seen on the platform and now proper cloud-based features to get your notes out of your device. Penultimate is just $0.99 on the App Store.

Noteshelf, another app we’ve covered on MacStories before, has been updated to version 5.0 adding the most requested functionality: text. You can now tap anywhere on the screen, and bring up the iPad’s touch keyboard to start typing text alongside your handwritten notes and sketches. Unlike Penultimate, Noteshelf is jam-packed with features: aside from notebook themes and several page designs (also available in the in-app store), Noteshelf comes with highlighters and smiley faces that can be embedded in a document, page search (limited to typed text) and tagging (new in version 5.0). Starting from the interface, Noteshelf seems to appeal to a different kind of iPad user than Penultimate, one that is looking for many powerful functionality rather than the focused simplicity of Penultimate. Noteshelf undoubtedly comes with many functionalities, and the page toolbar UI can be a little disorienting at first. However, the new features introduced in 5.0 make up for the slightly more cluttered UI, which just needs some time to get used to.

Noteshelf is a very powerful piece of software, available at $4.99 on the App Store.

Consume, a beautiful app by Bjango (iStat Menus, Sideways Racing) is a “versatile usage monitor” that allows you to check on stats for your mobile phone, broadband, and rewards cards, as well as check on package deliveries and various “clubs” supported worldwide. Consume is a beautiful app and from what I hear it works amazingly well in tracking usage for iPhones and iPads; however, I can’t use the app as intended because the carriers I’m subscribed to (3 on my iPhone, TIM on my iPad) aren’t supported by Consume. I’ve always wanted to use Consume, but couldn’t.

Fortunately, with version 2.0 of the app (released a few weeks ago), Bjango has given me a reason to start using the app that I bought last year, hoping that someday 3 and TIM would show up in the list of supported providers. Besides getting a universal version with iPad support and iCloud sync for settings (it’s great), Consume 2 adds better support for package tracking, better handling of multiple accounts, and background provider updating. This means that, combined with the online services already supported in Consume, I’ve found a way to not only simply enjoy the app, but actually make it useful for me.

I use Consume to track shipments, check on my SKY account and available space across all my Gmail accounts, Evernote, and Dropbox. The interface is elegant, simple, and makes it a pleasure to see how much space I’m consuming on Evernote this month (I’m a Premium subscriber). Shipments are laid out with nicely designed icons and menus and, overall, the whole interface of Consume features pretty pixels all over.

Do I wish Consume 2 worked with more Italian carriers? Sure. Maybe someday it will. Right now, I’m just happy I can use this beautiful app with a few functionalities that have a certain usefulness to me.

Consume 2 is $2.99 on the App Store.

Day One 1.5 can read and save files to iCloud automatically, in the background, all the time. As on iOS, existing entries from Dropbox will be merged with iCloud if you decide to use Apple’s service, but you can’t use iCloud and Dropbox simultaneously. Sync is blazing fast in Day One, with iCloud constantly pushing changes across devices as you type. This is true on the Mac as well, as journal items are pushed almost in-real to and from OS X.

The core features of Day One for Mac remain intact in this update. The menubar quick entry menu is still there, as is the Tweetie-like navigation in the main journal with access to days, calendar, favorite items, and reminders. You can set a passcode for the entire app while keeping the menubar’s quick entry panel (possibly with a keyboard shortcut) working and fully functional; you can also navigate between months and years easily through the journal’s main interface.

Among Day One’s new features the most notable one is undoubtedly Markdown and MultiMarkdown support. Folks accustomed to John Gruber’s popular plain text formatting tool will be up and running with Day One in no time; Markdown support has been enabled in Write and Read modes, meaning you’ll see visual live previews of Markdown formatting (*italic* will be displayed as *italic*) as you type. The layout of Read and Day modes has been improved, and there are other new cool additions such as font size controls and Sans/Serif /Monospaced fonts waiting for you to be activated in the Preferences, which are now accessible from a new cog icon in the bottom left corner of the app. Also new in 1.5 is hover preview in Days and Starred views, which will give you a nice-looking popover to get a quick peek  at single entries in your journal.

With Markdown formatting for easier writing, live previews, new font options, popovers and an overall refined UI (transitions and various refinements, including a full-screen mode for Lion), Day One 1.5 sure looks like a winner.

It’s not just sync and the good looks. Day One 1.5 comes with more options to get your data out of the application, too. Auto Backup has been enabled, allowing you to sync with iCloud, but back up the database to another location on your Mac (such as Dropbox). Furthermore, entries (or entire days) can now be exported to Markdown format (.md) besides plain text.

Other minor features from 1.5 include:

• Auto Bold First Lines (Titles)
• Live sync UI updates
• Command S to Save
• Printing
• On Startup Preference
• Journal Merging
• Spelling and Grammar Preferences
• Keyboard Navigation and Controls

With better export options and auto-backup to any folder, Day One 1.5 offers the same strong foundation of the iOS version, but delivers more in terms of quantity of functionalities and quality of writing environment. Day One still is the best app to archive your thoughts and keep a daily journal, period.

Day One 1.5 is available on the Mac App Store.

Available for free on the App Store, Shazam Player is built atop Apple’s music API for iOS, which enables third-party developers to plug directly into a user’s music library synced with iTunes or iCloud. Shazam Player borrows several functionalities from the standalone Shazam app – such as LyricPlay, artists’ bio and related YouTube videos – and blends them together with songs from the native Music app. Whereas Shazam (free, Encore) forces users to tag songs beforehand and then try the LyricPlay functionality, Shazam Player is meant to serve as a full replacement for Music.app, only with more features that existing Shazam users are likely already accustomed to.

Upon first launch, Shazam Player will ask you to scan the Music library synced on your device. This is required for the app to match your songs with available LyricPlay tracks, whose information is stored on Shazam’s servers. You can read more about Shazam’s support for lyrics in my overview from last week. Once the scanning process is complete (it might take several minutes depending on how many tracks you have synced on your device), you’ll be brought to Player’s main UI, which is heavily resembling of Shazam’s typical interface (that is, it could use some polish here and there) but adds a couple of new design elements and interaction patterns. Read More

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve seen an increasing number of developers implement iCloud’s documents & data storage in iOS and Mac apps. From preference syncing (Consume, Instacast) to actual library storage (Day One), it appears developers are now fully realizing the potential of iCloud as an automatic syncing solution across Apple’s devices (iCloud isn’t without its flaws, many developers say, and I hope the upcoming release of iOS 5.1 will also bring this kind of fixes).

An area that’s been strangely absent from my App Store watch list of iCloud-enabled apps is that of text editors. Wildly popular when it comes to Dropbox sync (just to name a few: Elements, Notesy, Notely, Nebulous Notes), there hasn’t been a full-featured text editor to show up with iCloud sync yet. Instead, what I’m seeing is a trend towards simpler note-taking applications that allow you to jot down quick notes and have them synced on iOS and, sometimes, Mac clients with iCloud support. Such app is Werdsmith from Australian developer Nathan Tesler, free with in-app purchase to unlock more space and available as a universal app for iPhone and iPad (no Mac version yet).

Werdsmith features a very peculiar interface with a wooden tab bar and a creepily awesome ‘mustache banner’ at the top. This banner slides down when your list of ideas and projects is empty, but otherwise it’s got no specific use in the app. Overall, the design of the app is very clean, and reminds me of Wunderlist. There is an annoying bug with scrolling long lists on the iPhone that sometimes requires a complete restart of the app; I hope it’ll be fixed with an update.

In Werdsmith you can save ‘ideas’ and turn the most complex ones into ‘projects’. Werdsmith is aimed at writers, so a project will basically consist of a single note with a title and a goal — the latter being a minimum word count for your next essay, journal entry or blog post. You can save ideas as quick notes and leave them in your inbox, or you can make one a project and start writing against that word count. A percentage will indicate how far you’ve gone into completing your project, and when you’re done you can tap on ‘Finish’ to archive it.

Werdsmith is really simple, perhaps a little too simple for my tastes. You can’t export notes in any format (only email sharing, and that’s it), there is no support for Markdown formatting (a must-have these days) and you can’t tag, search, or move notes around. Keep in mind, though, that Werdsmith isn’t meant to be a text editor — rather, I see it as an iCloud-based scratchpad for writers, and it’s pretty decent at that. Werdsmith works fairly well if you’re up to accept its nature of simple utility; I’d like to see, however, the iCloud syncing engine rewritten to be more like Day One, as it’s not really immediate in this 1.1 version.

Even if you’re accustomed to more powerful solutions, you should take Werdsmith for a spin — it’s free and it works with iCloud. You can download Werdsmith here.

Earlier this year, I started using Day One. Not just another text editor with Mac and iOS versions and support for Markdown formatting, Day One is at the same time a flexible and focused solution to archive your thoughts, memories, experiences into a well-built interface that keeps everything in sync across Macs and iOS devices. A fresh take on the old paper journal, Day One takes advantage of modern technologies such as local reminders to tell you when it’s time to write your journal; on the iPhone and iPad, the app supports different font sizes and Markdown, so you’ll be able to write nicely formatted documents that you can easily export to HTML. On the Mac, Day One comes with a standalone menubar application that makes it incredibly fun and quick to jot down thoughts whenever you want.

Day One’s 1.5 update for iOS, released today on the App Store, brings a more powerful Dropbox sync for iPhones and iPads (Day One can store its database in Dropbox, and it allows you to export notes on the Mac via File>Export) and the long-awaited iCloud sync, which I’ve been able to test on my iPhone 4S and iPad 2 (Day One 1.5 for Mac isn’t live yet, but it’s been submitted to the Mac App Store).

I came from an old installation of Day One with a Dropbox database synced to my iPhone and iPad. As I upgraded to version 1.5 and launched the app on both devices, I was asked to disable Dropbox sync if I wanted to use iCloud. I disabled Dropbox, and waited a few minutes for the initial iCloud background sync to finish (it had to pull at least 50 entries to begin with).

Once iCloud is up and running in Day One, it is extremely reliable, fast, and invisible. Unlike Dropbox, it’s not manual sync you have to initiate or automatically perform upon launch and quit — it’s push technology that constantly sends changes back and forth between devices. As an example, I started writing a new entry on my iPhone and it showed up after a few seconds on my iPad, which was running Day One. The main list of notes on the left basically refreshes to accomodate a new note — no manual sync needed. For the same reason, notes are pushed with iCloud as you write them — typos included.

Day One 1.5 clearly fits in a much bigger picture with the Mac client constantly receiving changes from the cloud, but this doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy Day One 1.5 for iOS now. In fact, I often find myself writing my journal on iOS devices rather than the Mac, so iCloud support (with this kind of invisible push technology) is more than welcome.

Day One for iOS is $1.99 on the App Store.

I’ve never been a dedicated user of calendar software on my Mac and iOS devices, but I’ve always been interested in checking out well-made applications capable of working with Google Calendar, MobileMe and, more recently, Apple’s iCloud. Whereas Apple’s Calendar app (iCal on the desktop) has taken quite the skeuomorphic turn with the latest iOS and Lion upgrades (in spite of the iPhone version still lacking the leather and stitches Apple seems to love so much), other utilities like the excellent Fantastical (our review), QuickCal, Week Calendar and Agenda have all offered their unique takes on event creation, quick reminders, access to multiple calendars, and more. I may not be entering events in my “Personal” iCloud calendar all day long, but I enjoy trusting a fine app when I need to schedule that Sony CES keynote or NBA game and don’t want to even look at iCal. To me, calendar has always been a system I’ve wanted to use more — perhaps the right app is key to this.

Chocomoko’s Calendr, which I discovered in the App Store last week, is yet another iPhone client that comes with built-in integration with iOS calendars; unlike other apps that focus on supercharging the iPhone’s native calendar experience with features (Week Calendar, QuickCal) or interface approaches (Agenda) different from Apple’s, Calendr caught my attention because it doesn’t come with hundreds of alternative functionalities, focusing instead on two key elements: navigation and touch-based event creation.

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Being all about access, services like Rdio and Spotify (and MOG and Deezer, to name a few alternatives) often forgo the need of having a “complete package” for the music you’re paying a monthly fee for, focusing on streaming and leaving additional information like artists’ bio, photos, videos and, yes, lyrics as second citizens on the feature checklist. Which may be regarded as a rather anachronistic choice, considering the interconnectedness these web-based services offer through APIs, web apps and add-ons. Probably also because of lyric rights being treated differently from music streaming rights by labels and publishers, services like Rdio still don’t provide users with an integrated way to check on the lyrics of the song (or entire album) they’re streaming.

The flourishing of streaming services and their obvious lack of lyrics integration has lead, I believe, to a decent if not considerable increase in Google queries for lyrics websites, which are many, often ugly, yet still the best option you’ve got if you want to know what a song is saying. These websites are generally crammed with ads, ringtone adverts, and a plethora of additional information most users looking for the latest Adele single won’t ever need. These websites are awful to navigate. The fact that a Google suggestion for “lyrics website without ads” even exists is telling.

For the reasons listed above, and because I’ve been on a Rdio collection-and-playlist building spree lately, last week I set out to find the simplest iPhone, iPad and Mac apps to give me lyrics for the songs I listen to every day. My requirements were pretty basic:

• Rdio support
• iTunes support (just in case)
• Decent UI
• Easy to use
• A search box

As it turns out, I’ve only found three apps that might work for me in the long term. As I tweeted yesterday, the big player in the iOS music-recognition scene, Shazam, doesn’t offer the same amount of functionality of its popular iPhone app (I use Encore) in its iPad client, which is surprisingly poor and limited. You’d expect Shazam to have some kind of deal or API integration with Spotify and Rdio (and, again, possibly others), but they don’t. Shazam offers a “Play on Spotify” command, but to me it looks like they’re missing big time on the music streaming front by only providing access to microphone recognition and manual search. The same is true for Shazam’s biggest competitor, SoundHound; I could be wrong about the API offered to developers by the likes of Spotify and Rdio, but I’m firmly convinced these companies should figure out a solution together if they want to reach the millions of users that are increasingly streaming music, and want to know more about it. Still, both Shazam Encore and SoundHound (universal app) offer basic lyrics support with manual searches; the third app I’ve installed is a very simple utility called Instalyrics, which is a paid app that works on the Mac and iOS with integration between the two.

Here’s a quick look at how these three apps provide lyric access. Read More

Shortly before the Christmas holiday, a few apps got a lot of attention in Apple media after being barred from the App Store for inappropriate use of the Notification Center. These apps, App Switcher, Launch Center, and Quickpick, were submitted with the intent of using the Notification Center as a way to access a list of customized commands (shortcuts) that take advantage of Apple’s and third party URL schemes. App Switcher and Quickpick were pulled, and Launch Center simply didn’t get approval. The three apps removed this feature and are now available on the App Store as standalone applications.

If you jailbreak your iOS devices, these apps probably aren’t going to find their way into your standard toolkit. Paid and free utilities available through Cydia will mirror features available on Android through widgets, the lock screen, and the Notification Center. Purists, however, could find some value in automating common tasks and reducing the time it takes to perform custom actions. Jeff Broderick’s Settings is free, but the icons are fixed and I decided I only want access to a few. There’s also Icon Project, but I have no desire to fiddle with making icons. Of the apps noted above, Launch Center looks polished and simply presents a clean list of actions.

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We’ve had a great response to our search for the best iPhone App, iPad App, Mac App and iOS/Mac Game with votes numbering in the thousands and people really excited about the huge giveaway that we ran alongside the vote. We’ve given away most of the codes but the final winners will be emailed over the next few days, so keep your eyes peeled for that.

We’ve tallied the votes and figured out who you, our readers, have deemed as the best apps and games of iOS and Mac. The winners may be largely what is expected, but it is interesting to see who the runner-ups were – there are a few interesting results there.

Just a quick note to all those who voted; thank you! We didn’t know whether you would embrace this idea or not, and we’re thrilled that so many of you voted and that we got such a large sample of our reader’s opinions on the best apps and games of 2011.

Jump the break to find out who all those winners and runner-ups all are.

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Skitch is a popular tool for annotating screenshots and images with the ability to quickly share them with others. It was purchased by Evernote back in August of this year and today they are proud to present Skitch for iPad.

Skitch is the amazingly fun and surprisingly powerful way to move your ideas and projects forward using fewer words. With Skitch, annotate and draw on just about anything that you see, whether it’s a new or existing photo, a webpage, screenshot, map, or a blank canvas. Then, share your work with friends, colleagues or save it all to Evernote. It couldn’t be simpler.

Skitch for iPad has a handful of useful features as well as some not so useful features, all of which are housed in the very common “home screen” style interface. I am not personally a fan of apps that lump their main features in to a grid of large square icons. I think it is a lazy approach to user experience on a touch screen device. The fonts, colors and images used for the layout elements makes the entire app feel like a cartoon. After all the featured icons are the thumbnails of the drawings you have added. To remove them you have to tap and hold like you would expect to do on a home screen except the icons don’t jiggle as an indication. Because of this, it feels like an unfinished implementation. When you are finished removing images you can’t just tap in an empty area of the screen like you would with an actual home screen, you have to find the tiny Done button on the bottom corner of the screen. These are certainly not a huge issues, just more like disappointments and it all goes back to the lack of thought that went in to the design of this app.

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With current Twitter apps, you only need to sign into your Twitter accounts via the Settings app in iOS. Twitter apps will look for those accounts and request access so you don’t have to sign in each time. Dropbox now works similarly; With the Dropbox app installed on your iPhone or iPad, simply logging into their app provides access for other apps using the new SDK. This of course makes logging into and using Dropbox much easier — you’re simply redirected to the Dropbox app and asked whether you’d like to accept or cancel the app link. The feature is pretty cool and it’s the first time I’ve seen Dropbox authentication like this in an iOS app.

With QuickShot, you can easily upload photographs to a Dropbox shared folder to quickly share images and videos for events, parties, and get-togethers. We think it’s a splendid little camera app, and you can give QuickShot a try for only $0.99 on the App Store.

If you like to read Instapaper and Read It Later on your desktop through your web browser, why not give the second iteration of ReadNow a try? No longer a menubar application, ReadNow 2.0 was built from the ground up to feel like a native OS X application from the start. Based on traditional RSS apps, ReadNow organizes your Instapaper and Read it Later articles for offline access, optimizing articles for a cleaner reading experience on your Mac. ReadNow features a custom article view that let’s you style the article, change the line height and article width, and customize the font. Archiving and liking articles in the app will push those changes to the respective service in realtime. Unlike your favorite iOS apps, ReadNow lets you drag and drop articles into folders and tags to quickly move them from the reading list. You can currently share articles you find interesting to Twitter, Facebook, Pinboard, Delicious and Evernote from within the app. With support for multitouch gestures, search, and tag and folder management, ReadNow gives you access to Instapaper and Read It Later in one easy-to-use application.

An Instapaper subscription is required to use the service with ReadNow. ReadNow is $3.99 on the Mac App Store.

The whole team at MacStories has worked together to come up with a short list of iPhone, iPad and Mac apps as well as a short list of games that we believe were the best to come out in 2011. Now we need your help to decide which of these apps are the best from each category. To do so, we are running a poll that we want you to take, and we want you to cast your vote for what you think was the best app of 2011.

The Biggest MacStories Giveaway Ever!

However, this event isn’t just about rewarding the very best iOS and Mac developers, we want to reward you for being readers of MacStories this year and for taking the time to help us choose the best apps of 2011. This giveaway, as the header states, is the biggest we have ever run – and by quite a stretch. We’re going to be giving away over two-hundred license codes for apps that have made it into our short lists – and there may still be more to come! Some of the apps we will be giving away include:

• Alfred
• Fantastical
• iA Writer
• Instacast
• Mr. Reader
• Tweetbot
• and many, many more…

How To Enter The Giveaway

There are three ways to be in the running for some of these licenses:

1. Vote (when you vote we first ask for your email address, just enter a valid email address and you go into the running to win some free apps).
2. Tweet about this contest (just make sure you have this article’s URL in the tweet, or just use the example tweet below).
3. Let your friends or family know about the poll and have them enter your email or Twitter handle in the referral box that is on the voting page.

MacStories Best Apps of 2011: vote now and enter our huge iOS & Mac app giveaway! http://mcstr.net/rVDwy8

Rules & More Information

• You can only vote once, this is why we require an email address when you vote. If you enter an invalid email address or vote multiple times your vote(s) will not count.
• Please don’t spam your Twitter followers, friends or family, asking them to vote and add you to the referral box. It’s not nice and we don’t want to come across as being the source of this spam – if we see such spam we will ensure you don’t receive any licenses.
• Some licences will be given out during the voting process, whilst the rest will be given after voting closes.
• Once voting closes, no more entries for the giveaway will be accepted.
• Because of the limited number of licences we have per app, you might not get the app you really wanted if you are a winner – but we will try to be as flexible as possible!

Sorry, voting is now closed. Winners will be announced Saturday, 24th.

The winning apps will be announced on Saturday, December 24th (Christmas Eve).

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