Google has just released its first official Gmail app for iOS, available on the App Store here. The app runs natively on the iPhone and iPad, features notifications, messages threads, Priority Inbox and many other Gmail features from the web interface. In developing Gmail for iOS, Google says they have tried to bring the best features of Gmail for the web — which is also optimized for iOS devices — to the iPhone and iPad while taking advantage of the native capabilities of these devices.

The company has indeed implemented name auto-completion and Camera Roll integration for image attachments, but we couldn’t find support for multiple email accounts in this first version. Also, we were unable to receive “badge notifications” for new messages, although this may be related to the just-launched nature of the app and an error that several users are reporting on Twitter. The lack of multiple account support is disappointing, frankly, as the app simply loads up a web view upon first launch, asking you to log in with a Google account, and that’s it. There are no settings, no account options — there is a “reset app state” button in the iOS Settings app, which will simply reset the app’s state (logging you out of your account) as the name suggests.

As many have already noticed, the interface of the app seems to consist mainly of a web view inside a native environment that guarantees some of the aforementioned features such as attachments from the Camera Roll. Some animations are smoother than Gmail’s web counterpart — such as the swipe-to-reveal Inbox action — and this should be an advantage of the “native” nature of some elements of the app. Other animations and menu, however, are clearly web-based, and not as smooth and responsive as you would expect from, say, Apple’s Mail app. Overall, it appears Google took Gmail’s existing web app for Mobile Safari, added some new features and graphical elements in the inbox and message list, and released it as a free app on the App Store. This app clearly can’t be compared to Android’s native Gmail experience, or Apple’s Mail app for iOS, which still remains a fine and powerful client. If you’re a fan of Gmail’s web app for iOS devices, I believe you’re going to like some improvements of this “native” version, but I can’t imagine any Gmail power-user — people who regularly switch between two or more accounts every day — doing any serious email work with this app.

There are some nice improvements over the Gmail web app for iOS devices, but this is far from the “pretty fantastic” native app many were expecting.

From the feature list:

• Get alerted to new messages with push notifications and sounds
• Find an email in seconds with search across your entire inbox
• Autocomplete email addresses from your Gmail contacts or select from your device’s address book
• Upload photos with a click using the new attachment button in compose view
• On iPad, navigate your inbox and read your mail simultaneously with split view

You can find Gmail for iOS on the App Store.

Update: Google had to pull Gmail from the App Store to fix the notification bug mentioned above.

Back in April I wrote about Plex 1.1, a new iOS version of the popular media manager for Mac and Windows (as well as other connected devices such as Roku) that brought a new design, better streaming of movies and TV shows with Direct Play and Direct Streaming, and many changes from the original application that was released a year ago in November 2010.

With a series of releases announced via various blog posts, the Plex team launched last night version 2.0 of Plex for iOS, another major revamp of the mobile client for iPhone and iPad that brings an improved home screen design (for the grid UI that was introduced in 1.1), new remote access, better subtitle management and over 150 bug fixes. As previewed last week, the Plex team figured one of the most requested functionalities for the desktop media server — a utility that finds media on your computer or local network and handles transcoding, metadata and streaming to Plex clients — was better access of personal media (movies, music, TV shows) over the Internet. In its previous versions, Plex was capable of making a computer or external hard drive available over the Internet via port forwarding, but setup was far from easy and seamless, and the lack of any online counterpart for over-the-air sharing made it impossible to build a platform on top of a local Plex installation. With myPlex, Plex brings “real” remote access to all your media, allowing the app to communicate with my.plexapp.com through a user account (which you can create for free), letting users not only access servers (like your iMac or Mac mini) remotely, but also to share specific sections of a library with other Plex users.

myPlex is a full-featured solution to access, share and save content for later. “Access” means all your connected Plex media servers will show up online, readily available to show your sections and library; I haven’t been able to personally test the remote access part of myPlex as my router doesn’t want to play nice with port mapping, but I can see how the redesigned preference panel will make for a more intuitive experience when making a computer available online. Moreover, the screencasts posted by the Plex team (available below), show how easily it’s possible to connect media servers to myPlex.

Sharing plays another big role on myPlex: whereas in previous iterations of Plex users could only share content with others by opening up their routers for external access, providing a friend with the required authentication system to access a Plex installation, myPlex makes it extremely easy to pick a folder (say a Music collection, or a TV series), enter an email address of another Plex user, and start sharing content online. Users can share an entire Plex library or just some sections, and obviously the system will take advantage of Direct Play and Direct Streaming between remote connected users and libraries whenever possible. myPlex is a simpler interface on top of the old (manual, URL-based) sharing process, and it’s deeply integrated with the updated iOS and Mac clients. (more…)

WordPress has released an update to their iOS client earlier today, adding a number of features that have been requested since the original release of the blogging client for iPhone and iPad. I’ve been trying the latest WordPress, and while it’s still far from being the perfect app to write long articles on the go, the new features introduced in the latest update surely contribute to enhancing the overall experience.

For one, WordPress 2.9 has a refreshed text editor. It’s not the same visual editor you’d get on a self-hosted WordPress blog — it still forces you to write with visible HTML, then hit a button to preview text — but it’s got an additional keyboard row both on the iPhone and iPad with buttons for bold and italic text, adding links, quotes and strikethroughs, bulleted lists, and more. The app is pretty smart in that text will be automatically wrapped between HTML tags both when you hit the buttons as you type, or manually select text afterwards. I’d like to see the possibility of manually arranging and customizing the extra keyboard row in a future update, but there’s no doubt the feature gets the job done for now.

Editing is done in a pop-up window on the iPad (my main writing machine when I’m on the go), with buttons along the bottom to switch between HTML, settings, preview, and attach media. Whereas the iPad app lets you switch between modes with the tap of a button, on the iPhone you’ll have to hit “Done” to go back to the previous view (with settings, title, categories, etc.).

WordPress mentions two more features in the iTunes changelog:

Full Screen Editing. No more teeny-weeny content editor — now you can view more text at a time while you post on the go.

Reading Made Easy. Keeping track of your favorite blogs has never been easier. Browse all the latest posts on blogs you follow in one place, right from your iPhone.

WordPress 2.9 comes with three minor fixes as well, which include posting pictures that you’ve already taken with Quick Photo (introduced in version 2.8), and stats/referrer links that can be opened in-app. In a post on the WordPress for iOS blog, the developers explain the new “Read” feature:

If you have one or more WordPress.com blogs in your WordPress for iOS app you’ll now see a Read button in the blogs list. This is the fastest way to keep up with posts from blogs you’re following on WordPress.com. Here’s how it works: if you go to any WordPress.com blog and click the Follow button, you’ll not only get email notifications about new posts from that blog, they’ll also show up right in the app!

WordPress 2.9 is an interesting update, one that I’m sure will get more writers to consider the iOS app as a feasible alternative when a laptop is not available. I’m definitely looking forward to version 3.0, which is going to be the “biggest update to the WordPress for iOS app since its birth”.

Download WordPress for iOS here.

In my review of the first version of Tweetbot, I asked whether it was still possible to bring innovation to Twitter clients for iPhone, a category of apps that have offered more or less the same features for quite some time now, with the focus now being on interface design to make an app feel “unique”. With different takes on the same concept (interacting with Twitter) and with the company itself advising against “regular” third-party client apps that most users won’t install (they say people fire up the App Store, download Twitter’s official app, and that’s it), mine was a legitimate question. Is there still room for something new?

As Tweetbot’s successful launch has proved, there’s a niche of users willing to try out what’s new in the Twitter ecosystem. Tapbots have managed to build a loyal new userbase of customers interested in their unique spin on Twitter clients — these people have stuck around long enough to wait for push notifications and the consequent rapid rollout per Twitter’s own API approval. But I also take a look at Twitterrific from The Iconfactory, another third-party client that has built its own ecosystem across the Mac and iOS and which, from what I’m hearing, is about to introduce great new features in an upcoming update. I’ve mentioned Tweetbot and Twitterrific so far, but there are dozens of clients from both big and smaller indie companies that are thriving in spite of Twitter’s official free tools for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

And then there’s Apple’s initiative with Twitter and iOS 5, which will bring native Twitter access (single sign-on, contact lookup, tweet integration) to its mobile operating system. Users will be able to tweet photos and webpages, addresses in Maps and cool videos they find on YouTube. But they won’t be able to read their timelines, or receive push notifications through Apple’s native implementation. For these reasons, and because it is my job to look out for what’s next, I believe innovation in Twitter clients is far from done (that is, unless Twitter adopts changes that will make it impossible for developers to keep creating third-party tools), and we just need to keep looking to find the next app that may, in some way, improve the way we share information on Twitter from a smartphone or tablet. (more…)

Sparrow started out as a minimal, Tweetie-like email experiment for Mac back in October of last year and, following the success of the public beta, eventually evolved into a powerful desktop solution to access Gmail and IMAP email accounts using new interface concepts inspired by iOS apps, Mac gems like Twitter and Reeder, or other changes previewed by Apple in Lion. As we reported in our previous coverage, the latest big update to the app, Sparrow 1.2, went as far as adding social support with Facebook integration,  Gravatar support, and more.

Sparrow 1.3 was approved yesterday, but the developers had to quickly pull it from sale as a critical bug that caused the app to crash was discovered. After apologizing for the technical error and uploading a patched version for non-Mac App Store users, the team announced a fix had been already submitted with the request of an expedited review from Apple. Personally, I updated to Sparrow 1.3 yesterday and didn’t experience any issues, but I decided to hold my coverage until the promised fix would be available on the App Store — more importantly, the entire app had to come back on Apple’s servers as the developers pulled it to make sure no one would install a “buggy” version. (more…)

Alien Blue, the popular Reddit client for iPhone and iPad, is coming to the Mac with a native version that will be released on the Mac App Store. For those who haven’t tried Alien Blue, it’s an unofficial Reddit application that’s been very successful on the App Store thanks to its clean design, possibility to create shortcuts for subreddits (categories) to reduce the number of taps to navigate the website, as well as inline media viewing for pictures and video, undoubtedly a huge part of Reddit’s success. Alien Blue for iOS (an app that I’ve personally enjoyed using over the past months), is a full-featured Reddit client with login features to check on your Reddit account and leave comments, Read It Later, Instapaper and Readability integration and many more functionalities including a “search” feature to look into Reddit’s archive of posts.

The Mac version of Alien Blue, teased on the app’s website today, looks very elegant and falls in line with the iOS counterpart’s minimal, yet powerful approach to the social sharing / commenting website. Alien Blue for Mac will have a three-panel interface with a column on the left to switch between front page, subreddits and your account’s sections. The mid panel will be used to scroll posts, or check on your messages and notifications. The right panel, the larger one, will allow you to see the actual posts, images and videos. As you can see from the screenshots, everything will be reformatted and redesigned to fit Alien Blue’s aesthetics and color scheme. From a first impression, the app seems to be slightly inspired from Reeder, Sparrow and OS X Lion in general in the way it makes use of monocrome icons, large rounded buttons and a compose window similar to the one seen in the alternative mail client. It looks very intriguing overall, but of course some things may change come the final release.

The developer also writes on the website Alien Blue for Mac will integrate HTML5 technology for YouTube and Vimeo videos, implement Readability to elegantly lay out webpages, and folder for groups of subreddits.

To follow the development of Alien Blue, you can check out Reddit’s dedicated section, or follow the developer on Twitter.

I’ve tried several Twitter clients over the past three years; some of them were iPhone apps with no Mac counterparts, others were Mac apps that found their way to iOS with smaller, more affordable versions. After the iPad came around and companies like the The Iconfactory and Echofon showed that it was possible to create a “Twitter ecosystem” outside of Twitter’s official applications (which also happen to be available on the Mac, iPhone and iPad), users like me started wondering whether it was possible to achieve the long-awaited dream of a continuous client — an app that always remembers where you left off, and allows you to start reading (in our case, tweets) again in the same position across devices, through the cloud. For Twitter clients, the concept is simple: if you’ve already read tweets from 3 hours ago on your Mac and then you pick up my iPhone, you shouldn’t see those tweets again.

Echofon has tried to implement this, with results far from perfection. Echofon’s unread sync isn’t always reliable, and when switching devices I often find the app picking the wrong spot in the timeline or automatically scrolling to tweets I’ve already read. Still, the idea is there: as users switch devices, the position of the “last read tweet” should be maintained with online sync.

Manton Reece, developer of Tweet Library for iPad at Riverfold Software, wants to offer developers who are building Twitter clients a solution to easily keep timelines in sync using Tweetmarks. Tweetmarks is a service that runs in the cloud and can be implemented to keep the last-read tweet in sync across apps and devices. With documentation available here, the developer explains:

I’ve already showed it off to a few developers, and if you’re writing a Twitter app I’d love for you to support it too. It will be baked into the next version of Tweet Library.

There are still some unknowns (especially around whether I will need to ask for help to cover hosting costs), but I wanted to launch it now before WWDC so that other Twitter app developers meeting at the conference can give me feedback on the service. Tweetmarks has actually been running for months, and when an opportunity came along this week for a new logo (thanks Alex!), I knew it was past time to finish documenting the service and get it out.

The concept is simple, yet nobody until now managed to pull it off with a system that’s reliable and unobtrusive enough to work “like magic” across platforms and different devices or computers. Developers who are interested in the project can learn more about it here and, personally, I’d love to see a new version of Twitterrific with such a feature (alongside live streams, but that’s another story). If you build and sell Twitter clients for a living, we strongly recommend checking out Tweetmarks for your next multi-platform update — the continuous Twitter client may start right here.

Ever since the release of Instagallery in March, there haven’t been many Instagram clients coming to the iPad. Whilst the platform has seen an explosion of iPhone-connected applications, Mac and web tools aimed at enhancing the regular Instragram experience with features like postcard printing and screensavers, the iPad feels like it’s been left behind in the race to shipping the ultimate third-party Instagram app to browse photo streams with the comfort of a 9.7-inch screen. Instamap, a new app by NextRoot, is probably the nicest and simplest use of Instagram’s API that I’ve seen on the iPad so far. Available at $1.99 on the App Store, Instamap doesn’t let you upload photos but it’s got some clever maps-related features that you can use to browse photos by location — say you want to see Instagram pictures shot in Paris, just enter “Paris, France” in the search box and hit Go. Instamap will display a new photo stack on a map (If you choose map view) or a simple (animated) grid of photos for you to tap around, like, and comment. Similarly, in the same “subscriptions” section in the sidebar, Instamap enables you to enter a tag to browse photos associated to a specific keyword, useful if you’d like to see photos sorted by context rather than location. These subscriptions can be deleted and refreshed at any time — the grid design is beautiful and the animations pretty neat.

All the way down in the sidebar, Instamap also gives you access to your stream and currently popular photos on the service. While I generally avoid the Popular tab because I don’t care about vintage kitten photos and other people’s meals, the possibility to check out my feed within Instamap is really welcome. It would be even better with native uploads. I also would like to see buttons to load more photos and “shuffle” in a future update.

At $1.99, Instamap is an elegant and lightweight Instagram client that feels good on the iPad and works well in the way it can group photos by tag or location. Get the app here.

Released a few minutes ago in the App Store, Photofon is a new app by Echofon, makers of a popular Twitter client for Mac and iOS devices, that strips away all content from your Twitter timeline to display photos shared by people you follow. More often than not, especially if you follow hundreds of users, there’s a chance photos are skipped when checking out news on Twitter because either a) you don’t care about what people are eating or b) you’re just following that guy for the news he posts, and you don’t want to see his cat. For as much as we like cats (and puppies in general) here at MacStories, I agree that sometimes people I follow share photos I really don’t care about or don’t add anything to the experience of being on Twitter to discover interesting new content, and not kittens. But other times, these people share some beautiful iPhone photography that I don’t want to miss, yet I do because I don’t have a proper client that’s solely focused on media, rather than tweets.

Photofon is a Twitter client built around photos. Whether they’re shared on Instagram, img.ly, the omnipresent Twitpic, Flickr or yfrog (I haven’t been able to test other services), these photos will show up against a minimal dark background that doesn’t distract, and makes colors truly shine on the iPhone 4′s Retina Display. The original tweet is displayed alongside buttons to fave and retweet, so you won’t forget about sharing or saving that photo you really loved. Pinch and zoom gestures allow you to see a photo in greater detail, and pull-to-refresh at the top does just what you expect. I’ve noticed the app loaded around 30 photos from my timeline, and I’d definitely like to see a button to load more, because if I’m going to fire up a client only to see photos, I want to see them all.

Photofon is free and available here. It’s not universal, but it’s a neat way to check out Twitter’s photography on your iPhone without getting lost amidst news and trends.