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“Chrome Sync” for iOS Syncs Chrome Tabs, Bookmarks and History

After using Google Chrome for more than two years, I still find it rather amusing that Google hasn’t released an iOS companion app to access your browser history, tabs and bookmarks on the go. Mozilla does this, third-parties have figured out a way to do this, yet Google doesn’t seem to think an iOS version of Google Chrome with, perhaps, a minimal set of functionalities would be necessary. Fortunately, a developer in the App Store has figured out a way to sync your Chrome session (that is, history, tabs and bookmarks) from the desktop to an app, aptly named Chrome Sync Pro.

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.

QuickCal 3.1 Released with Improved Recognition Engine, iCloud Reminders, Autocomplete Feature

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.

Apple’s Q1 2012: Quarter Recap and Estimates

At 2 PM PT, Apple is set to announce its financial results for the quarter that ended on December 24th, 2011. According to several analysts polled in the past weeks and Apple’s own guidance for the quarter, Q1 2012 is on track to become Apple’s biggest quarter to date both in terms of sales (with expected record iPhone and iPad sales) and revenue. Until today, Apple’s most profitable quarter has been Q3 2011 with $28.57 billion revenue. Below, we’ve compiled a breakdown of Q1 2012 estimates with a recap of what happened during the quarter.

Estimates and Previous Quarters

During last quarter’s earnings call, Apple said they were expecting $37 billion in revenue and diluted earnings per share of around $9.30 for this quarter. As Apple’s guidance for future quarters is historically low and conservative, the already high projection of $37 billion led bloggers to speculate Apple’s Q1 2012 would be a blowout quarter; some analysts, on the other hand, usually don’t pay attention to Apple’s guidance as the company lowballs expectations for the upcoming quarter.

Analysts and bloggers polled in the past few weeks had different takes on what Apple will report later today. Some of them, such as Robert Paul Leitao, Horace Dediu and Navin Nagrani projected revenue above $44 billion with iPhone sales of 34-35 million units and iPad sales in the range of 13 million units; as we reported three weeks ago, Asymco’s Horace Diedu estimates that Apple will report earnings of $12.3 on revenues of $44.6 billion, with the street price aiming at $9.75 EPS on $37.99 billion. As Philip Elmer-Dewitt also noted, analysts’ estimates need to be taken carefully, as several of them were released after the previous quarter’s results, and were never updated reflecting changes that took place through the quarter (such as fluctuating iPhone demand and international product launches).

Fortune’s comprehensive list of estimates for Q1 2012 is available here.

As far as iPhone sales are concerned (in Q4 2011, the device accounted for 47% of Apple’s revenue), this quarter will see Apple finally providing some actual insight into the iPhone 4S’ performance on the market. The device is well-regarded as a success on various international markets and the United States, but the only real numbers Apple posted referred to the opening weekend. Predictions for Q1 2012 go as high as 35 million units sold (those would indicate cumulative sales for iPhone 4, 4S and 3GS, not just the iPhone 4S), with an approximate figure of 30 million units sold being shared the majority of analysts and bloggers.

According to Nielsen, the launch of the iPhone 4S had an “enormous impact” on smartphone owners:

Among recent acquirers, meaning those who said they got a new device within the past three months, 44.5 percent of those surveyed in December said they chose an iPhone, compared to just 25.1 percent in October. Furthermore, 57 percent of new iPhone owners surveyed in December said they got an iPhone 4S.

This morning, Verizon Wireless reported 4.2 million iPhone activations. Reuters wrote Verizon’s “business was hit by the high costs of sales of advanced phones such as the Apple Inc iPhone.”


In Q4 2011, Apple posted revenue of $28.27 billion, with 11.12 million iPads, 17.07 million iPhones and 4.89 million Macs sold. The company posted quarterly net profit of $6.62 billion, or $7.05 per diluted share. iPhone represented a 21 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter; iPod sales were down 27 percent from the year-ago quarter, and Apple reported the best iPad quarter to date with over 11 million units sold and a 166% increase over the year-ago quarter. In the year-go quarter, Apple posted revenue of $26.74 billion with 7.33 million iPads, 16.24 million iPhones and 4.13 million Macs sold. Read more

PDF Expert 3.2 Brings Full PDF Searching And Better Support For Bluetooth Keyboards

PDF Expert for iPad was updated last night to version 3.2, adding some nice new features to further improve the capabilities of the excellent PDF manager, viewer and annotation iPad app. The big new addition is full text search, allowing you to search through all your PDFs, rather than just their file names. I gave this new feature a quick try and whilst the initial indexing took a few minutes, I did have 535 files saved in PDF Expert. Furthermore, once it was indexed, subsequent searches worked virtually instantly.

A new sorting panel is also present in PDF Expert 3.2, now allowing you to reorder your files by name, date or modified date. If you use a Bluetooth keyboard with your iPad you can now use those “Tab” and arrow keys for faster data entry, particularly for PDF forms.

Readdle has also improved the Handwriting and Wrist Protection features in PDF Expert so they work better with less accidental annotation because you have rested your wrist on the iPad’s screen. Included in this is a new eraser tool for your handwriting, so if you do make a mistake it is now easy to erase just what you want. Finally, yesterday’s update included the use of data protection APIs, so all your PDFs are now stored securely inside the app.

PDF Expert for iPad is available for $9.99 on the App Store.

Virgin America Names Jet “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish” After Steve Jobs

The saying that Steve Jobs made popular with his 2005 Stanford commencement address, “Stay Foolish, Stay Hungry” has now (literally) made its way onto a Virgin America plane.

An Airbus A320 plane (tail number N845VA) that Virgin America owns and runs, has been named “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish”, with the quote emblazoned on the front of the plane, as seen above. A Virgin America spokesperson explained to MacRumors that the name was chosen after an internal naming competition.

The quote originated from the 1970’s magazine The Whole Earth Catalogue as Steve Jobs noted in his commencement address:

On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

[Via MacRumors]

A5 Jailbreak Reaches One Million Downloads in 24 Hours [Updated]

According to developer and hacker Joshua Hill, the latest jailbreak for devices running Apple’s A5 processor has been downloaded more than one million times in one day, Cult of Mac reports. The new jailbreak – dubbed Absinthe – was released for Mac OS X on Friday after months of speculation as to whether it was possible to hack into Apple’s new CPU architecture. The Absinthe jailbreak supports the latest version of iOS, iOS 5.0.1; iOS 5 was released in October, and users of iPhone 4S and iPad 2 have been waiting for a fully untethered jailbreak solution compatible with their devices since then.

According to Cult of Mac, one million downloads were achieved on Mac OS X alone as a Windows version of the jailbreak was released after the initial 24 hours. As Alex Heath notes, this figure is noteworthy as it seems to confirm that interest in jailbreaking devices hasn’t died down after the release of iOS 5; the operating system introduced more than 200 new features for iPhone and iPad as we detailed back in October. If anything, it was iOS 5 itself that led developers to create new apps and tweaks that are taking advantage of the latest features offered by Apple such as Notification Center and Twitter integration.

To put the A5 jailbreak’s numbers into context: one million downloads were reached in 24 hours by JailbreakMe 3.0 as well when it came out for iOS 4 devices last summer. Currently, the Absinthe jailbreak is available for OS X and Windows machines over at Greenpois0n.com.

Update: With a tweet, MuscleNerd says that 205,000 new Cydia accounts were created by Sunday morning, suggesting that a large percentage of Absinthe early adopters were users who had jailbroken their devices in the past, thus likely already having a Cydia account. See update below.

Update #2: Whilst we assumed “new Cydia installs” referred to the amount of new accounts created last weekend, MuscleNerd has clarified the figure indicates how many times Cydia was launched on a unique A5 device.

Update #3: Cydia creator Saurik chimes in with more numbers, clarifying that 205,000 were the iPhone 4S units with Cydia until Sunday morning.

Update #4: And last, the Dev-Team has published a blog post with the official numbers since Friday morning:

  • 491,325 new iPhone 4,1 devices (4S)
  • 308,967 new iPad 2 devices
  • 152,940 previously jailbroken (at 4.x) iPad 2 devices

For a total of 953,232 new A5 jailbreaks in over three days. At this point, if the previous 1 million/24 hours figure is to be believed, it’s possible 1 million downloads actually happened in 24 hours, but many users couldn’t immediately run Absinthe due to the server problems that affected Greenpois0n.com.

Preview: Analog 1.1 Launches Tomorrow With New Photo Options, Filters

When I reviewed Realmac’s Analog, a lightweight photo sharing app, back in September, I was impressed by the execution of a simple concept – applying filters to your photos to share them online – that was made popular on iOS by apps like Instagram and Camera+. From my review:

Analog offers 20 filters, which have been carefully researched by Realmac over the past months to make sure each one of them has its own personality (something we know that matters in this kind of apps) and will make your photos look great. Now I’m no photography expert, but I can recognize a nice filter when I see it. Analog’s filters range from washed out (Hefga, Golden Hour) to black & white (Noir, Dark Knight, Bromide — three B&W variations with different grey scales and contrast) to contrasty (Memory, XProcess) and other interesting options that I can’t quite classify (Kyoto, Hawkeye). Analog’s filters look good, and I definitely like the choice of 20 different filters offered by Realmac. You might argue some of them look similar to each other, but the developers have also implemented a system that ensures scratches, noise and other effects are always randomized on each processing session.

I had a chance to try out a pre-release version of Analog 1.1, which is coming out tomorrow, and it looks like those who liked the workflow and polished design of version 1.0 might have to hit the Mac App Store’s Update section as soon as the app goes live. Analog 1.1 improves on several aspects of the first version: performances and memory management have been improved, making the app snappier and more responsive when adding filters and switching between edited and non-edited versions of a photo.

The update will bring three new filters (I tested them, they look good), two new borders, and, more importantly, a new slider to adjust the intensity of your chosen filter. In my tests, this has turned out to be quite handy to manually refine the amount of modifications I wanted to make to an image. Obviously, Analog 1.1 retains the filter randomization capabilities of the previous version (so that scratches, noise and other effects are randomized on each processing session) and all the other features that made Analog 1.0 intuitive and fun to use.

Analog 1.0 is currently available on the Mac App Store at $6.99. Analog 1.1 will be available tomorrow (January 24th) as a free update for existing Analog customers.

An Experiment with Comics, iBooks 2.0 and iBooks Author

Last week, Apple unveiled its iBooks Textbooks initiative alongside a new desktop application for OS X, iBooks Author, aimed at offering a single solution for authors willing to edit and design iBooks for the iBookstore or manual distribution through exporting options. Some limitations of iBooks Author have sparked a debate that we’ve covered extensively on MacStories last week, also through articles in our Reading List.

Proprietary file format controversies aside, it was already clear that iBooks Author would undoubtedly facilitate the creation of textbooks and eBooks heavily relying on graphics with its easy-to-use align tools and familiar interface.

Today, cartoon and t-shirt designer Richard Stevens has published an iBooks adaptation of its popular webcomic series that’s been entirely converted and tweaked using iBooks Author as an initial experiment.

Waking Up With the Diesel Sweeties is a tiny little free ebook for the iPad. It contains all my comics from last month with a few tweaks, formatted in iBooks Author. This version only works on the iPad. It’s not in the iBookstore, so you’ll need to download the file and sync it to your iPad.

The eBook is available for download through Dropbox, and it can be installed on an iPad running iBooks 2. You can manually sync the file from iTunes to your iPad, or use an app like GoodReader to download it directly on your device and open it in iBooks. Whilst Stevens’ first iBook is an experiment, it shows the possibilities opened by iBooks 2 and iBooks Author: the book fully supports iBooks’ new annotations, highlights and study cards, and you can pinch on pages to access iBooks’ new navigation with thumbnails displayed at the bottom of the screen.

I wrote last week that I wouldn’t be surprised to see iBooks Author-based eBooks be used for something else other than regular books – for instance, I’ve heard more than one developer say that they’d be interested in using the software to create interactive manuals and help tools for their apps, among other things. iBooks Author may have been criticized and there’s still a lot of features Apple has to clarify and implement (especially for independent authors and publishers), but the interactivity and WebKit-based functionalities offered by the format look more promising every day.

Review: Logitech Tablet Keyboard for iPad

As I mentioned in my post about new apps and tools for 2012, I’ve been playing around with a Logitech Tablet Keyboard for iPad, which is available at $69 through Logitech’s website or $59 on Amazon. The Tablet Keyboard connects to the iPad (or any iOS device) wirelessly over Bluetooth, comes with built-in batteries, a carrying case that can be turned into a stand for the iPad, and media keys that trigger some of the tablet’s functions such as audio controls and Spotlight. Here are my impressions so far.

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