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Etymologies, Pronunciation, and Notes with WordBook

WordBook

WordBook

I was recently looking for a dictionary app that could handle standard dictionary features (thesaurus, synonyms, web lookups, etc) as well as user notes for words, and I decided to check out WordBook after reader Jeff Clatworthy recommended it to me on Twitter. As I mentioned last night on The Prompt, WordBook isn’t the prettiest app around, but it does exactly what I need for definitions and notes.

Because English isn’t my first language, I often want to associate Italian expressions with English words to remember the context of a definition – for instance, I would associate “for the umpteenth time” with “per l’ennesima volta” in Italian, which makes it easier for me to remember the word “umpteenth”. Surprisingly, I wasn’t able to find a dictionary app with this kind of feature (Terminology, my favorite one, doesn’t have one) and, of course, Apple’s built-in dictionary lookup functionality on iOS is limited to the basics. WordBook has an option to add notes to words and, in trying the app, I also found other features that I like.

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Terminology Workflows For Editorial→

Greg Pierce:

Terminology has always had great direct integration with our own apps, Drafts and Phraseology that allows you to easily lookup and select replacement words and have them directly replaced inline with your editing. You can see that integration in action.

In the latest version (3.0.6) of Terminology, I added a tweak to its URL schemes to allow it to integrate more easily with certain other apps, particularly Editorial, Ole Moritz’s excellent iPad text editor.

Terminology is my favorite dictionary app and I wish Editorial had a popover to replace Apple’s default dictionary, like Instapaper did. The workflows are the best alternative to that for now, and they work well.

It would be nice to have selectable synonyms and antonyms built into the system dictionary in iOS 8.

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Getting App Prices with Editorial

Editorial workflow

Editorial workflow

When I write on my iPad mini, I often need to look up and reference price of apps that I already own. That’s a surprisingly hard thing to do on an iOS device, so I decided to remove the annoyance caused by this problem with an Editorial workflow. I call it “Get App Price”.

If you own an app, searching for it in the iOS 7 App Store won’t show you the price information alongside the app’s icon and description – you’ll only get an Open or Install button. Unlike the Mac App Store, there is no separate pricing field in the app information at the bottom of the screen, which usually forces me to go to a developer’s website to find out what the price of an app is.1 There wouldn’t be any problem if Apple allowed Safari to open iTunes web previews without redirecting them straight to the App Store, which is what they do on OS X. I have tried to force Safari to open web previews, and I even downloaded browsers that can set a modified user agent string to trick iOS into thinking they’re desktop web browsers worthy of a web preview – eventually, the App Store app always opened, displaying no price.

I set out to create a simple workflow to fetch an app’s title and price directly from iTunes with no clipboard import or other middleman. I later found out that you can tap on the “Related” tab in the App Store or gift an app to view its price, but I had already created a workflow that’s faster than opening the App Store and tapping a bunch of buttons just to get a price. I’m a free man, and I deserve my own App Store lookup solution.2

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Terminology 3 Review

Less popular than Drafts but equally impressive in terms of functionality and inter-app communication, Greg Pierce’s Terminology, a dictionary and thesaurus app for iOS, is relaunching today for iOS 7 with a new Universal app that adds sync, configurable actions, and a redesign that matches iOS’ new general aesthetic. I have been testing Terminology 3 for the past few months, and this new version holds up to expectations by honoring Terminology’s tradition of simplicity and bringing powerful new features.

We first reviewed Terminology in 2010, when it was an iPad-only app that already showed how developer Greg Pierce wanted to focus on words and definitions rather than heavily custom graphics and fancy effects. A few months after the iPad version, Pierce released a standalone iPhone version, called Terminology Ph, that carried all the features of the tablet counterpart onto the smaller screen; a year after version 1.0, Terminology 2.0 was released, refining the user interface and adding new app integrations. Throughout 2011, 2012, and the better part of this year, Pierce maintained Terminology with compatibilty updates but otherwise focused on Drafts, which, as MacStories readers know, has contributed to redefining iOS automation and the idea of a “quick notepad” for iOS.

The new Terminology represents a break from the past, fully embracing iOS 7’s new design philosophy and offering customers an easier purchase experience with a Universal version. As a new app, you will have to buy Terminology again – something that is perfectly acceptable after three years of usage of the same app. Read more

MacStories Interviews: Greg Pierce

In our ongoing series of interviews with developers and creators in the Apple community, I had the chance to talk with Greg Pierce, founder of Agile Tortoise. Greg makes some of our favorite iOS apps here at MacStories, namely Drafts and Terminology. Greg is also the man behind x-callback-url, an inter-app communication spec that I’ve been personally researching for the past few months. On Twitter, you can find Greg as @agiletortoise.

The interview below was conducted between May 7 and December 29, 2012.

Federico Viticci: Hey Greg! Could you introduce yourself to the readers who haven’t heard about you or haven’t tried any of your apps before?

Greg Pierce: Well, my name is Greg Pierce. I’m a family man and somewhat accidentally a professional developer living near Fort Worth, Texas. I am President of Agile Tortoise, an indie software company I founded in 2006 – where I split my time between developing my own iOS and web projects, and doing consulting.

Most of your readers would know me best for my word reference app Terminology, and for my newer apps Drafts and Phraseology. While I, sadly, am not a great writer myself, I’ve always had a great love of language and writing and I try to focus on producing simple and useful tools to writers (or anyone else using text and words) that exploit some of the interesting possibilities of the iPad and iPhone.

When I’m not working on my apps, I do Ruby on Rails development – primarily STEMscopes.com, a Texas-based science curriculum resource that serves K–12 schools. This is also an exciting project that is on the cutting edge of the move to replace traditional textbooks with online resources. Read more

New Apps & Tools For More Efficient Writing

For the past week, the entire MacStories team and I have been focusing on finalizing our coverage of Mountain Lion, which, according to recent speculation, may be coming out next Wednesday, July 25th. As you may have noticed, we have been posting less frequently on the site, but we wanted to get our coverage just right, and I think we’ve managed to come up with a good plan. More details soon.

In the meantime, I’d like to share some links of apps and tools I have been using to research, write, and edit my review of Mountain Lion. As a general tip, make sure to check out our Reviews section, as several of the apps we have reviewed recently have a spot on my iPhone or iPad Springboard. But I’ve also discovered some new gems that, while working on the review, have helped me organize all my material more efficiently.

Scrivener. Per Dave Caolo’s recommendation, I decided to give Scrivener a try as a desktop app for writing and researching articles, and I’m glad I did. I’m still a novice – Scrivener is very complex and feature-rich – but here’s a few things that immediately enhanced my workflow: possibility to organize ideas and drafts as outlines, text, or visual notes; support for file attachments and OPML; document references for webpages; split-mode for comparing “snapshots” of document copies without creating duplicates of a file. I have been using Scrivener to compare various edits of my review, and I love it. An iPad app is coming, and I also got this book to learn my ropes around the app. Even better: Scrivener can sync to Dropbox, so I can make additions using the app I prefer. For iOS integration, I’ve been testing an app called Index Card, though I’m still not entirely sold on its implementation of the cork board.

Marked. To preview Scrivener’s contents (written in Markdown), I use Marked. Its exporting features are fantastic, and I have been using the outline navigator to get a better sense of my review’s structure. If you write on a Mac, you need Marked.

Keyboard Maestro Markdown Library. I only found out about this collection of macros this week, when I was looking for ways to automate link insertion in my article with Markdown. It turns out, the Keyboard Maestro Markdown Library contains macros for links, formatting, lists, and even images. I have tweaked them to better suit our site’s requirements (for instance, I have added captions to my image macro, and article titles to the link one using this tip), and, in total, I’m pretty sure they have already helped me save minutes I would have spent copying & pasting HTML instead. Amazingly useful. More on why I love Keyboard Maestro here.

OmniOutliner and CarbonFin Outliner. I have recommended these two apps in the past, but they’re worth a second mention. For my review, I created an outline on my iPhone months ago and started adding new ideas and notes from there. On iOS, I like Outliner because it supports Dropbox and has a simpler interface than OmniOutliner for adding notes and indenting elements. But on the Mac, I rely on The Omni Group’s app because it’s got the best support for keyboard shortcuts and notes – which are both essential to my workflow.

NoMoreiTunes. I had to look up several iTunes applications in the past week, and this Safari extension did the trick (read: it doesn’t launch iTunes when Safari opens an iTunes link).

Markdown Service Tools. Because sometimes I want to use my Mac’s contextual menu to quickly generate HTML off some Markdown.

Macdrifter’s Dictionary Macro. Mountain Lion features a new three-finger single-tap action for Dictionary lookups and file previews, but some apps don’t recognize this gesture. If you use Keyboard Maestro, this is a nice way to forward any selected word to Dictionary.

Evernote. While my writing happened in Scrivener, all other research material that didn’t strictly belong to the article went into Evernote. With it, I use a combination of other apps and hacks that make it easy to save URLs, images, and just about anything. I use EverWebClipper to quickly beam URLs into Evernote from Mobile Safari; lately, I’ve also been playing with EverClip, which doesn’t feature a bookmarklet but can run in the background (“listening” for every new copied file) for 10 minutes. It’s sort of like Pastebot, but for Evernote, which is nice. To automate the process of saving links while on my Mac, I use a couple of AppleScripts put together by our Don Southard, which are obviously configured to work with Keyboard Maestro.

Captio. Indispensable utility to quickly save new tasks into my OmniFocus database.

iFiles. Following GoodReader’s somewhat unexpected removal of its iCloud-based file storage, iFiles came out with a similar functionality, and it works pretty well. iFiles hasn’t received a major update in months – apparently, the developer is working on a 2.0 version – but this iCloud integration is interesting, and works as you’d expect from an iOS file manager.

Last, IFTTT. If I’m not writing, I’m typically distracted by Internet while I browse around looking for interesting stuff. To make sure I can focus on writing without missing out on cool links, I have set up IFTTT to backup favorite tweets and starred Google Reader items to my Evernote and as a text file in my Dropbox. This way, if these services go down or will someday cease to support these functionalities, I’ll still have a complete archive of everything I had saved.

Comparing My Favorite iOS Text Editors

Earlier this year, I promised myself that I would get more work done using the iPad. The plan was an ambitious one: after three years of writing, researching, and online communication done exclusively using my MacBook (and, perhaps to an extent, my iPhone) switching to the iPad as my main work machine did indeed seem like a daunting task at first. Yet the more I thought about it, the more I realized the long-term benefits of giving the iPad a fair chance as a full-time writing tool would outnumber the perks of using a device I am accustomed to. With a mature ecosystem of apps that sees great new software coming out every week and a Retina display on the horizon, starting to use the iPad as my main computer was an investment.

The experiment has been a success so far. I use my iPad a lot more, I enjoy it, and, more importantly, the device is helping me work smarter because it lets me focus more on what I do for a living: writing.

If anything, the only negative note is that the iPad has given too much choice when it comes to picking a single writing tool. See, on the Mac, when I need a text editor, I usually fire up Text Edit (rigorously set in plain text mode) and forget about it. But there is no Text Edit for iPad. And all those text editors on the App Store look so tempting.

What follows is an overview of the four text editors (for writing, not coding) that I have preferred using in the past three months. Like TJ Luoma, I have bought many of them. Almost too many, to the point where I needed to stop fiddling already, and get the writing done. Because while I’m one for supporting developers and buying apps and paying for the tools I use, there is a line between “trying software” and “using software to work better”, and I had crossed that line with my curiosity for text editors. So I took all of them, tested them, and deleted the ones I didn’t like. I kept the ones with Markdown formatting and Dropbox sync. I didn’t include recent additions to the ecosystem like iA Writer (for iPhone) and Byword, as I need to test them more accurately. Eventually, I picked four apps.

Some smart folks have already written about the note-taking apps/text editors they like and use. Mine doesn’t want to be a comprehensive comparison that takes into account all the possible options from the App Store. It will likely lack the app you like, and yes, it’s also very likely that it’s not here for a reason. In this article, I am just comparing four apps that, taken singularly, allow me to write for the site; these four apps can stand on their own. However, they have their differences, which is why I am, ultimately, going to choose one and stick with it. The apps are universal, and while I am primarily looking at their iPad versions, almost all of the features I mention are also available on the iPhone.

I have no doubt new iOS text editors will come out, activating my curiosity trigger again. Until then, these are the four text editors I was most impressed with. Read more

OS X Mountain Lion: The iOS-ification Continues This Summer

Earlier this morning Apple caught the Internet by surprise with a series of major announcements regarding the future of OS X. To put it simply, Apple officially unveiled OS X Mountain Lion, or version 10.8, the next major iteration of OS X that will become available later this year – the initial targeted release date is a vague “this summer” – through the Mac App Store. A preview of Mountain Lion was given to a few selected tech blogs, including The Verge, Macworld, Daring Fireball, and The Loop, which we are linking back to summarize the new features of Mountain Lion and reflect upon the changes previewed by Apple.

The basic theme of Mountain Lion is iOS-ification.

Apple took the best features of iOS, and in particular iOS 5, and brought them “back to the Mac”, giving them a desktop-class facelift to make applications and services suitable for the Mac environment. Mountain Lion will feature some familiar faces for iOS users: iChat has been renamed Messages and integrated with the iCloud/iMessage ecosystem from iOS; Notes and Reminders are now standalone apps; Notification Center, Game Center, AirPlay Mirroring, Share Sheets, and a new security system called GateKeeper are now part of OS X as well.

In this post we’ll provide a quick description of the new features, a Storify bundle that aggregates the most interesting links and tweets about Mountain Lion (which is available as developer beta today), and some thoughts on what Mountain Lion means for Apple and its users. Read more

Siri Accounts for 25% Of Wolfram Alpha Queries→

Siri Accounts for 25% Of Wolfram Alpha Queries

Following last night’s announcement of Wolfram Alpha Pro, coming tomorrow at $4.99 per month, The New York Times’ Steve Lohr reported in his piece about Siri’s integration with the service. Apple’s voice-based assistant accounts for 25% of all Wolfram Alpha searches four months after the launch of the iPhone 4S, which embeds Wolfram-powered results directly into the Siri interface.

The subjects in the Wolfram Alpha database are now more useful to the average person. Type in “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy showtimes,” and Wolfram Alpha delivers the schedule for local theaters. The movie times, Dr. Wolfram notes, come not from scouring the Web, but from a specialized information service.

Siri accounts for about a quarter of the queries fielded by Wolfram Alpha, whose staff has grown to 200. Several large companies in health care, financial services and oil and gas recently hired Dr. Wolfram’s private company, Wolfram Research, to do tailored corporate versions of Wolfram Alpha for them. Microsoft also licenses Wolfram Alpha technology.

With 37 million iPhones sold in the last quarter and the iPhone 4S being the most popular model among them, I assume a good percentage of new 4S owners are using Siri regularly to file requests through Wolfram’s knowledge engine. The question is, how regularly? Whilst some have already dismissed Siri as a “passing fad”, I’m hearing of people using it on a daily basis for things like quick reminders, alarms, and data lookups (queries like “how many people live in France?” are perfect for Wolfram Alpha). Saying Siri is not a fad because we heard our friends are using it is just as tricky as claiming the opposite, so it’s nice to finally have some actual insight (in the form of user adoption) by Wolfram.

Apple says that support for more languages will come in 2012 to Siri, and it will be interesting to see whether Wolfram will be supported internationally by then.

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