If you’re saving up for a that special movie, latest iTunes albums, or popular new app, keep track of it with Mentio. The wishlist app lets you add media by searching iTunes and the App Store, lets you share your wishes with friends, and has both light and dark themes for your viewing pleasure. Each item you add contains a small summary (like descriptions for movies), and the option to purchase the item once you’re ready to buy. Useful if you buy apps and media using iTunes gift cards. Download Mentio for a dollar on the App Store.
VLC Gets Updated for iOS 7→
It’s a common headline as of late, but VLC, an open source media player for desktop and mobile, have updated their iOS app with a refreshed look and plenty of new features. VLC’s latest update lets you stream media from Google Drive and Dropbox, adds new multitouch gestures, and has an improved library for TV shows and audio. The app’s free to download from the App Store for iPhone and iPad.
Twitterrific 5.6 With Live Streaming
Hey! Live streaming for Twitterrific is really here. It works over Wi-Fi, and can be enabled by toggling the setting in the settings. Live streaming works similarly to “pin timeline” settings in other apps, where enabling live streaming makes it so that you’re always viewing the latest tweets in your timeline. You can scroll around, but the timeline will jump to the most recent tweet when left idle (useful for anyone who docks their iPhone in a cradle at their desk). On the flip side, Live streaming keeps the display turned on, which can unintentionally drain your battery if you set your phone down or forget to put it to sleep. I think it needs some fine tuning before it’s just right.
Something to keep in mind is that Twitterrific enabled background refreshing in a previous update, which fetches tweets when you’re outside of the app. If you only check the app a few times a day, Live streaming might not be such a big deal. If you’re always on Twitter, however, Live streaming is worth turning on, despite some caveats.
The other biggie found in Twitterrific 5.6 is list management. You can create, add people to, and remove people from lists. You can create and delete lists, as well as set whether they’re private. I would expect to find a lot of this functionality in the sidebar, but Twitterrific has it tucked away in a contextual menu. Creating and managing lists is done by tapping and holding on an avatar in your timeline, selecting “Manage in Lists,” and going from there. I kept looking for list settings, a hidden add button, and kept wondering what I was missing — it’s pretty well hidden. You can also get to it by tapping the gear icon when viewing someone’s profile.
As for the smaller things, you can now view images in Direct Messages, as well as copy discussions from the share menu.
Live streaming for Twitterrific has obviously been a long time coming. Twitterrific 5 has been a series of big incremental improvements, starting with things like Push Notifications and Muffling, and performance continues to blow me away. To celebrate their big update, Twitterrific 5.6 is $0.99 for a limited time in the App Store, and those who’ve previously purchased the app can download the update for free. And you’re getting a lot of bang for your buck: the app works across iPhone and iPad.
Perhaps the last remaining question is when is The Iconfactory going to bring these updates back to the Mac?
A History of People Telling Apple What To Do→
Harry McCracken calling out all of this nonsense:
Some wise person — I wish I knew who — once said that everybody has two businesses: their own, and show business. The same is true in the world of technology, except the two businesses people have are their own, and Tim Cook’s.
Everyone, in other words, seems to have strong opinions about what Apple should be doing. And a remarkable percentage of the people who share their thoughts state them not as a suggestion or a preference but as an imperative so absolute that ignoring it could plunge the company into crisis. To emphasize the seriousness of the matter, their headlines usually use the words “Apple must…”
GoodReader Gets a Big Update for iOS 7
GoodReader is the missing file manager for the iPhone[1]. It virtually eliminates the compromises you have to make on a mobile device by allowing you to download files from the web; view and arrange documents, photos, music, and video into folders; and connect to local servers over Wi-Fi or your Dropbox, SkyDrive, Google Drive, WebDAV, or FTP server on the web. Conveniently, you can connect to GoodReader over your local network to grab files by plugging in an IP address on your Mac or Windows box.
GoodReader’s most immediate change is their update interface, which puts all of the most used tools in a tab bar at the bottom of the display. The two tabs you’ll likely use the most are WiFi and Connect, which starts a WiFi transfer or lets you grab files from the web. Otherwise, a tools button in the top right of the file browser brings up the usual action sheet for selecting files, creating new text documents, creating folders, renaming files, opening files in other apps, etc. In short, everything’s a lot easier to find[2].
Tossing an album onto your iPhone? GoodReader finally lets you listen to audio in the background while you read or do other things on your iPhone.
Images copied in the clipboard can be pasted as a file in GoodReader[3]. Look in the second page of tools for the paste command when an image is copied to the clipboard. The opposite is true as well: you can copy images to the clipboard to paste into other apps like Mail. Images can now also be imported / exported directly into and out of GoodReader, so multiple photos can be saved to your camera roll at once for example. This can be incredibly useful for shuffling files from your iPhone between multiple online services, like Dropbox and a hosted web server.
Various improvements to PDFs have been added across the board, such as faster rendering for certain files and the ability to flatten (embed) annotations as they’re emailed prior to sending. And while GoodReader itself doesn’t require iOS 7, GoodReader will open iWork 2013 files for those that are running Apple’s the latest iOS.
The iPad and iPhone versions can be purchased separately on the App Store, each version costing $4.99. Links below:
- What I mainly use GoodReader for: if I purchase an eBook on the go, I can paste the download link into GoodReader, which will usually suck down a ZIP file since all the DRM free formats are there. I can unzip the archive, send the EPUB to iBooks, and send my other files to my computer or to a service. You don’t have to manage much on OS X if you use something like Hazel so MOBI files are automatically dropped into your Kindle the next time you plug it into your Mac. As a nice bonus: iTunes doesn’t mediate anything. And you can apply this system to a lot of things, such as music downloads if you make purchases on anything outside of iTunes or Amazon (i.e. Bandcamp) or even documents a friend might share with you from Dropbox or SendSpace. ↩︎
- Remember when you had to visit that red web downloads folder to get files from the web? ↩︎
- Part of the problem is that images are often linked to other web pages, and the Copy action in Safari copies the URL the image links to, not the actual image itself. Unless you can get to the root of the image on your iPhone or iPad, getting to images on mobile is not as easy as right clicking and selecting “view image” on a desktop browser. ↩︎
Horizon Captures Landscape Videos, No Matter the Orientation→
Here’s an app that fixes a common problem in recording videos: recording horizontal, widescreen videos no matter how you’re holding your iPhone. As you rotate the phone from landscape to portrait, or vice versa, Horizon uses the iPhone’s sensors to keep the aspect ratio the same. The phone rotates around a virtual frame, rather than being the actual frame. The transitions aren’t perfect yet, but it works pretty well and I imagine camera shake can be ironed out in future updates. Horizon lets you capture video in other aspect ratios as well, has few different filters to choose from, and lets you share your videos to social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Download it from the App Store for a dollar during their launch sale.
An Overview of OmniOutliner 4
Finally.
It was just over a year ago that CEO Ken Case of The Omni Group outlined the company’s plans for 2013, following a successful “iPad or Bust!” campaign that allowed the company to bring all five (well okay… “four”) of their desktop productivity apps to the iPad. So it was back to the Mac as it were, with OmniFocus 2 being at the forefront of the company’s plans with OmniOutliner 4 due afterwards in the first quarter. As an app that was first released in January, 2005, OmniOutliner 3 was in need of an update. As Ken Case said himself, “… other than a few tweaks to the inspectors and toolbars, its design has mostly stayed the same: it’s starting to feel a bit long in the tooth.” 2013 came and went, and as they say, all good things take time.
OmniOutliner 4 is a big update. For posterity, we’ll call it Outliner for the rest of our overview. And honestly, I really don’t know where to start.
Yahoo News Digest
As someone who both enjoys long form content and sharing what I think others might enjoy, it’s easy to write off Yahoo News Digest as something that feels indifferent. Unlike the Evening Edition, which features important world news summarized by real people, Yahoo boasts its mobile digest as a product of algorithms, whose editors bring together the day’s hot topics into smart summaries from multiple sources. It’s considered to be the result of Yahoo’s $30 million acquisition of Summly, with founder Nick D’Aloisio taking charge behind the company’s initiative into the “news for everyone” space.
It’s not a new endeavor, however, if you consider previous forays like Livestand, which brought news and weather together in a magazine-like format on the iPad. Then there’s Yahoo’s self titled app, which later integrated Summly to create an endless stream of news, entertainment, sports, and lifestyle content. Even Yahoo’s homepage is a landing page for those subscribed to Internet service providers like AT&T, delivering trending topics, stories, local weather, and stocks to anyone who wants to log into their provider’s email accounts. This is unlike Google, whose homepage is barren sans occasional promotions and informational snippets. Needless to say, Yahoo has been dishing out news for a long time.
Yahoo News Digest is their attempt to modernize the thirty minute local or national news segment, re-imagining it for mobile as series of articles covering current events from around the world. Digested down to eighteen articles, nine for the morning and nine for the evening editions, Yahoo shares what they consider to be the most relevant articles of the day, rounding out the day’s news under traditional topics such as US News, World News, Entertainment, Sports, etc. It’s a news service built for the masses.
So… Is it any good?
Eidetic Helps You Remember Anything→
Think of Eidetic as the modern flashcard for the iPhone and iPad. Eidetic uses a memorization technique called spaced repetition, which helps you commit information to long term memory. Whether you’re cramming for a test or need occasional reminders, Eidetic notifies you when it’s time to study. Outside of coursework, Eidetic is helpful for memorizing pin codes, phone numbers, addresses, and passwords. If you have an iPhone and iPad, Eidetic will store what you’re memorizing to iCloud so you can study on either device. You can download the app for free from the App Store, unlocking tests via inexpensive in-app purchases.