Graham Spencer

997 posts on MacStories since January 2011

Former MacStories contributor.
graham@macstories.net

Firefox 11 Released, Features Add-On Sync, New Developer Tools

It’s been about a year since Mozilla shipped Firefox 4 and outlined its intentions to move toward faster and more frequent releases of Firefox. They’ve sure delivered upon that, yesterday releasing Firefox 11 with a handful of notable new features for both consumers and developers.

For users, the big new feature is add-on sync. It effectively allows users the option to keep their add-ons in sync across computers. This is an opt-in feature that is available in the Sync tab of the Preferences window. Meanwhile  developers can utilise a new ‘Page Inspector 3D View’ that literally turns a website into a 3D model that highlights how the particular webpage elements are constructed on top of each other.

While developer tools like “view source” have always been useful to learn about how to develop a page, the 3D View more clearly illustrates how the parts of a website are structured. After selecting “3D” View in Page Inspector, just hover your mouse over the elements to get more information about each piece you select.

Firefox 11 also features a ‘Style Editor’, allowing developers to edit CSS stylesheets and view their changes take effect instantly and live - all “entirely within the browser”. It’s sure to make it easy for developers to iterate quickly and efficiently. Once done developers can save the updated stylesheet to their computer.

Jump the break for a short video that demoes the new Page Inspector 3D view. You can download Firefox 11 here.

[via Firefox Blog]

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Quick Review: Steps

Nearly a month ago, Cody reviewed Clear. It was a new todo app from Realmac Software and Impending, and we called the app “delightful and clever” thanks to its refreshing take on how a todo app could work. Around that time I was let into the beta of another new todo app for the iPhone, and for the past month I’ve been using it intermittently — between giving Clear a go myself, using Things, and using nothing (as I so frequently revert to). That new todo app, Steps, debuted on the App Store last week and it shares many similarities to Clear - particularly in its minimalistic design and strong colour scheme.

Whilst preparing this review, I found myself in a bit of a dilemma. See, I kept constantly and subconsciously comparing Steps with Clear. As I said, they are quite similar because they both target the segment of the todo app market which aims to be super simple and minimalist. I felt as if I wrote this review as a comparison between the two, I would belittle the accomplishments of Steps, because whilst I think it’s a great little app, I also like the “delightfulness” of Clear a lot. But I think because the two apps are so similar in purpose and goal, it would be remiss of me to just ignore the excellence of Clear. So jump the break to see how Steps compares and how the two apps do diverge in some details.

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Apple Reveals The 25 Billionth App Downloaded & Winner Of $10,000 iTunes Gift Card

Apple has just issued a press release noting that the App Store hit 25 billion downloads (on Saturday) with the 25 billionth app downloaded being Where’s My Water? Free. The app was downloaded by Chunli Fu of Qingdao, China - that lucky person has won a $10,000 iTunes gift card for being the person who downloaded the 25 billionth app.

“We’d like to thank our customers and developers for helping us achieve this historic milestone of 25 billion apps downloaded,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services. “When we launched the App Store less than four years ago, we never imagined that mobile apps would become the phenomenon they have, or that developers would create such an incredible selection of apps for iOS users.”

View the full press release here or below the break. Be sure to also read our run-down of the apps that Apple have featured in the new “all-time top” section and the trends they show.

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Square Wants To Get Rid Of Old POS Systems With Its New Square Register App

Mobile payments company Square has today stepped up its game of disrupting payment services with its new Square Register app and service. Directly targeted at retailers, merchants and small business owners, this new iPad app is aimed at replacing the old clunky registers and point-of-sale (POS) systems with the infinitely more flexible and appealing iPad accompanied with the Square reader.

“I truly believe POS, as you know it today, is dead,” says Megan Quinn, director of products at Square. “This will bring Square to an entirely new, small-market audience (bricks-and-mortar stores).”

Integrating support for their existing Card Case app, Square Register can recognise when customers arrive at their store, as well as send the Card Case app information about the business for new customers who haven’t been before. The actual app itself has a main transaction screen that lists “favourite” items (this is completely customisable), but if there are thousands of items, that isn’t a problem either because there is also a list view available. The app has support for loyalty programs to reward loyal customers and customers don’t necessarily have to pay by card, with the app also supporting some cash drawers that can be connected up.

For the business owner or manager, Square Register can require a PIN for staff to access certain functions and custom permissions can be given to staff. The service also offers powerful analytical tools with interactive charts so you can view when the store is busiest and what days may be under performing. Square Register is available for free, with the standard 2.75% processing fee for all card transactions processed through Square, just the same as their existing apps.

[via TechCrunch, USA Today]

Apple: 25 Billion Apps Have Been Downloaded From The App Store

Apple announced a short time ago that 25 billions apps have been downloaded from the App Store since it launched in mid-2008. Apple has updated their homepage with the above graphic and slogan of  ”A billion thanks. 25 times over” and the App Store Twitter and Facebook accounts have also publicised the milestone. Interestingly, the graphic used by Apple varies depending on whether you are viewing an international version of Apple.com (such as Japan) or whether you see the standard US website.

Apple will announce within a few days, who the lucky winner of a $10,000 iTunes voucher will be. Users could enter the competition by either simply downloading an app or filling out a form on Apple’s website - the winner will be the person who downloaded the 25th billion app or the person who first filled out the form after the 24,999,999th app had been downloaded but before the 25th billion app.

In Apple’s previous App Store and iTunes competitions, Eddy Cue (Senior Vice President, Internet and Software Services) has called the winner and congratulated them on winning. Shortly after this has happened Apple releases a press statement announcing the download milestone and who the winner was. When Apple ran the competition to mark 10 billion apps downloaded, the winner initially hung up on Cue, thinking it was a scam call.

February 2012 In Review

February sure went by quickly, but that certainly doesn’t mean there was a shortage of news, reviews and editorials - in fact it was quite the opposite. After a pretty big January with their education announcement and financial earnings, Apple didn’t slow down in February. They released new ads, previewed Mountain Lion, continued the PR battle over supplier responsibility and confirmed the (presumed iPad keynote) media event for March 7th. February was also a big month for Apps with an updated Tweetbot for iPhone and new Tweetbot for iPad, Clear, Photoshop, Vimeo 2.0 and VLC amongst others. Whilst we continued to focus on providing you, our readers, with great editorial content we discussed topics such as the iPad as a PC, supplier responsibility, greed and iOS 6 wishes amongst others.

Jump the break to view the full review of February 2012. You can also view January 2012 in Review here.

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Exploring MoneyWiz: Complete Personal Finance Control On Your iPad

It wasn’t originally a New Year’s resolution to keep better track of my spending, but by the way things have turned out, it almost seems as if it was one. Early in January I began looking for a good Mac app for exactly this task. Originally I had hoped that Saver, an app I reviewed last year had since released an iPad app that I had not heard about – I really liked the app but wanted it on the iPad or Mac. Unfortunately Saver is still iPhone only, so I looked around a bit longer, asked around and tried a few apps on the Mac. I wasn’t thrilled with what I found. They all seemed a little to complex for what I wanted, so I kept looking. I forget how, but I eventually stumbled upon MoneyWiz which is available on the iPad and iPhone (at the time it was called SilverWiz). The developers haven’t yet released a Mac version (they’re working on it and expect to launch it in Spring this year), but they did give me an early look at the recent update to MoneyWiz for iPad (version 1.3), which launched late last week.

MoneyWiz for iPad does a couple of things: it keeps track of your expenses, allows you to set budgets (and track your progress), and provides you with the ability to create reports on various aspects of your financial situation. More importantly, I found MoneyWiz to be very flexible, not overly complex like some of the Mac apps I tried, and, at the same time, full of a wealth of features that should be sufficient for most individuals. Read more

Adobe Photoshop Touch Review

When I first heard that Adobe was bringing Photoshop to the iPad sometime last year, I was sceptical. I presumed it would be a very limited app compared to the powerful desktop app, or maybe just a slightly improved version of Photoshop Express. At best I thought it might give you some good editing tools to fix and correct photographs, perhaps with some layer support and effects. I didn’t think Adobe could pull off creating a great tablet version of Photoshop, and I wasn’t sure the iPad would be a good fit for the tasks in Photoshop.

So when I finally got to try out Adobe Photoshop Touch, I was intrigued to see what Adobe had accomplished. After a couple of hours playing around in the app (it accidentally went live yesterday, then Adobe pulled it) I’ve come away very impressed with what Adobe has accomplished. Photoshop Touch is a powerful and capable version of Photoshop for the iPad, without a doubt. To me, it is the latest iPad app that has demonstrated that the iPad is for more than “content consumption” — that’s just an old myth now.

It’s the apps that make the iPad great and Photoshop Touch is perhaps the prime example of the potential of the device and how flexible it is at becoming a great machine for a whole slew of different tasks, from reading, to writing, to viewing to editing and now, to using Photoshop for more than just basic photo edits. Sure, Photoshop Touch is still not as powerful as the desktop version, in fact it’s quite a distance away from reaching such parity — but it all comes down to the car Vs. truck analogy that Steve Jobs rather famously explained. Photoshop on your Mac or PC is still available for when you need to do complicated and advanced tasks, but for a lot of other tasks, you could probably migrate to the iPad and Photoshop Touch.

Enough with the introduction, let’s dive into our review of Photoshop Touch.

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Tip: Handle iMessage Notification Overload with Contact Settings

Since Apple released a public beta of Messages for Mac, we’ve been having a bit of a notification overload here at MacStories HQ. See, ever since iMessage was released with iOS 5, we’ve had our own group message with everyone on the MacStories team – it was a portable water cooler, where we could chat about random things, share silly pictures and even co-ordinate things for the site, even when we were out and about. We used it quite frequently, but things turned for the worse last week when we all got that Messages for Mac beta. What might have been 10 messages in a given time period, suddenly morphed into 50 messages because of the convenience of having iMessage just a click way on our Macs. Things were becoming chaotic and quite distracting, Don had even turned off vibrations — meaning he got no notification for any message, from anyone.

We didn’t want to give up on using Messages for Mac, and it was probably going to be a hard task to change our messaging behaviours to limit the number of messages sent, but it was clear this week that we had to do something.

Fortunately, we think we have found a solution. In iOS, Apple includes the ability to change the text tone and ringtone on a per-contact basis. What we did for everyone in the MacStories team, was to change the text tone to “None”. You can do this by going into the Contacts app, selecting a contact and tapping the ‘Edit’ button and scrolling to “text tone”.

This now means regardless of whether your phone is on Silent or not, you will not get any noise or vibration to alert you to the new message. There are two downsides to this ‘workaround’: the first is that you will still get the notification bar flipping down from the top of your screen. The second problem, which could be a deal breaker for some, is that any messages from that person will not cause a vibration or text tone – important to remember if they are a participant in a few of your group message threads.

There should be another way…

Whilst the ability to change the text tone (and ringtone) on a per-contact basis is really cool (and can be used for a number of other purposes), perhaps there should be another way to control message notifications differently – especially now that iMessage is bundled in iChat, and may lead to an increased number of messages sent to iOS devices. Specifically I’m talking about muting specific message conversations. This would allow me to mute the message thread that has all of the MacStories members, but still receive notifications from Federico, in case he urgently wanted me to cover something.

Apple could easily implement the option inside the Messages app, simply displaying a mute icon next to each message thread when in the ‘Edit’ mode. Just like changing the text tone on a per-contact basis, this power-user option wouldn’t make the UI messy, because it would only appear in the ‘Edit’ screen. That way, users could choose between completely muting on a per-contact basis or on a per-message thread basis – all whilst still receiving notifications for your other messages.