The first alarm app for families.
On this week’s episode of AppStories, we follow up our RSS app and service episode with a closer look at how each of us uses RSS for work and pleasure reading.
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Hot on the heels of Twitter’s abandonment of its official Mac client last week, The Iconfactory announced new Twitterrific features and a price reduction.
One of the highlights of the update is enhancements to multi-account support. If you have more than one Twitter account set up in Twitterrific, right clicking on the reply, quote, retweet, or like buttons displays a popup window for choosing which account you want to use for each of those functions. Alternatively, if you are in the middle of composing a reply or quote-tweet, click on your avatar in the compose window to switch the account from which it will be sent.
The Iconfactory has added several other nice refinements too:
Twitterrific for Mac has come a long way since the commencement of its crowdfunding campaign last winter, and many of the shortcomings of version 1.0 that I highlighted in my review last October have been addressed. It’s fantastic to see Twitterrific continue to grow and evolve, especially now that Twitter has walked away from its Mac app.
To celebrate the one year anniversary of Project Phoenix, the crowdsourced Kickstarter project that relaunched Twitterrific on macOS, the price of the app has been reduced from $19.99 to just $7.99. Twitterrific is available on the Mac App Store.
Remote for Mac is an iOS app that lets you use your Mac from anywhere on your home network. Using just your iPhone or iPad as a trackpad and keyboard, you can launch apps or control system settings on your Mac.
Remote for Mac is perfect for controlling a Mac that serves as a media center. Instead of trying to balance a keyboard and trackpad in your lap while you sit on the couch or lie in bed, use Remote for Mac to navigate your Mac from your iPhone comfortably. You can also use Remote for Mac with AirPlay Mirroring on an Apple TV to browse your Mac on a big screen TV.
All you need to do is install a helper app on your Mac and use Remote for Mac on the same WiFi network to control system settings and apps and services like iTunes, Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, YouTube, Plex, Kodi, SoundCloud, Spotify, and VLC.
Remote for Mac isn’t just for Mac media servers though. The uses are only limited by your imagination. You can just as easily use the app to browse the web or read email on a Mac connected to your TV. Using the app’s keyboard and virtual trackpad makes navigation a breeze. When you’re finished, Remote for Mac can put your Mac to sleep, turn off your display, or even shut down your Mac.
Remote for Mac has a special giveaway for MacStories readers. The first 30 readers who visit this link will get a free copy of the app.
Take control. Download Remote for Mac from the App Store today.
Our thanks to Remote for Mac for supporting MacStories this week.
In the time honored tradition of releasing bad news at the close of business on a Friday, Twitter announced via its Twitter Support account that it was removing its Mac client from the the Mac App Store and discontinuing support for the app:
https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/964635740444360704
Twitter gained a native Mac client when it acquired Tweetie for Mac from Loren Brichter in 2010, but the company’s support for the app over the years has been half-hearted at best. As John Gruber explained on Daring Fireball:
Twitter dumped Tweetie’s codebase years ago, of course, and their Mac app has been garbage ever since they did. It’s all fine, really, so long as they continue to allow third-party clients like Tweetbot and Twitterrific to exist. But this “Mac users should just use the website” attitude is exactly what I was talking about here as an existential threat to the future of the Mac.
Twitter’s move is not surprising given the history of the app. Most Mac users I know moved on to third-party clients years ago. However, Gruber’s broader point is an important one. There has been an increasing trend away from native Mac apps and towards web apps and cross-platform apps based on technologies like Electron. Many of these non-native solutions are resource hogs, and even the best often fail to take advantage of OS-level features, which makes them feel out of place among native apps. Perhaps the rumored Project Marzipan is designed to reinvigorate Mac development, although it’s hard to see that working if companies like Twitter simply don’t care to provide the best experience on macOS.
Q&A Follow-Up: Microsoft Office on iOS and Relational Databases
Last week I answered a question about editing Microsoft Office files that are stored in iCloud Drive and said that only cloud services with direct integrations, such as OneDrive and Dropbox, could perform edits without making copies of files. Club member Teddy wrote in and shared...
App Debuts Housecraft Developed by the creators of Threes, Housecraft is a free ARKit toolbox that lets you place 3D models of furniture in your home and play around with them with controls for size, orientation, and more. Thanks to an intuitive UI design and high-quality 3D renders, this is a good app to get started...
Creating a GIF from an MP4 File on iOS Twitter converts GIFs to MP4 videos when they’re included in a tweet. A tool like GIFwrapped can save one as a GIF much of the time, but not always. If you find a short video that you can’t live without as a GIF, here’s what you need to do. First, open the clip in...
When Apple acquired Shazam, people wondered what would become of the popular song identification and music discovery app. It’s not unusual for an app acquired by a big company to be pulled from the App Store or for development to slow substantially. Questions were also raised about whether Shazam would continue to support Apple’s music streaming rival, Spotify.
As it turns out, Shazam has continued to be updated and support Spotify since Apple’s acquisition. In fact, there have been at least four updates to Shazam since the acquisition including one today that adds synchronized lyrics and a design refresh of the app’s results screen.
The new UI looks great. The results screen is dominated by a background image of the artist. In the foreground is a big play button, the name of the song the app recognized, and the name of the artist. If you tap on the artwork, you get an image of the artist and album in some cases, plus more details on the artist, album, song, and release date.
Along the top of the results screen is a menu you access by swiping horizontally that includes lyrics, videos, additional songs by the artist, and related artists. If you swipe over to the lyrics screen while a song is playing, they are displayed in perfect synchronization with the song that’s playing, which is perfect for impromptu karaoke moments. Adding songs to Apple Music and Spotify playlists has been streamlined too – it now takes one less tap to add a song to a playlist.
One thing to keep in mind though, is that if you’re using the iOS 11.3 beta, playback is broken throughout the app. Tapping on any play button freezes the entire UI and requires you to force quit the app. Playback works as expected if you’re not on the beta, however.
Shazam is available on the App Store.
Federico
Ryan
