Federico Viticci

10865 posts on MacStories since April 2009

Federico is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of MacStories, where he writes about Apple with a focus on apps, developers, iPad, and iOS productivity. He founded MacStories in April 2009 and has been writing about Apple since. Federico is also the co-host of AppStories, a weekly podcast exploring the world of apps, Unwind, a fun exploration of media and more, and NPC: Next Portable Console, a show about portable gaming and the handheld revolution.
@[email protected]
@viticci.macstories.net
viticci@macstories.net

Soulver for iPhone Updated with iCloud Syncing, URL Scheme→

Soulver, my favorite iOS calculator app that isn’t really a calculator (I like another app for that), was updated today on the iPhone to support iCloud syncing, sub-folders, and a URL scheme. iCloud syncing was first brought to Soulver for Mac in December 2012, and now the iPhone app (Soulver for iPad hasn’t been updated yet) should be capable of syncing named documents with its Mac counterpart. If you trust iCloud with your Soulver documents, I guess that this will be a handy addition.

The URL scheme is much more interesting for my workflow. According to the release notes on iTunes, there’s now a URL scheme to launch Soulver, create a new document with text, or even to append text to an existing document. I am already thinking about the possibilities opened up by this feature for integration with apps like Launch Center Pro and Drafts – but I can’t find documentation anywhere. The app does support a soulver:// URL scheme, and hopefully more information will soon be posted on Acqualia’s website.

I’m looking forward to playing with Soulver’s URL scheme and updated preferences (not so much with iCloud sync). Soulver for iPhone is $2.99 on the App Store.

Update 9/1: The guys at Acqualia have posted a URL scheme documentation here. I have already set up a Drafts URL action that lets me quickly type a calculation in Drafts – which is my go-to text capturing tool – and append it as a new line to a specific Soulver document I have called “Calculations”. From Drafts:

soulver://new?text=[[draft]]&title=Calculations

I’m already using this action all the time to launch quick currency conversions in Soulver. Open Drafts, type “2 usd in eur”, and boom – Soulver opens, displaying the result. It’s a nice URL scheme.

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The Omni Group Releases OmniKeyMaster Mac App Store License Tool→

From The Omni Group’s blog:

OmniKeyMaster is a simple app that finds App Store copies of Omni apps installed on your Mac, then generates equivalent licenses from our store - for free. This gives Mac App Store customers access to discounted pricing when upgrading from the Standard edition to Professional, or when upgrading from one major version to the next. Another benefit: since they don’t have to wait in an approval queue, our direct releases sometimes get earlier access to new features and bug fixes. OmniKeyMaster lets App Store customers access those builds, as well.

Tools like OmniKeyMaster have become quite common lately, as developers of third-party Mac apps keep struggling with the limitations imposed by Apple on the Mac App Store. Having new versions of apps every time a major upgrade is released isn’t an option for many developers, and they are resorting to workarounds like this to have the best of both worlds: the Mac App Store’s purchase system and the control on your own website and app updates. It’s a trade-off, and, in most cases, the process is quite convoluted.

In The Omni Group’s defense, their Mac App Store license tool seems easy to use and clever in how it finds all App Store copies of Omni apps on a Mac. Apple may not be interested in offering upgrade pricing on the Mac App Store, but developers find a way…or at least a viable workaround.

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AgileBits Teases 1Password 4 For Mac→

Dan Moren, in his preview of 1Password 4 for Mac:

Several of the newest capabilities originated in 1Password 4 for iOS, including the ability to mark your frequently used items as Favorites, support for multiple logins on the same site, and the ability to sync via iCloud. You’ll also find new types of items to supplement existing options, such as driver licenses and reward programs, and you can add custom fields to most items, to store any other information you want. And if you want to share a specific item between the Mac and iOS apps, you can do so by sending it via encrypted iMessage or email.

1Password for Mac received its last big update in 2009 with version 3, and, following the launch of 1Password 4 for iOS, a revamp of the desktop client is long overdue. I’m particularly excited about the Back to the Mac approach – 1Password 4 is one of my favorite and most used iOS apps, and the upcoming Mac app seems to retain much of the mobile counterpart’s functionality, enhancing it with features that make sense on OS X (such as the new browser extension).

Apple will provide its own password generation and sync solution with iCloud Keychain, and that’s great news because it’ll help users have safer logins with minimal effort. However, I want more from my password manager, and I’m looking forward to trying 1Password 4.0.

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The Future Of Feed Reading→

Shawn Blanc:

And so, could this hypothetical service take all that information, put it into a database, and then find and recommend things for me to read? I think yes. That’d be the easy part. The hard part is if the service could pick out articles for me as well as Pandora can at pick out songs, or as well as Netflix can pick out 4-star movies. Now, wouldn’t that be something?

Services like Feedly, Feedbin, and Feed Wrangler have pretty much nailed the filesystem of news idea of RSS readers (with some unique differences, as Shawn outlines for Feed Wrangler).

The next step is discovery of relevant and personalized news in an RSS-based environment. No one seems to be doing that quite right at this point and there are a lot of services and technologies that may be using RSS in the backend but that are trying different proprietary approaches. Flipboard with magazines and top stories; Zite with algorithms; Feedly with popular feeds; others with lightweight Twitter and Facebook integrations.

My primary concern is that a feature such as the one envisioned by Shawn – which I’d love, by the way – would require a tremendous amount of scale, data, analysis, time, and, ultimately, resources, which I’m not sure an independently developed feed reader could ever have (or pull off properly). But, yes, that sort of news recommendation inside a feed reader would be fantastic.

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Rdio For iOS Gets Station Tuning, New Collection Options

rdio

rdio

Following the introduction of improved, personalized radio stations in early August, Rdio has today rolled out an update to its iOS app that brings a wider range of controls for stations and Collection views to iPhones and iPads.

In stations, it’s now possible to alter the selection of tracks that the service will automatically pick choosing between “Familiar” and “Adventurous” settings with three additional levels of fine-tuning in the middle. Like Rdio for desktop computers, these settings are displayed as dots in the radio playing view.

Other additions in this update are more subtle, but still noteworthy. In search results, filters allow you to easily view results for artists, albums, songs, playlists, people, or labels – a handy change to simplify the process of finding exactly what you’re looking for. In the Collection view on the iPad, you can browse with a new (and admittedly visually more appealing) album view, and both the iPhone and iPad apps get the ability to sort Collection by Recently Added – useful to get a quick overview of the artists, albums, or songs you’ve been adding to your account lately.1 In the Stations area, Rdio for iOS can now start artist-only stations, just like the Mac app.

rdio

rdio

I’m a big fan of Rdio’s recent work on UI design and stations. Rdio has been looking like an iOS 7-ready app for quite a few months now, thanks to a great use of blurs and music artworks as backgrounds – a design choice that is in line with iOS 7’s focus on deference and user content. In Stations, I’m impressed by the accuracy of the “Your FM” algorithm and the way it manages to regularly bring up songs that it knows I’ll like. I can’t wait to see what Rdio will do with the actual iOS 7, and I’m curious to see if they will (finally) bring back standard Recommendations, which briefly showed up for me, but then disappeared.

You can get the latest Rdio for iOS here.

  1. I personally peruse the History section on a daily basis to quickly re-listen to songs I’m currently addicted to over and over. ↩

Mirimage’s Editorial Workflows for Pocket and App.net→

Great demonstration of Editorial’s scripting capabilities. First, a workflow to fetch a random article from Pocket:

I’ve made 3 workflows; two for the authentication (Pocket Auth 1 & 2), and one that fetches a random article from the user’s unread queue and opens it in the Editorial browser. The Pocket authentication only needs to run once.

And then one to post on App.net (which could be nicely chained to my Post To WordPress workflow):

If you’re an App.net Developer, you can post to App.net directly from Editorial. I integrated this workflow into Federico Viticci’s Post to WordPress workflow, to post new articles to App.net in addition to Twitter.

Side note: I’m keeping track of Editorial workflows I find over at this Pinboard tag.

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ReadKit 2.3→

ReadKit, my favorite RSS/read later client for OS X, has been updated today to version 2.3, which brings a new icon, several bug fixes, and some new welcome features.

For me, the two most important additions are the improved sharing system and a global preference to group items by date or feed. The latter is available in Preferences > General, but there’s also a smart folder-specific setting that can override the general preference (so if you like to group a smart folder by feed instead of date, you can do that). Sharing is reminiscent of Reeder in that it supports services like Evernote, Twitter, Facebook, and Pinboard and it lets you assign custom keyboard shortcuts to each sharing service.

I’m a fan of the new sharing options, as they are faster to activate than drag & drop between sources (which was already supported). As the developers write:

ReadKit started out as a read later application for Instapaper, Pocket and Readability and it wasn’t so important to share articles between these services, despite the fact that it has worked with a simple drag-and-drop. Then RSS abilities has been added to the application, but the way of sharing remained unchanged. It’s time to improve this functionality, so this version introduces the new sharing menu, customizable sharing shortcuts and the ability to send articles into non-premium Instapaper accounts as well. Additional improvements and services are coming soon.

I’ve been using ReadKit every day since version 2.0 and I highly recommend it. The 2.3 update is available on the Mac App Store.

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