Federico Viticci

10933 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.
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@viticci.macstories.net
viticci@macstories.net

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Today Weather Gets Dark Sky Alerts, Forecast.io Support

Today Weather

Today Weather

Savvy Apps’ Today Weather, my favorite iOS weather app, has been updated today to include support for Dark Sky alerts and Forecast.io, the Dark Sky Company’s recently launched weather service that comes with an API for third-party developers. Available as a $0.99 In-App Purchase, support for Forecast won’t turn Today Weather into an interface for Forecast Lines (another product from the Dark Sky Company, focused on displaying weather trends), but instead it’ll simply enable Forecast.io as a new weather source alongside Weather Underground.

While the Dark Sky iPhone app is primarily limited to North America, Forecast.io is a global weather service that aggregates data (temperature, pressure, forecasts, etc.) from various sources, statistically providing “the most accurate forecast possible for a given location”. I have been testing Today Weather with Forecast.io for the past month, and results were more accurate than Weather Underground for the Italian locations I tried: Viterbo (where I live), Montalto di Castro, and Rome. Weather Underground has been reliable in the past, but Forecast.io data had a series of minor differences that, eventually, proved to be true; admittedly, it wasn’t a major divergence in terms of temperatures and forecasts, but still accurate.

Dark Sky alerts are equally interesting: sitting in the top right corner of a location’s summary veiw, they provide a handy summary for Now, Next Hour, Next 3 Hours, and “Today and Upcoming” forecasts. I am a fan of Dark Sky’s human-readable text summaries, but, alas, temperatures haven’t been localized to Celsius (I believe this is a Dark Sky API limitation), and, at least for my saved locations, there’s not much information available for Next Hour and Next 3 Hours. I am sure that, for countries with better availability of weather tracking services and data providers, Today Weather’s Dark Sky alerts will offer even better summaries.

I like Today Weather and I’m a fan of The Dark Sky Company’s work on Dark Sky and Forecast. The $0.99 In-App Purchase is a no-brainer if you want to try Forecast.io’s data into Savvy Apps’ solid weather client.

Pocket Adds Drafts Sharing→

After an update that added support for Quotebook, Pocket for iOS has been updated today to let users send text to Agile Tortoise’s Drafts.

In the current implementation, the app will send an article’s title and shortened URL if no text is selected; if there is a text selection, Pocket will send quoted text and shortened URL to Drafts. I like it, but I wish there was a setting to send the shared link with its original, non-shortened URL.

I’m very glad Pocket added Drafts integration. In this way, you can tweak my Evernote workflows to, say, append bits of text to a single note.

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Gmail for iOS Updated With New Sign Out Option, Integration with Google iOS Apps

Gmail

Gmail

An update to the official Gmail app for iOS released today brings a series of welcome improvements that users had been requesting since the (re)launch of the client last year.

The first notable addition is support for signing out of individual accounts. In older versions of the app, users were forced to sign out of all accounts at once, a tedious process that didn’t make much sense considering the app had a dedicated section for accounts that could use better sign out options. In today’s update, you can tap & hold an account’s avatar in the sidebar to bring up a Sign Out button in a popover at the bottom.

The new version of Gmail also works nicely with Google’s other apps for iOS: from the Settings, you can now specify whether YouTube, Google Maps, and web links should directly open in Google’s native app replacements or a mobile web view. These options are available in the Settings screen for each account, but they will be enabled for the entire app, not single accounts.

The last new feature, also shown in the app’s updated walkthrough, are search suggestions as you type. While Gmail has always been able to search across all your mail, today’s version brings suggestions that (based on initial tests) should match addresses and subject lines found in your account.

You can find Gmail for iOS on the App Store.

Messages.app Primer→

A useful collection of tips for Messages for Mac by Amit Jain. I’ve always thought there wasn’t a way to add new lines or switch between conversations, so I’m glad Amit put together this post.

Unfortunately, these tips don’t fix Messages’ problems with memory usage and out-of-sync conversations – which I have been experiencing since the app’s first release.

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Goalie for HockeyApp→

Goalie is a $9.99 app that developers can use to manage their HockeyApp accounts on the iPhone.

I’m not a developer, but I use HockeyApp on a daily basis to install betas of apps I’m trying, and I know how the service works. So I asked for a test account, and played around with Goalie. The feature set is solid: you can view all your apps, get stats on versions (such as installs and crashes), view crash groups and full crash logs, manage team members, and even access the feedback area where you can delete or reply to threads. If you’ve been looking for a way to manage HockeyApp on the go, I think Goalie deserves a look. Make sure to check out the app’s website for screenshots and details.

Goalie is $9.99 on the App Store.

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Tweet Library 2.3→

Nice update to one of my most-used iOS apps.

The new version adds compatibility with the new Twitter API, changes the calendar viewer to a thin bar that runs across the top of the timeline, and brings performance improvements alongside a clearer design.

I use Tweet Library on a daily basis to search my entire Twitter archive. The new calendar makes it easier to move between months/years, and the app is much faster when loading tweets.

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How Panic Is Using Status Board→

Fascinating look at the widgets and hardware Panic is using for their own Status Board setup.

This bit caught my attention:

Units have been especially interesting since they reveal so much about the economics of (our) iOS software, as this Graph panel shows. Although (our) iOS apps sell a respectable number of units, the revenue they bring in barely charts compared to our Mac stalwarts. So far! We’re working hard on improving our iOS apps, and trying new ideas, in order to crack the iOS market a little bit more.

Diet Coda, priced at $19.99, is a fantastic piece of iPad software, and yet it doesn’t bring in much revenue compared to Panic’s Mac apps.

Just yesterday, I was thinking that it’s strange how Apple still hasn’t brought the Developer Tools category of the Mac App Store over to the iOS App Store. There are excellent examples of developer-oriented software, especially on the iPad: Textastic, xScope Mirror, Codea, Pythonista, and the aforementioned Diet Coda come to mind – plus many more. Two years ago, I asked whether the iPad needed programming apps.

Times have changed. Today, I wonder: would a Developer Tools category in the App Store help apps like Diet Coda get more exposure? Wouldn’t it make sense to give these tools another category, more specific and focused than the crowded Productivity one?

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