Posts in reviews

Evernote Brings Widget, Share Extension to iOS 8

I save everything into Evernote. While I’m almost religious about plain text and Markdown for my articles, anything else goes into Evernote: PDFs, screenshots, photos with GPS information, my shared shopping list, and any other note that has a visual component (such as formatting or hyperlinks).

I started using Evernote in 2009, and it’s become an external brain where I archive everything that I need to remember but not store in my own brain. Evernote suffered in its transition to iOS devices as it couldn’t be as flexible as the Mac app: Evernote is only as good as the ways it gives you to create notes, and the iOS app couldn’t use the best one – the clipper.

This is changing today with Evernote 7.5, which adds extensions for iOS 8 to let you save anything from anywhere with just two taps.

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MyFitnessPal Adds HealthKit Support, Bringing Its Data to iOS 8’s Health App

Popular food tracker and calorie counter MyFitnessPal, available for free on the iPhone, iPad, web, and other platforms, has today introduced an update for iOS 8 users that adds support for Apple’s new Health app. I’ve been testing the updated MyFitnessPal, and I believe that Health integration has the potential to be a great way to let the app integrate with other services on iOS 8.

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Discovering Sunrise

“On a paper calendar, what you see is what you put in. We believe that over time, you’re going to put less and less stuff yourself – it’s just going to come automatically.”

Since launching Sunrise in February 2013, Pierre Valade, former UX designer at Foursquare, had a busy year. Started as an iPhone app aimed at reinventing digital calendars and how people manage their schedules, Sunrise quickly gained 250,000 users, added support for Exchange calendars, and expanded to the web, iPad, OS X, and Android. Valade and his team listened to Sunrise’s userbase and added better invitation management and Google Maps previews, but, more importantly, they had to deal with a data breach that forced them to switch to a new token-based authentication for iCloud. More recently, Sunrise launched native app integrations, building on the founders’ vision of a calendar that extends beyond events with a developer platform to let anyone to build services connected to Sunrise.

Valade wants digital omnipresence and modern features to be key elements of Sunrise, which is still a free app with over $8 million raised in funding thus far. And today, with the launch of version 2.5 on the App Store, Valade is hoping that new functionalities such as search, push for Google Calendar, and integration with Todoist will continue to offer the value that, according to his plan, should make Sunrise an app people can’t work without.

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Based on Launch Center Pro, Contact Center Simplifies Contact Shortcuts

Contact Center is not for me. The latest product from Contrast, Contact Center is a simplified version of Launch Center Pro that brings a subset of its features to a free iPhone app supported by ads and aimed at a less geeky and power-user audience. I don’t need Contact Center. But, at the same time, I recognize that it’s a great idea from the Contrast team, cleverly executed in this 1.0 release.

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CloudApp 3 for Mac Brings Effortless GIF Screen Recording, Support for Teams

CloudApp today launched version 3 of their Mac app and it comes with the addition of a new feature called CloudApp Motion. Behind the fancy name is actually the really useful tool of being able to record your screen and automatically upload a GIF version to CloudApp. Alongside the updated app, CloudApp have also announced CloudApp for Teams, which includes team pricing plans and custom features.

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Quotebook 3 Brings New Design, Revamped Management of Authors and Sources

Quotebook, developed by the folks at Lickability, has long been my favorite app to save and archive quotes and passages on the iPhone and iPad. Over the years, I’ve tried several solutions to store quotes – I started with Markdown archives in plain text, moved to Evernote, and recently began using Instapaper Highlights, also connected to Evernote with IFTTT – but Quotebook kept striking me as one of those purposeful, well-considered apps that perform one task exceptionally well. I was especially satisfied when I realized that Quotebook had native Instapaper integration and could be connected to my feed reader of choice, Mr. Reader, to save quotes from RSS.

Yesterday, Lickability released version 3.0 of Quotebook as a free update on the App Store, bringing a new design, rewritten iCloud sync, and new features for quote creation and author navigation that make the app easier to use and better suited for large libraries of quotes and sources.

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