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Tweetbot for iPad Review

Since its release two years ago, the iPad has always needed a better Twitter client. Tweetbot for iPad is the better Twitter app I have been waiting for, and it sets a new standard that future Twitter clients will have to be compared with.

From a Twitter power user’s perspective, the iPad came at an interesting point in the history of the platform. Twitter clients for iPhone and Mac had reached a kind of maturity and complexity that enabled users like me to demand a certain grade of efficiency from new Twitter apps for the tablet; Twitter itself was beefing up its first-party app portfolio with acquisitions and a fresh strategy based on making the official clients the go-to apps for the average Twitter user. Some notable Twitter clients came out on the iPad throughout 2010, including the excellent Twitterrific, which we have reviewed several times on MacStories.

In 2010, Twitter also released its very own application for the iPad; developed by Loren Brichter, the man behind Tweetie, Twitter for iPad launched to a (still ongoing) controversy as to whether iPad interfaces should adopt more courageous designs in displaying information and sections to the user. Taking the best features of Twitter for iPhone (fluidity, clean design, pull to refresh) and mixing them up with new interaction schemes such as panels and pinch gestures, Twitter for iPad collected rave reviews and considerable disapprovals because of its interesting use of classic Twitter elements (vertical timeline, separate section for Mentions) alongside a new model for driving users’ taps around the app in the form of sliding panels, modal menus, and popovers. You can read more about it in my original review from 2010.

The problem with Twitter for iPad, I believe, is that it failed to appeal power users in the long term, stalling on the same feature set it had at launch without adding substantial improvement over what could have been a fantastic application. I, for one, used the official Twitter iPad app for months, but then I came at a point where I couldn’t stand seeing decent third-party apps staying on top of new Twitter functionalities and “unofficial” services, and Twitter’s own app left behind with Brichter gone and seemingly no interest from Twitter’s mobile team in keeping it up to date – fixing the bugs and annoyances that were reported on day one. Some improvements and new features eventually found their way to the app, and word is that we are waiting for a major 4.0 redesign of the client which, I believe, will put the app on par with the disastrous iPhone version. Tweetbot for iPad thus arrives in a landscape with no clear leader, but with some very good apps that have caught the attention of both power and average users in the past two years.

I wrote about this before. I wish third-party developers would accept Tweetbot as the de-facto app for power users and move on to innovate on other areas of the service. I’m biased: I love Tweetbot, I use it every day on the iPhone, and I couldn’t wait for an iPad version to be released. Today is kind of a dream come true for a Twitter nerd, but the question is – was it worth the wait? Not just good – is Tweetbot the great app the iPad was waiting for? Let’s dive in. Read more

Tweetbot 2.0 Review

How do you improve something that’s already great? You keep working on it, trying to look at your product from as many perspectives as possible. If you believe in it, you can make something great an even greater product. Last year, I reviewed Tweetbot 1.0 for iPhone, the Twitter client many of us had been impatiently waiting for:

Tweetbot is the app I’ve been waiting for: an excellent innovator of the Twitter platform. My new favorite Twitter client.

Tweetbot is everything I’ve ever wanted from a Twitter app: it looks great, it’s fast on WiFi and 3G, it innovates in several aspects that have been regarded as “standards” from both users and developers for too long. Could Tweetbot be any better? Maybe. The developers could work on improving the speed of animations and refresh times as much as possible, or implement support for Readability and other URL shortening services. But as far as the Twitter experience goes, Tweetbot has got everything I’m looking for.

I have tried many Twitter apps in the past years, as you may know, and I’ve never seen a third-party developer as committed to making their client great as Tapbots did with Tweetbot for iPhone. Iteration. Tapbots listened to feedback, and managed to pull the old trick of implementing features without turning your original vision into a piece a software it wasn’t meant to be. With version 2.0 of Tweetbot for iPhone, Tapbots has improved almost every aspect of the original experience, adding features, bug fixes, and refinements that still make Tweetbot the finest Twitter client available on the iPhone. Now faster, smoother, and more intuitive. Read more

Quick Review: Remarks

Readdle is today launching their latest iPad productivity app, Remarks. In some ways it is similar to their existing products such as ReaddleDocs or PDF Expert because it features full PDF annotation capabilities, but it is distinctly different because it is the first of their apps to really push the idea of handwriting and note taking as a core function. We’ve reviewed many of Readdle’s products before and by this stage it is clear to us that they make quality productivity software for iOS, so the real question I had when I downloaded this app was what exactly does it let you do and how might it fit into how I work.

What struck me almost instantly was that this app is clearly aimed at being a PDF creation tool, it isn’t like ReaddleDocs or PDF Expert which are more focused as being document management and PDF annotation apps. Remarks may have those same annotation tools but it wants you to create PDF documents, whether it be a handwritten note, drawing or diagram that you want to send to a colleague or perhaps a study note.

In its current form, PDF annotation may be useful but it’s a bit of a pain to get a PDF into Remarks, unlike PDF Expert and ReaddleDocs it doesn’t (yet) have support for cloud services such as Dropbox or SugarSync. Fortunately, this will only be a short-lived annoyance, Readdle plans to have an update ready within two weeks that adds support for cloud services.

Once you do get a PDF into Remarks, you won’t be disappointed - the same powerful annotation functionality that is in Readdle’s other apps is also available in Remarks. So you’ll get the tools to add text, draw shapes and write or draw in freehand on those PDFs, and as usual it is all editable in Preview on the Mac or any other PDF reader such as Adobe Acrobat.

I think for me, this app will come in handy when I need to take down study notes that also require diagrams or illustrations. Things that I can’t do in Evernote, which is very much a text focused note-taking app. In the past I have sketched them down in an exercise book and then for the most important ones I have subsequently drawn them up in Photoshop, OmniGraffle or OmniGraphSketcher, importing those into Evernote. Now I could just use Remarks to make an electronic copy of all my study notes, not just those that are in plain text. I’ll probably still use Photoshop or one of the Omni apps for some of my diagrams that are super important so they are a little neater - but its no longer a requirement.

Before I wrap up, I just wanted to make a quick mention of using a stylus with the iPad. The app does recommend using one and I must admit using a stylus in the context of drawing diagrams and general notes does make a lot of sense - using my finger wasn’t as effective as I had hoped and it soon got tiring. So I foresee myself picking up a stylus in the near future, to make sure I can take full advantage of what Remarks offers.

If you are just looking for an app to annotate PDF documents it might be a better idea to go for PDF Expert or ReaddleDocs. But if you want to do more freeform note-taking, drawing diagrams or creating your own simple PDFs, Remarks is the way to go. Remarks is available in the App Store for $4.99.

Dropzone 2.0 Gets Path-like Radial Menu

Back in November when I took a look at the Mac App Store release of Aptonic’s Dropzone, I was impressed by how the utility transitioned to the Mac App Store whilst keeping most of its functionalities intact. Through a simple drag & drop interface, Dropzone allows you to save time on common and oft-repeated tasks such as sharing images and bits of text, uploading files to your FTP server, or moving files from one location on your Mac to another.

With Dropzone 2.0, released today on the Mac App Store, Aptonic has been inspired by Path’s radial menu (introduced in version 2.0 of the app) and created a new drag & drop interface based on Circles, which as the name suggests are circular icons that sport pretty much the same animation seen in Path 2.0 for iPhone. I don’t know if the new Circles system is more intuitive than the old dock/menubar-based grid of icons (as a Dropzone user myself, I’ll have to see how Circles works in daily usage and if the feature doesn’t get in the way), but it sure looks very nice. Aptonic has also put together an HTML5 demo of Circles, available here.

Dropzone 2.0 comes with other features and improvements as well:

  • New improved Amazon S3 support
  • New task completion sound
  • Added an option to choose whether to intall applications in the user or main application folder

Like I said, I’ll have to keep on using the new Dropzone to see whether the new Circles interface can grow on me. I love the custom sharing menu in Path, but I don’t know yet if the same approach can work for file management and the various shortcuts I have set up in Dropzone. To celebrate the launch of version 2.0, Dropzone will be available at $9.99 until February 5th.

Reader X for iPad Is A Different Take on Google Reader

Those who have been following MacStories in the past months know that I switched from Reeder for iPad to Mr. Reader for my daily RSS feed consumption and management. I have reviewed Mr. Reader on multiple occasions, and as I wrote I was particularly impressed by its attention to a clean interface and integration with services such as Send2Mac, Evernote, and Pinboard. Yesterday Mr. Reader also received a major update that brings themes and several optimizations to the app.

In spite of Mr. Reader gaining a well-deserved spot on my Home screen, I’m always looking for new apps that offer a fresh take on the (much discussed) subject of RSS and Google Reader. Such app is Reader X, released today on the App Store, which brings a minimal yet highly visual approach to RSS that shouldn’t disappoint those who are looking for a new and easy way to quickly scan headlines.

Reader X, in fact, doesn’t let you browse feeds by folder, or manage subscriptions, or scroll unread items vertically as you would expect from a standard RSS client such as Mr. Reader. Well, technically you can sort by folder and scroll vertically, but the implementation of Reader X is entirely different: the app displays feeds as a “mosaic” of news, a list of articles organized in horizontal stripes that represent the websites they belong to. This huge “wallpaper of news” syncs with your existing Google Reader account, and is capable of fetching unread and starred items, folders and all items from a single subscription. Upon firing up the app for the first time, the software will sync with Google Reader and get the latest entries for every subscription in your account; you can tell the app to pre-fetch webpages in the background, and show a badge on the Home screen.

The way news are visualized on screen is functional to what Reader X tries to achieve – that is, trying to offer a more scannable interface for items you’d have to manually scroll with your mouse (or fingers) in a list. Items in the wallpaper are color-coded: unread items are blue, starred entries are yellow, everything else is gray. Newer items have a more saturated color, whilst older entries are gradually fainted as you scroll back in time. Recent headlines are displayed on the left next to a website’s name, and you can also choose to “zoom in” a single subscription (such as MacStories) to browse the most recent articles from that source.

Holding true to its premise of quickly peeking into your RSS items, when you tap on an article headline in Reader X you’re not immediately taken to a full-screen web view. Instead, the app loads webpages in a popover window that, however, still allows you to enter full-screen mode and share a link on Twitter, Pinboard, Instapaper, Tumblr and ReadItLater. You can also share via email, or forward links to Safari.

I like the super-simple and straightforward interface design of Reader X, but I can’t help but wonder how this thing would look like with a bit more polish, especially in the popover and sharing menu design. I’m all for avoiding complex interfaces and over-designed applications, but Reader X feels like it could use some extra pixel love in some areas, so I am looking forward to future updates. I would also like to be able to change the default font of the list, though the one the app currently ships with isn’t too bad.

Reader X won’t replace my main Google Reader client. I do believe, however, that there is room in my workflow for a different take on RSS consumption – a companion app – that allows me to quickly skim through headlines in a visual way that doesn’t get in the way and can make me save precious time when going through RSS feels like a chore. Reader X isn’t perfect, but it sure takes advantage of the iPad’s screen and it’s a promising 1.0 version. You can get the app at $1.99 on the App Store.

Launch Center 1.2 Gets All-New App Detection

One of my favorite apps in a long time, App Cubby’s Launch Center (our previous coverage here and here), just got a lot better thanks to an update released on the App Store a few minutes ago, version 1.2. Whilst one wouldn’t normally expect an app to get significant improvements in a 1.2 update, Launch Center’s latest version is, I believe, quite possibly the greatest addition to the app since its release, making it extremely easier to discover new third-party apps that can be integrated with no further configuration in Launch Center.

For those who are not familiar with Launch Center already, as we detailed in our previous reviews this utility allows you to set up custom shortcuts on your iPhone to launch common actions or often-used applications with a single tap. Upon firing up Launch Center, you’ll be able to create and manage shortcuts for, say, calling your wife or texting a coworker; you can create a quick action to activate the iPhone’s flashlight, launch a website in Safari, tweet, email someone, or Google your clipboard. As I’ve written before, Launch Center has replaced a bunch of existing apps in my dock thanks to its super-simple approach to aggregating default apps and functionalities that can be triggered through the popular URL schemes you can find documented on websites such as HandleOpenURL. And it’s from this idea of hidden URLs that only a few people know about that App Cubby decided to make Launch Center 1.2 all about app detection and integration.

Launch Center 1.2 leverages your apps’ internal URL schemes to simplify the process of discovering new shortcuts and speeding up your workflow. Launch Center comes with a new section called “Supported Apps” inside the Launch App menu, which lists third-party apps that can work with Launch Center through a URL. Launch Center organizes this list in Installed Apps (the ones you already have on your device) and Featured Apps (which you don’t have installed, and you can get from the App Store). This list of support apps, it turns out, has been built directly by App Cubby and it is hosted on the developers’ servers alongside links to the icons that, as you can see from the screenshots, are served directly to the iPhone and look great on the Retina Display. The reason behind App Cubby’s decision to keep the list of supported apps on their servers is to encourage more developers to get in touch and ask for integration in Launch Center which, ultimately, has a chance of becoming the de-facto solution for quickly accessing apps’ settings/sections/menus using a technology Apple is (seemingly) okay with.

App Cubby writes:

We’d also appreciate help in spreading the word about URL schemes. It’s surprising how few apps support them, and those that do don’t always go very deep with supported actions. If you have an idea for an app and/or action that would make sense in Launch Center, please contact the developer of that app directly and point them to this page.

Launching an app is great, but the true power of Launch Center is in the ability to trigger specific actions deep within an app. For example, while using Tweetbot, you may leave the app buried deep within a search. To launch the app and tweet might take quite a few taps as you have to back out of the search, tap the compose button, select an account, paste text, etc. Launch Center can make that a reliable 2 taps. 1 to open Launch Center and 1 to trigger the action.

In my Launch Center, I was pleased to see many of my most-used apps were already supported. I have set up shortcuts for 1Password, Instagram’s camera and Facebook; I tweaked Tweetbot’s shortcut to jump directly to my Favorites, and created an OmniFocus launch to create a new task “using clipboard for note”. Other apps I see as supported (and installed on my device) include Agenda, Evernote, Consume, Flipboard, Delivery Status Touch, Camera+, Instapaper, Skype, and Reeder. Hopefully a lot more will be coming soon thanks to App Cubby’s decision to make their iOS App URLs page public.

As I said above, Launch Center has become one of my favorite new apps for iPhone. It speeds up my workflow and looks neat, and I look forward to seeing how many developers will get in touch with App Cubby to formally introduce support for Launch Center in their apps (I also would like to see App Cubby figure out a way to fetch icons for any app).

You can find Launch Center 1.2 in the App Store.

Quick Review: RankIt Checks On iOS & Mac App Store Charts

Developed by Steve Reynolds (Analytix, Clicky Touch), RankIt is a new iPhone app that allows you to check on iOS and Mac App Store charts for any app that’s currently available for sale. Whilst some iPhone apps have tried to bring the complexity of web-based App Store analytic tools to iOS in the past, RankIt focuses on simplicity in that it allows you to quickly enter as many apps to “monitor” as you want, and refresh at any time to see real-time rankings.

As you fire up RankIt for the first time, you’re asked to add an app from the App Store you’d like to check rankings for. You can choose between iPhone, iPad, Universal and Mac apps, and change from United States to 9 other markets with available charts. In Settings.app, you can further tweak RankIt to adjust the number of maximum ranks returned (from 50 up to 400), set a default country, and refresh on launch. Once you’ve entered an app to monitor, RankIt will quickly refresh its ranking to check on freshly updated charts. RankIt will display an app’s position in the Top Paid/Free charts, as well as its ranking in the category’s charts. Universal apps will show iPhone and iPad icons next to them; with one tap, you can open a single app view that displays rankings in multiple countries. You can refresh at any time, with RankIt taking only a few seconds to get updated charts from the App Store.

In spite of its simplicity, I believe RankIt can be a worthy addition to any iOS or Mac developer’s workflow. In fact, the app’s focus on “quick stats” might just be its biggest selling point when compared to more in-depth tools that can’t just be refreshed every 10 minutes, whereas RankIt seems to be meant exactly for this – quickly checking on the App Store’s charts. I’ll make sure to test RankIt again during one of the big app launches next week, and see how it handles updates in real-life usage scenarios.

RankIt is $1.99 on the App Store.

Witness Home Alarm System Gets AppleScript Support, Sneak Peek, Face Detection

I’ve been a loyal and satisfied Witness customer since the app’s original release last year. Witness, developed by Orbicule (makers of Undercover and Macnification), is a Mac-based home surveillance system that uses your Mac’s built-in FaceTime/iSight camera to snap photos of whoever’s using your computer when you’re not there. This utility, in fact, securely communicates with a web service that’s connected to iOS apps (iPhone and iPad) that enables you to remotely lock your machine as you walk away from your house, and receive push notifications when the camera detects motion in front of your Mac’s screen. Witness sends push notifications, snaps photos and videos that are sent in real-time to your iOS devices (so you know instantly what’s going on), and can lock your computer using Lion’s standard login screen, or the app’s own lock dialog. You can read more about Witness in my review.

With Witness 2.0, released today, Orbicule has supercharged its home alarm system technology adding a series of functionalities that give more control to users away from their computers, and more issues to (possible) burglars looking to steal your Mac without being seen (or really, just people who want to mess around with your Mac without telling you). Aside from motion detection, which has been improved, Witness 2.0 comes with face detection, allowing you to be notified only when an actual person is sitting in front of your computer’s camera. There are settings to adjust motion sensitivity, and, overall, this feature can really come in handy if you have pets running around the house when you’re not there. I have tried this with my two dogs, and it worked remarkably well with motion sensitivity set to “Normal”: Witness didn’t detect anything with my dogs normally walking around, and I was only sent a notification when I held my dog right in front of the FaceTime camera. Similarly, Witness’ alarm didn’t fire off when I asked my girlfriend to simply walk around the living room, but I did get a notification as she approached my computer.

Next up: multiple cameras and sneak peek. Whereas Witness 1.0 allowed you to set up one camera (the built-in one) and watch images and videos sent after a successfully triggered alarm, Witness 2.0 lets you connect up to 3 cameras (USB or FireWire) and check upon your room from multiple angles. Combined with a new feature called Sneak Peek that lets you load an image from your camera at any time, Witness 2.0 offers a good combination of real-time capturing and multiple angles – I imagine this can be particularly useful for large rooms and office areas.

Last, Witness 2.0 has AppleScript support and auto-activation. You can ask Witness 2.0 to run an AppleScript when an alarm is activated, deactivated, or motion is detected, thus creating a whole new range of possibilities for remote automation. Someone’s using your Mac? Why don’t you tell iTunes to start playing this at the highest volume? Or perhaps open a totally creepy video in the default browser? With AppleScript support, you have endless possibilities for customization and it’s really up to you to find something that might be useful when executed automatically by the system. Even better, with Witness 2.0 you’re given the option to forget about activating your alarm as the iOS app now uses geo-location to see when you’re not near your Mac anymore, and activate the alarm for you. Obviously I still recommend manually activating alarms (especially if you’re working with multiple Macs in different locations) as geo-location can’t always be 100% reliable, but in my tests Witness managed to activate an alarm roughly 2 minutes after I left my house, so I’d say it worked fairly well.

With these new features and optimizations, I highly recommend existing Witness users to upgrade to version 2.o and check it out by themselves today. If you haven’t tried Witness yet, a single user license is available through Orbicule’s website at $39 with a student discount available.

Exclusive offer for MacStories readers: Using this link, you can purchase Witness 2 (single user license) with a 20% discount. The coupon code is directly applied, and it will be valid until February 6.

Quick Review: NewsFlash Aggregates The World’s Headlines

Even though I do most of news consumption in Instapaper, Twitter, and Zite these days, I still enjoy getting up to speed with “real news organizations” every once in a while. The majority of time that means getting to fire up some Italian website that delivers news (such as Ansa) or “big media” publications from the US, depending on what I’m looking for in that particular moment. Just as I was wondering why some sort of “Techmeme for Italy” doesn’t exist yet, an email dropped in my inbox pointing me at NewsFlash, a new universal app by Sollico, the same guys behind CurrencyPad for iOS.

NewsFlash is basically an RSS aggregator for the major news sources in the world – that is, some sort of “Techmeme for Italy only” for more countries, with “big media” websites aggregated by default and no relevance algorithm in the backend. In Italy, you can have news from the likes of Il Corriere Della Sera or Ansa; in the U.S. you’ll both find Reuters and Msnbc alongside TechCrunch and MacRumors. The app, in fact, is organized in sections that range from News and Politics to Sports, Technology and Gossip, providing a way to quickly change the topic you’re looking and get the facts, or at least what’s been written, about the latest news. It’s like Techmeme meets MacHash meets Tech News Tube meets Google Reader, only in a clean, intuitive app for iPhone and iPad.

The app obviously allows you to share stories via Facebook, Twitter (iOS 5 integration is supported), email and text message. NewsFlash doesn’t always load a website’s mobile view when jumping to stories (and that can actually be a good thing), but it offers font size controls and options to block ads and links to third-parties. News can be updated with the typical pull-to-refresh gesture, whilst a top toolbar is used to switch between countries and sections through a single swipe. Currently, NewsFlash comes with support for the following countries: Italy, UK, US, Germany (both in Deutsche and English), Japan, France (both French and English) and Israeli. The app’s preferences allow you to hide certain sections and add custom feeds (you can add literally anything that supports RSS, turning NewsFlash into a simple RSS reader), adjust fonts and change the app’s background. I like how the app automatically looks at your device’s language and tries to load news from that country.

NewsFlash is free, but you can disable iAd with a $1.99 in-app purchase. Give it a try if you’ve been looking for a nice app that aggregates “general” news, whilst keeping your real RSS subscriptions in a standalone Google Reader app.