Posts in reviews

iCloud, Mobile Documents Sync and GoodReader

Last night we detailed how it’s possible to sync documents across multiple Macs configured with the same iCloud account through a hidden folder in Lion’s Library called Mobile Documents. As I explained in the article, this folder is actually the destination and sync location for iCloud-enabled apps, such as Instacast and iWork, that have been updated by developers to officially take advantage of iCloud’s Documents & Data. But as it turns out, Mobile Documents can be used for syncing files across Macs “manually” – just drop a file or folder in there, and it’ll show up on another Mac running the same iCloud account. So whilst Mobile Documents is “officially” used for App Store apps that work with iCloud, it can also come in handy as a native “drop box” powered by iCloud.

As many were quick to point out, syncing files between Macs is nice, but “real” syncing solutions like Dropbox come with mobile apps to make sure your documents and folders aren’t simply synced between desktop machines. Since Apple isn’t offering a new version of iDisk based on iCloud – and seems to be moving away from the concept of filesystem altogether – the method I described in the article was obviously meant for owners of multiple Macs – the Mobile Documents “hack” is cool, but it’s not supported by Apple.

On the App Store, however, that are several apps that over the years have tried to re-implement the filesystem on iOS by offering access to a plethora of online sources for your files, such as FTP servers, Google Docs, Dropbox and SugarSync. These “file management” apps like iFiles and iStorage aren’t integrated on a system level, but they work as “aggregators” for documents you may have already saved in the cloud, only they bring them together in a single location.

One of such apps is GoodReader, perhaps the most popular document reader & file manager ever landed on the App Store’s virtual shelves – GoodReader comes with hundreds of features and support for multiple online services, plus it’s also a decent PDF reader with annotation functionalities and an overall good preview engine. As I was playing around with the idea of having Mobile Documents work with an iOS app, I realized one of the latest GoodReader updates introduced full iOS 5 and iCloud compatibility, meaning the app can store its documents and data in iCloud, and will show up as iCloud-enabled app in your account (to check this, open Settings->iCloud->Storage & Backup->Manage Storage on iOS, or System Preferences->iCloud->Manage… on OS X Lion). And if an iCloud-enabled app with Documents & Data shows its contents on OS X under Mobile Documents, it means GoodReader should be capable of syncing its own filesystem back to the Mac.

Indeed, you can use GoodReader to manage files and folders on iOS, and have them available on the Mac as well through iCloud and Mobile Documents. GoodReader will create its own folder inside Mobile Documents, and every change (new file, new folder) you’ll make on the iOS app will appear inside GoodReader’s “Documents” directory. Of course, you’ll have to use GoodReader’s “iCloud” folder to enjoy these syncing features; thanks to GoodReader’s file management features, you’ll be able to create folders and sub-folders, move documents around and delete them, create new text files, rename documents, and more. GoodReader has some pretty powerful features, and it’s nice to see the developers are supporting iCloud out of the box with a dedicated folder on the main “My Documents” page.

Thanks to GoodReader’s support for multiple online services, you’ll be able to, say, move files from Dropbox or Google Docs to iCloud directly from the iOS app.

In my tests, iCloud sync with GoodReader has been extremely fast and reliable. Documents imported on iOS would show up in seconds on the Mac’s Mobile Documents, and vice versa. I was able to move screenshots between my Mac, iPhone and iPad using Mobile Documents and GoodReader, but I also created folders, compressed files, imported PDFs and MP3 files. Because iCloud is based on push technology, files are pushed immediately to the cloud and downloaded on all configured clients, but I noticed that GoodReader for iOS, unlike the Mac’s Mobile Documents folder, doesn’t download a full document as soon as the data is “pushed” from iCloud. Try this: on your Mac, drag a medium-sized PDF into GoodReader’s iCloud folder. Notice how the PDF’s icon and name show up on GoodReader after your Mac has pushed the document to iCloud. But try to open the PDF from GoodReader, and you’ll see the app will require additional download time, as only the main information about the file has been pushed to iOS – if you want to read it, you’ll have to wait for the full download. I actually found this method pretty clever, as it gives me up-to-date file information in seconds, and allows me to download files when I need them. Overall, I’m impressed by iCloud and GoodReader working together to sync files across different iCloud clients.

Why should you care to have GoodReader syncing files that also happen to show up on your Mac? First off, it’s a cool trick. More importantly, iCloud’s push technology works well, and users (like me) may find it convenient to have an easy way to, say, import iOS screenshots on the desktop without using Photo Stream, while still relying on iCloud. Thanks to GoodReader’s support for audio and video, iWork and Office files, HTML archives and text files, you’ll be able to copy a variety of documents from your desktop onto iCloud, and have them synced back to iOS in seconds.

Check out how to sync files with Mobile Documents and iCloud here. GoodReader is available on the App Store for iPhone and iPad.

Recommended Read: “Talking to Siri” by Erica Sadun and Steven Sande

I got my iPhone 4S two weeks ago, and have been experimenting with Siri and my best American accent since then. In spite of the software still not supporting maps and directions in Italy (more countries, including Italy, will support Siri in 2012) and weather requests, I’m having my fun in playing around with Siri for things like messages, notes, emails and Wolfram Alpha questions (I thank Americans for giving me a reason to convert their units to the metric system). Siri makes for the perfect iPhone demo to non-iPhone users, but impressive presentations aside it’s actually a great tool to quickly “do stuff” that would require looking at your phone and manually interacting with apps otherwise. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve already asked Siri to send messages to my co-workers while I was driving, change songs, call my girlfriend, or create new calendar appointments.

A few days ago I was sent a link to “Talking to Siri: Learning the Language of Apple’s Intelligent Assistant” by TUAW’s Erica Sadun and Steven Sande. I’ve read the book using the Kindle app on my iOS devices and Amazon’s CloudReader on the web and, let me tell you, it’s a great book to learn more about Siri.

At first I was skeptical – why would I need a book when Siri is so intuitive? It turns out, Erica and Steve have put together an impressive collection of things Siri does that I didn’t know about, also explaining with a friendly and familiar style (if you’ve been reading TUAW, which I do) how you should ask things to Siri. The book is organized in sections, covering every system app that’s integrated with Siri as well as built-in tools such as Wolfram Alpha and Yelp. Erica and Steven have also included lots of screenshots and descriptions, so you’ll be able to immediately understand and see what they’re referring to in describing Siri. It’s an incredibly pleasant read for new iPhone 4S users, and a nice handbook to get started with Siri. Without spoiling much, let me just say that I’ve learned a lot about things you can ask Wolfram (built into Siri), how to keep adding new items to a note, sunrise and sunset times and recurring reminders.

“Talking to Siri” covers in great detail every possible combination of commands Siri supports, providing a comprehensive guide to know more about what Siri can do for you. You can buy the book on Amazon as Kindle edition.

Plex 2.0 for iOS Brings Revamped Remote Access, New Home Screen - Plex 0.9.5 “Laika” Released

Back in April I wrote about Plex 1.1, a new iOS version of the popular media manager for Mac and Windows (as well as other connected devices such as Roku) that brought a new design, better streaming of movies and TV shows with Direct Play and Direct Streaming, and many changes from the original application that was released a year ago in November 2010.

With a series of releases announced via various blog posts, the Plex team launched last night version 2.0 of Plex for iOS, another major revamp of the mobile client for iPhone and iPad that brings an improved home screen design (for the grid UI that was introduced in 1.1), new remote access, better subtitle management and over 150 bug fixes. As previewed last week, the Plex team figured one of the most requested functionalities for the desktop media server – a utility that finds media on your computer or local network and handles transcoding, metadata and streaming to Plex clients – was better access of personal media (movies, music, TV shows) over the Internet. In its previous versions, Plex was capable of making a computer or external hard drive available over the Internet via port forwarding, but setup was far from easy and seamless, and the lack of any online counterpart for over-the-air sharing made it impossible to build a platform on top of a local Plex installation. With myPlex, Plex brings “real” remote access to all your media, allowing the app to communicate with my.plexapp.com through a user account (which you can create for free), letting users not only access servers (like your iMac or Mac mini) remotely, but also to share specific sections of a library with other Plex users.

myPlex is a full-featured solution to access, share and save content for later. “Access” means all your connected Plex media servers will show up online, readily available to show your sections and library; I haven’t been able to personally test the remote access part of myPlex as my router doesn’t want to play nice with port mapping, but I can see how the redesigned preference panel will make for a more intuitive experience when making a computer available online. Moreover, the screencasts posted by the Plex team (available below), show how easily it’s possible to connect media servers to myPlex.

Sharing plays another big role on myPlex: whereas in previous iterations of Plex users could only share content with others by opening up their routers for external access, providing a friend with the required authentication system to access a Plex installation, myPlex makes it extremely easy to pick a folder (say a Music collection, or a TV series), enter an email address of another Plex user, and start sharing content online. Users can share an entire Plex library or just some sections, and obviously the system will take advantage of Direct Play and Direct Streaming between remote connected users and libraries whenever possible. myPlex is a simpler interface on top of the old (manual, URL-based) sharing process, and it’s deeply integrated with the updated iOS and Mac clients. Read more

Adobe Carousel Review: Sync & Edit Photos Anywhere

With the introduction of iOS 5 and iCloud, Apple enhanced the standard photo management experience on iOS devices and Macs with Photo Stream, a new cloud service that makes all your photos available anywhere at any time through iCloud. As I detailed in my iCloud overview, Photo Stream is a new “invisible” part to iCloud that lives inside the iOS’ Photos.app or iPhoto on the Mac, allowing the operating system to instantly push photos – whether they’re actual photos or screenshots taken on iOS – up to the cloud, and back to all your devices configured with Apple’s service. So when you’re taking a new photo on your iPhone, Photo Stream ensures the photo is also pushed to your iPad and Mac, so you won’t have to sync or manually transfer files when you’re home.

Photo Stream is a convenient solution because it’s easy to use and doesn’t require any configuration, but this very lack of options and adjustments has generated quite a debate in the past few weeks among users who would like to be able to control their Photo Stream to exclude certain kinds of images, or at least manually delete the ones that aren’t worth the cloud storage. Because Photo Stream has been built to be invisible and extremely simple, it doesn’t come with any preference to, say, diversify screenshots from regular photos, or delete photos you mistakenly took from your online stream. Photo Stream is simply an on/off switch for all or nothing, and whilst it has turned out to be an indispensable tool in my workflow for photos and iOS screenshots, others would like to have some kind of control over how photos are chosen and pushed to their devices. Read more

ReaddleDocs 3 Review: Powerful Document Viewer & File Manager For The iPad

ReaddleDocs 3, the latest version of the popular document viewer and file manager for the iPad was released a few days ago and it packs a bunch of new features and improvements. The app is a little odd in some ways, because at its core it is trying to recreate the file system on an iPad — something that Apple has tried its very best to stay away from with iOS. But in reality, if you’ve wanted to be productive on an iPad you’re inevitably going to need some sort of file system, because whilst iCloud is beginning to help with document and app sync, it isn’t all that helpful for syncing between apps.

As a result, I use a few other ‘cloud’ services to keep all my documents in sync and available everywhere. The primary one I use is SugarSync, but I also use Dropbox (primarily for collaboration) and occasionally Google Docs. This allows me to use any of the computers I have at home, where I will have all my documents ready and available - I can even edit them and see those edits synced across to the other computers where I could access that same file the next morning with all the edits included.

But how do I deal with documents on the iPad? It’s been a bit of a complicated issue since the iPad was first released, and initially I was just emailing any documents I needed on my iPad to myself and then opening that email up on the iPad - but this was messy, complicated and required advanced ‘knowledge’ to send that file before you could see it on the iPad. Eventually I realised I had to find a better way to solve this, and that’s where SugarSync and Dropbox come in. Both these services (and a multitude of others) slowly began to be supported by various apps for the iPad and iPhone, hooking straight into the services. This was a far better way to open files on the iPad - but the apps felt very rough around the edges.

In recent months I’ve been using iFiles on the iPad and iPhone, it’s been pretty great and it was certainly the best app I had used to date for viewing documents from my Dropbox folder and SugarSync services. Then about a month after I started using iFiles, I came across PDF Expert. Primarily I was using it for PDF annotation, but I noticed it was also a pretty great file viewer, particularly because it would also integrate right into Dropbox and SugarSync. So over the past few months I’ve been using PDF Expert for most of my document viewing needs and occasionally opening iFiles.

When looking at it simply, PDF Expert and ReaddleDocs 3 are nearly identical — they share very similar user interfaces and are close in functionality too. Where they differentiate is mainly in price (PDF Expert is nearly twice as much) and in annotation abilities (it is far better in PDF Expert). So before I go into too much detail, if you want to do a lot of PDF annotation on the iPad, PDF Expert is what you should purchase (even if you want to use it as a document viewer, because it is also good at that). In all other cases my recommendation is for ReaddleDocs 3, particularly if you want to do some file management - it is virtually identical and also has some annotation capabilities.

Jump the break to continue reading my review of ReaddleDocs 3.

Read more

Pixelmator 2.0 Now Available On The Mac App Store, Our First Impressions

Pixelmator 2.0, a big new version of the popular image editing application for the Mac, just hit the Mac App Store and is available for just $29.99 (as an introductory price) and is a free upgrade for those who have previously purchased a copy of Pixelmator from the Mac App Store. Pixelmator 2.0 is a significant update, with significant improvements, completely new features, a new look and full support for OS X Lion.

With tons of exciting new features and support for OS X Lion, this new version of Pixelmator is the easiest, most enjoyable way to experience the best of image editing. Pixelmator 2.0 gives everyone the tools they need to unlock their creativity and boost their productivity, all for just $29.99. - Saulius Dailide of the Pixelmator Team

The big new features in Pixelmator 2.0 make it a truly powerful image editor and for most people it should be more than sufficient for all their needs - likely making something like Photoshop overkill for what their requirements are. A big drawcard for many will be Pixelmator’s new drawing tools that make it easy to create, combine and edit vector shapes easily. A new ‘Shape Settings’ palette also makes it simple to adjust the shadow, stroke and fill of a vector shape. A new healing tool in Pixelmator 2.0 features content-aware fill technology so that it is easy to remove ‘objects’ from a photograph and make it appear as though it was never even there.

By choosing either the new Healing Tool or the selection tools, a user can select wrinkles, blemishes, image damage or any other details present in images, and with just one click let Pixelmator seamlessly fill the selected area with similar nearby image content.

Then there are the new retouching tools of smudge, sponge (desaturate), burn (darken), dodge (brighten) and red-eye. These tools are great for retouching and work as one would expect. Finally, there is an improved type tool that not only makes it easier to format your text, but now also features more advanced typography tools for those that want complete control over how their type looks.

Taking advantage of the new features that Apple added to OS X Lion, Pixelmator now supports the native Auto Save and Versioning available in Lion, allowing you to easily save multiple versions of a document you are working on, and compare those versions easily. Lion’s Full Screen feature is also built into Pixelmator so you can easily focus on your work without distraction and also take full advantage of your Mac’s screen real estate. The last thing to note is that Pixelmator 2.0 also follows Lion’s lead and supports a number of gestures, buttons, menus and the new ‘invisible’ scroll bars.

The look of Pixelmator has also been refined in 2.0, with a new ‘Tool Options’ bar and an ‘Info’ bar. Both sit discretely at the top of the window and both bars are contextual, changing depending on what tool you choose, giving you the appropriate information and settings depending on what tool you are using - so you never see useless information. The Tools palette is also more customisable now, allowing you to add, remove and even group any tools you want - letting you create a Tools palette that matches what your workflow requires.

There are a number of other new features, improvements and tweaks that are too numerous to go into. But speaking as an occasional user of Photoshop, Pixelmator 2.0 seems to have almost all the features I require for my image editing and it gives them to me at a fraction of the cost. If you’re like me, you might find Pixelmator a little jarring at first, with various tools and options located in different locations, but this soon disappears when you realise its an incredibly capable piece of software - that from my experience is actually a little more nimble at accomplishing various tasks (particularly when dealing with text).

Pixelmator 2.0 is available on the Mac App Store at an introductory price of $29.99 so be sure to grab a copy of it - at that price it’s an absolute steal. If you have previously purchased Pixelmator from the Mac App Store, its a free upgrade.

App Journal, Episode 6: NotifyMe, Whale Trail, Twittelator Neue, BBC iPlayer

App Journal is a new series aimed at showcasing apps we have enjoyed using on our iPhones, iPads, and Macs, but decided not to feature in a standalone, lengthy review here on MacStories. App Journal is a mix of classic reviews, weekly app recommendations, and a diary of our experiences with apps that still deserve a proper mention.

With iOS 5, iCloud and the iPhone 4S now out in the wild and available for all users, App Journal gets back to its regular programming schedule and we couldn’t be more excited to start trying new apps that fully take advantage of the new features offered by iOS 5 and iCloud services. This week, Graham takes a look at the global version of iPlayer, while I try to set a personal record in Whale Trail (thanks to our friends at The Next Web for writing about this gem), experiment with a new Twitter client for iPhone, and enjoy the comfort of a quick-entry panel in a Mac app that creates reminders, but it’s not Apple’s Reminders.

We think this week’s selection is pretty great. Stay tuned for more App Journals in the next weeks.

NotifyMe

With iOS 5, Apple introduced Reminders, and as I wrote in my overview of the app, I’m glad they did. Reminders makes iOS as a platform more efficient and productive, allowing users to forget about having to purchase a standalone to-do app because now the functionality is integrated right into the system. But as I also wrote, it’s not like Reminders aims to replace more complex solutions like OmniFocus, Todo or Things: Reminders is very simple and aimed at people who don’t need advanced personalization of their to-do lists or project management features. Reminders targets the average iOS user that has always wished his iPhone would let him create reminders for when he gets home or needs to take out the trash. With Siri integration, Reminders gets even more accessible thanks to voice-based input.

There will always be room for third-party apps in the iOS ecosystem, and even if Apple “borrows” basic functionalities from third-party software every once in a while, developers always find a way to give their apps a reason to exist and prosper. Just take a look at Instapaper, Grazing, or Fantastical.

NotifyMe, a set of apps by PoweryBase, is an interesting and powerful alternative to Reminders for those who wish they could do a bit more with their to-dos and, more importantly, have them synced back to a native Mac app. NotifyMe is very similar to Reminders in its underlying concept: you create to-dos and they’re synced to the cloud. Unlike Reminders, NotifyMe doesn’t use iCloud – instead the developers have built an infrastructure called the NotifyMe Cloud that keeps iPhone, iPad and Mac clients always up-to-date with a free account you can create at notifymecloud.com. Syncing is free, with no subscriptions – but you’ll have to buy the iOS apps separately on the App Store (no universal version yet) and if you want to have to-dos on your desktop as well, NotifyMe for OS X on the Mac App Store.

Where NotifyMe really stands out is customization. You can assign reminders to specific categories and create new ones from scratch choosing a custom icon. On iOS, you can pick a melody for NotifyMe alerts, set a [Category] prefix in the notifications that you’ll get from the app, and choose whether or not you want the app to default an “auto-done” state for non-repeating reminders. Furthermore, you can set auto-snooze, customize the app’s badge type to overdue+today or overdue+all upcoming, and select a category for shared reminders added by your friends. NotifyMe makes it easy to curate a personal list of friends and family members that you want to share reminders with – just head over the Sharing & Friends tab in the iOS app, and send a request via email to another NotifyMe user. Friends can create shared reminders, but they can’t browse your whole account and see the reminders you’ve chosen not to share.

Both on the Mac and iOS, the app’s interface is easy to use and focused on lists and the “New reminder” button. Lists include your upcoming reminders, completed and recent ones, as well as your categories and Sharing. On the iPad and Mac you’ll see categories (and to-dos assigned to them) right in the left sidebar, whereas on the iPhone you’ll have to tap on Categories first to navigate to another view. NotifyMe also comes with a web app for those who don’t own a Mac, which you can find at webapp.notifymecloud.com.

NotifyMe’s reminders don’t have location features, but they have some other options worth mentioning. You can set repeating reminders and pre-alerts; pick a category, set auto-snooze, sharing and melody on a reminder basis and attach notes. The biggest advantage of NotifyMe over similar to-do software for iOS is that its Mac app enables you to create reminders with an OmniFocus-like quick entry panel, which can be assigned a systemwide keyboard shortcut and optionally expanded to reveal more settings as you write. The quick entry panel is possibly the single best feature of the Mac app that justifies the (steep) price if you’re going to create many reminders on your desktop, and have them always available through the cloud.

NotifyMe works reliably, and in some areas it offers more customization options than Apple’s Reminders for iOS 5. The full set of apps (iPhone, iPad, Mac) doesn’t exactly come cheap, so consider the purchase if you’re really going to use the Mac’s quick entry functionality and iPad client a lot. Read more

The Early Edition 2 Review

When the original iPad came out last year, it was immediately clear the device would be great for reading. As I outlined in my Instapaper 4.0 review, those who followed the launch of the device in April 2010 may recall that there was little doubt the iPad was going to change our reading habits: from the comfort of a couch or during a daily commute, the iPad’s bigger screen would provide a better alternative to web articles, RSS  feeds and eBooks than the iPhone’s 3.5-inch display. How reading was meant to be changed and enhanced, exactly, wasn’t really clear from the start.

The following months saw the rise of “social magazines” like Flipboard and Zite, a plethora of RSS apps – most of them abandoned now – and variations on the theme of “visual news” that would see developers building apps with a unique, at least initially, spin on the classic visualization of headlines. Among the pioneers of “iPad reading” was Glasshouse Apps, makers of some fine software for iOS devices like Barista and Gift Plan. Last year, Glasshouse Apps released The Early Edition, possibly the first popular app to take on the concept of RSS feeds rendered as a newspaper on the iPad’s screen. Whilst many would later try to copy Flipboard and come up with similar ways to build “social magazines” off your Twitter and Facebook streams, I remember The Early Edition was among the first apps to deliver a fresh RSS experience that turned RSS items into visually-appealing headlines with page layouts, subtitles, bold headlines and summaries. The Early Edition was capable of importing feeds from your Google Reader account and manually managing them inside the app, but it couldn’t sync with Google’s RSS service. The fact that, without any major feature or UI updates, The Early Edition is still in the Top Paid iPad News chart as of this morning is telling of the app’s quality. Overall, The Early Edition was a nice way to read RSS feeds in a different format; perhaps it was overshadowed by Flipboard (which also gained Google Reader capabilities later on), but it’s still a fine piece of software.

The Early Edition 2, released today as a separate app, improves on every aspect of the original application. The interface has been redesigned, the sharing menu completely rebuilt; the app can now sync back to Google Reader (while still offering you an option to manually manage feeds out of Google’s system) and it’s incredibly fun to use, as before.

One of the big advantages of TEE 1 over its many competitors, in fact, was that it was fun. As the iPad as a platform, TEE relied heavily on swipes and taps to let you navigate between articles and sites, with beautifully crafted graphical elements and page turning animations to help convey the feeling of a “real” newspaper on your iPad. The Early Edition 2 builds on the skeuomorphic guidance of the previous version: the sharing menu is a yellow envelope you send out to the world; a wooden background adorns the newspaper’s pages and columns and becomes your coffee table as the newspaper rolls back, revealing its sections. Pages turn faster, and the new Featured Feeds section resembles a newsstand you’d pick your favorite newspaper from while holding your morning coffee on the way to work. Even the Clippings section – the one that holds your “favorite” (starred) items – has been designed as an inbox that sits on your desk, right below your personal newspaper.

Some might say that The Early Edition 2 is over-designed and that it’s blindly following Apple’s trend towards real-life interfaces with textures and materials and physical metaphors – but I like it. Unlike, say, Lion’s iCal or Address Book, I think The Early Edition’s design is functional to what the app does and, ultimately, it’s got personality.

An obvious feature of digital newspapers is that, unlike physical ones, you can customize them. In The Early Edition 2, you can browse All feeds, Unread ones and Today’s only, and note that if Google Reader sync is active, unread items will change their status on all your connected Reader clients, such as Reeder for Mac or Mr. Reader for iPad. In this regard, The Early Edition has proved to have reliable sync: as soon as I scrolled past an article, that was marked as read and changes were synced back to the cloud. Sync is relatively fast, but the app will need a few extra seconds to “assemble your newspaper”, which includes deciding to preload pictures, finding Trending Words in article, and picking a position for Favorite items (which you can choose to display in the newspaper’s Front Page). Search and Trending words in particular provide a nice way to quickly skim through a freshly built newspaper, see what’s most talked about in your sections, or simply find something specific you’re looking for (you can save searches for future usage as well). Another way to customize the newspaper is to browse recent items from single sources: from the Feeds sidebar, the app will let you tap on a website to read its latest entries, but this screen won’t share the same interface design of the “regular” newspaper. It is, however, a nice option to have. You can filter feeds or browse by section, too.

Article reading view has been redesigned from version 1.0. Typographic choices look better on the eye, and the overall page design feels cleaner and more elegant. The app will fetch article information such as publishing date, author and website’s name when refreshing feeds, and as you read an article the page “disappears” underneath the main header – it’s a very nice effect. Along the top of the page, there are buttons to open an article’s web view, share it, increase font size, and email the link or open it in Safari. The reading view is extremely simple, and you can swipe between pages without going back to the main newspaper view.

The Early Edition 2 has also been enhanced with gestures to simplify navigation and provide quick access to often-used sections. Besides swiping to turn pages and navigating image galleries, you can swipe with two fingers to reveal the Browse sidebar, or swipe with three fingers horizontally to skip a section you don’t want to read. A rotate gesture with two fingers gives you access to the Featured Feeds at any time, whilst the Clippings can be accessed with a swipe up from the main view. The app offers a quick recap of available gestures through the Help menu in the toolbar (which you can reveal by swiping down), and I believe that if you’re going to spend a lot of time reading in TEE, gestures will make you save a lot taps (and thus, precious seconds).

Other miscellaneous notes about The Early Edition 2:

  • You can subscribe to feeds, manage your subscriptions, reorder items, and move them around between Google Reader folders
  • Font size controls
  • Hardware brightness controls
  • Double-tap images to enter gallery view (perfect for photography and design blogs)
  • You can “star” items and mark them as unread on Google Reader
  • You can customize Google Reader sync and how items are marked as read
  • OPML import

Overall, The Early Edition 2 is a good app – but the question is, why would you use this over your regular RSS reader or Flipboard? I think there are a few aspects to consider before dismissing The Early Edition or quickly hitting the Buy button. First, unlike Flipboard, The Early Edition bets heavily on the concept of “digital newspaper delivered to you every morning”, whilst Flipboard is more of a social-media powerhouse with support for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Google Reader items all displayed through a “magazine view”. Whereas Flipboard is deeply social both in the way it gets content and allows you to share it, The Early Edition feels to me more like an app you’d use once a day to read what’s new and relevant in the feeds you curate. Flipboard, too, enables you to subscribe to sections and feeds, but clearly its focus is on items shared by your friends, displayed through a better view than a web browser. And this is where the difference between The Early Edition and a regular Google Reader client kicks in: assuming that you’re an RSS “geek” with at least 50 subscriptions and hundreds of unread items per day, The Early Edition 2 positions itself as a nice way to read, and not skim, articles from your sources. I don’t know about you, but I use my main Google Reader clients to see what’s up, and other apps to read the good stuff that I missed while I was skimming through. With dynamic page layouts, The Early Edition 2 is also smarter than a normal RSS client, as it’s got an algorithm that decides which stories are more important than others and how they should be displayed. So here’s a first difference between the digital newspaper and a list of unread items. But the opposite is also true: what if you only subscribe to a few feeds, and you get your news via Twitter all day? In that case, you’re likely to use a Twitter client or, again, Flipboard. But when it’s time to read those few feeds, why use a client (which I believe is normally meant for heavy RSS users) when you can have a beautiful app like The Early Edition deliver them for you? It’s an interesting scenario that once again proves how the selection of iPad apps for reading web articles is changing our reading habits and empowering us to choose how we read. There’s one more possible usage scenario: assuming you use your “social magazine” for your “social news” and you don’t have a Google Reader account or even know what RSS is, The Early Edition’s standalone mode (no sync, no Google Reader integration) offers another way to manage the websites you like, not the ones recommended by your friends.

I believe RSS clients and apps like Flipboard and The Early Edition can coexist, but it depends on how you choose to read your news and feeds you care about. The Early Edition 2 is a beautifully designed app, which takes advantage of iOS 5 and nicely integrates with Google Reader.

The Early Edition 2 is propagating in the App Store right now. You will find the app here. Check out a gallery of screenshots and a promo video after the break. Read more

Fantastical 1.1 Brings Editing, Deleting, Notes and Full iCloud Support

With the release of the iPhone 4S and Siri, Apple is putting much focus on natural language input and the concept of “personal assistant”, a technology the company first explored almost two decades ago, which was impossible to implement until today. With faster processing power, persistent Internet connections and better voice recognition, Siri is perhaps the most impressive feature of the iPhone 4S and one that Apple will undoubtedly promote heavily in the next months.

On the Mac, of course, the situation is quite different. Whilst one of the new functionalities of Siri on the iPhone is being able to create and schedule calendar events, on OS X we’ve had calendar apps with natural language support for quite some time, such as Fantastical and QuickCal. And today Fantastical, which I first reviewed here, has received a major update that adds two of the most requested features: event editing and deleting.

With Fantastical 1.1, you can edit and delete events without jumping to your main calendar app, like iCal. Now, instead of having to launch iCal to make edits to something you entered through Fantastical, you can simply double-click on an event to start modifying it in a separate popup window. The interface is the same you already know for calendar events; you can also delete an event and add notes, which will be synced across all your devices and, if configured, iCloud. Option-double-clicking an event still opens it in your favorite calendar app – remember, Fantastical supports BusyCal as well – and anchor mode can now be toggled with a keyboard shortcut.

Another big improvement in Fantastical 1.1 is full iCloud support. The app already supported iCloud calendars, but now that Apple’s service is public the app has been specifically optimized to take advantage of its new push technology for calendars and events. And because Fantastical features direct CalDAV integration, everything you enter in the app will be immediately synced back to the cloud, without having to open iCal (or letting it run open in the background). In my tests, iCloud integration has been extremely reliable, allowing me to enter an event (or make edits) in Fantastical and see the results appear in real-time on iCloud.com and all my iOS devices.

Fantastical was already a great app, and now that it’s gained editing, deleting and notes it really can be used as a calendar replacement, which thanks to natural language input will also act as your personal “calendar assistant”. Fantastical is available at $19.99 on the Mac App Store.