If you’re looking for an in-depth review of the just-released OmniFocus 2, Shawn Blanc did a great job at explaining what OmniFocus does and documenting its evolution through the years.
I don’t need OmniFocus, but just reading Shawn’s review makes me wish I had more projects to love the app as much as he does.
Ellis Hamburger, writing for The Verge about Facebook’s “audio recognition”, an upcoming feature to tag music and TV shows when posting to the service with the Facebook app:
Facebook’s implementation, in fact, only works in the US for now, can recognize only 160 TV channels, struggles to recognize music in commercials (which are a big part of Shazam’s business), and only recognizes a few million songs so far. In most cases Shazam works seamlessly, an important part of the company’s secret sauce, but Facebook isn’t exactly competing with Shazam here. Facebook’s audio recognition is designed not to help you figure out what’s playing, but to make it as easy as possible to update your friends about what you’re listening to or watching.
An interesting experiment to drive traffic to Facebook pages for artists and TV shows, but far from a Shazam or SoundHound competitor. Much of the appeal of those apps is that you don’t need to post your discoveries anywhere, whereas Facebook is simply building a feature for the Post interface.
Developed by Game Oven in collaboration with the Dutch National Ballet, Bounden is a new iPhone dancing game for two players. The game uses the iPhone’s gyroscope and lets you “twist and twirl elegantly, or get entangled with a friend” in an experience that seems reminiscent of Game Oven’s previous work with Fingle and Bam fu for iOS, both games aimed at blurring the line between multitouch and physical interactions in iOS games.
Bounden looks like a unique concept, best explained by the promo video above and the developers’ description:
Holding either end of a device, you tilt the device around a virtual sphere following a path of rings. You swing your arms and twist your body, and before you know it, you are already dancing.
Bounden is $3.99 on the App Store, and Game Oven published a series of Making Of videos in a Vimeo album showing the game’s evolution and first demos with professional dancers and game journalists. Also worth reading: Kill Screen’s preview of the game from a couple of months ago.
Dan Moren has an overview of the changes Apple brought to iWork for iCloud today:
Several of the most prominent updates apply to all three of the apps in the suite: You can now have up to 100 collaborators in a single document at the same time—which hopefully won’t be too confusing—and you can choose from almost 200 new fonts. There are also additional options in the color panel, and you can finally create and format both 2D and interactive charts.
Apple has been making frequent and useful improvements to its iWork apps over the past few months. After reading about today’s update for the web apps, I decided to check out the collaborative editing again, and it’s now much better than what it used to be.
Once invited to collaborate on a document in iWork for iCloud, other users can edit their display name in a sharing menu; the name will be assigned a color, which will be shown as a cursor in the document while edits are being made in real-time. The experience is highly reminiscent of Google Drive for the web, and it worked well in my tests with a couple of other users. I could see edits in real-time in the browser, and I didn’t end up with duplicates or dialogs asking me to “take action”.
I don’t know if the collaborative changes were rolled out today or in the past few months, but I’m impressed by the progress that’s been made so far and it’s worth pointing it out. The native iWork apps for OS X and iOS still don’t support the same real-time editing of the iCloud versions, which is why we can’t switch to Pages full-time yet. I really like Apple’s implementation of collaborative editing on the web (you can “jump” to a user’s cursor by clicking their name), and I can’t wait to have the same features on iOS.
Comprehensive, nicely illustrated collection of OS X keyboard shortcuts by Matt Gemmell:
I recently wrote an article about being productive on a small screen, which mentioned my belief that the most effective route to productivity on a computer is learning the available keyboard shortcuts.
In this piece, I’d like to share some of the keyboard shortcuts and related functionality that I use every day on the Mac.
And if you also like to learn keyboard shortcuts for your iPad, don’t forget that iOS 7 supports them in both Apple and third-party apps.
Peter Bright, writing for Ars Technica about the new FTL technology in WebKit:
The LLVM-based fourth tier is called FTL, for Fourth Tier LLVM (and, of
course, faster than light). It shares some portions with the third stage,
since the third stage already does important work for handling JavaScript’s
dynamic nature but has a different code generating portion.The result is a healthy performance boost. FTL produces code that is more than
40 times faster than the interpreter, with benchmarks taking about a third
less time to run than the old three-tier system.
And from Filip Pizlo’s detailed blog post at Surfin’ Safari:
Rather than continue replicating decades of compiler know-how, we instead
investigated unifying WebKit’s compiler infrastructure with LLVM – an existing
low-level compiler infrastructure. As of r167958, this project is no longer
an investigation. I’m happy to report that our LLVM-based just-in-time (JIT)
compiler, dubbed the FTL – short for Fourth Tier LLVM – has been enabled by
default on the Mac and iOS ports.
Truly fascinating work that we’ll likely see in a future version of Safari. Currently, FTL can be tested in the WebKit nightly builds.
Bentley’s new ad (via Jim Dalrymple) has been shot on an iPhone 5s in New York City and edited in a Bentley Mulsanne using an iPad Air with an Apple wireless keyboard.
It’s a nice promo video – if anything, it shows a wide array of accessories and apps used for the task (like Apple’s crew), and it confirms that iOS needs more keyboard shortcuts. People in the video are constantly switching between the hardware keyboard and the screen, which is uncomfortable – it’d be nice to have improvements here with iOS 8.
Following OS X, iTunes, and Podcasts for iOS, Apple released a long overdue update to the iTunes Connect app today, bringing a new iOS 7 design and wider support for media sold on the iTunes Store.
If you’re a developer or content creator, you can now enjoy a redesigned app (nothing special, but nice icon) and view stats for music, movies, and TV shows available on iTunes.
iTunes Connect 3.0 is available on the App Store.
