In late October, Aqualia’s Soulver was updated with iOS 7 support on the iPhone, and I noted how syntax highlighting ultimately made the app better than the iOS 6 version:

If you’ve used other iOS 7 apps like Byword, you know how syntax highlighting is beneficial to the user experience: numbers turn green, units are purple, operations are blue, and plain text is standard black. Syntax highlighting makes lines more scannable because operations and individual bits of text stand out more; furthermore, because Soulver allows you to type units manually (you can write “USD”, “usd”, “dollars”, etc) you’ll instantly know if what you typed has been recognized by the app thanks to color highlights. Besides being nice visually speaking, syntax highlighting — a simple addition in theory — makes the experience of using Soulver considerably better.

Today, Soulver 2.4 has been released with iPad support, making the app Universal. The iPad’s interface isn’t revolutionary – you still get a split layout but keys and number pads are larger on the iPad and you get easier access to some of the app’s features.

Soulver is a great app and on sale for a limited time at $1.99 on the App Store.

Chris Gonzales hits the nail on the head with his “rules for App developers” concerning review prompts in apps (you know, the alerts that ask you to rate an app). All of the previous discussion is linked to in Chris’ piece so you can catch up there. As per Chris’ suggestions, I like this one in particular:

Respect the users’ wishes. If a customer chooses to opt out of leaving a review, your app had better not continue prompting them about it afterward. I can live with a one-time popup, but there are some apps that ignore opt-out requests and that is definitely not okay with me. It might even be a good idea to respect opt-outs across app updates, if possible. If I didn’t want to review your app two updates ago, I’m no more likely to do so today.

I personally don’t care for review prompts because they’re intrusive. They get in the way and I feel like a jerk every time I have to tap some variation of, “No thanks.”

An app that does it better is Twitch.tv’s iOS app, which instead of showing alerts[1], has a little translucent bar at the bottom of the screen that asks you to review the app if you like it. It doesn’t get in the way of what’s on the screen or make me stop what I’m doing, and it doesn’t pop-up very often. I think Twitch can use it for other things as well, such as making users aware of new features. The other nice thing about their version of a notification bar is that it can port nicely to other platforms, keeping that experience consistent across mobile devices.

Nice app by Filibaba (makers of other vegetarian and vegan recipe apps for iOS) that’s just a virtual egg timer for your iPhone. You can spin the egg in 1-minute increments and the app will send you a local notification when the timer is up. There are backgrounds to choose from and In-App Purchases to unlock different eggs (including a golden one, perfect for your new 5s).

Free on the App Store.

Created by Shai Goitein, PowerUp is a small Bluetooth Smart-powered accessory that can turn any paper airplane into a smartphone-controlled toy. I don’t typically link to a lot of Kickstarter campaigns, but this one’s too cool not to mention. The campaign is well over its original funding goal, and the first PowerUp 3.0 prototypes will be sent to backers in the first months of 2014.

The device is entirely based on Bluetooth Smart, which allows an iPhone/Android phone to control the PowerUp within a range of 60 yards through a custom app. The PowerUp can fly for 10 minutes on a single charge – at $30, this should make for a great gift next year.

Acorn is my favorite image editor for OS X (I liked the changes in version 4.0) because it’s powerful but easy to use. The way that Acorn organizes filters and layers and lets you interact with them in the tools palette just makes sense for the way I want my image editor to work. Version 4.2, released last week for website customers, brings some welcome additions – I’m especially a fan of the Share menu and tweaks to selections.

The technical changes are also worth noting:

Pixels get to the screen so much faster now that everything is drawn through OpenGL.  Not only that, but Acorn takes advantage of OpenCL by virtue of using Core Image. Acorn also uses custom OpenCL kernels I hand coded to speed up other operations.  Acorn incorporates some super fast algorithms combined with GCD to minimize the amount of drawing that happens. Less drawing means longer battery life and overall things go faster.

I had mentioned in a previous post that I was reworking the compositing engine.  I’m not done with that yet, but the progress I have made is promising.  So with a bit more work and time, things are going to get even faster for Acorn.

Our thanks to Smile for sponsoring MacStories this week with the PDFpen family of products for iOS and OS X.

PDFpen isn’t just an app – it’s a family of powerful apps for the Mac, iPhone, and iPad that let you edit, sign, scan, and OCR your documents anywhere. On iOS, PDFpen for iPad allows you to sign contracts, make changes, and fill forms when you’re out of the office or on the go; all these features are also available on the iPhone’s smaller screen with PDFpen for iPhone, which comes with all the functionalities of the iPad version.

On the Mac, PDFpen can perform OCR (Optical Character Recognition) so that pictures of text in your document will be turned into real text that you can use; with PDFpen Pro, the advanced version of PDFpen,  you have the ability to create a PDF form, build a table of contents, and convert HTML files to PDF. Recently, Smile added support for PDF stamps: you can browse a library of standard business stamps (e.g. Approved, Confidential, Sign Here) to quickly apply to your documents without complex editing required.

All versions of PDFpen for iOS and OS X can sync documents and changes using iCloud and Dropbox, and you can also exchange documents via Box, Evernote, Google, and other services. To easily get new documents into PDFpen for iOS, you can use the new PDFpen Scan+ app, a utility that lets you scan documents, articles, receipts, and more, using your iPhone or iPad camera with OCR and support for 16 languages.

PDFpen is a fantastic example of a suite of apps that work seamlessly across platforms and take advantage of each device’s unique features to augment the user experience. You can learn more about the PDFpen suite of apps here.