Alongside bug fixes and improvements for a minor 4.5.1 update, Pocket for iOS has added sharing to WordPress, Quotebook, and Twitterrific.
Quotebook is, as MacStories readers know, my favorite app for storing and retrieving quotes. I already use it with RSS, and it’s good to see Pocket supporting it with the share menu that was revamped in version 4.5.
Pocket 4.5.1 is available now on the App Store.
Mikey Campbell:
As seen in the image above, Apple is no longer allowing developers to submit app description edits with the unique character sets, which in this case includes a checkmark, explosion, “no symbol” and a speech bubble. It is thought that others are included in the new restrictions, but that has yet to be verified.
It appears that Apple has also started restricting usage of glyphs that aren’t necessarily emoji.
I would welcome a change to text-only release notes. While emoji and other characters can add a bit of fun and personality to otherwise boring release notes, some developers were overusing them.
Big update for Twitterrific today, including automatic theme changing based on local sunrise and sunset times, automatic timeline refreshing after posting a tweet or DM, and improved VoiceOver support. The list of updates is long, but the rest is comprised of bug fixes and various improvements.
By the way, if you’re looking for those Trends, they’re buried in Search under the Tweets tab. For Favstar, you’ll also have to turn on those links in the Settings under Other Services.
For more information on Twitterrific, be sure to read our earlier reviews.
Another neat web app following the release of Forecast.io last month:
Forecast Lines shows you the forecast spread for each field (temperature, precipitation intensity, pressure, etc.), overlaid with our best guess of what will actually occur. It’s a simple idea, but a powerful one: at a glance, you can see what will happen over the course of the next week, and where we are most–and least–confident in our predictions.
Essentially, Lines looks like a consumer version of Forecast.io’s API raw data sources, which is also available here.
I’m a big fan of the Dark Sky team’s work with web apps and developer APIs for weather data. I can’t use the main Dark Sky app in Italy, but I am testing various third-party apps that are implementing Forecast.io and I’m impressed with their accuracy so far.
I like the idea of Lines’ statistically-aggregated graphs, and, unsurprisingly, the iOS web app is solid.
Good find by Macworld’s Jonathan Seff. I’d love to see more download options for the App Store as well – such as something similar to CameraSync’s location monitoring, but for app downloads.
MacRumors’ Arnold Kim published a preview of Delicious Monster’s upcoming Delicious Library 3, a major update to 2008’s Delicious Library 2. In version 3.0, the app will evolve from being a catalogue of the media you own to become a recommendation tool based on the products you own:
We’re centered on the idea of your books (movies, cds, whatever) being an aspect of your unique personality, and our app does neat things with your personal data—like give you cool graphic summaries, or really good composite recommendations.
I have been struggling in the past months to find a system to help me keep track of things I want to buy. Initially, I set up a Pinterest board, but I ended up not liking the service’s focus on social and sharing; then, I started appending URLs to a text file in Dropbox, but I missed the richness of Pinterest’s image thumbnails. Right now, I’m using Evernote with a mix of rich text and inline photos/screenshots, but the solution isn’t ideal (although I believe it’s better than what I was doing before).
I’m intrigued by Delicious Library’s new focus on recommendations. I look forward to trying the app’s engine and iOS version (with sync – I assume).
Make sure to read MacRumors’ post for more information and screenshots.
Colin Donnell:
Besides Finder, Evernote is the only app I know of that you can really just throw anything at — PDFs, images, text notes — everything. And it’s not just that you can put everything into it, it’s that it treats most of those things the same way (through OCR), so that doing a text search is going to bring up results from all of the above.
That is indeed one of my favorite aspects of Evernote (which, last month, was also updated to support search inside iWork and Office documents). The other, as Sean said, is saved searches.
In episode 031 of the Generational podcast, I was invited by Gabe and Erik to talk about my life in the past year, writing for MacStories, and how we pick the topics we cover here.
I believe it turned out to be a good episode. Go listen now.
When we design an x-callback-url action, we tend to focus on the x-success parameter because we want to get more things done. Yet, when we use these actions, especially the ones that involve two or more chained actions, sometimes we feel the need to cancel the first task and either return to the original app or continue with the second task. Either way, based on our most frequent use cases, we may need to revisit these chained actions and redesign them to include the x-cancel parameter.
Great point by Eric Pramono.
In my articles, I tend to omit x-cancel or only mention it in passing. But it’s essential if you want URL scheme-based workflows to fail gracefully.
