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1Password 4.2 Brings 1Browser, Login, and Search Improvements

1Password for iOS, AgileBits’ excellent password manager, has been updated today to version 4.2, which brings some notable improvements for login management and 1Browser, the app’s built-in web browser for the iPhone and iPad.

On the iPad, Go and Fill bookmarks have been added to the browser, making it easier to quickly open a previously saved login and directly log into it using the (also new, and not iPad-only) auto-submit option for login filling. Bookmarks are available in a popover and they can be searched: in both bookmark and regular search, you can now expand search to all fields if you remember a piece of information of a specific item that doesn’t show up in regular search.

Bookmarks aren’t available on the iPhone’s smaller screen, but, both on the iPad and iPhone, login filling now uses the same sweet animation that was brought to the desktop extensions a while back. Combined with auto-filling and the aforementioned animation (which can be disabled in the new 1Browser settings), logging into websites with 1Password 4.2 is now a faster and more enjoyable process.

In my original review of 1Password 4, I lamented the lack of options for creating new logins from the embedded browser. While the app still won’t prompt you to save a new login, 1Browser for iPad does have the same strong password generator found elsewhere in the app, with the same amount of options to control repeated letters, pronounceability, and more. Two small touches that I particularly enjoyed while testing 1Password 4.2 were the smart clipboard detection when launching the app (1Password will ask if you want to open a URL in your clipboard) and the fact that the app will return to the Vault after closing the last 1Browser tab. I look forward to seeing if and how AgileBits will figure out a way to port the new 1Browser features to the iPhone.

Thanks to the latest updates, 1Password for iOS is reaching the same degree of functionality of the desktop app with browser extensions. In some areas, I actually prefer using 1Password for iOS: the URL scheme makes it extremely easy to find and open login items; 1Browser for iPad is a great tool; the new sharing options of version 4.2 include tappable 1Password links that you can send to your spouse or colleagues to let them easily add a shared item to their Vault.

1Password remains one of my must-have iOS apps that I use every day, and the additions of version 4.2 are welcome. The update is now available on the App Store.

Sponsor: Smile

Our thanks goes out to Smile this week for sponsoring MacStories with TextExpander.

TextExpander saves you time regularly spent writing out the same addresses, signatures, and prose when composing emails, replying to business correspondance, and helping customers. Instead of copying and pasting common replies, TextExpander becomes your magical shorthand for quickly typing out paragraphs and signatures with just a few key presses. By setting up small, text reminders and snippets, you can quickly expand bits of text into long paragraphs, addresses, symbols, boiler plate text, code snippets, and more. Inserting dates, creating statements with customized form fields, and fixing common misspellings will make TextExpander an invaluable tool as a part of your daily workflow. Plus, you can sync TextExpander with Dropbox for keeping shortcuts shared between the office and your personal devices. TextExpander is also integrated into over 140 iOS apps, giving you the option to use your shortcuts anywhere with your iPhone or iPad.

TextExpander is available for only $34.95, and the complimentary version of TextExpander touch for iOS is only $4.99. You can learn more about TextExpander and a download a free trial for your Mac here.

Flipboard 2.0.2 Surfaces Magazines Your Friends are Sharing

New Profile and Friends Screens

New Profile and Friends Screens

Having just shipped a web editor for managing magazines, Flipboard released a small update this morning that focuses on bringing forward basic readership activity and the magazines your friends are curating, as well as adding more options for sharing articles with a new share menu.

Flipboard is continuing to flesh out features related to magazines by first revisiting profiles. Profiles have been updated to display some basic information such as the number of magazines you’re sharing and the number of readers that are currently subscribed to the content that you’re curating. You can’t delve into any kind of trend data at the moment (as you can with Pocket for Publishers for example) — all Flipboard is providing are simple stats that don’t divulge specifics.

Magazines, being a focal point since Flipboard hit verison 2.0, are now included in an additional Friends category as you open the Content Guide. Instead of searching for topics or things you like, you can browse the magazines your friends are publicly curating and subscribe to them. Friends, for example, can be pulled in from Twitter if you’ve added your Twitter account for browsing Tweets and links.

New Share Menu Screen

New Share Menu Screen

The share menu has been vastly improved, and I’m very happy with what’s been done to make sharing links easier than ever. Flipboard now plugs into a variety of social networks, letting you tap icons for Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ in addition to email and sharing via SMS. There’s also new options for copying links to the articles and saving photographs to the Camera Roll.

While Google Reader is being shut down on June 1st, Flipboard is continuing to improve upon integration with the RSS service by making it easier to navigate folders.

Flipboard is available as a free download from the App Store.

Jim Dalrymple Launches The Loop Magazine

The Loop Magazine

The Loop Magazine

Marco Arment’s The Magazine showed that a new way of building a profitable magazine with recurring subscriptions was possible. While it seemed “obvious” in hindsight, The Magazine proved that Apple’s Newsstand platform could be used to deliver a simpler, yet engaging magazine experience to the reader, eschewing the typical complexities of magazines that struggled in their shift from paper to digital. With its simplicity, The Magazine set a new standard.

Today, Jim Dalrymple is launching The Loop Magazine, an “extension” of The Loop with a focus on longform content. Available on the iPhone and iPad and built with TypeEngine, The Loop Magazine will publish two issues per month with a $1.99 monthly subscription; thanks to Newsstand, issues will be delivered wirelessly and automatically, with payments handled directly by the iTunes Store.

As a reader of The Loop and listener of Jim’s podcast on the 5by5 network, Amplified, I wanted to ask him about his decision to launch a standalone magazine and, why, after 20 years of writing on the web, he picked Apple’s Newsstand as the only delivery platform.

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Federico Viticci: Why did you decide to build a magazine for The Loop?

Jim Dalrymple: I’ve looked at building an app for The Loop for several years, but nothing seemed to fit with my vision. I didn’t want an app that mirrored the Web site, I wanted to add value for the readers, to be able to give them something they couldn’t find on the Web site. When I saw Marco’s magazine, I knew that’s what I wanted to do. Obviously, the content is much different and that’s what will set the publications apart.

A tremendous amount of work has gone into every aspect of The Loop magazine from the fonts and design, to the writers I chose to be part of it. I want readers to enjoy every single article in a clean, ad-free environment. They should look forward to every issue because the experience was so good.

FV: How will The Loop website and magazine complement each other in the future?

JD: The Loop magazine is an extension of my interests on the Web site, so they will always complement one another. On the Web site, I will link to a story that I find interesting. In the magazine, I will go to the writer and ask them to write an exclusive article for The Loop magazine.

FV: What topics do you want to cover in The Loop Magazine going forward?

JD: I’m open to almost anything. That’s what makes The Loop Web site so unique. There could be a story on Apple and the next thing could be a video of Jimi Hendrix or Ozzy Osbourne. It could also be a story about design or user interaction with apps – as long as it’s interesting, it could find its way on The Loop or in the magazine.

FV: Do you see Newsstand as the future of mobile publishing?

JD: I began publishing on the Internet in 1994. At that time traditional media outlets were having a tough time getting their heads around publishing to that new platform, and in some ways they are still struggling. I was convinced that the Internet was a big shift in publishing and it was. There have been a lot of attempts in the intervening years to bring magazines to the digital realm, but I haven’t taken the plunge until now. None of them seemed right to me.

Apple’s Newsstand is the first time since 1994 that I’ve felt another shift in the publishing industry was upon us, so I jumped at it. Apple takes care of distribution, payments and the business side of things, leaving the publisher focus on what they do best – publishing great content.

In some ways, I feel like I’m back in 1994. The traditional magazine outlets are having a hard time wrapping their heads around platforms like Newsstand and the best way to publish content. I’m confident that offering readers exclusive long-form articles in a clean app is the way to go.

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I have been able to read the first issue of The Loop Magazine in advance, and the app is exactly what you’d expect in a post-The Magazine world: using The Loop’s existing color scheme, The Loop Magazine has a clean layout, built-in sharing options, embedded author bios, and a sidebar where you can navigate issues and articles. The first issue comes with six articles – I especially liked the ones by Matt Gemmell and Flexibits’ Michael Simmons. Unlike The Magazine, the app has a built-in web browser to open URLs, but I’d like to see an option to send links to Google Chrome. Right now, supported sharing options include Safari, Twitter, Mail, and Messages.

I’m glad to see more writers experimenting with new business models and I’m happy about the fact that Arment’s The Magazine has encouraged others to move away from traditional advertising on the web. I look forward to seeing how Dalrymple’s The Loop Magazine will evolve in the future.

Pixelmator 2.2 Blueberry

Viva la Pixelmator!

Viva la Pixelmator!

Pixelmator 2.2, codenamed Blueberry, includes more than 100 new features and improvements for quickly creating and shaping shapes, contextually working with images and vectors, and recreating sunny retro-inspired images. Artists will find new Color Popovers for faster access to color swatches, new gradient presets, improved drawing tools, a refined Type Tool, and the ability to copy a shape’s style to other shapes.

The standout features in Pixelmator 2.2 let artists quickly create and edit shapes for logos, web elements, flyers, and more. Smart Shapes provide easy-to-use controls for adjusting a shape’s outline, while Shape Styles make adding gradients, changing stroke styles, and adjusting inner shadow effortless. For those looking for a jumping off point, a brand new Shapes palette comes prepackaged with over 40 custom shapes that can be added to the canvas with a simple drag and drop. New shapes can easily be added to the palette, and new shapes can be quickly shared with friends and coworkers by simply dragging the palette to the Desktop. Text can also be converted into shape layers with the new Convert Text into Shape tool, allowing artists to reshape individual letters to apply separate gradients, shadows, and strokes. As image layers and shapes can intermingle, the Smart Move Tool brings up the appropriate options you need as items on the canvas are selected. And swapping between image and vector editing is as easy as a keyboard shortcut.

For budding photographers, the new Paint Selection Tool lets anyone simply brush the canvas to select objects in their images without having to manually trace an outline or use selection tools. The new Light Leak effect can also add a bit of flair to images for creating retro-artistically illuminated images.

Pixelmator 2.2 is now available for download through the Mac App Store at a promotional price of $14.99, or as a free update to previous customers. A free 30-day trial of Pixelmator can be downloaded from Pixelmator’s homepage. Read more

PDF Expert Adds New Annotation Features

Readdle’s PDF Expert has been my favorite PDF reader for iPad for a long time now. With Dropbox integration and a clean UI full of powerful options, PDF Expert is the app I rely upon when it comes to reading and editing PDF documents. The 4.6 version, released today on the App Store, adds a series of new features that make adding annotations and managing them inside a document even easier.

Annotations can now be copied and pasted inside a document and across different documents in PDF Expert: to do so, you can use a new selection tool available in the top toolbar. This new tool will let you select a single annotation/shape and use iOS’ familiar copy & paste menu – but you can also select multiple annotations at once to move them, copy them, delete them, or change their properties. PDF Expert’s selection is also smart: if you select two shapes, the popup menu will show options for shape thickness and color (also new in version 4.6); if you drag the selection on top of text annotation, the app will show properties for font, colors, and font sizes.

In this update, Readdle also included a new custom date/time keyboard (which reminded me of a similar keyboard from another Readdle app, Calendars+) that makes it easier to fill date fields in PDF forms.

While I prefer Skitch for “quick” annotations that involve shapes and callouts, PDF Expert remains my choice for text annotations and reading long documents. PDF Expert is available at $9.99 on the App Store.

There’s an Ad for That→

A good take by Harry Marks on the differences between Apple and Samsung ads. You know where I stand.

Towards the end, I especially liked this bit:

It’s been rumored that iOS 7 is going to bring a drastic overhaul to the UX, including a new home screen and enhanced features. This will inevitably bring a level of complication users haven’t had to deal with yet. Seeing as how this is Apple we’re talking about, I doubt these updated bells and whistles will be difficult to trigger, but there will most likely be a bit of a learning curve in the beginning. Every familiar paradigm starts out as something new and unknown.

I don’t know how much ads can be an effective teaching tool for users, but I agree: there will be a new learning curve, but some changes are necessary.

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A Summary of Adobe’s Creative Cloud, Photoshop CC, and Projects Mighty and Napoleon

Adobe’s Creative Cloud launched a year ago as a subscription-based alternative to the traditional licensing model that went with the Creative Suites, offering access to the full Adobe Creative Suite 6 suite of software, services such as Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite, Adobe Touch Apps for mobile devices, and online syncing and storage for a membership fee. Today during Adobe’s MAX, The Creativity Conference keynote in Los Angeles, California, Adobe announced that they would be phasing out the licensing model altogether, launching updated CS6 applications through Creative Cloud. This means that instead of purchasing an expensive Creative Suite, you’ll have to pay a monthly fee to use apps like Photoshop and Illustrator.

Creative Cloud

Adobe’s Creative Cloud can be thought of as the company’s own version of Microsoft’s Office 365. Next to Adobe’s library of applications, Creative Cloud gives customers a way to connect with others, share files, and build their creative portfolios through Behance to showcase projects and get feedback. Plus Adobe offers 20 GB of cloud storage (100 GB for teams) for storing files and syncing assets between desktops, laptops, and mobile devices like the iPad. In addition to having access to services such as those listed above, customers can take advantage of the entire catalogue of Typekit fonts for use on websites or in desktop applications.

Many of Adobe’s desktop applications will be updated and branded with CC to designate their integration with Creative Cloud. Photoshop CC, InDesign CC, Illustrator CC, Dreamweaver CC, and Premier Pro CC are the big highlights amongst HTML5 oriented Edge apps or video tools like After Effects. Lightroom is an exception as it will be both available with a Creative Cloud membership and with an individual license. Unfortunately, Adobe has said they are discontinuing development of Fireworks due to product overlap. For those who wish to continue using Fireworks, Fireworks CS6 will continue to be supported through the next major updates for OS X and Windows. CS6 itself will also remain available for purchase (and volume licensing) outside of the Creative Cloud, although you won’t have the latest features that are being introduced with Creative Cloud.

Photoshop CC

Photoshop in particular is receiving some wonderful new features with the upcoming Creative Cloud update. Photoshop CC includes an all-new Smart Sharpen tool for bringing out more detail while reducing noise and halo effects, intelligent up-sampling for scaling images with reduced artifacts, and camera shake reduction for restoring sharpness to blurry photos. The latter technology is the most impressive, as it lets anyone restore clarity to lost photos with a simple wave of the wand tool.

Mighty and Napoleon

Projects Mighty and Napoleon are announced hardware offerings from Adobe XD, which consist of a Wacom-like pen stylus and a digital ruler. The devices are cloud connected, interfacing with your Creative Cloud account. For example and as shown in the video above, the pen allows artists to copy and paste snippets between Adobe’s suite of touch apps for mobile devices. The digital ruler is also interesting as it projects shapes to trace on the screen, acting as pocket-able replacement for a large variety of traditional pen and paper tools.

Creative Cloud Pricing

Creative Cloud costs $19.99 a month for a single application, and $49.99 a month for access to every application and service Adobe provides. For the first year, previous Creative Suite customers will only have to pay $19.99 a month if they have Creative Suite 6, and only $29.99 if they have a license for a previous Creative Suite. Students can also get promotional pricing for their first year, paying only $19.99 a month after proving their institutional affiliation. Students should apply by June 25th.

Teams, or small businesses, will have to pay $69.99 per month per user, or $39.99 per month for the first year for previous Creative Suite owners. Teams should sign-up and add users by August 31st. Educational pricing for teams is also set at $39.99 per month per user.

Moving forward, Adobe will only be offering their latest desktop applications through the Creative Cloud. The CC updates for Adobe’s desktop applications will go live on June 17th, but you can join Creative Cloud at any time to take advantage of previously-mentioned services.

[Source: Adobe]

Today Weather Gets Dark Sky Alerts, Forecast.io Support

Today Weather

Today Weather

Savvy Apps’ Today Weather, my favorite iOS weather app, has been updated today to include support for Dark Sky alerts and Forecast.io, the Dark Sky Company’s recently launched weather service that comes with an API for third-party developers. Available as a $0.99 In-App Purchase, support for Forecast won’t turn Today Weather into an interface for Forecast Lines (another product from the Dark Sky Company, focused on displaying weather trends), but instead it’ll simply enable Forecast.io as a new weather source alongside Weather Underground.

While the Dark Sky iPhone app is primarily limited to North America, Forecast.io is a global weather service that aggregates data (temperature, pressure, forecasts, etc.) from various sources, statistically providing “the most accurate forecast possible for a given location”. I have been testing Today Weather with Forecast.io for the past month, and results were more accurate than Weather Underground for the Italian locations I tried: Viterbo (where I live), Montalto di Castro, and Rome. Weather Underground has been reliable in the past, but Forecast.io data had a series of minor differences that, eventually, proved to be true; admittedly, it wasn’t a major divergence in terms of temperatures and forecasts, but still accurate.

Dark Sky alerts are equally interesting: sitting in the top right corner of a location’s summary veiw, they provide a handy summary for Now, Next Hour, Next 3 Hours, and “Today and Upcoming” forecasts. I am a fan of Dark Sky’s human-readable text summaries, but, alas, temperatures haven’t been localized to Celsius (I believe this is a Dark Sky API limitation), and, at least for my saved locations, there’s not much information available for Next Hour and Next 3 Hours. I am sure that, for countries with better availability of weather tracking services and data providers, Today Weather’s Dark Sky alerts will offer even better summaries.

I like Today Weather and I’m a fan of The Dark Sky Company’s work on Dark Sky and Forecast. The $0.99 In-App Purchase is a no-brainer if you want to try Forecast.io’s data into Savvy Apps’ solid weather client.