This Week's Sponsor:

Dropzone 5

Improve your Drag-and-Drop Workflow

Posts in reviews

Ecoute 2 Review

Ecoute 2

Ecoute 2

Last year, when we reviewed Ecoute, we called it the best music player for iOS. Apple’s Music app has never been packed with features when compared to iTunes on the Mac, but it’s the app that the majority of people use because it’s free and built into the operating system.

With iOS 7, Apple redesigned the Music app with some questionable choices for artist and album navigation and more advantages over third-party clients through the inclusion of iTunes Radio streaming and a special widget in Control Center to like songs and add them to your wish list. The Music app is, effectively, irreplaceable if you care about iTunes Radio and managing your music and playlists, but I think that the new Ecoute for iOS 7 does several things better than Apple’s app. Read more

Tydlig: An Innovative Free-Form Calculator for iOS

Tydlig

Tydlig

Developed by Andreas Karlsson, Tydlig wants to reimagine how a calculator should work in the modern age of iOS devices and multitouch screens. Rather than mimicking every aspect of old physical calculators in the transition to pixels, Tydlig eschews conventions by turning an iPhone or iPad’s screen into a canvas where numbers can be placed anywhere, linked together, and rearranged. The result is a breath of fresh air into the landscape of iOS calculators, but it also takes a while to get used to it and it likely won’t appease purists. Read more

Party DJ Brings iTunes DJ Feature Back to iOS 7 With App for iPhone and iPad

Party DJ

Party DJ

Developed by Alex Price, Party DJ is an iOS 7 app that brings back one of the old features of iTunes DJ and Apple’s Remote app: the possibility to collaborate with friends on what music to play through a voting system. The app, available today on the App Store, comes in two versions: a paid, $1.99 “host + remote” app to handle playback and queue management, and a free Remote companion to install on iPhones or iPads that can vote songs. Price is the developer behind CameraSync, a longtime favorite of mine, and I was immediately intrigued when he showed me Party DJ a few weeks back. Read more

DaisyDisk 3

DaisyDisk

DaisyDisk

I’ve been using DaisyDisk for years now. Developed by a small team, DaisyDisk is a disk analyzer tool that manages to make the boring process of understanding what’s wasting space on your hard drive pretty and almost fun. We’ve covered the app quite a few times on MacStories over the years, and the basic functionality hasn’t changed, but we missed the 3.0 update released in September and I wanted to fix that. Read more

Better Two-Factor Authentication with Authy for iOS and OS X

In my list of Must-Have iPad Apps for 2013, I mentioned Authy and two-factor authentication:

Authy. If you’re not using two-step authentication for online services that support it, you’re doing it wrong. And if you assume that the ugly Google Authenticator app is the only way to generate one-time security codes, well, let me tell you about Authy. Simple and well designed, Authy is “a Google Authenticator app” in that it can generate codes for services, like Evernote and Dropbox, that would normally ask you to use Google’s app. Authy is secure and fully compliant with the standards required by two-step authentication; it has a clean UI, it’s free and Universal, and it comes with a Mac utility to share codes locally over Bluetooth.

Because it’s an app that I use every day, I thought that Authy deserved a separate mention on the site; I replaced Google’s terrible Authenticator app with Authy, which provides a cleaner interface, support for multiple devices, and a Mac utility to share tokens using Bluetooth Low Energy. Read more

Launch Center Pro 2.1: Fleksy Keyboard, Lists, Photo Attachments, and Share Sheets

Launch Center Pro 2.1

Launch Center Pro 2.1

In October, Contrast released Launch Center Pro 2.0, a free update to their shortcut launcher and automation tool for iOS that brought a new interface for iOS 7 and, among other minor additions, Dropbox integration. Launch Center Pro is one of the three apps I keep in my dock[1], and I use it several times a day to create new tasks in Fantastical, launch Google searches, open my favorite websites, and more.

Today, Contrast is launching Launch Center Pro 2.1, a seemingly not-so-major update that, however, brings important changes to the app, including a new way to build visual actions and support for the new third-party Fleksy keyboard. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that version 2.1 is just as important as 2.0 for heavy users of Launch Center Pro. Read more

Castro, A New Podcast Player for iOS, Does Two Things Well

Castro, a new “high fidelity” (come on… I mean really?) podcast player for iOS, looks good and has a few clever ideas for podcast listening. Forget playlists: Castro presents podcasts in a day-to-day timeline that keeps the most recent shows at the forefront. I don’t know if I’m a fan of how text is overlaid on translucent show art since the app’s look is dependent on whether the podcast you listen to has appealing cover art, but I am a fan of the player’s decided simplicity when it comes to podcast controls. There are no timers, no speed settings and no share button. However, underneath the show notes and behind the basic forward, back, and pause/play buttons is a hidden scrubber, which lets you scrub to any position in the currently playing episode with surprising ease. I don’t think it’s discoverable, but it’s unique and surprisingly accurate. It was the thing that John Gruber pointed out and the first thing I showed Federico when discussing the app. Update: Also hidden is a playback speed setting if you tap and hold the play/pause button (thanks Twitter).

The biggest thing Castro has going for it, in my opinion, is its search feature. It’s fast. Like, it’s really fast as podcasts appear as you type. If you’re making a podcast app, I’m pretty sure Castro has set the new high bar here. It made subscribing to a bunch of shows for the first time pretty painless.

Grab it from the App Store for $2.99.

Discover The Meaning of Acronyms with Acronymph for iPhone

Acronymph

Acronymph

Acronymph, developed by Calvin Robertson, is an iPhone app to discover the meaning of acronyms.

With a variety of built-in categories that range from Internet slang and sports to music, economy, and goverment acronyms, Acronymph simply displays matches it finds in its built-in database. You can’t configure sources you want to see/hide because the app has no settings, but a recent update added a URL scheme that lets you send an acronym from apps like Launch Center Pro or Drafts directly to Acronymph without having to tap the app’s search box and type.

When results are found, you can tap on them to copy them, open a Google search, or share them to other apps. I’m nitpicking, but I don’t like how “@AcronymphApp” is appended to an acronym’s meaning when you’re sharing a result to Mail or Twitter.

Acronymph is simple and effective. I’ve looked up several acronyms in the past weeks and the app always found meanings in less than two seconds; it’s the kind of utility that you likely won’t need on a daily basis, but that will come in handy if you don’t need a full-featured dictionary app like Terminology. And, btw, Acronymph is $0.99 on the App Store.