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Daily Weather Summaries with Weather Notifications

Weather Notifications

Weather Notifications

Weather Notifications, developed by Taco23, is a simple utility to get a daily notification with a weather summary on your iPhone. It’s not a weather app in the sense that it lets you browse forecasts, temperatures, or other weather data in a traditional way; instead, Weather Notifications is, as the name implies, a notification tool powered by Forecast.io.

Weather Notifications is, essentially, a Settings screen where you can configure the notifications you want to receive every day for your location. Alerts can be set to fire off at five different times: afternoon before, night before, morning, afternoon, or evening. You can only pick one, and, unfortunately, you’re also forced to pick one location; you can’t tell Weather Notifications to send you a notification the day before for Location A and in the morning for Location B. I set Weather Notifications to send me alerts for Rome the night before, so I’ll have an idea of the weather I’ll wake up to in the morning.

You can choose to receive a daily summary or condition-specific alerts for rain, snow, and fog. There are temperature, wind, and humidity thresholds that you can also optionally configure, but I’ve been enjoying the daily summary, which gives me a succinct recap of weather conditions for the following day.

And that’s it. Weather Notifications isn’t available on the iPad and it could use customizable alert sounds and support for multiple locations; Forecast.io’s accuracy may vary for your area, but it’s been fairly reliable for me in Italy.

Weather Notifications is $1.99 on the App Store.

Pinswift: A Powerful Pinboard Client for iOS 7

Pinswift for iPhone

Pinswift for iPhone

Developed by Joel Carranza, Pinswift is a new $4.99 Pinboard client for iPhone that packs powerful bookmark management, discovery, and search features in an interface specifically designed for iOS 7. Since trying one of the early betas a couple of months ago, I’ve been keeping Pinswift on my iPhone’s Home screen as it offers (almost all) of the Pinboard functionalities I need on a daily basis. Read more

1Password 4.1: Password Fields, A New Classic View, A New Login Prompt, and More

It was October when AgileBits first launched 1Password 4 for the Mac, engineered and redesigned to be just as functional and beautiful as its iOS counterpart. 1Password 4 shipped with a ton of new features, which included iCloud sync, favorites, multiple vaults, Security Audit, and 1Password Mini. Today, our favorite password manager for the Mac is getting even more features in what AgileBits is calling, “The Little Big Update.” While this update is packed with lots of goodies, three stand out to me as the big ones.

New features

First up: one of my own requested features. A great feature on the iOS side lets you add password fields to items, and this feature has finally been brought over to the Mac. If you’ve been adding things like security answers as text fields, you can also convert them into concealed password fields as well. 1Password Mini makes these fields especially easy to get to if you ever need to answer any of your security questions.

Next up is a new option for viewing items. A new Top Item List Layout view (found under View > Item List Layout > Top) organizes items into multiple columns. It condenses a lot of information into a classic list, making it easy to view logins, dates, and password strength at a glance. Fans of MailMate should will appreciate the formal look.

Lastly, 1Password 4.1 has overhauled how Logins are saved and updated. When you change a password on a site, the 1Password extension will let you choose which Login to update if there’s more than one, while additionally letting you set tags and file Logins into folders. The new dialog box is much more like a save prompt for a Mac app, making it easier to save and sort your Logins on the spot.

There’s a few other notable little features that are worth mentioning as well. When you search, you’ll have the option to expand an existing search across all fields in items if what you’re looking for can’t be found by title alone. If you’re printing out items, you’ll be able to do so individually through their share menus. Lastly, lots of bugs have been squashed for WiFi syncing for those who prefer to keep their 1Password databases out of the cloud.

When can you get your hands on it?

You can download 1Password 4.1 from AgileBits’ website at 12pm Pacific Time / 3pm Eastern Time. If you purchased 1Password 4 directly from AgileBits, then you can grab it this afternoon.

Mac App Store customers can download 1Password 4.1 once it’s approved. Basically, “Soon.”

Looking to learn more about 1Password? Check out everything we’ve had to say, including news and reviews on one of our must-have apps.

PDF Expert 5 Brings Updated Design, More PDF Editing Features to iPad

PDF Expert

PDF Expert

Released today on the App Store, PDF Expert 5 is Readdle’s new version of the popular PDF Expert for iPad, a feature-rich PDF manager and reader that I’ve been using on my iPad for years. PDF Expert 5, a separate app sold at $9.99 on the App Store, brings a cleaner design for iOS 7 and, more importantly, new functionalities such as better document management, an improved sidebar and document viewer, Review mode, and more. Read more

MindNode 3

MindNode 3

MindNode 3

When I’m writing for MacStories, I tend to prepare articles as outlines in Evernote, where I’ll also throw in some images and hyperlinks. For pieces that are focused on a single subject (like an app review, a tutorial, or an opinion piece), the simple outline system works well because Evernote can keep everything in one place and show inline previews.

For longer articles that require deeper research and span a variety of topics, however, I like mind maps. Since I was in middle school and especially in high school, I got used to remember topics by creating mind maps (“concept maps”, as our teachers called them) with pen and paper for classes like History, Ancient Greek, English Literature, or Philosophy. Back then I had no iPhone or iPad and the school’s computers were some cheap Pentium 4s that the school administration couldn’t upgrade due to lack of regional funds, so I spent hours drawing little boxes and coloring them with highlighters. I made hundreds of them over the years.

When my brain has to jump from point to point several times and a text outline isn’t enough, I like the visual approach of mind maps. And in the modern age, unless I need specific advanced features of iThoughts, I usually open MindNode – IdeasOnCanvas’ app for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. MindNode for iOS gets the 3.0 treatment today with a major update that redesigns the app, makes it iOS 7-only, adds new features, and cleans up some old ones while staying free for existing customers. Read more

Unbound: A Photo Viewer for Dropbox

Unbound

Unbound

I’ve been keeping my photos in Dropbox for over a year now. I’ve remained loyal to a folder structure that organizes photos in years and months (Bradley would be proud of me) and I still use Hazel and CameraSync to upload my photos. While I’ve been happy with the uploading/organizing process of this photo backup workflow, the experience of browsing photos was never great. And I’d rather not talk about my brief, emotionally intense, and ultimately sad affair with Everpix.

Unbound by Pixite is a photo viewer for people who keep their photos in Dropbox. Unlike recent App Store trends, it comes as separate purchases for the iPhone and iPad priced at $2.99. The app is built for iOS 7, and it comes with viewing and sharing features that, right now, make it my best option to browse photos I’m storing on Dropbox. Read more

Automate iOS Contacts, Location Services, and Open In Menu with Pythonista 1.4

Pythonista 1.4

Pythonista 1.4

Pythonista is the app that changed my iOS workflow a year ago. A Python interpreter with native access to iOS system features like photos, URLs, and interface elements, Pythonista allowed me to convert the scripts and macros that I was using on OS X to the iPad, automating iOS in better and sometimes unexpected ways. Pythonista eventually led to Editorial, also developed by Ole Zorn, which changed the way I write and work on my iPad every day.

Pythonista 1.4, available today on the App Store, is the biggest update to Zorn’s app to date. It includes a new UI for iOS 7 (the app is also iOS 7-only starting today), new modules and enhancements to existing ones, and, more importantly, it doubles down on iOS integration by bringing native support for contacts, location, and Open In. Read more

TextTool: Text Manipulation On iOS

TextTool

TextTool

It used to be that, to do nerd stuff, you had to get a Mac or PC. As iOS progressed over the years, however, developers saw that users were spending a lot of time trying to do work on their iPhones and iPads, and started building utilities that packed powerful functionalities in what looked like “just an app”. We got Drafts and Launch Center Pro, calendar apps and password managers just as powerful as their desktop counterparts, and, of course, apps to script iOS and a text editor with its own workflow system. To sum up: iOS is still maturing, but there’s no shortage of nerdy apps and utilities at this point.

iOS is great for quick text entry thanks to the portability of an iPhone or iPad mini, but doing advanced text manipulation is a bit tricky unless you want to get dirty with Editorial and Python scripts. On the Mac, it’s easy to fire up Automator and create a workflow that takes a line of text and turns it Into Title Case or UPPERCASE; even going the extra mile and building services to take selected text and indent it or swap spaces with tabs takes a few minutes, but it’s doable with a basic knowledge of built-in OS X tools. On iOS? There’s no Automator (yet?), so, until today, if you wanted to do automated text transformations you’d have to get Editorial and Pythonista or use some of Launch Center Pro’s (limited) text filters.

Craig Pearlman noticed this problem and built TextTool, a $4.99 Universal app that comes with 28 built-in text transformations that you can use inside the app’s text editor or chain to other iOS apps with URL schemes and workflows.

Read more