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Twitter, Twitter 4.3, and The Mixed Message

The new Twitter recap

As I was telling a fellow compatriot on Twitter, the Twitter apps exist as the gateway drug. Twitter’s app isn’t for the Tweetbot socialites who are connected to their timelines 24/7, nor is it for the Twitterrific users who treat Twitter as the break room water cooler. While many writers were waxing poetic on a disappointing update following the leave of Loren Brichter from Twitter, I tried to look at how Twitter was making their experience friendlier for everyone, and not just for the power users (who have, admittedly, established Twitter as what it is today).

Twitter’s focus shifted to answer two questions, “How do we retain users who leave because they don’t get Twitter, and how do we make money?“ The Twitter app exists not to serve people who want to mange their timelines, but for people just joining the service. It exists to show new users what Twitter is all about: this was made obvious with the Connect tab ousting Direct Messages. Its sole admission is to help newcomers get accustomed to finding and following people, things, or companies they are interested in. Then there’s Promoted Tweets which insert themselves into your timeline — it’s as intrusive as an advertisement but so far minimally impacts the experience. Twitter’s app is designed to show what you can do in (what I think) is an aesthetically pleasant package. It’s not for you, Tweetbot users.

Trying to defend Twitter gets people upset. Most everyone who read MacStories and are interested in tech want features — they want the Twitter emblematic of Tweetie and Tweetbot, not of the new Twitter. And I certainly understand that Twitter took away what was once an optimal experience for lots of people. In my approach, I understand that while Twitter shunned power users (which Tweetie users happened to be), they’re trying to make something everyone can use. It’s not an app fraught with finicky settings, but rather an app that provides a simple, core experience. I initially reviewed Twitter from a perspective of a newcomer — I think the app looks nice and for what functionality it does provide, that functionality works as intended. Unfortunately for Twitter, this message isn’t getting across. The audience Twitter wants (the audience I tried to put myself in) isn’t as vocal as the established user base is.

Let’s be honest: even I, despite trying to account for what new Twitter really is, use Tweetbot — heck, I still go back to my old favorite Twitterrific from time to time. And I don’t think anyone should mind that Twitter’s app exists as-is if Twitter is presenting their app as the gateway, and not as the path. I’m in agreement with what Twitter is trying to do as long as their app coexists peacefully with 3rd party Twitter clients. However, I’m not going to continue making my claim for why Twitter’s experience is okay if they’re shunning 3rd party developers and sending mixed messages in the process. I’m not okay with Twitter’s experience being the only experience.

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Guitar Pitch Pipe Lets You Quickly Tune Your Guitar

News from Hypercompact, the software company whose logo has inspired designer Evgeny Skidanov to create one of the most beautiful 3D animations I’ve ever seen. If they had published their app Guitar Pitch Pipe just one week earlier, I definitely would’ve integrated it in my story about the current state of music-making on the iPad — filed in the “small tools” sections. This guitar tuner is a perfect example for a small, reliable companion for guitarists on the road.

The App Store is flooded with guitar tuners. Apps like the UltimateGuitar tuner or Gibson’s effort are very prominent and elaborate apps — why considering this one then? Well, because it has one thing these other apps most of the time do not have: an innovative and simple UI. Guitar tuner apps are generally cluttered with features just a few percent of guitar players need like alternative tunings or the ability to change the tuning frequency; unfortunately, they are placed as prominently in the app as the standard tuning. This makes many tuner apps unnecessarily complex.

Guitar Pitch Pipe is different from that. Using a single main window, it plays back the six notes of the basic, 440Hz EADGBE guitar tuning with two different sounds: pipes (being the more unusual sound, and therefore integrated in the app name) and “classic” strings. The selected one is displayed in a visual interface, including tappable strings or pipes with the note characters on them. The currently playing pipes or strings are indicated by a closed pipe illustration or a cool 3D movement respectively. You can switch between these two layouts using the button in the top right corner.

You can either let Guitar Pitch Pipe play a note twice with a little pause in between for tuning, and then move on to the next one, or manually choose a string using the on/off switch at the bottom. The app then plays it until you move to the next one by tapping the respective string or pipe. The app constantly plays a note, there is no way, you could make it silent. Because of this you are more or less forced to only open it up when you really want to tune a guitar, otherwise it quickly becomes pretty annoying. This ensures a quick and focused use of the tuner, and makes it unobtrusive and functional.

The output sounds are very accurate, fitting to tuning both electric and acoustic guitars, and therefore make the app a very useful tool. The second reason for me using the Guitar Pitch Pipe guitar tuner from now on is its UI. We recently covered WTHR, a Dieter Rams inspired, minimalist weather forecast app for the iPhone. Guitar Pitch Pipe is quite similar to it. The app features no instructions or settings (because it doesn’t need any in its current state), it is colored beige, and uses skeuomorphed, plastic switches. The fretboard with strings and the pipes are crafted with love for detail; they are gloomy and very polished. It also features a cool icon but has a confusing description: “Super Quick”. The user could believe that the app is super quick, but without remembering which kind of app is behind the icon, it is very confusing.

However, while using the app for the first time, I immediately thought “Man, you could do much more with this design”. Retrospectively, this is still totally true: this app has potential to be enhanced with many new features while still maintaining its usability and simplicity. You could just add a second button, let’s say in the top left corner, make it trigger a pop down menu (which obviously needs to correspond with the rest of the app’s design), and let the user switch to alternate tunings like Drop D or C, or maybe even let them change the frequency. You wouldn’t need to change anything in the main screen design, just the sounds and the letters on the pipes or next to the strings to indicate different notes. This would make the app an even more complete and functional guitar tuner, suited for every type of guitarist — traditional (using standard tunings), metal and rock (dropped tunings) and progressive and experimental players (open and alternate).

But don’t get me wrong — Guitar Pitch Pipe already is a very good guitar tuner for the iPhone. Its output quality is outstanding, it’s fast and reliable, perfect for quick access, and does everything you need for tuning your guitar in standard tuning. There is just one thing that really annoyed me in its current version: sometimes, for instance when you use dropped tunings (which I personally use very often), you need some time to get back to standard tuning, especially on the lower E string. When you’re using Guitar Pitch Pipe’s automatic mode for that, the app plays each string just twice and then moves on to the next one, which is way too short in such situations. Users definitely must have the option to adjust how often single notes should be played back in auto mode. Otherwise, I absolutely recommend Guitar Pitch Pipe for any guitarist who is still searching for a good guitar tuner for his iPhone. Get Guitar Pitch Pipe for $0.99 on the App Store.

Quickly Send Webpages To Evernote with EverWebClipper

As I explained in my previous look at my writing workflow, I use a selection of tools to save notes and other bits of text to Dropbox and Evernote. While such array of applications and utilities is ever-changing due to the very nature of the App Store, the core intent of being able to distinctively store text in separate locations stays true regardless of app updates and new releases.

I use Evernote as long-term storage for a variety of text and media that isn’t necessarily an article I need to work on inside a dedicated text editor. I keep images and PDFs that I may want to reference in the future in Evernote; I archive my own tweets and favorite tweets in two separate notebooks using IFTTT (thanks to Evernote’s search, I consider this a DIY alternative to Cue, which I also use); I keep digital scrapbooks with screenshots, design inspiration material, and app documentation stored inside Evernote, and often shared with colleagues. Dropbox is for text; Evernote is for other kinds of text and more.

It doesn’t happen very often, but sometimes I want to archive webpages or links in Evernote as well. On my Mac, I use a couple of AppleScripts put together by our Don Southard to quickly archive URLs or text-based versions of webpages in my Evernote inbox for later processing. On iOS, I have been using a simple tool called EverWebClipper to instantly beam webpages from Safari to my Evernote account.

EverWebClipper isn’t pretty but it’s functional. Furthermore, it’s one of those tools that you don’t really need to look at, as much as you need to ensure it can work reliably in performing the functionality it was made for.

The app can be used to save webpages as URLs, styled pages, or “simple” ones. The styled option will try to preserve the original design of a webpage while allowing you to still edit text and other elements in Evernote; the “simple” clip style will strip out graphics and other elements from webpages, trying to focus on text and hyperlinks.

In actual testing, I found the styled setting to work reliably for minimalist sites like ShawnBlanc.net and Marco.org, suffering a bit in rendering graphics afterwards with sites like ours, or The Verge. However, it’s very convenient to be able to archive webpages “as they are”, even if some icons may be misaligned or missing. I’m not the biggest fan of Evernote’s “simple” mode for webpages, so I was bummed to see the app has some issues in saving the styled version of Instapaper-mobilized articles, which I prefer (and often convert to PDF on my iPad using Save2PDF).

Overall, I welcome the URL option; I like the possibilities offered by styled clips (though they’re hit or miss depending on the website); but I wish the “simple” setting would use a more capable parser like Instapaper’s.

Where EverWebClipper really wins over Evernote’s standard clipper (not optimized for mobile and terrible to use in Safari) is the actual clipping process. It’s entirely automated: you can install a bookmarklet in Safari and save webpages with one tap. This happens thanks to the app’s Automation settings, which enable you to tap on the bookmarklet, and have Safari automatically return in the foreground while EverWebClipper completes the saving process. You can return to Safari “immediately” or “after clipping” – if you choose immediately, the app will send a local notification when it’s done clipping.

There are other settings available in the app, as well as a manual mode to paste URLs and specify notebooks and tags every time, rather than through the bookmarklet.

At $3.99 for the iPad version and $2.99 on the iPhone, I don’t like EverWebClipper’s pricing scheme, and I think the developer should consider making a single universal version – especially considering the minimal differences in terms of features and design between the two. However, EverWebClipper provides a better experience than Evernote’s own bookmarklet for grabbing entire webpages (not portions of them) on iOS, so you should check it out if you’ve been looking for a solid mobile Evernote clipper.

Analytiks

Released yesterday, Analytiks 2.0 by Stelios Petrakis is an interesting widget-type iOS application to quickly check on your Google Analytics account. Whilst I don’t normally bother delving deep into Google reporting while on my iPhone, I have been looking for fresh alternatives to Garrett Murray’s Ego (which took a substantial hit in terms of daily usage after I stopped using Mint), and Analytiks delivers on the need of providing essential information at a glance with an elegant presentation.

Upon first launch, Analytiks will ask you if you’re using a black or white iPhone: this choice – falling back on user input as there is no way for iOS developers to determine the color of a device – will change the interface of the app accordingly, though it can be reverted in the settings. Using Apple’s widget apps for iPhone as a source of inspiration, Analytiks presents multiple sites associated with a Google account as full-screen “cards” you can horizontally swipe and double-tap to “flip back” and reveal more content. You can access up to 5 sites using the app.

The main screen displays a site’s total pageviews for the day and current month, with smaller counts for traffic sources (Facebook, Twitter, Google), visitors, and change since yesterday/past month. Typography is clean and focused, and I agree with the choice of displaying only an essential portion of Analytics data in this view. Pageviews for the day/month, visitors, and social traffic are the data points I want to check upon on a daily basis.

Double-tap (or hit the Dashboard-like icon in the upper right corner), and you’ll be brought to another screen showing various infographics for the past 30 days, 3 months, half year, or year. Here, you’ll find graphs for demographics, top browsers, desktop vs. mobile and PC vs. Mac users, time spent on your site, and new vs. returning traffic. It’s all incredibly pretty, the animations are cute, and the app updates data fast.

Analytiks looks good and it’s easy to use. If I had to nitpick, I’d argue that the data the developer chose to display gets the job done but there could be a section for top articles and referrals also embedded somewhere else in the app – though I recognize that’s also the kind of data that’s more difficult to visualize with fancy graphics and animations. Analytiks doesn’t let you modify time ranges and other data sets, but it does look great on the iPhone’s Retina display and it serves the purpose of being a simple widget to quickly check on some Google Analytics data.

Only $0.99 on the App Store.

Note: Stats pictured above are from my personal site, not MacStories.

Sunstroke - A Solid Fever Client for iPhone

In my review of Reeder 3.0, I mentioned how the app’s implementation of Fever doesn’t allow you to specify a time range to fetch Hot Links. In the way I use Fever, in fact, the possibility to use the app as a way to catch up on important news – rather than constantly checking for updates throughout the day – is a fundamental advantage over standard Google Reader and third-party Reader clients. I recently took a week off the Internet, and relied exclusively on Fever and Flipboard’s Cover Stories to keep up with the most important news I cared about. Being able to set a time range in Fever’s Hot Links is becoming a must-have for me.

Sunstroke by Gone East delivers on the need of a full-featured Fever client for iPhone with solid sharing options, a good interface, and proper Hot Links support. I recently started using Sunstroke as my main Fever client on the iPhone, and I have been very pleased with its results and integration in my workflow. More importantly, Sunstroke concretely allowed me to keep up on the news thanks to its time range-based Hot Links, providing actual tools to filter news I had missed by time period, thereby ensuring I could be brought up to speed on relevant items no matter my absence.

Visually speaking, Sunstroke offers a fairly familiar Fever experience. The main screen hosts Hot Links, Kindling, Saved, and Sparks sections, enabling you to switch between read/unread items and groups configured in your Fever account. I found refresh times to be slightly faster than Reeder’s – albeit it’s worth mentioning how Sunstroke comes with entirely different settings for managing Fever sync.

You can set the app to “sync automatically”, delete items after 2, 4, 6, or 10 weeks, and auto-mark items as read as you scroll. This last feature is extremely well done, with smooth scrolling when skimming through hundreds of subscriptions on my iPhone 4S. Overall, I like Sunstroke’s sync indicators and custom icons in the main screen of the app.

Where Sunstroke really shines is the Hot Links list. Unlike Reeder, a bar across the bottom of the UI lets you display Hot Links “from the past” few days, weeks, and month “starting” now, yesterday, and up to 5 weeks ago. This feature alone made purchasing Sunstroke worth it as it offers a solid yet simple way to set the time range according to which Fever’s hot items will be displayed. Per Fever’s typical presentation, hot items are sorted by “temperature”, and grouped by site.

Sunstroke stores every item from the Fever database on your device, which means every link that contributes to a link’s hotness can be viewed inside the app. This means that a) you can go offline and still tap around links and read articles through Fever’s own mobile viewer (though you can also use the Instapaper mobilizer) and b) you can tap & hold on a hot link to load related items as a swipeable “gallery” inline. The latter option is particularly attractive and well-implemented; my only issue is with the way Fever often cuts off headlines from hot links, but that’s not Sunstroke’s fault.

I found Sunstroke to be very polished in other areas, too. In the settings, you can tell the app to hide unread counts and show newest items first, or to cache images on WiFi-only while also setting a specific cache size.

The app supports sharing through a dedicated sharing button and by tapping & holding any link, and the sharing options include Facebook, Twitter, Pocket, Sparrow, and Instapaper. Like Reeder, you can assign toggles for right/left swipe actions – mine are, unsurprisingly, set to Pocket and “Toggle Saved”, but you can also “Toggle Read”. The notification for saved items is also nicely presented and elegant.

Sunstroke is not perfect (the app crashed once in my tests; there is no iPad version for now; options to control font appearance and size would be welcome), but it undoubtedly is the most complete Fever experience currently available on the iPhone. Sunstroke has got good sharing options, great Hot Links implementation, a fast engine and navigation, and, overall, a feature set meant for heavy Fever users that outpaces Reeder’s basic support for the service.

Fever users looking for a solid iPhone client need to check out Sunstroke, which is available at $4.99 on the App Store.

A Fine Impression of Apple’s Modernized Podcasts App

Apple’s Podcasts app is an acknowledgment that podcasts make up a substantial part of entertainment on iOS devices — more people than ever are subscribing to, learning from, and taking part in conversations around the topics that interest them. Long neglected with basic playback controls and mediocre syncing in the Music app, Podcasts is now its own standalone application. You couldn’t miss the news either — the Music app notifies you of this change on your iPhone or iPad when you open it.

With large and indie media networks recording weekly, if not daily, audio and video content, listeners who want “radio on their own time” can subscribe to and take part in discussions that they otherwise can’t be a part of through traditional radio or broadcast TV (i.e. time slots). Podcasts, while not a new concept, give listeners the opportunity to stream and download often short, consumable chunks of content that that’s more accessible than written text — it’s the way to catch up on news if you’re sitting in rush hour traffic, taking the dog for a walk, or doing the dishes.

Over the years, consuming podcasts becomes an incredibly intimate experience. Because people choose to listen on their own time, and often when they’re doing specific activities where they otherwise can’t read or listen to an available live stream, people look for specific features tailored to provide a custom listening experience. Being able to increase the playback rate of podcasts, set sleep timers, create playlists, add bookmarks, and stream podcasts over wireless networks has become increasingly important. Features, more-so than fancy user interfaces, are often preferred by users who regularly listen to podcasts.

Apple’s Podcasts application on iOS is their new central hub for finding, subscribing to, and listening to podcasts on your own terms. In consideration of how Apple’s podcast directory (their Catalogue) and podcatcher intermingle, it’s a pretty typical Apple experience. And in places where I thought Apple would fall short, I’m actually impressed at the amount of stuff they’ve added to their once featureless podcatcher. While Apple has certainly gone above and beyond my expectations in what they’ve provided, I think there can be some room for improvement.

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Review of WTHR - A Simpler, More Beautiful Weather App

I admit it, I have a bit of a fetish for weather apps. My taste in them is a bit different than all the other categories because I am a data geek when it comes to what’s happening outside. Apps like WeatherSnitch do a great job showing you a lot of info on a small screen but many don’t present them to the user very effectively. Until Dark Sky for iPhone came out, I didn’t think I could use a weather app that focused on the important details instead of all of them. Since then I have changed the way I use weather apps and rely on Dark Sky for short forecasts / radar and iOS’ built-in Weather app for extended forecasts until today.

WTHR is a brand new weather app from David Elgena. He wanted to build a weather app based on Dieter Rams’ 10 principles of design so the user could stop wasting time staring at weather radars and atmospheric pressure readings and spend more time enjoying what’s happening outside. WTHR started as a mockup on Dribbble about a month ago and received a lot of attention there. More mockups and a programmer later, WTHR was submitted to Apple and is available today.

WTHR is one of the best looking weather apps available — I love the style and simplicity of it. I appreciate that it hides the status bar to give your entire iPhone the look of being a handheld weather device with zero distraction. Launch the app, watch the animations, get your forecast and go. Some people may not like the color scheme but if you know Dieter Rams’ designs you understand where the colors come from. When you launch the app, it asks for your location then the UI presents the weather data in a retro-futuristic style. There’s only 2 buttons to interact with, one to refresh the forecast and the other to flip from Celcius to Fahrenheit. The refresh animation is great and the spinning notification in the 7-day forecast almost looks like a Rams dial. Underneath the current forecast is a 7 day extended forecast. All the weather icons are Adam Whitcroft’s wonderful Climacons which look perfect to the stylings of WTHR.

David Elgena told me that they are already working on future updates to include, but not complicate, more features and data like multiple locations and a dark mode. “My intentions with WTHR was really to create something as beautiful as the device that hosts them… and I do believe that even UI designers and app developers could gain inspiration from Dieter Ram’s product designs. Too often we load digital products with features and hidden or hard to use interfaces because we are suddenly given this almost infinitely layered product, the real discipline is control. There is no difference from when Dieter Rams was designing his first clock face…to an app on the iPhone. I look forward to creating more apps in the future…and continually improving upon WTHR.”

The lack of contrast in the 7-day forecast can make you squint a bit — an option to switch to a 5-day forecast could help. I’m glad the app icon wasn’t designed with the same skeuomorphism in mind, as I am not a fan of doing this in iOS because it clashes too much with most other icons. International iOS users – don’t worry, WTHR uses a global geo-location weather API so no one is exempt from using this great app. The weather data is a little different than what iOS uses but only a few degrees at times as Federico noticed in Italy. WTHR has gained a spot on my home screen with its beautiful, focused purpose. WTHR is available for 99¢ via the App Store.

WeatherSnitch 2.1 Brings Full-Screen Weather, New Artworks

Today is the second time I don’t obey my “never cover stocks and weather apps” principle. I think I’ll have to abandon it completely, as there are way too many cool UIs in this app category. After I reviewed StockTouch some weeks ago, I recently discovered WeatherSnitch 2, a weather app by developer Snitchware (with a website certainly inspired by apple.com). The original WeatherSnitch v1 and this new update are designed as  ”one view is all it takes” apps — just fire them up, get to the main screen displaying all relevant information, and continue with your workflow right away. Read more

Transit Beautifully Displays Public Transport Routes Around You

Google GTFS is an acronym some developers and bloggers might already be familiar with. The Google General Transit Feed Specification is a developer tool that public transport services can use to track their bus or train lines on Google Maps via GPS. Using GTFS, created using a bunch of zipped text files (you can get more information on the Google dev pages), public transport companies can voluntarily publish their routes for Google Maps users to incorporate them into route planning. Front-end developers can also benefit from this specification. One of the newest products for the iPhone which incorporates GTFS is Transit by Sam Vermette and Guillaume Campagna, which has been published today.

Transit locates you via GPS or Wi-Fi hotspots, and then displays the nearest public transport routes sorted chronologically after their departure. This way, you’re always up to date what traveling possibilities you have around you. If it’s in your home town, you only get what you need and what you’re familiar with, because the app displays only the nearest lines with the “real lines” colors and numbers. Your current location is then displayed in a small panel at the bottom of the screen with the route information in a custom list above it — tap it to change the saved location. Transit also works offline, so you can download foreign cities’ routes before traveling there to save 3G costs and still always be up to date. The bundle downloads can be reached via the location button in the bottom left corner of the screen (along with the amount of public transport agencies displayed).

When looking at the list of your closest routes, route information elements inform you with big, readable typography about the next departures with location, time of departure, line information, bus/train stop location, and the route direction. Tap and hold one of them to get the direction and distance to the next stop, or to get the next departure times displayed in a cute popup panel above your finger. When you tap on one of the elements, there are four other actions to perform with it. You can switch the direction if the displayed destination is not the one you’re looking for,  then check the route with the Google Maps view to see other stations and their route distances. Furthermore, you can star routes to mark them as favorites so you can always pin them to the top of your list. You can also browse the whole line schedule for the day in a separate list if you need the information for a departure at a later time. This way you get the information you need quickly and efficiently.

Currently, Transit is only supported in three Canadian cities: Montreal, Toronto and Quebec. But the two developers promised to work hard and want to finish covering Canada by the end of July, with European and U.S. cities following in August. To keep the app clutter-free, Transit will always display the nearest routes and change displayed transport companies when the user is in a new location.

Transit can be freely downloaded on the App Store, however, certain features are restricted until they’re unlocked with a subscription. Using the free version, you cannot view routes offline and the app only displays the three closest routes. By paying $0.99 for one month, $2.99 for six months, or $4.99 for a year, you add the ability to view maps offline and see all routes within a 1.5km radius. This is a very good pricing plan: you can get free transit data in a pinch, or pay to receive the most comprehensive mapping data (which will probably be worth the subscription fee for constant travelers once more cities are added).

But what makes Transit really worth a try is its user interface. The trend of applying outer shadows and light textures to UI elements and buttons has been a common way to style an app in the last years, but not many designers manage to make it unique while still using this method. Sam Vermette did: Transit features a stunning amount of cool interface elements. Some of my favorites are the Tweetbot-like action menus when tapping a list element, the already mentioned small information popups, the black vignette design around the menus and the Google Maps view, and especially the popup list when changing the location. The latter shows a deep care for consistent design: within the list, the developers changed the text display font to the sans-serif font which is used throughout the app. Using Transit’s UI is pretty smooth — the performance only lacked a couple times when online data got fetched.

Another thing I really like about Transit is the icon. It’s unique, simple, and makes my fingers want to touch it.

So, as you could possibly tell from the review, I like Transit very much. I’m thrilled to see it coming to Europe over the next months (although not every public transport agency supports GTFS), because it’s plain, easy to use, but still has a great feature set which really solves the problem of combining multiple public transport agencies in one single, and still awesome user interface. Even if you’re not a resident of Toronto, Quebec or Montreal, I still urge you to download Transit for free on the App Store, take some time looking over its stunning UI, and wait for your city to be supported.

Be sure to keep an eye on Transit’s Twitter account to stay up to date on when new cities are added.