Posts in reviews

Quip: A New iPad Twitter App With A Focus On Conversations

I have often written about the need for developers of third-party Twitter clients to focus on different, fresh experiences aimed at providing a new take on mobile tweeting. On iOS, as I have previously argued, apps like Tweetbot, Twitterrific, and Twitter’s official client have managed to capture a large portion of a devoted userbase split in those seeking a wide array of functionalities, a streamlined interface, or the free price tag. Quip, a new Twitter app by Glasshouse Apps (makers of The Early Edition), takes a unique approach at filtering the typical Twitter timeline by conversations, images, and retweets.

I have been testing Quip since its early beta versions, and the app has been no replacement for Tweetbot on my iPad. But that’s exactly Quip’s greatest strength and, I believe, one of its most valid points alongside a care for beautiful UI design and ease of use. While capable of being an average user’s primary iPad client because of its support for basic Twitter functionalities such as direct messages, search, and favorites, I think Quip works best as an attractive companion for catching up on Twitter and browsing certain sections/tweets that could otherwise get easily lost in a “regular” timeline. Quip doesn’t support Twitter lists, its search features are limited, and you won’t find the same degree of link and tweet manipulation options of Tweetbot.

Rather than contributing to the app’s possible detriment when compared to more advanced clients, however, Quip’s extremely specific feature set catalyzes the convenience of those Twitter-based functionalities that Glasshouse implemented. Read more

Fantastical 1.3 Adds Reminders Integration

Flexibits’ Fantastical, a menubar-based calendar application to quickly enter new events with natural language recognition, has today been updated to include native integration with Reminders, a feature that Apple rolled out with its own app in iOS 5 last year. I have been testing the new Fantastical (version 1.3) for the past weeks, and its integration with calendars, reminders, and natural language input is as solid as ever.

One of Fantastical’s biggest advantages over similar apps to quickly add items to synced calendars is its built-in CalDAV engine, which ensures the app can directly communicate with online calendars without having to leave iCal open in the background. As with events, Fantastical 1.3 lets you create reminders with a few keystrokes, using reminder lists already configured in your calendar app of choice, such as iCal or Outlook. Because Fantastical is capable of directly communicating with the syncing engine behind Reminders – not just the calendar application that displays them on the desktop – you’ll be able to add reminders in Fantastical and have them synced across devices without leaving iCal open. In my tests, Fantastical 1.3 indeed took reminders I added from the menubar, and synced them to iCloud.com and other iOS devices within seconds. If iCal opens, as Flexibits explains in the FAQ, it’s because of a Lion default setting related to push; switching iCal’s refresh rate to 30 minutes doesn’t compromise Fantastical’s ability to create events and reminders independently of iCal.

Fantastical can create, edit, and delete reminders with natural language recognition. In testing the app, I told Fantastical to “remind me to take out the trash”, and the app intelligently parsed the command as just “take out the trash”, interpreting the initial portion of the sentence as a reminder input. Similarly, commands like “remind” and “todo” will trigger reminder creation in Fantastical 1.3, which, generally speaking, tries to associate every new item without a date to a reminder list. This, however, can be reverted at any time, as the interface to switch between reminders and events includes a handy switch to jump through both options.

Reminders can be given a specific date or priority, assigned a note, but they don’t support location and time-based alerts, as those features are exclusive to iOS’s Reminders and Siri. In the app’s UI, reminders are displayed alongside calendar events, and they use the same floating popover windows for modifications.

In testing Fantastical 1.3 with my iCloud calendar and reminders, I found the app to be remarkably fast and reliable. As you would expect from Fantastical, adding new reminders takes seconds thanks to keyboard navigation and shortcuts, and the syncing engine didn’t miss a beat when communicating with iCloud and iOS. Unsurprisingly considering previous versions of the app, the parser doesn’t disappoint when it comes to automatically switching between event and reminder creation (try to add a date to a reminder, and check out the animation).

Fantastical 1.3 is a great update if you’ve been looking forward to Reminders integration, and another solid release for an app we’ve previously recommended. Fantastical is $19.99 on the App Store.

Change Displays Your Stock’s Current Value

Every time I think that there are enough stock and weather apps for iOS, I find a new one. And every time, I think something like “Please, let this one be cool”. Of all the apps that I regularly check out as a possible new topics, just 1% of them is usually worth a try. The rest is rubbish. When it comes to weather and stock apps, though, that rubbish part is also somehow twice as large. It’s as rare as an edelweiss in the Sahara that a new app with such purposes can offer a unique concept. Change by Jon Wheatley, however, is a perfect example of uniqueness and simplicity applied to stock UIs on the iPhone.

Wheatley reduced his app’s feature set to the question any stock owner always asks himself: have I gained or lost money with the stocks I own? Nothing more, because let’s be honest – more data is typically for the intellectual academics who call themselves stock analysts when reviewing iOS apps. Change is divided in two parts: a main information window, and a detailed list view to add or delete stocks you own. No preferences, no graphs, no predictions – just the current situation of your investments.

After the first launch, you have to enter the information about the stocks you own. Adding new ones afterwards is just a tap on the top right + button away. In the second panel, you have to type in the amount of stocks you own, the price you paid for them, and the stock symbol (like AAPL) of the respective company. Although the developer kindly implemented number fields for the first two panels, he did not manage to implement a search feature for the symbols, something which is totally common and useful, and definitely needs to be added in future updates.

What follows is an easy calculation in the background. The overall difference (all entered stocks are included in the main window) between your stocks’ value today and the time you bought them is then displayed in a large circle in the center of the screen. If it’s red, you lost money; if it’s green, you gained some. Additionally, you get your total gain (or loss) over time and the total value of your stocks via smaller numbers below the circle.

Tap on the diagram button in the top left corner, and you get to the mentioned list view where you can also add new stocks you recently purchased. Here, a more detailed look at single stocks is provided: you can see which part of your portfolio was more profitable today and over time.

Besides the fact I had to restart Change the first time I tested it (it crashed when I refreshed the calculation by tapping the circle), Change ran flawlessly on my iPod touch 3rd Gen. The simplicity in functionality can also be seen in the app’s UI. There are no distracting tones except for the aforementioned red and blue colorization of the circle. This way, nothing is distracting the user from the app’s purpose: easily displaying changes in stock value. The rest of the app is monochrome and easy to overview – this is mainly the case due to the very tastefully chosen sans-serif typefaces in which the headlines and information are set, and the subtle, but unique background texture.

Change takes the area of stock surveillance into a whole new direction: simplicity. And another great decision Wheatley made with Change is the app’s price: you can get Change for free on the App Store.

Cleaning Mona Lisa: Showcasing the Potential for iBooks

Cleaning Mona Lisa Book Cover

Cleaning Mona Lisa Book Cover

Behind a beautiful portrait of Mona Lisa and a blue ribbon denoting its newness to my iBooks shelf, I discovered a world of rich and vivacious color drowned out by the ill effects of aging varnish, dust, and improper lighting. Restoring the world’s most famous paintings requires not only an understanding of the fine arts, but an even deeper understanding of the tools artists used to create the wildly vivid and awe-inspiring paintings we often observe in museums and art galleries. As you’ll come to learn in Lee Sandstead’s interactive iBook, preserving a painting is an art itself.

Sandstead’s 30-page digital iBook is nothing short of an exemplary example of what iBooks Author can produce when great minds meet great developers. The concise text, coupled with interactive images, galleries, and interviews, provides a much more personal platform for learning and engagement than my history textbooks ever could. That’s not to say “Cleaning Mona Lisa” was written for study — it’s an intriguing, personalized story from a passionate and talented art historian.

Cleaning Mona Lisa Lighting Page

Cleaning Mona Lisa Lighting Page

Covering the history of painting techniques from tempera to oil painting, Sandstead has to first recreate the methods artists used to create their paintings. As you’ll learn, the tools artists used and our neglect about how these paintings were intended to be preserved has been detrimental to the quality of the paintings themselves. Sandstead made it his mission to understand both what affects the quality of a painting and how to do undo the toll of time itself to reveal what are truly beautiful masterpieces.

iBooks Author has enabled the creation of an interactive e-book, that as Apple intended, flows perfectly no matter what orientation you decide to read it in. Videos guide you through the author’s investigative process, while interactive word bubbles clue you in on the observations made on a particular painting. Tapity’s iteration of engagement immerses you with the content — it doesn’t detract you from the author’s message. The author’s prose, combined with the layout of images and interactive content, make for an ebook that’s accessible and clever.

“Cleaning Mona Lisa” is an iBook for all ages that can be read in an evening. It didn’t take me long to read through, but the material was genuinely interesting, and I have nothing but good things to say about the book’s presentation and content. Only $2.99 on the iBookstore, “Cleaning Mona Lisa” sets the example for what an iBook should aspire to be.

Espionage 3: Effortless Encryption for your Mac

Tao Effect’s Espionage has always taken a novel approach to encrypting data on OS X. In contrast to applications like TrueCrypt or Knox that protect data in individually encrypted virtual disks or vaults, Espionage does its best to mask encrypted disks from the end user. Rather than interfacing with virtual disks that are individually encrypted, Espionage uses the folders you want to protect as a reference point and applies a 1Password approach to the protected folders on your system. Espionage solves two problems: it centralizes all of your protected data and makes that data easy to access through a single master password. Espionage’s approach to securing your data means that you can interface with folders on OS X as if they were regular folders — tasks like mounting and unmounting encrypted volumes are taken care of for you in the background through a streamlined interface. Protecting your data shouldn’t have to come at the cost of convenience.

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Mailsum Enhances Your Mail Account Surveillance

When it comes to email clients, most Mac users still stick to Apple Mail as their client of choice, although there are plenty good alternatives available. The reasons for that are clear: over years of constant development, improvement and changes, Apple managed to create a powerful, but still clearly laid out program, which fits the needs of both private and professional business users. Diversified labelling options, multiple mail signatures, folders, and diversified reply and creation features are just some examples. Nevertheless, there are still some people out there demanding one specific feature Apple mail lacks: statistics. But, as you know, there’s always an app for that. In this case, it’s Mailsum by Appmasters. Read more

Inkflow Has One Great Idea

When we talk about hotly contested app markets for the iPad, we’re either talking about iOS text editors or sketching apps — today we’re focusing on the latter. Between Adobe, Autodesk, Paper, and Penultimate, something needs to be dramatically imaginative and different to make it stand out in a section of the App Store that is well contested and already populated with great apps. Sometimes an app like SyncPad stands out by providing new and interesting features (in this case it’s immensely useful for presentations), but very rarely does an app come along that can compete with these established tools on the iPad. Similar to how Instapaper and Pocket (once Read It Later) have captured the “read later” space, the aforementioned apps broadly cover everything you’d likely need or want when it comes to writing, drawing, and sketching.

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Tweetbot 2.4 Brings New Search View, Keyword Mute Filters, Refinements

Following updates focused on iCloud sync and gestures, Tweetbot 2.4, released today on the App Store (iPhone, iPad), brings an updated search view with additional location features, relocated Trends and People categories, and various improvements that make the client’s search functionality more powerful and intuitive.

The new Search tab unifies Trends, People, and Top Tweets under a Browse section, with Saved Searches and the classic search box still available at the top of the screen. The dedicated Top Tweets option is quite enjoyable – I have indeed found myself browsing such flow of status updates on a couple of times for the occasional laugh or remarkably snarky tweet. Top tweets now also show up in regular search results, and they are marked by a silver star indicator.

Trends, on the other hand, can be changed to another location directly from the search view of Tweetbot 2.4 – I don’t use Trends, but I assume the option will come in handy for those who, for some reason, like to check the recurring #Buongiorno trend in Italy.

The big addition in Tweetbot’s new search interface is support for nearby tweets. Here, you can view nearby tweets with the ability to change your location (just tap on the embedded Google Map), and you can perform location-based keyword searches for tweets containing specific words that also happen to be located near you. Unfortunately, Viterbo resembles a ghost town when it comes to looking for fellow local MacStories readers. I asked Tapbots, and they confirmed my town’s insistence of loading @viticci as the only local MacStories tweeter isn’t an app’s bug.

There are two more little touches I like in Tweetbot 2.4: you can double-tap the search tab to open search with the keyboard, and the search box has been optimized to let you easily jump to tweets, users, or a specific @user without additional taps.

Keyword Mute Filters

Tweetbot has been offering advanced mute filtering options for quite some time now. Version 2.4 now allows you to block specific keywords – not just users or clients – and there’s even support for regular expression if you really want to make sure you’re not reading about the latest spoilers in Game Of Thrones. Mentions can be muted as well.

Miscellaneous

There are plenty of other refinements in Tweetbot 2.4. Offline support, for instance, will ensure tweets marked as favorite or sent to a Read Later service when no Internet connection is available will get “queued”, then sent/favorited as soon as you come back online. Sure enough, while browsing my timeline in Airplane mode, I fave’d a couple of tweets, sent some links to Pocket, and Tweetbot queued them. When I turned WiFi back on, the app refreshed, the tweets were marked as favorites in my account, and they appeared in my Pocket.

On the iPad, web and map views can now be dismissed with a two-finger swipe down gesture, which I found incredibly convenient and faster than reaching out for the Close button in the upper left corner. Also on the iPad, list views show one line of a list or profile description, and when viewing an image in full-screen, you can hold down for options.

Additionally, aside from the usual bug fixes, you can now swipe to the right on profile views to go back; items sent to Pinboard are marked as unread; and last, the compose screen comes with basic smart quote support (for quotes, em dash, and ellipsis).

With powerful new features and UI refinements added to an existing set of great functionalities, Tweetbot 2.4 retains familiarity while striving to remain the best third-party Twitter app for iOS. Get it from the App Store today.

Pulp Gets Retina Graphics, iCloud Sync for Mac & iOS, Trends

Between RSS clients and read later apps, Acrylic’s Pulp has always taken a different approach at presenting news beautifully on the Mac and iPad. Combining the traditional aspects of RSS (Pulp lets you add a website’s feed through search, direct OPML, and Google Reader) with the rich visual presentation of apps like Flipboard, Pulp (nèe Times) offers a magazine-like experience for web articles, which can also be stripped out of unwanted graphics through a feature called Magic Reader. In our previous coverage, we were positively impressed by Pulp for Mac’s push sync and Lion support, as well as the iPad version’s elegant layout.

Today, Acrylic is releasing two major updates to Pulp for Mac and iPad, adding an improved interface and Retina graphics on iOS, iCloud sync across platforms, and a new “smart home page” feature that automatically aggregates trends and relevant news items from your feeds.

Retaining the same page-based layout that allows you to add multiple sources in newspaper-like columns with different display options, the new Pulp adds a “Home” start page that features popular and trending articles from your existing feeds. Using a series of algorithms that determine an article’s relevancy through keywords, date, and other feeds mentioning it, the new Home page provides a grid of fresh and popular stories for the day. In actual testing, this meant that with Pulp set to refresh every 5 minutes, the app would look at my four sections (Apple, Technology, Science, Arts & Entertainment) and bring in popular news like the Google/Oracle trial and Jony Ive’s knighthood, sorted by keyword and grouped by sources.

The concept is interesting; I was told by the developers that Pulp builds this “smart home page” completely on the client side of the app – no data is uploaded to Acrylic’s servers and social networks aren’t contacted to aggregate popular links, either. I haven’t been able to test Pulp’s algorithm during a major news break, but I believe it is safe to assume it would grab popular stories within a couple of minutes. Overall, I think the new Home page is a good idea as it provides a simple and efficient way to “see what’s important” without navigating through feeds manually; in my tests, I noticed refreshing trends took slightly longer on the iPad version of Pulp – but the results were the same afterwards.

The big new feature of Pulp 2.5 is iCloud sync. Moving from the previous Pulp Sync service, iCloud will automatically keep feeds, pages, and shelf items in sync across the iPad and Mac. For testing purposes, I updated to Pulp 2.5 on the Mac, configured my virtual newspaper, and saved a couple of items to the app’s shelf using the new browser extension. Once I updated to the new 1.5 version on the iPad, the first launch of the app made me wait around 30 seconds for an automatic import of my data, and I couldn’t experience any errors of sort. iCloud sync has been fast and reliable in my tests, with Pulp deleting and adding sources between the iPad and Mac app within seconds. The addition of synced shelf items is welcome, too, as it offers a simple way to save articles “for later” – albeit the app also comes with direct integration for Pocket, Instapaper, and Readability.

Pulp 1.5 for iPad and Pulp 2.5 for Mac are two gorgeous, solid, and clever updates. Pulp has always wanted to provide a solution in between the fast-paced nature of RSS and the laid-back reading experience of magazines, and the new version builds on that foundation, enhancing it with iCloud sync and a useful, constantly up-to-date Home page.

Pulp for iPad is available at $2.99 on the App Store; Pulp for Mac is $4.99 on the Mac App Store.