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Review: TouchArcade for iPhone

Part of Arnold Kim’s other sites, AppShopper and MacRumors, TouchArcade is one of my favorite weblogs: I  read it every day. Whether I’m reading about upcoming iOS games, news, or searching the forums, TouchArcade is simply one of the best resources for iOS gaming available. They’ve been around for 4 years, and for a website that’s a lifetime. I jumped when I was asked to help be part of the beta team for an iPhone version, and today, TouchArcade has released their very own iPhone app with the help of Flexibits and Bartelme Design.

When you first launch the TouchArcade app you will see a featured story on top along with a navigation list below for News & Reviews, Top Reviews, Hot New Games, Watch List, and Forums. On the right is a flickable list of their Hot New Games section with icon previews, and this is one of my favorite features of the app. If you’re looking for a great game to purchase this is the first place to look, and the list is constantly being updated too.

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Invy Is An Iconic Date Planner For iPhone

What do you prefer when it comes to apps: functionality or ease of use? Most people would answer “a combination of both, a good compromise”. It might be true in many cases, but sometimes the balance between those two sides is not the right goal, and to meet a specific niche you need to move into more extreme directions. Invy, a new iPhone app by Bread & Pepper, helps you to set up meetings or dates and inviting friends, family or colleagues to them, and it’s a good example how such a hard decision can turn out pretty well.

Creating appointments and inviting other people to them is nothing new; it’s more or less integrated in any sophisticated calendar or even mail application. Because of this, often developers cannot focus on functionality while creating new apps in this area anymore; they either need to create a gorgeous design to convince users to buy their product, or they need to make one specific feature a must-have. Here lies the reason why I chose writing about Invy: it has got both.

When firing up Invy for the first time, you’ll need to register your email address from which you’ll send out invites to other people. To create a new event, just tap the create button at the top, set the date’s description and location, invite recipients, set day and time and hit send. Within seconds, everyone you invited will get the same information in their inbox (emails are designed similarly to the app; see image below). Invitees can accept or refuse to participate: those who have Invy installed on their iPhone will be brought to the app, while everyone else can confirm the date via the Invy website.

All your set dates are displayed in a very elaborately designed list view in the app’s main window. By tapping one of them you can investigate all the attached details and how many people already answered the invite. If you set up the date, you can modify and fix it, and Invy automatically saves the appointment in iCal — and thus on every device with iCloud sync. Invy is intuitive and serves exactly one need: setting appointments and dates easily, and with style.

Responsible for Invys good UX is its clean and bright design, which is centered around the use of big, colored sans-serif typography and white background to automatically focus on the most important information: the dates you set. The big date descriptions change their color when they go through the process of sent invites, answered invites and fixed dates moving from a light blue (just sent) to red (fixed and saved date). This doesn’t just look good, it also ensures a fast recognition of whether a date already is important to you or not.

So Invy is a great date planning app, but nothing more. It has a really focused feature set, and serves those features in a fast, easy and good-looking way. I recommend Invy as a way to plan dates within small groups of people, like in businesses or families, especially when all members have got an iPhone and are likely willed to pay $1.99 for Invy on the App Store.

Mirroring Multiple iOS Devices To A Mac: Comparing AirServer and Reflection

In my review of AirFoil Speakers Touch 3.0, I wrote about AirPlay:

Ever since developers started reverse-engineering the AirPlay protocol that Apple introduced with iOS 4.2 in November 2010, we have seen all kinds of possible implementations of Apple’s streaming technology being ported to a variety of devices, for multiple purposes and scenarios. From tools to turn Macs into AirPlay receivers for audio, video, iOS Mirroring sessions, then a combination of all them, to more or less Apple-approved “AirPlay audio receivers” sold in the App Store, then pulled, then released in Cydia, the past two years have surely been interesting for AirPlay.

The past few months have indeed seen a surge of AirPlay-compatible desktop utilities and apps that take advantage of Apple’s technology for audio and video streaming. From games enhanced with AirPlay to enable new controls and interactions, to several desktop utilities that are now connecting Macs and Apple TVs with AirPlay, there’s plenty of options out there to beam images and audio to devices running iOS or OS X.

AirServer was one of the first applications to bring proper AirPlay support to the Mac, initially only with audio and video, then iOS 5 and Lion, and, around the time Reflection also came out, AirPlay Mirroring. Recently, the AirServer team made some major changes to the way AirServer handles AirPlay Mirroring (our overview) on OS X with multiple iOS devices, so I thought it’d be appropriate to give the app a second try. At the same time, I figured I hadn’t used Reflection much since it came out two months ago; I installed both the latest AirServer and Reflection on my iMac and MacBook Air, and tested multiple iOS devices with AirPlay Mirroring enabled at the same time. Read more

Slow Feeds Brings A Simple, Unique Innovation To RSS Apps

In the oft-abused Death of RSS debate, a common and universal truth is typically forgone: RSS is a standard, not a single entity, and as such its survival or presumed “death” should be related to the services that use it, not the standard itself.

The problem many people have with RSS is roughly the same others have with email: it’s not as real-time as Twitter, and if you don’t keep on tabs on it you can easily get overwhelmed by the onslaught of unread items demanding your constant attention. While in the past few years some amazing apps and technologies have leveraged RSS as a foundation to provide new experiences, little has been done to address the simple problem behind the possible frustration caused by RSS: that RSS can be useful for sites with fewer but focused items, but it can get annoying (like email) with hundreds of unread items. Is it possible to retain the usefulness of RSS, while ensuring its catch-all nature is relegated to a level that avoids frustration?

Slow Feeds by Stefan Pauwels is an iPhone app that does one thing well: it separates “slow” from high-volume feeds, and it lets you check out both within a single interface. It fixes a simple problem with a unique, yet totally obvious approach: it understands the convenience of RSS for either “low” and “high” volume websites, and doesn’t treat them equally.

Once logged in with your Google Reader account, Slow Feeds (whose icon is very appropriate) will take a couple of minutes on first launch to “understand” which feeds are usually slow, which ones have many posts per day, then it will break them up into two categories: Slow Feeds and High Volume. A third tab in the bottom bar is also dedicated to Starred items.

The first tab, Slow Feeds, lets you switch between All or Unread items for sites with few content every day: for instance, this is where I can find things like the iFixit Blog, Minimal Mac, or Beautiful Pixels. These are sites that I am interested in, but that because of their low-volume nature could sometimes easily get lost in the plethora of unread items (ever wondered why these sites usually don’t publish on Apple keynote day?). The app has been very accurate at picking “slow feeds” for me, going back a few months to older items it knew I might have missed – indeed, thanks to Slow Feeds I rediscovered many articles that I had unintentionally ignored.

The High Volume tab, on the other hand, displays a list of all items from all sites that publish a lot of items every day. In here, I can find MacStories, MacRumors, Daring Fireball, The Loop, and all those other publications that are very active in terms of post frequency. The results have been accurate in here as well, but I think there are some things the app could do better. For one, when compared to “regular” RSS apps like Reeder or Mr. Reader, the High Volume tab is obviously lacking: there are no sorting options, no folders, and the list of items isn’t organized by date. Slow Feeds isn’t meant for this kind of consumption – the app’s purpose is to keep “slowly updated feeds from getting lost in the fast river of news” – but I think some more options wouldn’t hurt.

Similarly, it’d be nice to be able to manually specify feeds that are “low volume”. By default, Slow Feeds automatically calculates the frequency for each feed based on the number of items per feed and time interval, but a manual option could be useful for, say, those sites that don’t typically publish a lot items, but may have exceptions (such as several Apple blogs on a keynote day). Being one of the first releases of the app, I wasn’t expecting to find the same amount of configurable options and settings as in Mr. Reader, but nevertheless, I am looking forward to having more sharing features in the article reading view (which right now only supports Twitter, email, and Instapaper).

Slow Feeds won’t replace your daily RSS app (it doesn’t want to), yet at the same time, I believe it really has a chance of becoming an app many will use alongside their RSS client on a daily basis. Slow Feeds’ core concept is so clever, and so naturally implemented, I am now wondering why, in retrospective, others didn’t come up with it first.

Slow Feeds is $2.99 on the App Store.

Reading News With Hacker News ∗

Hacker News from YCombinator is a reliable and very active source of information for all things geeky. Users collect noteworthy technology news articles from all over the web, comment and discuss on them, and vote to create a top list sorted by popularity. Following the trends of the community by joining the network or just regularly visiting the site and clicking through new articles is interesting for anyone who wants to know a bit more about the latest web technologies and how to help enhancing them, from entrepreneurs to developers. In my opinion though, the HN website is cluttered, and the typography is a mess. Maximilian Mackh solved many of these issues by recently publishing his iPhone client for Hacker News. Read more

Track 8 Brings The Metro Experience To An iPad Music Player

At what point do we cross the line that separates insipid clones from genuine inspiration, uncomfortable hybrids from interesting experiments? Track 8, a $1.99 music player by Ender Labs, tries to imagine what listening to music on the iPad would be like using Microsoft’s Metro UI experience.

Following the basic principles of Swiss graphic design, the Metro design language is focused on getting rid of “superfluous” design elements such as buttons and toolbars to turn the content – words, pictures, videos – into the user interface to manipulate on screen. Originally conceived on Windows Phone 7 and being updated as the foundation of the future Windows 8 OS, Metro has struck a chord with the design community thanks to its elegant approach to modern typography, dynamic layouts, and intrinsic originality compared to other mobile platforms. But does Metro make sense as an app running on iOS, the polar opposite of Microsoft’s studies in terms of UI design and experience?

Ender Labs isn’t afraid to say that they wanted to see how Metro would work on the iPad, without excuses. So while I’ll leave the task of determining whether this is right to someone else – I sure hope Microsoft doesn’t come knocking at Ender Labs’ door for any reason – I want to to focus on Track 8 the app for iPad you’d probably interested in checking out.

Fetching music directly from the native iOS music app, Track 8 displays four tabs (home, artists, albums, playlists) on a clean canvas that emphasizes typography, solid colors, and album artworks instead of icons, buttons, and scrollbars. In pure Metro fashion, the content becomes the interface you are manipulating: tapping on an album will advance a level “into” the content of that album, and tapping again on a song will bring up the now playing view with a larger cover art, and only some basic buttons to play, pause, shuffle, and repeat. Everything is kept as minimal as possible: the volume and progress controls are two simple flat, solid bars you can slide; to go back to a previous view, you tap on a large back button in the upper left corner that “snaps back” with a nice fading animation. To move horizontally between content, you swipe.

Track 8 comes with some appearance settings to customize the look of the Metro experience on iOS. The background color can be set to light or dark, and 10 additional options are provided to set the “accent color” for selected content and UI items. The app has some wallpapers (including linen), and you can also opt to display artist backgrounds, which are pulled from Last.fm and saved in the app’s local cache for when you won’t have an Internet connection. To keep the app in line with Metro’s elegant and uncluttered paradigm, I turned artist backgrounds off and chose a simple light wallpaper.

Track 8 works and it looks gorgeous, but it is undeniable that is an app that’s not meant to be on this platform. Not just for mere aesthetics – as an iPad app, Track 8 contradicts the very underlying principles of iOS interaction and navigation. The fact that tapping on sections at the top, for instance, gets you into a single level of interface is the antithesis of the iOS tab bar, which always allows you to switch with one tap between multiple, even nested sections. Or again, alphabetical lists: on iOS, letters are placed on the right side of a scrollable view, allowing you to quickly jump to a specific letter. With Track 8, artists and albums are grouped alphabetically, sorted horizontally in a grid, and tapping on a specific letter will display a popup grid to quickly jump to any other letter.

Track 8 doesn’t want to be an iOS app by design, and whilst this can be an advantage as long as loyalty to the Metro design language goes, it is also the app’s biggest shortcoming when it comes to expecting certain elements and patterns that are standards on iOS.

Track 8 won’t win an Apple Design Award. It won’t revolutionize the market of third-party music players for iPad, and it sure is an experiment that doesn’t aim at pushing the limits of iOS forward. But that’s not to say Track 8 doesn’t look great and work well on the iPad: if you’re a fan of Metro and would like to see that kind of experience in app that also happens to have a real functionality, Track 8 is your best option. You can get it at $1.99 on the App Store.

Building Our MacStories Wiki with VoodooPad 5

In the past three years writing for MacStories, I have stumbled across several applications that I really wanted to try, but eventually put off because I didn’t have time to learn more about their functionalities and purposes.

VoodooPad by Flying Meat – Gus Mueller’s indie development shop, also behind my favorite OS X image editor, Acorn – has been one of those apps for the longest time. I’m all for supporting independent developers, and I believe that, at some point, I even purchased a VoodooPad 4.x license and the iOS version “because you never know”. I wanted to learn and use VoodooPad, but I kept reverting to Evernote, Dropbox, and you know what else. When I read about the improvements and new features coming in VoodooPad 5.0 and got invited by Gus to test the major release, I realized two things: that I needed to learn more about VoodooPad without further delays, and that version 5.0 revealed the fleeting purpose I had been missing from my quick skims through VoodooPad’s website.

Some apps are complex, but they are not complicated. The subtle difference between these mechanics is exemplified by VoodooPad, which is presented as a “personal wiki app”, but that, in reality, is so much more. In fact, starting with powerful wiki capabilities as the app’s foundation, VoodooPad can be used for just about anything as long as you can type or come up with ways to enter information into the app. All this while staying simple, intuitive, and powerful at the same time, hiding advanced functionalities under the hood alongside those little details connoisseur of great Mac software can recognize and appreciate.

If you’re looking for a list of features in VoodooPad 5.0, the website and documentation pages are the perfect place to read through. Flying Meat is well known among Mac veterans for its painstakingly accurate and in-depth docs (possibly only second to Bare Bones Software), so make sure to check them out if you want explanations and answers. In this post, I thought it’d be fun to briefly illustrate how we are using VoodooPad at MacStories, and how I think the app can make sense alongside other text-oriented syncing services like Dropbox editors and Evernote.

VoodooPad is a personal wiki-building application at its core, and we’re using it at MacStories exactly for that. Read more

Create Multiple Mail Signatures On Your iPhone with Signatures

When it comes to mail conversations, it’s often difficult to find the right signature for the mail you’re about to send. You obviously cannot send a mail to your grandma ending up with “Kindest Regards, Lukas Hermann – Staff writer for MacStories.net”. I mean, of course you can, but she may misconceive that a bit. To avoid uncomfortable answers or telephone calls from her, mail apps for the Mac most of the time offer the ability to create several signatures and add them to a mail with a single click. On the iPhone, you can only create one signature, it completely lacks of this ability although it’s Mac companion has this feature. Signatures from Crowded Road fills this gap of functionality with a great UI and many useful features. Read more

My New Dropbox “Quick Note-Taking” App: Drafts 1.1

In my review of Drafts 1.0, I wrote:

Drafts is neither a text editor nor a minimal Twitter client. Drafts is a frictionless way to capture and save ideas that also happens to be integrated with system functions and applications you may be already using to elaborate on those ideas. Drafts can be used as an inspirational notepad to store the genius idea you have while you’re brewing coffee, or when you’re busy writing something else (just fire up Drafts, and quickly dictate your text if you have an iPhone 4S). I would like to see an even faster way to email text (like Captio or Note 2 Self do) as well as support for Evernote and more text-based iOS apps in a future update, so here’s to hoping the feedback on this initial version will be strong enough to encourage Greg Pierce, the developer of Drafts and Terminology (which the app also supports for definitions), to consider more functionalities and an iPad counterpart.

And from my Dropbox Writing Workflow, about the service I use to save “quick snippets of text” into Dropbox:

I am not always writing long form content. In fact, most of the time I am simply saving ideas and short sentences in Dropbox. The web service I use to quickly get bits of text as .txt files into Dropbox is Send To Dropbox. Using my “Attachments” folder, Send To Dropbox connects via OAuth to my Dropbox account and gives me a unique email address I can email stuff to.

Drafts 1.1, released today, delivers in the two areas I used to find myself dabbling in: quick notes and Dropbox. Aside from a new icon by Wet Frog Studios, some minor UI refinements, and better feedback for executed actions, Drafts 1.1 comes with direct Dropbox integration to let you easily save a draft with one tap into your Dropbox account. Drafts will save notes as timestamped .txt files, meaning that, if you’re clever enough and want to automate your quick note-taking workflow, you could build rules in Hazel to look for specific timestamps and content inside the Apps/Drafts folder in Dropbox.

Personally, Drafts 1.1 fills a particular void in my workflow – a native iPhone app whose sole purpose is to save quick bits of text as single .txt files in Dropbox. With Drafts 1.1 and TextDrop, I can reclaim control of my drafts without being forced to use Send To Dropbox (which still has the obvious advantage of working anywhere). I like how I can type text into Drafts 1.1, hit the Dropbox sharing button, forget about it, and then access my text snippets with TextDrop, iOS file managers like ReaddleDocs and GoodReader (which allow you to directly edit text or “open in” other apps), or my OS X Dropbox folder.

Drafts 1.1, however, doesn’t just bring a few enhancements, bug fixes, and Dropbox support. For instance, third-party app integration has been supercharged with direct support for Sparrow (text will be passed along as email body, and the cursor will be automatically placed in the Subject field), Messages, and Simplenote. Even better, Drafts now lets you configure the apps and actions you want to keep visible in the sharing list with a dedicated menu; installed apps are automatically recognized, whilst supported-but-not-installed ones have a link back to the App Store (the App Store link button could use the same fresh coat of UI paint the icon received). You can enable and disable actions with a double tap.

Typically, 1.1 updates don’t fundamentally change the nature of an app, as they improve on existing features and fix glaring omissions of the first release. For me, Drafts 1.1, with the addition of Dropbox and more stability, feels like an all-new app that now sits in my iPhone dock to quickly save .txt into Dropbox. If you liked the functionalities of Drafts 1.0 and were waiting for more, I highly recommend Drafts 1.1, available on the App Store today at $0.99.