This Week's Sponsor:

Dropzone 5

Improve your Drag-and-Drop Workflow

Posts in reviews

Camera+ 3.0 Review

Few iPhone apps have managed to substantially improve on the functionalities offered by Apple in its core system apps. Tap tap tap’s Camera+, a popular alternative to Apple’s Camera app, is one of them, and the 3.0 version released today takes a major leap in turning Camera+ into a more powerful solution to shoot, edit, and share photos online, as well as providing a solid foundation other developers can integrate their apps with.

The thing about Camera+ is that its lead developer and creator, John Casasanta, knows what people want from an iPhone app, and understands the rules behind viral marketing for software sold on the App Store. In spite of a 4-month ban that forced Camera+ out of the App Store due to a functionality the developers shouldn’t have hidden without telling Apple, the app has been an example of modern success in the App Store, granting its developers a renowned position in the top charts with millions of copies sold worldwide. But it’s not just about clever marketing (Casasanta also runs MacHeist, a website dedicated to promoting deals on Mac software that has amassed an incredible amount of followers in the past years). Camera+ is a very well-done app – from the polished user interface to the features it adds on top of Apple’s standard camera-related functionalities, Camera+ has become many users’ go-to camera app thanks to its enhanced view options, filters and effects, and elegant sharing capabilities.

With Camera+ 3.0, a free update for existing users, tap tap tap wants to refine every aspect of the app, whilst opening the door to third-party devs with APIs to offer Camera+’s features into other apps. Read more

OnCue 5.0 Brings Powerful Music Queue Features To iOS

These days, most of my music consumption happens on Rdio. The term “consumption” isn’t there because that’s how providers like to present content: I consume albums and artists that I discover online. However, for as much as I’m completely hooked to paying a monthly fee to get access to a (virtually) unlimited amount of music, there are albums that I still have to keep synced locally through iTunes. Either because Rdio applies some curious restrictions on several artists from Europe or because these artists choose not to make their music available for streaming (ask Coldplay), I have resorted to keeping a portion of my music synced on the devices I own (32 GB iPhone 4S and iPad 2, soon to be new iPad). And when I want to play songs from this “mini library” I sync, I stumble upon the same problem I initially wrote about last year: Apple’s Music app doesn’t let me create queues, and I loathe creating playlists for all possible scenarios my music listening habits may fall into. Just like last year, Dan Pouradi’s OnCue comes to the rescue, this time with a completely re-engineered version that works with iOS 5, and sports a new UI. Read more

Quick Review: Steps

Nearly a month ago, Cody reviewed Clear. It was a new todo app from Realmac Software and Impending, and we called the app “delightful and clever” thanks to its refreshing take on how a todo app could work. Around that time I was let into the beta of another new todo app for the iPhone, and for the past month I’ve been using it intermittently — between giving Clear a go myself, using Things, and using nothing (as I so frequently revert to). That new todo app, Steps, debuted on the App Store last week and it shares many similarities to Clear - particularly in its minimalistic design and strong colour scheme.

Whilst preparing this review, I found myself in a bit of a dilemma. See, I kept constantly and subconsciously comparing Steps with Clear. As I said, they are quite similar because they both target the segment of the todo app market which aims to be super simple and minimalist. I felt as if I wrote this review as a comparison between the two, I would belittle the accomplishments of Steps, because whilst I think it’s a great little app, I also like the “delightfulness” of Clear a lot. But I think because the two apps are so similar in purpose and goal, it would be remiss of me to just ignore the excellence of Clear. So jump the break to see how Steps compares and how the two apps do diverge in some details.

Read more

Reddit Client Alien Blue for iPad Receives Major 2.0 Update

When I’m not writing, reading, or talking to my team, one of the things I like to do online is casually check on Reddit for the latest meme, links to interesting news, or more serious discussion that can only take place thanks to Reddit’s unique nature and community. And when I’m not using my computer, which is “most of the time” these days, I like to do so using Jason Morrisey’s Alien Blue, a Reddit client for iOS that I recently re-reviewed in its newest iPhone version, and that today received a major 2.0 update on the iPad.

Just like the 2.5 update for iPhone, Alien Blue HD 2.0 includes several interface changes to make the Reddit browsing experience more pleasant, as well as various new features that take advantage of the iPad’s larger screen. For instance, Alien Blue HD is already Retina-enabled for the new iPad, with the exception of launch images, which will be updated soon. But the biggest change in this version, new coat of interface paint aside, is the new panel-based navigation that allows you to seamlessly move through Alien Blue’s main sidebar – which lists Reddit sections and subreddits – and posts, comments, and web views. Inspired by Twitter for iPad’s panel-based UX, but much simpler to use, Alien Blue lets you swipe through panels to move around in the interface, or simple pinch on these panels to dismiss them. In fact, the entire app has been tweaked to allow for more gestures, as listed below:

  • Double-tap header for fullscreen
  • Hold-tap on Posts list to show post options
  • (Alternative) 2-finger swipe to show post options
  • 2-finger tap to upvote items
  • 3-finger tap to downvote items
  • 2-finger left swipe over comments to collapse to root
  • Drag Posts list up to load more

I’ve found myself using the double-tap and 2-finger tap gestures a lot, and I think they contribute to making the app faster and easier to use. A visual guide for gestures is available in the Settings screen as well.

There are several improvements and optimizations that found their way in this 2.0 update. The app now supports larger thumbnails, and you can view videos alongside comments in any thread. The post and comment interfaces have been redesigned, alongside the new pull-to-refresh gesture that works similarly to its iPhone counterpart (the subtle animation is pretty amazing). Image links and YouTube videos are now displayed more elegantly, and a new “Optimal” setting for web views enables webpages to scale intelligently to fit Alien Blue’s window. There’s more: you can now delete posts, and links to subreddits open directly within Alien Blue. The app sports Evernote integration to let you save posts in any of your notebooks, and you can check out a submitter’s details right from a post you’re viewing. There are new tags for NSFW posts, and Facebook and Twitter sharing have been fixed. There are dozens of little improvements and fixes in Alien Blue HD 2.0, so I recommend you check out the release notes for the complete list.

More importantly, I like how Alien Blue’s experience is still intact in spite of the interface changes and new navigation schemes. You can still switch to Canvas view to browse images as large thumbnails, and there are several themes to choose from in the Settings. The new UI doesn’t add weight to the app in terms of performance, as Alien Blue still scrolls smoothly and updates fast on the iPad 2.

Alien Blue HD 2.0 offers a rich and intuitive Reddit experience in a native app that comes with many options to interact with Reddit content and links submitted to the site. Even if you don’t spend hours on Reddit every day, the app still offers an incredibly polished experience that I recommend you consider if you’re planning on browsing Reddit from your iPad.

Alien Blue HD 2.0 is available at $3.99 on the App Store.

iA Writer for iPhone Review

A few months ago, I decided that it was time for me to start a personal blog. I have been writing for MacStories for almost three years now, but I’ve never had “a place” to share my personal thoughts that wouldn’t fit in 140 characters or less. So as I was pondering the decision of trying to manage a separate, personal blog to share links and longer opinion pieces that I didn’t simply want to be short bursts on Twitter, I also decided that I would write such weblog exclusively from my iPad. The experiment has been a success so far, and that’s largely thanks to iA Writer, which starting today is also available on the iPhone.

Released as a universal update a few minutes ago on the App Store, I have been trying iA Writer for iPhone for the past few days, and I’m pleased to say Information Architects managed to squeeze (almost) everything that makes iA Writer great on the iPad and Mac (our coverage) into the iPhone’s smaller screen. Not only does iA Writer look great on the Retina display – it’s also functional and easy to use.

There isn’t much to say about iA Writer if you’re familiar with the iPad and Mac versions. It’s a minimalist take on plain text writing that focuses on letting you write without distractions with great typography, and only the essential features. There’s no cluttering interface with too many options. If most text editors and writing tools want you to feel connected with the web by adding social sharing functionalities, search look-ups, and various integrations with different services, iA Writer wants you to feel disconnected from the Internet’s noise to reconnect exclusively with what’s in front of you: text. Your words.

It’s called iA Writer for a reason – it’s about you, the writer, and the app, the digital writer. Everything else is secondary. That’s how I see this app.

This concept has been ported well to the iPhone. iA Writer can sync documents with iCloud and Dropbox across devices, and both are fairly reliable at keeping changes up to date and ready to be modified. Dropbox, as usual, can be slightly more “manual” in that iCloud is “invisible” in pushing and receiving changes automatically, all the time. Fortunately, iA Writer for iPhone has also a sync button, so if you’re not sure about the latest change fetched from the app, you can always hit Refresh and check that you’re getting the latest version of a document before you start writing. In my tests, iA Writer for iPhone was able to push changes to the same document already open on other devices, and I’m pretty satisfied with how iCloud sync turned out on iOS and OS X.

The core of iA Writer’s experience has been preserved in making the leap to the iPhone, but something’s got to give when you’re porting an app to the smaller screen. Either that, or iA simply didn’t have time to squeeze in more features – I don’t know, but as it stands now iA Writer for iPhone lacks Focus mode, and support for visual Markdown previews, which are both supported on the iPad and Mac. The iPhone app does, though, feature a custom keyboard with often-used keys placed in an extra row that also contains a drag handle to dismiss it (I love this aspect of the app), and arrows to navigate. The typing view of iA Writer 1.5 is now full-screen, which I think is incredibly better on iOS devices than being forced to always see window chrome. I do wish there was a gesture to quickly close a document without having to pull down the keyboard first, and I would like to see character count and reading time become available on the iPhone as well. I’m a big fan of the app’s separate storage for iCloud and Dropbox.

Ultimately, it comes down to the writing experience, and iA Writer excels at this because it is an app that wants you write more by seeing less. This first version of the iPhone app might not be as powerful as its Mac counterpart, but it sure is a pleasure to look at on the Retina display as what really matters, in the end, is that you’re looking at your own words, and nothing else.

iA Writer 1.5 is now available at $0.99 on the App Store.

Favs: The Mac App I Wanted For My Internet Favorites

Favs, a new app for Mac I initially wrote about when it was in beta in February, is now available on the Mac App Store. And I don’t say this very often, but Favs is exactly one of those things I was looking for, and needed, as I had wondered why no one on the Internet had come up with it yet. In my article, I explained the main concept of the app:

A few weeks ago, I tweeted I’d like to see some sort of Twitter client with its only focus being on Favorites — I keep Twitter open all day, and I save a lot of links. Prior to ending up in my Evernote or Pinboard accounts, the tweets I want to “save for later” are marked as favorites, which, I believe, provide an easy way to use a built-in Twitter functionality for general-purpose “bookmarks” that I may or may not consider for a post or more serious bookmarking in a second service. As you can see, I have a lot of favorites. The same is true for other services I use on a daily basis, such as Google Reader, Vimeo, YouTube, or Instagram: I like to be able to “star”, “like” and mark things as favorite so a) the service knows the stuff I’m interested in and perhaps will leverage this data sometimes in the future or b) perhaps other apps will. And while I’m still waiting for the ultimate app that looks at your Internet favorites and delivers content intelligently to you every day (albeit Zite is on the right path), it turns out someone has built a functional and nice-looking desktop aggregator called Favs.

The app is mostly unchanged from the latest public betas, but there are some notable additions here and there. For one, the updated list of supported sources now includes:

  • Delicious
  • Dribbble
  • Facebook
  • Flattr
  • Flickr
  • Github
  • Google Reader
  • Instagram
  • Instapaper
  • Pinboard
  • Readability
  • Read It Later
  • StackOverflow
  • Twitter
  • Vimeo
  • YouTube
  • Zootool

Coming from the beta, the sidebar icons also seem more polished, the animations a little faster. As you can see, Favs is yet another app that uses Tweetie’s old navigation concept for switching between sections; for as much as I can’t stand ideas being shared around between apps without considering an app’s unique nature, I think some elements do work across different software, and become standards.

Favs can be viewed in normal mode, with a web view for your Internet favorites on the right, or in compact mode. I particularly appreciate the latter, as you can then use Quick Look (hit the space bar or CMD + Y) to preview items in seconds. This works for articles, images, videos – anything you can mark as favorite online becomes an item in Favs.

Another nice feature of Favs is the tag cloud. If you save a lot of items online like I do, it’s likely that you’d be interested in a way to later search for a specific entry within all those articles and Instagrams. Whilst I use Greplin to do most of the heavy lifting for me, I like Favs’ basic tag and search features – Favs is capable of fetching a lot of items through APIs, and keeping a searchable list of old favorites is a welcome addition.

There are a few things I’d like to see in a future version of Favs. More keyboard shortcuts, for example, and a revamped sharing system that allows me to easily pass links to other services, like Reeder does. Right now, Favs’ sharing features are limited, but you can always rely on Copy Link and Services to automate the process of sharing links. Last, as I previously wrote, I think an iOS version of this would be fantastic, especially on the iPad.

Services like Instapaper and Pinboard empower you to “read later” and “bookmark” the things you like. Favs runs at a higher level, collecting favorites from other services that already enable you to save favorites. As I said, this kind of app is a web nerd’s dream come true for me, so I recommend you check out Favs at $4.99 on the Mac App Store.

Path 2.1

Released earlier today on the App Store following a media event where CEO Dave Morin gave out some interesting tidbits about the company, Path 2.1 is a substantial update to the social networking app that aims at build a beautiful journal of our daily lives. Sarah Lacy at PandoDaily has liveblogged the most interesting details: over 100 million moments have been shared on Path, with over 1 billion pieces of “feedback” on them (I assume these include comments and reactions); Path is announcing an API for third-party developers to integrate their services and apps with, and Nike is an initial partner (the API is private for now). The Verge is also reporting that Path has listened to the suggestion of hashing users’ data, and will do so in an upcoming 2.1.1 release.

What we have today is Path 2.1 – I have tried the new version, and it’s pretty good. I haven’t been able to test Nike integration as I’m not a user, but I’ve taken the new music recognition functionality for a spin. Similarly to how Shazam works, Path 2.1 lets you hold up your iPhone’s mic to a music source, and wait a few seconds for the app to contact an online service (in Path’s case, Gracenote) and return the title of the song alongside other information (album, artist, etc). Path’s implementation of this is unsurprisingly great-looking, but Gracenote’s database isn’t nearly as powerful as Shazam’s. For instance, the app recognized The Shins and Coldplay, but failed fetch The Uprising and Tell Me What It’s Worth. Overall, I like the interface of this new music feature; I hope more databases will be added in the future.

Path 2.1 also comes with improvements to existing lenses and a new one, called Pow. I have never liked Path’s approach to filters and custom lenses, but I’ll admit the ones in this new version look better. What I do like is the new control for exposure and focus, which, unlike many apps, makes it extremely clear what you are moving on screen.

Path 2.1 is a good update – here’s to hoping Path will stick around long enough to get more friends of mine to use it. You can get version 2.1 here.

iPhoto for iOS Review

iPhoto for iOS was released on the App Store earlier today, and after an enthusiastic introduction at Apple’s media event in San Francisco, the latest photo editing app from Cupertino received a controversial “welcome” on various blogs and Twitter streams as users got their hands on the all-new interface and photo management system. So what’s all the fuss about iPhoto for iOS?

I have been trying the app on my iPad 2 and iPhone 4S (running iOS 5.1, of course, as it’s a requirement) for the past few hours, and I think that it is very powerful. As I’ll illustrate in a bit, Apple did manage to squeeze some advanced photo editing and refinement technologies in the mobile version of iPhoto, putting it on the same level if not above iPhoto for Mac when it comes to editing, making quick adjustments, and interacting with your photos. Once mastered, the new gestures and tap commands can be quite powerful, although the app can have a steep learning curve. I also believe, however, that iPhoto for iOS suffers from a serious file management problem, in that it’s the best example of iOS’ lack of a centralized file system where apps are able to easily “talk” to each other and share files or modifications to them.

I want to get this out of my system before I get to the (very) good stuff. If you were hoping to see Apple coming up with an effortless way of importing photos avoiding duplicates and manual management, well, I’m sorry, you’ll be disappointed with iPhoto for iOS. This version of iPhoto is yet another data silo that is self-contained, and won’t simply “sync” the changes it makes to photos out of its closed environment.

I say “simply”, because there are exceptions in iPhoto for iOS, as it doesn’t use the exact same system of iPhoto for Mac when it comes to finding photos on your device. Because iOS devices come with a systemwide “Camera Roll” that’s accessible by other apps, Apple engineers had to make sure iPhoto could access such location – and here’s where I started to run into issues. Read more

ListBook Goes Universal, Adds iCloud Sync

When I reviewed the first, iPhone-only version of ListBook from noidentity last year, I called it ”a good alternative to Apple’s Notes app for most iPhone users”. In the past 12 months, however, Apple shipped iOS 5, a major revision of its mobile operating system that, among other things, includes a native list-making app called Reminders. The writing was on the wall for developers of third-party list apps: Apple likes to “borrow” ideas from successful applications every once in a while, and simple todo lists are just something too common to ignore for a possible system integration. As usual after Apple comes out with its own take on a previously third party-only idea, many rush to declare Product X has been “sherlocked” by Apple. It happens every time. The opposite is quite true: Apple’s take on such ideas and workflows often creates an even bigger market for developers, raising the public’s awareness on a particular kind of software, leading more people to seek out alternatives and different takes from other developers.
The new ListBook, released today, falls exactly under this category. With a simple interface, lists, and iCloud sync, one could easily think it’s a Reminders clone with a price tag on top of it (the app is sold at $1.99 on the App Store). As I mentioned above, those looking for a different take on Reminders – which will also gain a desktop counterpart on Mountain Lion – will be pleased to find in ListBook some clever features implemented in a way that makes switching between the iPhone and iPad version as effortless as iCloud allows.

ListBook makes lists. On the iPhone, these lists are accessible from a button in the top left corner that you might have seen elsewhere recently;  on the iPad, the app uses a split interface that’s quite attractive and works fine.

Lists can be assigned an icon (the selection is nice), and you can disable Home screen badges on a list basis. Each list shows how many items you entered in total (tasks) and how many of them haven’t been completed (open). Because ListBook isn’t strictly GTD, but wants to combine text-based lists with a simple todo management system, completed items will stay in a list until you delete them permanently – a Filter button lets you view only “open tasks” if you prefer such view. This view setting, alongside lists and todos, will sync across devices using iCloud, and in my tests sync has been fairly responsive – it takes only a few seconds to see new items appear on another device, even if the app is already in the foreground.

Overall, I think ListBook 3.0 is a great update and the right path to follow for the developers, especially with iCloud, which would open the door to a possible Mac app in the future. If you like well-crafted user interfaces (the icon is also very polished and not blue or red), a simpler approach to list creation and supporting indie developers, you should give ListBook a try – it’s $1.99 on the App Store. For people who are just looking for a basic todo list app that syncs across devices, however, hitting the Buy button on this one might be a little hard. Apple’s Reminders does more, is integrated with Macs and PCs, and it’s free. Those users will be more than fine using Reminders, and I don’t blame them – Apple’s utility covers various aspects of list management very well, it’s got Siri support, and will gain a desktop version this summer. If, for some reason, you don’t like Reminders, or are simply intrigued by third-party apps in general, you should still try the new ListBook – it’s very nice and gets the job done.