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QuickCal 3.1 Released with Improved Recognition Engine, iCloud Reminders, Autocomplete Feature

I love the start of a new year because it is a great time to revamp your productivity workflow. You can re-evaluate what tools you use and even buy new apps completely free of guilt. It is no secret that the cornerstone of any good system is the calendar but it can be difficult to force yourself to create calendar events on a regular basis. Well, the folks behind QuickCal have just released a great update to get you back in the routine of managing your calendar.

One major improvement in QuickCal 3.1 is the re-written recognition engine that the app uses to understand natural language input. QuickCal has no structured syntax for adding events and reminders which actually makes adding items extremely flexible. When typing in the event you no longer have to start with the event title, you actually have the option of starting with a time, duration, location, or title and QuickCal will almost always get it right. I have also noticed a dramatic improvement in QuickCal’s ability to correctly parse out event locations which is something I have had trouble with in previous versions. Regardless of the order in which you type out the information, QuickCal does an excellent job figuring out the details for you. Adding events to your calendar without worrying about correct syntax is incredibly powerful. The only way QuickCal could get any faster at creating calendar events is if it actually finished sentences for you.

oh, wait…

Have I mentioned their new autocomplete feature? Autocomplete does exactly what you expect it to do. As you are typing common words, QuickCal gives you suggestions of words it thinks you might be typing. To accept the autocompletion you can just hit the tab key and continue on typing. It will even pickup on your most frequently used words and auto-suggest them in the future. After only 3 or 4 reminders relating to my wife Leslie, QuickCal was finishing her name for me. It is awesome. In fact, I am finding it so useful that I am not sure how I had ever used QuickCal without this feature.

Perhaps the greatest improvement to QuickCal is its integration with iCloud Reminders. A reminder is now added to your default Reminders list and shows up in the iOS 5 Reminders app. If the reminder has a date or time then an alarm is also created. This alone is a neat feature but it wasn’t enough to pry me away from the Alfred extension I had created to quickly add simple iOS 5 Reminders. Although as I continued to use the new version of QuickCal, I realized that I could also add items to other lists by simply typing the name of the list. For example, my wife and I share a Groceries list. If I just start typing Gro… it suggests switching to my Groceries list so I can add an item to it. In true QuickCal fashion it does so very intuitively and without effort. It is a great feature that truly increases my dependency on QuickCal. The only drawback is still having to open iCal to trigger an iCloud sync. When CalDAV is supported and I no longer need that extra step, QuickCal will be my ideal iCal replacement.

Check out QuickCal 3.1 and all of its new features on the Mac App Store.

Review: Logitech Tablet Keyboard for iPad

As I mentioned in my post about new apps and tools for 2012, I’ve been playing around with a Logitech Tablet Keyboard for iPad, which is available at $69 through Logitech’s website or $59 on Amazon. The Tablet Keyboard connects to the iPad (or any iOS device) wirelessly over Bluetooth, comes with built-in batteries, a carrying case that can be turned into a stand for the iPad, and media keys that trigger some of the tablet’s functions such as audio controls and Spotlight. Here are my impressions so far.

Normally, I wouldn’t have much to say about a keyboard except for “it’s comfortable” or “I can’t type anything on this”. Fortunately, the Logitech keyboard for iPad fits into the former category, with a sturdy plastic design that feels “premium” when compared to other keyboards available on the market, a good keyboard layout, and a carrying case that’s not as premium as the device but certainly gets its job done. Below, the Italian layout of my Logitech Tablet Keyboard:

As you can see, the keyboard isn’t necessarily “standard” as it’s been designed to include iOS-specific keys like shortcuts for Spotlight search, Home button, volume controls, slideshows, media playback and screen lock/unlock controls. The basic layout is the one of a Mac keyboard, and the function keys can be activated by holding fn. Obviously, this isn’t as intuitive as simply reaching out to the screen with your finger to adjust volume, but if you’re going to work with your iPad using the keyboard, you’ll want to know it’s possible to do more than just type.

Which brings me to this: why would you want a physical keyboard for your iPad when the system one is more than acceptable? I don’t know about you, but I’ve been working mainly from my iPad in the past month, and I found a physical keyboard to be a must-have if you’re serious about getting real, regular writing done in a text editor or word processor. iOS’ multitouch keyboard is fine to fire off quick email replies and tweets (and iOS 5’s new split keyboard helps a lot for “general typing” in every day usage), but I still can’t give up on the allure of plastic QWERTY for long-form content and serious email time. Logitech’s iPad offering fits nicely in my workflow (and Tom Bihn Ristretto Bag): I can get it out of its case, turn it on, wait a few seconds for the iPad to connect (once paired, the Bluetooth connection process is very fast on iPad 2) and start writing. Read more

xScope 3: Measure. Inspect. Test.

Any designer will tell you how important image sizes and spacing are to their craft – graphics, the web, etc.. Measuring each element can take tedious time unless you have all the right tools. There are ‘measuring’ and ‘location’ tools out there, but none work better or have more bells and whistles than Iconfactory’s (and Artis Software) xScope. xScope 3.0 is out today and it brings over 70 new features to its already complete pixel toolkit.

xScope 3.0 (Mac 10.6 and higher) is a huge update to version 2.x with two components: a Mac side and an iOS side for the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. If you feel a little bewildered at first with all these new features, be sure to use the useful in-app help, as it outlines everything and answers many questions. I’ll cover some of the great new highlights of version 3.0.

The most notable feature of xScope 3.0 is the Mirror tool. Remote viewing lets you easily view the contents of any Mac desktop window on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch with the accompanying iOS app (via iTunes, Free). Once xScope for Mac is open, launch the iOS app and it will find your Mac over Wi-Fi and ask you to pair them together.

Once paired, the Pin & Lock tool lets you move the Mac window anywhere, always staying in focus on iOS. The iOS app has a chromeless UI: there’s no overlaid chrome to get in the way while you’re working. Multiple iOS devices can connect and view the same window on a single Mac, which is great for demos or meetings. Read more

Yoink 2.0 Brings Smarter Drag & Drop To Lion

Back in September I reviewed the first version of Yoink, a utility by Eternal Storms Software that greatly enhanced Lion’s drag & drop support by adding a virtual “shelf” to the side of your screen to store temporary files you needed to move elsewhere. From my review:

Yoink is a drag & drop assistant for Lion, in that it provides you with a virtual “safe zone” to temporarily store files — or rather, links to them — you want to move from one location (say your desktop) to another space or full-screen app. Yoink doesn’t “copy” a file, or multiple ones, to its shelf: it only acts as a bridge between the original file, and the destination of the drop.

In its first version, Yoink was primarily meant to provide a better way to move files from the Finder to full-screen apps – that is the reason the app was built with Lion APIs from the ground up. Yoink 1.0 undoubtedly offered a quick and elegant way to move files around apps and desktops in an intuitive manner; Yoink 2.0, released today, is a huge step forward that now allows the app to accept almost any kind of input from OS X, from text to images and web clippings from any app.

In accessing content from apps, Yoink has become more than a simple tool to temporarily store files that need to be moved around full-screen apps – think of  Yoink 2.0 as a secondary, visual clipboard that can accept almost any kind of file you throw at it. In my tests, besides dropping content from apps into Yoink’s shelf, I’ve copied links, text and images from Safari and Chrome, and successfully watched Yoink create text clippings and full copies of the images ready to be pasted anywhere on my Mac, both in the Finder and other apps. Rich text from a web browser is converted to .textclipping once imported in Yoink, and you can easily re-export everything to the Finder, or into another app that accepts text, such as TextEdit or Twitter’s compose window. Want to tweet a famous quote by The Beatles? Drag text into Yoink’s shelf, open your client of choice, and drop your previously copied text. How about quoting someone else’s words on your blog (and this is something I’ve been looking forward to)? Drag text into Yoink, fire up your blog’s editor window, drop text.

Yoink’s new drag & drop system works with almost any app  and any kind of content – you won’t be able to preserve the exact formatting of a rich text document when copying, but it surely works very well as a lightweight solution to quickly save plain text files.

Yoink 2.0 brings a couple more interesting additions besides improved drag & drop. The interface has been redesigned to have more linen and the app can be assigned a keyboard shortcut; more positions for Yoink’s window have been added and files shouldn’t be lost anymore if they’re moved from their original location. One issue I had (and already reported to the developer) was with an alias I moved from Dropbox to my Desktop, which didn’t resolve correctly in Yoink and displayed a permission error. The error is likely happening because of some restrictions from Apple’s sandboxing technology or the fact that the alias came from Dropbox – Yoink 2.0 is capable of resolving aliases and, in fact, it worked fine with a file that was originally stored on my Desktop.

Last, Yoink now comes with File Stacks, a neat way to drag and drop multiple files into Yoink’s window and have the app combine them into one item in the shelf. This can be very handy if you’re dealing with multiple images and PDFs and you want to get them quickly out of the way.

At $2.99 on the Mac App Store, Yoink remains a fantastic way to enhance Lion’s drag & drop with an app that acts as a temporary scratchpad/visual clipboard for content that you want to copy, move elsewhere, or simple save for later. Highly recommended, you can get Yoink here.

Quick Review: Wikibot

Aside from jokes about a name that sounds like a Tapbots app, I’ve been using Wikibot, a Wikipedia client by Avocado Hills, on my iPhone, iPad and Mac regularly, earning a spot on my Mac’s dock as well. Whilst Wikipedia’s website is mostly fine to quickly check on something you don’t know (albeit I’d refrain from lacking particular amounts of knowledge on January 18) and desktop launchers like Alfred made it extremely easy to query the service for anything you need, Wikibot stood out to me because of its clean interface and integrated approach to languages, history and bookmarks.

On the Mac, Wikibot starts up as a minimal window onto Wikipedia’s database with a button in the upper toolbar to display the app through Lion’s full-screen mode, one to load a random article, and a search bar. Search is where you’ll be entering your keywords and there is an option to visualize results as text (title + preview) or just title. You can open multiple tabs (CMD+T), change your preferred language from the menubar item, and “copy link” or “open in browser” via a keyboard shortcut.

The nicest features of Wikibot on the Mac, however, are Favorites, History, Read Later and the overall page design, which as I mentioned above is very uncluttered and clean. Not Articles-clean, but still very readable. As for the other functionalities, you can tell Wikibot to add a page to your favorite items, or access your entire history for all the things you looked up. These options are located in a sidebar, which can also display contents of an article (such as sections and references) and categories (as you can see in Instapaper’s case, “iPad” and “iPhone software”). Favorites can be organized in folders, and it’s easy to add a page to your bookmarks using a keyboard shortcut or drag & drop. If you, however, don’t feel like building a permanent database of bookmarks while you’re using Wikibot, but just want to quickly save a link for later inside the app, you can use the local queue functionality.

At $2.99, Wikibot for Mac is a fine desktop app for Wikipedia meant for those who don’t want to keep lots of tabs open in their default web browsers.

I, however, very much prefer the iOS versions of Wikibot, which work like their Mac counterpart but add iCloud sync for History, Favorites and Settings across devices, intuitive font size controls, visual history, gallery for images, sharing options for Twitter and Facebook and offline caching. Wikibot for iOS is a powerful Wikipedia client with a simple interface, and I’m told iCloud sync will soon come to the desktop as well. I especially like the app on my iPad, where visual search and image galleries have more room to shine and “it just feels right” to spend hours augmenting your knowledge.

Plus, Wikibot for iOS is $0.99 right now, which is a great price. Get it here.

Phraseology for iPad: Write, Remix, and Markdown

You could choose to write in Helvetica Neue, Marker Felt, or Georgia, but Phraseology has a personality all its own that’s best reflected in American Typewriter or Courier. Plenty of text editors on the iPad offer one or both of these font types, but there’s something about Agile Tortoise’s sandy colors and subtle paper-like textures that make Phraseology feel more tangible. It’s the modern equivalent of a typewriter explained through a text editor.

Read more

iPad Handwriting Apps: Penultimate and Noteshelf Receive Major Updates

We often cover Dropbox-enabled text editors and word processors here at MacStories, but we’ve been keeping an eye on handwriting apps as well, a category of software that has seen a huge rise in popularity and user adoption since the release of the iPad. Two personal favorites of mine in this space (and admittedly the biggest players on the App Store, too), Penultimate and Noteshelf, have been recently updated with major new functionalities that dramatically improve the usability and performances of these apps.

Penultimate, which we have covered quite a few times in the past, reached version 3.3 adding direct Dropbox and Evernote integration, Dropbox backups and an “Open In” menu to send notebooks to other installed iOS applications. Penultimate can now send notebooks or individual pages to Dropbox or Evernote; in Evernote, the service’s OCR capabilities for images will make sure your notes will also be fully searchable (that is, unless you really have bad handwriting that OCR can’t analyze). The Dropbox backup option, available in Settings, allows you to always keep the most recent versions of your notes backed up the cloud.

Other improvements in Penultimate 3.3 include bug fixes and possibility of pasting ink copied from other apps (I couldn’t get this to work with either Noteshelf or Bamboo Paper). Overall, Penultimate remains a fantastic iPad handwriting app with one of the finest inks I’ve seen on the platform and now proper cloud-based features to get your notes out of your device. Penultimate is just $0.99 on the App Store.

Noteshelf, another app we’ve covered on MacStories before, has been updated to version 5.0 adding the most requested functionality: text. You can now tap anywhere on the screen, and bring up the iPad’s touch keyboard to start typing text alongside your handwritten notes and sketches. Unlike Penultimate, Noteshelf is jam-packed with features: aside from notebook themes and several page designs (also available in the in-app store), Noteshelf comes with highlighters and smiley faces that can be embedded in a document, page search (limited to typed text) and tagging (new in version 5.0). Starting from the interface, Noteshelf seems to appeal to a different kind of iPad user than Penultimate, one that is looking for many powerful functionality rather than the focused simplicity of Penultimate. Noteshelf undoubtedly comes with many functionalities, and the page toolbar UI can be a little disorienting at first. However, the new features introduced in 5.0 make up for the slightly more cluttered UI, which just needs some time to get used to.

Noteshelf is a very powerful piece of software, available at $4.99 on the App Store.

Quick Review: Consume As An Online Usage Monitor

Consume, a beautiful app by Bjango (iStat Menus, Sideways Racing) is a “versatile usage monitor” that allows you to check on stats for your mobile phone, broadband, and rewards cards, as well as check on package deliveries and various “clubs” supported worldwide. Consume is a beautiful app and from what I hear it works amazingly well in tracking usage for iPhones and iPads; however, I can’t use the app as intended because the carriers I’m subscribed to (3 on my iPhone, TIM on my iPad) aren’t supported by Consume. I’ve always wanted to use Consume, but couldn’t.

Fortunately, with version 2.0 of the app (released a few weeks ago), Bjango has given me a reason to start using the app that I bought last year, hoping that someday 3 and TIM would show up in the list of supported providers. Besides getting a universal version with iPad support and iCloud sync for settings (it’s great), Consume 2 adds better support for package tracking, better handling of multiple accounts, and background provider updating. This means that, combined with the online services already supported in Consume, I’ve found a way to not only simply enjoy the app, but actually make it useful for me.

I use Consume to track shipments, check on my SKY account and available space across all my Gmail accounts, Evernote, and Dropbox. The interface is elegant, simple, and makes it a pleasure to see how much space I’m consuming on Evernote this month (I’m a Premium subscriber). Shipments are laid out with nicely designed icons and menus and, overall, the whole interface of Consume features pretty pixels all over.

Do I wish Consume 2 worked with more Italian carriers? Sure. Maybe someday it will. Right now, I’m just happy I can use this beautiful app with a few functionalities that have a certain usefulness to me.

Consume 2 is $2.99 on the App Store.

Day One for Mac 1.5: iCloud Sync, Markdown, Full-Screen

Following the 1.5 update that brought iCloud sync to iOS earlier this week, journaling application Day One (my review) has been updated on the Mac as well, adding sync with Apple’s iCloud just like its iPhone and iPad counterparts, but also bringing several additional functionalities, especially in the text editing and exporting areas.

Day One 1.5 can read and save files to iCloud automatically, in the background, all the time. As on iOS, existing entries from Dropbox will be merged with iCloud if you decide to use Apple’s service, but you can’t use iCloud and Dropbox simultaneously. Sync is blazing fast in Day One, with iCloud constantly pushing changes across devices as you type. This is true on the Mac as well, as journal items are pushed almost in-real to and from OS X.

The core features of Day One for Mac remain intact in this update. The menubar quick entry menu is still there, as is the Tweetie-like navigation in the main journal with access to days, calendar, favorite items, and reminders. You can set a passcode for the entire app while keeping the menubar’s quick entry panel (possibly with a keyboard shortcut) working and fully functional; you can also navigate between months and years easily through the journal’s main interface.

Among Day One’s new features the most notable one is undoubtedly Markdown and MultiMarkdown support. Folks accustomed to John Gruber’s popular plain text formatting tool will be up and running with Day One in no time; Markdown support has been enabled in Write and Read modes, meaning you’ll see visual live previews of Markdown formatting (italic will be displayed as italic) as you type. The layout of Read and Day modes has been improved, and there are other new cool additions such as font size controls and Sans/Serif /Monospaced fonts waiting for you to be activated in the Preferences, which are now accessible from a new cog icon in the bottom left corner of the app. Also new in 1.5 is hover preview in Days and Starred views, which will give you a nice-looking popover to get a quick peek  at single entries in your journal.

With Markdown formatting for easier writing, live previews, new font options, popovers and an overall refined UI (transitions and various refinements, including a full-screen mode for Lion), Day One 1.5 sure looks like a winner.

It’s not just sync and the good looks. Day One 1.5 comes with more options to get your data out of the application, too. Auto Backup has been enabled, allowing you to sync with iCloud, but back up the database to another location on your Mac (such as Dropbox). Furthermore, entries (or entire days) can now be exported to Markdown format (.md) besides plain text.

Other minor features from 1.5 include:

  • Auto Bold First Lines (Titles)
  • Live sync UI updates
  • Command S to Save
  • Printing
  • On Startup Preference
  • Journal Merging
  • Spelling and Grammar Preferences
  • Keyboard Navigation and Controls

With better export options and auto-backup to any folder, Day One 1.5 offers the same strong foundation of the iOS version, but delivers more in terms of quantity of functionalities and quality of writing environment. Day One still is the best app to archive your thoughts and keep a daily journal, period.

Day One 1.5 is available on the Mac App Store.