Sparrow has a really sweet Mac update available this afternoon from the Mac App Store, bringing lots of new features and tons of bug fixes to improve its game and interface on Lion. The last update brought full-screen support and a redesigned sidebar that’s significantly improved my workflow, and now that sidebar is getting some additional use thanks to drag & drop. Whether you’re on an IMAP account or using Gmail, you can drag and drop emails into a folder or label to quickly move and archive messages. That alone makes us really happy, but check out what else Sparrow has added past the break.
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Sparrow 1.3.2: Drag & Drop to Labels, Conversation & Reply Redesigns, and Gradients!
13-inch MacBook Air Review
The new MacBook Air is the best Mac I’ve ever owned. This machine is shaping the future of OS X, both as an operating system and a bridge between iOS and the desktop.
In October 2008, I bought my first Mac. I had been a Windows PC user for seven years, and I was accustomed to using a PC at home for my browsing and writing needs, and at work – where my boss demanded we used PCs as he said they were more “reliable” and “fast”. After months of reading and peeking through Apple’s FAQ pages and video tutorials, I decided to buy a MacBook Pro. It was a 15-inch Unibody model with glossy screen, 4 GB of RAM, multi-touch trackpad, and Core 2 Duo processor. Back then, it was my first Mac but also the best computer I ever had. The moment I took it out of the box – and I was immediately impressed by Apple’s attention to detail in packaging and overall presentation – I knew that machine was going to change the way I “did work” on a computer. And it did. A few months later my boss fired me, and I started MacStories.
That MacBook Pro has been with me until last week.
Last year, I bought an iMac. Being the kind of Mac user that travels back and forth every day between his office (where I spend most of my day writing and managing the site) and his home, I was tired of being constantly forced to pack my MacBook Pro inside a bag, carry it around, gently place it on the passenger seat of my car, and pray that the hard drive wouldn’t die because of the terrible roads we have here in Viterbo. In spite of the fact that the MacBook Pro was the best computer I ever had, I slowly came to a point where I couldn’t stand carrying it around anymore. I decided to buy an iMac and make it my “home computer” so that I could offload media on it, backup documents, and do all those other things you’re supposed to do on “a home computer”. I bought a 21.5-inch model – again with a glossy screen – as I thought I wouldn’t ever need anything bigger than that. I was right. I’m happy with my purchase – the iMac is the finest piece of desktop hardware Apple has come up with in the past decade. Sure, my 2009 iMac doesn’t feature a Thunderbolt port and won’t get the performance boost of a Sandy Bridge-enabled machine, but it’s a trusted companion that I plan to keep for at least the next two years (that is, unless something really bad happens to the hardware, or Apple comes out with a desktop computer so revolutionary that it’ll be impossible to say no and don’t buy it).
For me, an iMac is the perfect desktop computer. It sits there, it makes my desk more elegant and classy than it could ever be, and more importantly it never failed me.
But I still had a problem with the MacBook Pro being a clumsy machine I didn’t want to carry around with me all the time. Read more
Tweetbot 1.4.3: Sleep Time for Notifications, Hiding Spam, and Mentions from only People You Follow
Tweetbot 1.4.3 has been approved and is now waiting for your loving fingers to tap Update in the App Store. With push notifications now open to everyone who uses Tweetbot (in case you haven’t heard), you’ll now have access to realtime updates for when a tweet is favorited, retweeted, replied to, when you’re mentioned, or when you receive a direct message. With so many notification types available (and our forgetfulness to put our devices on mute before going to sleep), Tweetbot also adds features to help curate what kinds of notifications you receive, and when you receive them.
Banca: Convert Currencies Swiftly With this Beautiful iPhone App
With the US economy in flux, it’s a good idea to keep a close eye on your dollar. As world travelers we find ourselves spending a good dime overseas, and international friendships online can lead to an occasional penny dropped in each other’s PayPal bucket. As foreign currency plays a big role in today’s lifestyles and businesses — boundaries are practically absent — knowing how the USD compares to the Euro or the Australian dollar at the press of the button becomes very useful. Radiant Tap’s Banca for the iPhone isn’t just a calculator, but a currency converter (it supports all of the world’s currencies) that’s both beautiful and incredibly elegant in design.
Measures for iPad Is A Powerful Unit & Currency Converter
Back in 2009, I installed a simple currency and unit conversion utility on my iPhone called Measures. Developed by Michael Neuwert, I remember Measures as one of the first “popular” converter apps for the iPhone, one that actually managed to move thousands of sales back when the App Store was still relatively small. Two years and hundreds of thousands of app later (let alone the iPad and two new App Stores), Measures is coming back with an HD version built specifically to take advantage of the iPad’s screen. Retaining the same icon and UI color scheme of its iPhone counterpart, Measures HD packs 170 currency exchange rates (constantly updated over the air) and 1000 different units, organized in 40 categories.
I like Measures HD not because of its design, but because it’s functional. Measures may lack the amount of polish seen in any Tapbots or Iconfactory app, but as far as the actual unit and currency conversion goes, Measures works better than anything else I’ve tried on the iPad to date. There are two aspects of the app that truly stand out to me: the Favorites sidebar, and the fact that Measures doesn’t stop at normal units like those pertaining to length, area, speed, or temperature. Measures adds dozens of categories ranging from Male Shoe Sizes and Data Storage to Radioactivity, Male Sizes for suits/coats/shirts, and Typography. With all these types of “units” available at your fingertips, Measures lets you convert, say, a European shoe size to a UK or US one, or your milligram/deciliter blood sugar level to millimol/liter. And again: you can easily convert megabytes to yottabytes, short tons to pounds, and obviously US Dollars to Euros and other currencies as well.
Measures’ unit database is huge, and if it’s not the biggest one on the App Store yet, then it definitely get very close to it. Whilst most converter apps focus on providing a fresh interface for the usual units and currencies, Measures sacrifices some attention to the overall design (I don’t like the slider to adjust decimals and the looks of the keypad – but this is just personal taste) to focus on “real life usage” with options like the aforementioned shirt sizes, or fuel consumption and data storage. This is the kind of stuff I always need to check (especially when buying some cool t-shirt from a website that doesn’t list EU sizes), but that very few apps provide. In fact, most of the times I’m forced to look it up on Wikipedia. Speaking of which, Measures HD comes with a Wikipedia search function to look up the selected unit on the website’s database. Multiple Wikipedia articles (when found, otherwise it’s just a single one) are listed inside a popover, and you can decide to open the webpage within Measures, in Safari, or in Sophiestication’s Articles. Next to the Wikipedia button in the top toolbar, there’s also a “list” icon to see all converted results without being restricted to a single conversion.
Another nice feature is the Favorites sidebar, which enables you to save any conversion for quick access at a later time. If you find yourself converting Euros to Dollars pretty often, you might want to consider saving that conversion as a shortcut in the Favorites so you won’t have to use the (gimmicky) unit picker at the botton; Apple itself suggests in its Interface guidelines to use a “date and time picker” for iPad inside a popover rather the main screen – I agree, as the result is not really pleasant in Measures and it feels unresponsive if your finger runs down to the iPad’s bezel.
Overall, I enjoy having Measures on my iPad because it’s useful. The app could use some UI refinements and re-thinking, but as it stands now it is the converter app for iPad with the largest array of options I’ve seen so far. You can download Measures HD at $1.99 on the App Store. Check out more screenshots of the app after the break. Read more
TweetFire: A Lightweight and Fast Twitter Companion for iPhone
In my review of the first version of Tweetbot, I asked whether it was still possible to bring innovation to Twitter clients for iPhone, a category of apps that have offered more or less the same features for quite some time now, with the focus now being on interface design to make an app feel “unique”. With different takes on the same concept (interacting with Twitter) and with the company itself advising against “regular” third-party client apps that most users won’t install (they say people fire up the App Store, download Twitter’s official app, and that’s it), mine was a legitimate question. Is there still room for something new?
As Tweetbot’s successful launch has proved, there’s a niche of users willing to try out what’s new in the Twitter ecosystem. Tapbots have managed to build a loyal new userbase of customers interested in their unique spin on Twitter clients – these people have stuck around long enough to wait for push notifications and the consequent rapid rollout per Twitter’s own API approval. But I also take a look at Twitterrific from The Iconfactory, another third-party client that has built its own ecosystem across the Mac and iOS and which, from what I’m hearing, is about to introduce great new features in an upcoming update. I’ve mentioned Tweetbot and Twitterrific so far, but there are dozens of clients from both big and smaller indie companies that are thriving in spite of Twitter’s official free tools for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
And then there’s Apple’s initiative with Twitter and iOS 5, which will bring native Twitter access (single sign-on, contact lookup, tweet integration) to its mobile operating system. Users will be able to tweet photos and webpages, addresses in Maps and cool videos they find on YouTube. But they won’t be able to read their timelines, or receive push notifications through Apple’s native implementation. For these reasons, and because it is my job to look out for what’s next, I believe innovation in Twitter clients is far from done (that is, unless Twitter adopts changes that will make it impossible for developers to keep creating third-party tools), and we just need to keep looking to find the next app that may, in some way, improve the way we share information on Twitter from a smartphone or tablet. Read more
Alfred for Mac Gets Extensions, Growl Support, New Lion Theme
Alfred, the application launcher for the Mac, received a fairly substantial update today which brings important new functionalities such as extension support, Growl integration for action outputs, a new theme inspired by OS X Lion, and several bug fixes. Personally, I’ve been a big fan of Alfred since its first release last year, and I’ve followed the development closely as I switched from Quicksilver (which came back from a long hiatus a few months ago) and started looking into the customizable search and launch environment offered by Alfred. In the past months, in fact, Alfred evolved into a minimal, yet powerful application launcher capable of doing a bunch of other things such as filesystem navigation, clipboard management, AppleScript launching and dictionary. I was particularly impressed with the 0.9 version, which allowed users to assign a keyboard shortcut to any AppleScript on your machine, similarly to how the popular FastScripts lets you pair a shortcut with a script.
Whilst the developers are still planning a major 1.0 release that will likely see the Powerpack (a set of premium additional features) become available as in-app purchase on Lion’s Mac App Store, Alfred 0.9.9 has been publicly released today and, in spite of what the version number suggests, it is a milestone release that sets the path for future Alfred versions and the kind of integration with the system the developers are willing to bake into their application launcher . Read more
HypnoBlocks: A Fast Paced Game Where Racking up Combos is Competitive and Addictive
I’m a big fan Ambrosia Software’s titles (Multiwinia is still a blast and they have an excellent solitaire game), and now they’re expanding the lineup with yet another addictive title for the iPad called HypnoBlocks. I’d bet you it was created for the sole purpose to take advantage of my short attention span and drive to be competitive. Two hours later after much cursing and ranting and raving, I found myself hitting the 2nd spot in the global leader boards on Game Center. So HypnoBlocks, you’ve succeeded in bringing out the sweaty yet competitive gamer in me. I was hooked!
Skyfire VideoQ for iOS Queues Up Flash Video
Skyfire has a new Flash player on iOS that queues up video you want to play on your iOS device by sending the video request through email! Yeah it’s old technology meets… old technology, but lets not dwell on the fact that we do want to watch Flash videos, and that iOS can’t play them. You have your YouTube and your Hulu, but those Funimation videos aren’t gonna play themselves. So whether you see a Flash video on the latest startup from TechCrunch, or you want to watch a segment of The Daily Show, VideoQ is there to convert your Flash video to a format compatible with your iPhone or iPad.
I gave VideoQ a chance on my iPod touch, and the first thing Skyfire asks is for you to send an email from an address you want to register with the company. Also sent in the email is your devices unique ID, which I find somewhat odd. I think that’s a bit skeevy, and I don’t know why Skyfire needs a device identifier, but it’s whatever right? With the email sent, you wait a few seconds to be registered, then VideoQ presents you with a tutorial you can watch to learn about the app.
So it breaks down like this: whether you use Safari or another web browser on iOS, you can email that webpage to Skyfire so you can playback that Flash video in VideoQ. VideoQ will show you the videos you’ve queued up (and you can also casually browse hot videos via the appropriate tab). Video playback isn’t spectacular: video is grainy, audio is muffled, and sometimes Skyfire can’t find the video, but in a pinch you can get your Jon Stewart fix on your iOS device. It’s not a replacement for a Mac or PC that can run Flash well, but it can give you some relief while traveling or when mobile. It works most of the time — it’s not perfect — but video is passable despite whatever conversion process Skyfire processes on their servers before serving the content back up to you on demand. I’d say if you watch a lot of flash video (and especially if you want to do it on the iPad), give VideoQ a try.
Skyfire’s VideoQ is $1.99 as a universal app in the App Store.
[found via Reuters]