Posts in reviews

Stratus: Finally, A Beautiful CloudApp Client for iPhone and iPad

CloudApp, the service I use on a daily basis to share links with my Twitter friends and files with my co-workers, never had a unified experience for the iPhone and iPad. Launched as a Mac-only desktop utility with an online interface to browse and manage your uploads, CloudApp later gained much needed functionalities like real-time streams for uploads and view counts, as well as custom domains for Pro users, and a redesigned web app with more options for downloads, inline viewing, and file sharing. Overall, I think CloudApp is the easiest and most powerful way to share items on the web, and manage what you’ve shared from a great-looking web counterpart. The Mac app has also been updated recently to include a flexible plugin architecture, more keyboard shortcuts, and live updating results in the menubar. But as far as iOS goes, and especially the iPad, CloudApp has never seen a huge adoption from developers.

On the iPhone, however, there was a nice surprise called Cloud2go that impressed me since its first release for the solid feature set, elegant interface, and overall nice implementation of CloudApp’s basic functionalities like clipboard integration and uploads. The app was updated a few months ago to include the aforementioned live streams, as well as a slew of other improvements that have undoubtedly turned Cloud2go into the CloudApp client to have on the iPhone. But it didn’t have an iPad version.

Today, developers Jeff Broderick and Kolin Krewinkel have released Stratus, a free CloudApp client for iPhone and iPad that I’ve been testing over the past months and it’s become my go-to app when it comes to uploading and sharing links with CloudApp, as well as managing what’s already in my account. Read more

Agenda: An Elegant Calendar App Powered By Gestures

If all developers were to follow Apple’s recent paradigms when it comes to designing applications for the average iOS and OS X user, we’d end up having tons of different apps using the same faux leather / paper / linen / notebook interface elements. Take a look at the Address Book and Calendar apps on Lion, or the recent introduction of Reminders on iOS 5: as Apple’s OSes move forward, the trend in UI design seems to be that of creating software that resembles old, real-life counterparts people are accustomed to. And while you can argue this started back in 2007 with the Notes and Calculator apps for iPhone OS, there’s no doubt the launch of the iPad last year and the upcoming Lion added fuel to the fire with their skeuomorphic interfaces.

Agenda, a new app by Ken Yarmosh of Savvy Apps, looks like your old paper calendar but, luckily for us, adds modern interaction schemes and ideas that help revitalizing the old concept of month sheets, notes, and calendars in general. Rather than mimicking a calendar but resorting to the usual menus and navigation buttons to get around monthly views, days, and events, Agenda enables you to swipe horizontally on screen to go back (and open) any view. For example, the app starts in a beautiful and elegant view that lets you see an entire year worth of events; with a swipe to the left, the app slides to the current month. With another swipe, the monthly view becomes a weekly one, with a list of your upcoming events; another swipe, and you can open the current day of the week. Swipe again, and you’re brought to a single-event view of what you have to do at a specific time of the day. Obviously, all these actions can be activated with regular taps, too: tap on a specific month, and Agenda will open it with its slide animation. Same applies for days in the monthly, or weekly views. However, it’s very clear the developer put the focus on the ease of use of gestures, rather than normal taps: swiping to move between views is intuitive and fun, whereas swiping vertically will allow you to navigate between months, and days of the week in the sections provided by Agenda. It almost feels like Windows Phone 7’s UI principles of swiping between views have been ported to a native iPhone application, without the Metro interface of course. Once again: you can get around Agenda’s interface by simply tapping on screen, but there’s no denying this app was built with gestures in mind and the possibility of swiping to get to the view you need.

As far as adding new events goes, Agenda relies on the standard iOS calendar functionalities to lay out the event creation menu and integration with calendars already configured on your iPhone. Agenda can access any MobileMe (even iCloud for iOS 5 users), Exchange or Google calendar set up on your device, and adding new events uses Apple’s default window to assign a title, location, time, invitees, and so forth.

Overall, Agenda is a nice complement to Apple’s default calendar solution for iPhone in the way it keeps things minimal, letting you focus on seeing what you have to do and what’s upcoming, rather than supercharging calendars with additional functionalities most users won’t ever need. Agenda is clean, easy to use, and powered by a great gesturing system that makes using the app incredibly simple and intuitive. Get it here at $2.99.

CleanShot Removes The Clutter From Your Mac Screenshots

How many times have you found yourself taking a screenshot of your Mac, only to realize that all that clutter on your desktop won’t make any good once the picture goes online, straight to Twitter or any other service where people can take a peek at your icons and apps? Let’s be clear about this: if you’re one of those people who care about the elegance and minimalism of your Mac desktop, being able to take perfect screenshots is nice; but you’re a blogger and you write about apps on a daily basis, you need to be able to take clear, simple screenshots that put the focus on the app, rather than those PDF documents and folders sitting behind the app’s main window. For this very reason, developer Stefan Fuerst at Media Atelier has created CleanShot, a $4.99 Mac utility that will help you grab better screenshots without the clutter of all your open apps, documents, and desktop folders.

CleanShot basically allows you to take a screenshot of your default desktop at different resolutions, with one app at the time in the foregound if you want. Once launched, CleanShot pops up as an overlay to your current desktop setup, removing all the apps from your view, focusing on the one you were working on. In addition to displaying one app and the default OS X background, CleanShot removes all desktop folders and icons, strips away content from the menubar and lets you even choose what default icons to display up there, such as AirPort, battery and Spotlight. In this way, you’ll be able to create “default” screenshots that don’t come with your personal stuff like documents, apps, and so forth.

As for the resolutions available in CleanShot, you can tweak them in the settings, but by default the app comes with standard ones like 1024x768, 1280x800, as well as the one currently set on your machine. In the settings, you can choose a custom desktop background; upon exporting, CleanShot will allow you to choose between a standard file saving menu, or a “copy to clipboard” action.

At $4.99 on the Mac App Store, CleanShot is an indispensable tool for bloggers, and a useful addition for those users constantly willing to take perfect screenshots without any clutter. Give it a try.

Link Your Computer And iOS Device With myPhoneDesktop: Double Pass Giveaway!

We’ve talked about myPhoneDesktop before on MacStories but we thought it deserved a short ‘re-review’ to accompany today’s giveaway. Keeping it simple, the premise of myPhoneDesktop is that it provides a portal through which you can easily transfer data and information from your desktop computer to your iPhone or iPad.

Broadly speaking the app transfers four types of data including phone data (both numbers and text messages), website URLs, text and images. When you send any of that data from your computer, and there is both a desktop and web client, it will be pushed straight to your device with a notification.

But where I think the app becomes most powerful is when you have the data on your iPhone or iPad. In the corner of the app it has the “Open in” icon where it literally has a wealth of options for your data. There is everything from the obligatory search with Google, to send by email, add to contact, send SMS or launching another app with that data. Importantly, the developers aren’t resting on their laurels, since we last talked about myPhoneDesktop there have been a few updates that continue to add more app integrations including Navigon and InstaTodo.

In reality I have only just scraped the surface of what this app can do, for example it also integrates with Google Voice and Skype, so make sure to check out the myPhoneDesktop website to learn more and get your own copy. Today we’re giving away 5 ‘double passes’ of myPhone desktop – in other words the five winners will receive two promo codes, perfect to give one copy to a iPhone-toting friend or family member, or (god forbid) use it as a belated Father’s Day gift. Details of the give away are past the break.

Read more

Send2Mac: An Easy Way To Send Webpages To A Mac Browser

Over the past few weeks I’ve mentioned on Twitter and in a couple of articles a service I’ve started using on my Macs and iOS devices, a simple tool that has contributed to making the process of sending webpages to remote computers incredibly easy. Send2Mac, a free service by developer Bastian Woelfle, installs as an app on your Mac and a bookmarklet in your browser to enable you to instantly send a webpage from any device or computer, to another Mac. It doesn’t matter where the target Mac is, or what kind of Internet connection you’re using on your iPhone, iPad, or office PC: as long as you can run a web browser and the remote Mac is connected to the Internet, the webpage will magically open in a few seconds.

In the past months, I’ve actually been busy trying to find the best way to remotely send webpages from a device to another. First, I came up with a Dropbox tweak to email links to myself, and watch them open in my desktop browser. Then I stumbled upon Push Browser, an iOS app and Chrome extension that enables you to send webpages back and forth between devices and desktop computers. I love Push Browser, but it’s got one major downside: on a Mac, it’s limited to Google Chrome, and I haven’t heard back from the developer about a possible Safari or system-wide integration. That’s why I thought of giving Send2Mac a try: rather than having a dedicated extension for each browser, this app directly plugs into a Mac’s default browser, whatever it is, and can send webpages to it. Simple. On the other end, Send2Mac generates a unique bookmarklet for each of your target machines, based on an API key thet you’re given randomly every time you visit send2mac.com to set up a new computer.

It works like this: I have two Macs, and both of them run the Send2Mac utility in the background. My MacBook Pro and iMac, however, have been assigned different API keys: they’re different, because they correspond to two different bookmarklets that let me send webpages from my iOS devices – or other computers I might happen to have. So when I’m on my iPhone and I find a webpage I’d like to check out later on my iMac, I hit the “Send2iMac” bookmarklet and it goes straight to the iMac, in a couple of seconds. If I want the page to open on my MacBook Pro, I hit the bookmarklet for that computer. If I want the page to open on my iMac, but while running Lion, I have another bookmarklet. It’s really simple: each target machine and OS has its own key and bookmarklet. No menus to navigate and no interface, you hit a button and the webpage travels from a browser to another.

I’d pay for Send2Mac if it were a premium service, but it’s surprisingly free and “might be really buggy”, as the developer writes on the app’s website. In my tests, I’ve found Send2Mac to work reliably as it’s even capable of launching a closed browser with the new webpage I sent because it’s a process that runs in the background all the time, alongside the default browser of your Mac. You can configure Send2Mac on iOS and Mac browsers, send webpages from Mac to Mac, iOS to Mac and even Windows to Mac as long as you have the bookmarklet installed.

You can start using Send2Mac by heading over here with your device, and generating a new API key for your Mac.

Discovr Apps Is Like Pandora For The App Store

Back in January I reviewed Discovr, an interactive music map that was aimed at letting you easily and joyfully discover new artists and songs based on your tastes. By providing an original interface that turned classic hyperlinking into an interactive experience with animated maps and multitouch, Discovr still holds up as one of the most original iPad apps to explore the iTunes Store in an alternate view that, eventually, also made its way to the iPhone. But after music, the Filter Squad developers might have asked themselves what is that iOS users want to discover on a daily basis. And that is apps, obviously. Discovr Apps, a new version of Discovr available in the App Store at $0.99, runs on the iPhone and iPad and, just like its music counterpart, wants to turn the App Store categories and links into a map that changes every time according to the suggestions you’re given and the apps you’re interested in.

In the main page, you’re presented with a search box to manually start looking for an app, or two tabs at the bottom: recommended for you, and suggested apps. For those who don’t know how Discovr works: after the first element – in our case, an app – pops up on screen, a tap will generate related items connected to it, thus creating a map. As you keep tapping to view related items, the map grows and the connections expand. To view an item in detail, you just have to double-tap and you’re brought to an App Store-like page with description and screenshots. If you want a broader view of the map you’ve generated, pinch to go back.

You can share discoveries on Twitter and Facebook or via email, but the main point of the app is to sit down, check out the recommendations or start with an app you like, and see where Discovr brings you with its interactive system. And as far as recommendations go, I’m very satisfied with this app-focused version of Discovr: even more than Discovr for music, I found app suggestions to be really tailored to my tastes and needs, with gems like Twitterrific, Evernote, Simplenote and Writings often showing up in my maps.

Discovr is, once again, an interesting experiment that offers an intuitive way to discover media you’d probably miss in the sea of App Store apps and updates. At $0.99 in the App Store, that’s an investment you should consider to discover more great apps in the future.

Lidpop Plays A Sound When Your Mac Wakes Up

Here’s a $0.99 app from the Mac App Store that I found quite hilarious and worth a mention here on MacStories. You know when you close your Mac’s lid, or wake the computer from sleep, right? Worst case scenario, you haven’t assigned any kind of security to the process so your Mac goes to sleep and wakes up without asking for any password or displaying a login screen. Or, maybe you’re a bit like me, and you’ve told System Preferences to lock the computer as soon as it’s closed so nobody will be able to open it and log in. But in both cases, closing the lid and opening it back again doesn’t change, right? It’s just a simple action: you open, you close. Here’s when Lidpop comes in: the app will make your Mac play a sound when it goes to sleep or wakes up. Close the lid, play a sound. Wake up from sleep, play another sound. It wants to add some personalization to the whole boring concept of opening and closing a computer, but I wasn’t quite sure about the idea until I tried it. See, Lidpop comes with some hilariously well-done sound effects like “electricity surge”, “sitcom laughter” or “slamming metal lid” that will play as you close the lid, or open it. I installed the app, and found myself smiling every time the lid made a slamming metal sound – you should have seen the look on my friends’ face. In fact, I think Lidpop is the perfect app to surprise your non-geek friends and convince them that Apple computers play those sounds when you close them. Might be something I have to try out.

Close the lid with a resounding clank or a happy slide whistle. Open it back up with a laugh or a whimsical chime — it’s up to you. Lidpop brings a dash of personality to your computer.

Lidpop won’t make you more productive but it’ll make laugh when you step away from your Mac and you hear the sound of a vault closing. Get the app here.

Twitterrific 4.2 Updated for Mac & iOS: MLKSHK, Pikchur, Read It Later, and More!

Twitterrific 4.2 is available on the App Store for both Mac and iOS right now if you’re so inclined to keep on top of the latest updates, and there’s some new major additions that we think you’ll really love. There’s also some big changes to how you’ll sign in–thanks to the way Twitter is requiring 3rd party clients to authorize your account–thus making 4.2 a mandatory update to comply with Twitter’s rules.

Read more

Musicon Lets You Add Albums To Your Home Screen

In the weeks leading to Apple’s WWDC announcements, there was one possible feature of iOS 5 that was making the rounds of the Internet, meeting many people’s expectations for the new OS: the possibility to create shortcuts for anything on a device’s Home screen would have been an interesting option to, say, let users create a WiFi icon to quickly access Network settings without opening the dedicated app. Playing around with the concept of aliases and app-specific shortcuts, the theories surrounding iOS 5 pointed at Apple building such a functionality to reduce the time spent tapping and scrolling around. That, of course, didn’t happen, but it hasn’t stopped third-party developers from releasing their own solutions that take on this idea of “creating Home screen shortcuts”.

Musicon, a new iPhone app by developer Fabian Kreiser, enables you to create Home screen icons for music albums you have synced on your device or, if you’re rocking the latest iCloud features, bought on your computer and automatically pushed to your iPhone. Musicon works like this: it scans your music library (the one from iPod.app, or Music.app if you’re already on iOS 5) and fetches albums and album artworks. If music is playing from the native iOS app, a “Now Playing” button lets you control it – this app isn’t meant to be a music controller on its own, unlike Kreiser’s other iPhone app On Stage. In fact, if you have On Stage (which we reviewed here) installed on your device the app won’t show any advertisement.

Once you’ve found an album you like, select it, and hit the big “Install Webclip” button. The app will already display a preview of the icon that you’ll end up with in the Home screen in the upper section of the screen. As you hit the button, Musicon does its thing to create a shortcut: it takes you to the developer’s website to install a webclip on your device. That’s right, these shortcuts are nothing but links to a webpage that somehow takes you to Musicon after you tap on the icon. Music will start playing in the native iPod app, and Musicon will come in foreground with the playback control UI. Not the most elegant solution if you ask me, but it works and the Home screen icons shine on the Retina Display.

Musicon is free, but I wish I could pay to remove advertising without having to keep On Stage installed. The idea is pretty nice and I can see why some people would want to save a couple of albums for quick access on a daily basis – if you’re one of them, get Musicon here and start creating your own shortcuts.