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Maps+ Enhances Google Maps On iOS

Maps+ by IZE, released earlier today in the App Store for iPhone and iPad, is a new free application that aims at enhancing the standard iOS map experience by plugging directly into Google Maps and adding several new features and interface improvements that turn the mapping software into a powerful location and social sharing tool. Maps+ supports Google Maps’ standard views (standard, satellite, hybrid, terrain) and allows you to quickly switch between them with a vertical three-finger swipe that may result unintuitive on the iPhone, but works really well on the iPad. What impressed me about Maps+ upon first launch is the way the app lets you customize the buttons that will overlay the standard map. From a translucent editing interface, you can drag buttons (settings, alarms, fetch position, Twitter, route and track) onto the map in pre-selected spots running along the top and the corners of the map screen.

Maps+ can get your current position, as well as search for specific addresses. Once you’ve found an address on Google Map, Maps+ can get you there with directions for driving, walking and bicycling (the selection happens from an iPad-like popover menu), give you different routes and check out the destination point in greater detail from a dedicated screen. Here, you can choose to “route here” or “drop pin”, add the place to your bookmarks, copy or mail the link and even export to GPX for viewing this information on your computer or other compatible apps. There’s more: you can use location-based alarms to be notified when you hit a place of particular interest and, if your device supports multitasking, alarm monitoring and (another feature of Maps) GPS track recording will work in the background. Among all the little additions to Google Maps and the functionalities you can check in the full app description on iTunes, one that really surprised me is Twitter integration within maps: thanks to Twitter’s geolocation support, once logged in with Maps+ you’ll be able to see your friends and people you follow on a Map, see who replied to you and where and even report spammers from Maps+. The developers describe it as a complete Twitter client, only displayed on a map.

Maps+ is free, but some features need to be unlocked at $2.99 via in-app purchase. Here’s what you get with the free edition:

  • Labels are limited to 1.
  • Pin bookmarks are limited to 3.
  • Route bookmarks are limited to 1.
  • Route transit points are limited to 2.
  • Track bookmarks are limited to 1.
  • Track recording is limited to 2 km.
  • Alarm bookmarks are limited to 1.
  • Importing bookmarks from GPX is disabled.
  • Logging in to Twitter is disabled.

If you’re serious about maps on your iOS device, forget the Google Maps webapp and Apple’s own application and go get Maps+ now. It’s powerful, well-designed, easy to use and Twitter integration adds a lot of value, and a welcome social aspect.

Ranky Shows Beautiful iOS & Mac App Store Rankings for Developers

If you’re an iOS or Mac developer, or you handle the marketing for a development studio that has apps on Apple’s App Store, you know the importance of checking rankings for your application on all the international App Stores. It doesn’t matter if your app is the next Angry Birds (probably not, though The Heist managed to take the #1 spot in the iPhone App Store after months of Rovio dominance) or something that will be fine sitting between the #20 and #100 positions, checking rankings by country and category is a common practice that helps you better understand how well an app is doing, where, and quite possibly also why.

Ranky, a new app by Studio Dalton, wants to make the process of studying rankings extremely simple, focused and beautiful. The app provides real-time results for iOS and Mac App Store apps, a feature that’s surely welcome as it allows to check for any app distributed through Apple’s App Stores. Once you’ve entered any iPhone, iPad or Mac app to track, you’ll only have to select the countries you’re interested in to start analyzing the markets. After that, for each app you’ll get an overview by category or “overall” – the same applies if you filter down apps by country, you’ll get the same screen with “overall” and “category” screens to see how your app is performing. Ranky also comes with the possibility of displaying changes since the last time you checked the app, and email and Twitter sharing built-in.

With a beautiful interface and a simple, yet powerful feature set, Ranky is a neat little tool iOS and Mac devs should test right away. Go download the app here at $0.99.

Echofon Releases Photofon: See Photos From Your Twitter Timeline

Released a few minutes ago in the App Store, Photofon is a new app by Echofon, makers of a popular Twitter client for Mac and iOS devices, that strips away all content from your Twitter timeline to display photos shared by people you follow. More often than not, especially if you follow hundreds of users, there’s a chance photos are skipped when checking out news on Twitter because either a) you don’t care about what people are eating or b) you’re just following that guy for the news he posts, and you don’t want to see his cat. For as much as we like cats (and puppies in general) here at MacStories, I agree that sometimes people I follow share photos I really don’t care about or don’t add anything to the experience of being on Twitter to discover interesting new content, and not kittens. But other times, these people share some beautiful iPhone photography that I don’t want to miss, yet I do because I don’t have a proper client that’s solely focused on media, rather than tweets.

Photofon is a Twitter client built around photos. Whether they’re shared on Instagram, img.ly, the omnipresent Twitpic, Flickr or yfrog (I haven’t been able to test other services), these photos will show up against a minimal dark background that doesn’t distract, and makes colors truly shine on the iPhone 4’s Retina Display. The original tweet is displayed alongside buttons to fave and retweet, so you won’t forget about sharing or saving that photo you really loved. Pinch and zoom gestures allow you to see a photo in greater detail, and pull-to-refresh at the top does just what you expect. I’ve noticed the app loaded around 30 photos from my timeline, and I’d definitely like to see a button to load more, because if I’m going to fire up a client only to see photos, I want to see them all.

Photofon is free and available here. It’s not universal, but it’s a neat way to check out Twitter’s photography on your iPhone without getting lost amidst news and trends.

QuickCal Mobile: Fast Calendar Entry On Your iPhone

Last night I reviewed QuickCal for Mac, a menubar utility that works in conjunction with the desktop iCal to provide a simple way to add new events to your calendars using plain English as natural language input. Unlike Fantastical, QuickCal can’t sync back to any calendar in the cloud if iCal isn’t running because of its lack of native CalDAV support (though it’s got built-in Google Calendar integration), but still it offers a cheap and easy to use way to create new events without having to deal with iCal’s menus, popups, and checkboxes. As I mentioned in my review, QuickCal also comes with an iPhone counterpart called QuickCal Mobile that, just like the Mac version, allows you to quickly jot down events using nothing but plain English.

QuickCal Mobile for iPhone may look like a stripped down version of the Mac app, but I was surprised to see it’s actually the same app, only integrated with iOS standard calendar features. This means events displayed in a list or monthly view can be edited and deleted with the same interface of Calendar.app for iPhone, and everything from alerts to location and availability status can be modified in-app without launching Apple’s Calendar. QuickCal Mobile recognizes all calendars already configured out of the box, allows you to specify a default one and comes with the same Smart Reminders functionality of QuickCal for Mac – you can set a default reminder, one for events that are weeks away, and another one for things you’ll have to take care of in the next months. The app’s icon badge can visualize the current day of the month, or you can disable it and enjoy the icon on your homescreen with no red badge.

QuickCal Mobile’s biggest feature is obviously support for natural language input, and I was pleased to see it works just like on the Mac. You fire up the app, start typing in a single text entry field, and QuickCal will recognize your words as values for a new calendar event. It’s really fast and results update as you type – again, like on the Mac. At this point, I wish QuickCal would also run natively on my iPad – most of the times I check on my calendar from the tablet, and being able to quickly enter events there would be nice.

QuickCal Mobile is available at $0.99 on the App Store, and if you’re fan of the Mac application you should definitely give it a try. The app won’t replace your Week Calendar or Calvetica, but it’s a very convenient way to add events in seconds.

ConvertIt Makes Image Conversion Simple From The Menubar

If your work consists of dealing with lots of image files on a daily basis, you know how much time is usually spent converting images from one format to another. While OS X provides a great built-in application called Preview that takes care of converting and swapping formats with a few clicks (alongside many other features), you’ll still need to open multiple files in it, manually select a new format, choose a destination, hit save, make sure the conversion went correctly, and trash the original files. Could the process be more straightforward, especially when trying to batch-convert multiple files at once? ConvertIt, a $0.99 utility from the Mac App Store, offers a simple solution to the problem.

Now, I’m sure there are hundreds of free and paid utilities for Mac out there that can handle image conversion just fine, and even offer batch-processing for when you need to get things done faster. However, I was impressed by ConvertIt’s super-simple interface that lives in the menubar, doesn’t get in the way when you don’t need it, and is capable of converting images to different formats with drag & drop. With ConvertIt, you can drag as many images as you want from the Finder onto the app’s menubar icon, and choose from a popover a new format for the files. The default location for the new files is the Desktop, but you can change this in the Preferences. To convert, you just have to select a new image format, wait a few seconds, and you’ll end up with the new files in your desired location; it works with a single file, as well as multiple ones dragged at the same time. Unfortunately, ConvertIt doesn’t have an option to delete the original files once conversion is over – I’d also like an option to convert existing files, rather than creating new ones. However, it was very nice to see ConvertIt could easily transform a PNG in a PDF document in a matter of seconds.

ConvertIt does one thing well, and it’s available at $0.99 on the Mac App Store. Go get it here.

QuickCal: A Simple iCal Add-On with Natural Language Input

When I reviewed Fantastical, a new calendar utility by Flexibits that lives in the OS X menubar, I was impressed by the design of the app and the support for natural language input, a feature that allows you to write down your calendar events quickly using nothing but plain English – say you have a meeting tomorrow at your local coffee shop, with Fantastical you don’t need to click on checkboxes and date fields to get your new event set up. You can just write “meeting at coffee shop tomorrow at 5.30 PM”, and Fantastical will know how to handle it. After my Fantastical review, several readers pointed out in the comments and via Twitter that QuickCal, another calendar app that works from the menubar, does more or less the same things of Fantastical, only with a more simple and standard UI and at $0.99 in the Mac App Store, as opposed to Fantastical’s $14.99 introductory price. Because I’m a sucker for new software I love to play with and I care about my readers’ app recommendations, I decided to download QuickCal for Mac and take it for a spin. There’s also an iPhone version available, but after the break I will take a look at QuickCal for Mac – the review of the iPhone version will follow later this week.

Surprisingly, QuickCal works a lot like Fantastical. That is not to say the Fantastical developers “copied” the main features of QuickCal – I’m just surprised I didn’t know about this app before. QuickCal is indeed very similar to Fantastical in how it enables you to write down events using simple, plain English, and it’s got some additional functionalities that integrate the app with iCal, or directly with Google Calendar’s online interface. QuickCal is also fundamentally different from Fantastical in how it lets you start adding a new event, and the design of the event list in the menubar has a simpler look that, unlike Flexibits’ app, doesn’t embed a full monthly calendar, bur rather only shows upcoming events in a vertical list. Both apps have some features in common, but the implementation is ultimately different and exclusive to each one of them. Read more

Daedalus Touch for iPad

I’ve started to shy away from the bulk of text editors that hit my inbox since few bring something different to the table. There’s only so many ways you can rewrite a text editor, and while I’d love to cover everything the ones I really want to showcase have to offer something truly unique for me to sit down and crank out a review in TextMate. It’s terribly difficult to find something that stands out, but I think those disappointed with the App Store’s current offering may find something of interest here. Daedalus Touch for the iPad is different in part because of how it allows you manipulate documents in a hybrid stack & coverflow style that takes advantage of gestures, and not lists, to organize your ideas. There are no lists or hierarchy of folders, but rather stacks of sheets that contain your text. Of course it has Dropbox and TextExpander support (a must nowadays), which means you don’t have an excuse not to check Daedalus past the break.

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Byword for the Mac, Now with Markdown

Byword might be your text editor of choice thanks to its choice of colors in white or black shades, the intuitive and consistently convenient formatting pop-over, or its writer-esque text preview that lets you focus on just a few lines of text. If you’re not yet a convert for Byword’s good looks alone, Markdown support has been added under the hood for the many of us who prefer the popular, readable language over tag-numbing HTML code. Byword’s latest update to 1.2 brings Markdown and more, all reviewed just after the break.

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Dragontape for iPad Lets you Browse, Share, and Edit Video Mixtapes

We traditionally think of the classic mixtape as an audio compilation of power songs and remixes that we’ll then share with friends or pass along to the cute girl two seats behind you in math class. Recently brought to my attention was Dragontape, a website that takes the concept of the mixtape further by combining YouTube and SoundCloud, effectively allowing you to create video & audio playlists of music, concert, and related promotional videos for your favorite artists, gigs, and tours. With Dragontape for the iPad you can watch the latest mixtapes, browse through what’s popular, and revisit favorites all without the need of your web browser.

While it’s obvious you can preview the collections of video, not-so-obvious is the ability to edit movies iMovie style to clip and cut your way to the perfect mixtape. You can save and edit mixtapes to your liking, though I didn’t find the controls initially intuitive (you’ll also need a Dragontape account to save any edits you make to a mixtape). Too, the iPad app is still reliant on sometimes fussy YouTube videos, which may not play on the iPad. “Not optimized for mobile,” it says. What’s interesting to me, however, is how Dragontape handles the integration with SoundCloud with YouTube video. For a clip, Dragontape displays a synth-y, pixelated equalizer that bounces to the beat of the music that’s used as a placeholder for video.

There are some quirks about Dragontape, as pinch-to-zoom for video has been replaced with simple taps, and the background image displayed when browsing mixtapes ends up being a pixelated, centered mess that attempts to be cool, but is unfortunately unappealing. Otherwise, the menu and video controls look incredibly sharp: perhaps Dragontape is aiming for distinctness between the interface and background album art in their own, weird way. Simply changing the fading between tracks prompts users to save the altered mixtape: you’ll quickly develop that dismissive “Cancel” reflex. The app has crashed for me a few times, but I’m interested in Dragontape’s mobile interface enough to keep me from deleting the app off my homescreen as others may do.

There’s flaws, and the app icon doesn’t make clear the that name is Dragontape (and not Drag On Tape), but this is a novel idea that needs to be explored. Those YouTube playlists you peruse can all be intermixed for a better browsing experience, and I sense an opportunity for discovery as Dragontape moves out of beta and integrates with other popular video sites. I personally enjoyed watching lots of promotional tour videos with Dragontape, but maybe you’ll have a much more creative use for it. The price for admission is free on the App Store. You can learn more about the service and create a Dragontape account on their official website and iPad landing page.