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AirServer Brings AirPlay For Everything to OS X

During the past months, I’ve stumbled upon several Mac apps that enable to turn your computer into an AirPlay receiver. None of them, however, provided the same amount of stability and functionality I’ve found today in AirServer, a $3 app that easily turns your Mac into an AirPlay device for audio, photos and videos. Since Apple introduced AirPlay with iOS 4.2 back in November, many have wondered whether it’d be possible to use the streaming features of the protocol (for music and other kinds of media) on a Mac, rather than on iPhones, iPads, and Apple TVs. The number of Mac apps that came out promising to bring AirPlay on the desktop was quite overwhelming: from simple utilities to stream music to more complex solutions like Banana TV, developers didn’t even refrain from creating similar alternatives for iOS devices, turning an iPad into a receiver for video. And if that’s not enough, remember a few weeks ago a hacker cracked the encryption keys used by Apple in the AirPort Express station – opening the door to even more apps with AirPlay / AirTunes integration.

AirServer brings some clarity and unification with a $3 purchase and a simple package that runs in the menubar. That’s it, no UI. Heck, the icon can be removed from the menubar, if you want. What AirServer does is simple: it turns a Mac into an AirPlay receiver for anything. Provided you have an iOS device (or another Mac) to start a streaming session, you’ll be able to listen to music (or any other audio) or watch videos and photos coming from AirPlay on your Mac’s big screen. I have an iMac at home, and AirServer is just perfect on it: I can fire up Instacast on my iPhone and listen to my favorite podcast on better speakers (pardon me if I don’t have external speakers); I can find a cool YouTube video and instantly beam it to my Mac without sharing any link; I can take my entire Camera Roll and show photos of my last vacation to my (poorly sighted) parents on the iMac. Now we’re talking.

As for quality, I have tested AirServer on two different local networks with pretty good results. Videos stored on device start playing almost instantly; music quality was great, with a couple of lags on my slower home network in a 2-hour playing time; photos stream just fine with responsive touch controls as you swipe. AirServer takes a minimal footprint on your Mac, and I’ve also noticed it reproduces the fading effect you get on the iPhone when you change your audio source. Overall, the app is stable and I was pleased to see an update was issued a few hours after I bought the app.

To sum up: at $3 you get an AirPlay receiver for Mac that supports audio, videos (even from Youtube and other apps) and photos. If you love AirPlay, get AirServer.

Listary for iPhone Creates Lists, Syncs with Simplenote

I’m a huge fan of Simplenote, the free web service that works anywhere and allows you to create and sync notes across the web, iPhone, iPad and desktop computers thanks to a plethora of native third-party apps. In fact, I believe Simplenote is the easiest, yet most powerful note-syncing tool currently available on iOS devices: forget MobileMe’s notes, Simplenote is elegant, minimal, and when unlocked at its full potential with a $19.99 Premium account it allows you to do some nifty things with your notes like turn them into plain text lists, back them up on Dropbox (thus opening a whole new layer of possibilities) and create a personalized RSS feed. Simplenote works well as a free service, but it becomes a powerhouse of notes when using it as a Premium subscriber. It doesn’t surprise anyone that in the past year dozens of apps that sync with Simplenote and also sport Dropbox integration have been released in the App Store. Thanks to all these apps (including the excellent Notational Velocity for Mac), users have found a way to keep notes in the cloud, and have them always available, anywhere, on any device.

Listary, a new iPhone app by developers Portmanteau, wants to turn Simplenote into a list management tool without requiring a Premium subscription. With an elegant interface and the use of its own plain text syntax to recognize new and completed items, Listary works on the iPhone as a native app but can be accessed by any other Simplenote app, text editor or web browser. It basically works like this: once logged in with your Simplenote account, Listary will look into your note database and asks you if there’s any existing note you’d like to turn into a list. Read more

FlickAddress Enhances Your iPhone’s Address Book with Gestures

When it comes to syncing contacts back and forth between the cloud and my iPhone, it all gets kind of boring. I don’t keep many contacts stored on my Address Book (less than 150), and the ones I keep are usually organized in three groups: Friends, Favorites, and MacStories. Everything else falls into Uncategorized, meaning it’s not been assigned to any group because I don’t need to – e.g. these are people I don’t get in touch with much often, so I don’t see why I should bother finding a group for them. My contacts – especially the work-related ones – usually come with both phone numbers and email addresses; contacts and groups all sync to Google’s servers or MobileMe on my iPhone, iPad and two Macs. Like I said, pretty common stuff for an Apple user nowadays.

FlickAddress, a new iPhone app from the creators of Sleipnir and Inkiness, wants to spice things up a little bit by bringing gestures and better grouping features into the mix, allowing users to easily flick through groups as “cards” and collect contacts with drag&drop and tap actions. FlickAddress plugs directly into your existing (local, perhaps synced) iOS Address Book so you’ll be ready to use the app right after launch. All your contacts and groups are there, alongside phone numbers, addresses and information you assigned to each contact. As the name suggests, in FlickAddress you flick: a swipe left lets you move to the second group in your list, a few more swipes and you’ll eventually get to the Uncategorized list like in my Address Book. If you don’t want to swipe to move between groups, an icon in the top toolbar enables you to access them from a classic list view.

The big feature of FlickAddress is that contacts can be moved around or assigned to a new group with a drag&drop gesture: if you tap & hold a contact, a tiny card icon will pop up on screen telling you that you’re about to move a contact; tap on another person’s name while you’re dragging and another card will be added to the popup. You can do this to move multiple people into a different group, or assign them to a new one heading over the + button in the bottom section. What if you want to contact these people instead of changing their groups, though? FlickAddress has got you covered here, too. If you’re in a group and you want to mass-email or text everyone in there, you just have to hit the mail icon, choose Mail or SMS and tap on Create. With email messages, you can choose between To, Cc and Bcc. Of course, the app also lets you call, email, text or FaceTime someone from the single contact view as that’s basically based on the standard iOS Address Book and replicates most of its functionalities. In addition, FlickAddress can bookmark specific information (like an email address or phone number) and save bookmarks into a separate section.

FlickAddress may not be as fast as Dialvetica when it comes to quickly calling or texting someone, but I think it’s because this product is meant for “address book power users” in the first place – iPhone owners who’d like to do stuff like mass emailing people and group management in an alternative interface as the one offered by FlickAddress. At $1.99 in the App Store, give it a try. Read more

Notificant Now Delivers Beautiful Reminders Across iPhone, Mac and Web

Released back in January on the Mac a few days after the Mac App Store grand opening, Notificant for Mac was a pretty sweet way to create reminders and timed notifications on the desktop, and have them always available thanks to the web app counterpart developers Caramel Cloud built. As the name of the company suggests, Notificant is a heavily cloud-oriented product: the Mac app is simple and unobtrusive in the way it lives in the menubar, but it leverages the power of the cloud and client sync to fire off notifications across computers and web browsers with incredible reliability and speed. And today, with the release of Notificant for iPhone, Caramel Cloud wants to extend the capabilities of the platform to the iPhone, delivering notifications anywhere, at any time.

Notificant for iPhone follows the path traced by the Mac and web apps, offering users a clean and elegant interface to create and manage upcoming notifications. Once you log in with your Caramel Cloud account, you’ll be able to choose a custom sound effect in the settings, as well as decide to show an icon badge on the homescreen. The main screen is organized in two tabs: Archive lets you access past reminders and re-schedule them if you want to create a new notification off an old one, whilst the Upcoming tab lists all the notifications that you set and are about to fire off across the cloud to your registered computers and mobile devices. To add a new notification, you have to tap on the + button in the upper right corner. In this new screen, two other tabs allow you to set a delivery date and time; the text entry box at the top lets you write down details of your reminder, as well as shorten any link you’ve inserted. Similarly to Twitter, Notificant’s reminders have a limit of 160 characters (Twitter’s limit is 140). In my tests, I’ve found Notificant’s reminders created on the iPhone to be as reliable and precise as those added on the Mac and web app – which is great, as it means the system put in place by the developers is working correctly and doing its job throughout the cloud. A welcome addition to the iPhone app would be a refresh button in the main page to quickly remove notifications and check for new ones – of course, it’d also be great to have a native iPad app in the future. I’m sure Caramel Cloud is considering the option.

Notificant for iPhone makes reminders simple, and available anywhere. It’s simple, well-designed, and focused on one feature: enabling you to be notified of the things you care about. Get the app here. Read more

Fontcase 2.0: Rewriting The Rulebook On Typography

Fresh off the letterpress, Fontcase 2.0 succeeds its previous design with grace and elegance, wowing us like any great font would with a tailored design built for the 22nd century. Re-imaging the font case with the kind of class only a design built for Lion could brag about, comparing fonts underneath the new Fontcase hood embraces a simpler restyling with basic (yet intuitive) drag and drop finesse. Curate your fonts with the font manager that’s re-writing Apple’s Font Book into an interface anyone from the casual web developer to the mindful graphic designer can appreciate: the focus is always on previewing fonts, and never on extraneous UI or flashy features. There are, however, some delightful surprises waiting inside the second generation of this svelte, font briefcase.

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CloudApp 1.5 Released With Lots Of New Features

Popular desktop sharing tool CloudApp – the app that was once teased “every Mac user’s dream” – is receiving a major update today that sees the release of the app in the Mac App Store for the first time since the January 6th grand opening, and the addition of several new features built on top of a complete rewrite aimed at making the app more stable, faster, and better integrated with OS X. CloudApp 1.5, available for download here, is a milestone update that turns a simple utility to share screenshots and files on the Internet into a full-featured “clipboard in the cloud” that now works in real-time, and can plug directly into a Mac’s system clipboard.

The first version of CloudApp, released last year, allowed users to quickly share almost anything on a Mac (links, images, documents, .zip files) by hitting a hotkey that sent selected items to the cloud, automatically returning a short URL to share with your friends on Twitter, Facebook, or email. What made CloudApp stand out from the crowd of Mac sharing utilities (like Tinygrab or Droplr) – elegance of the design aside – was the powerful Raindrop system that enabled developers to build plugins that connected CloudApp with other third-party applications like Chrome, Aperture, Photoshop and iTunes. With a single desktop shortcut, users could instantly share a .png of the Photoshop project they were working on, post a link of a song playing in Spotify, or shorten the URL of the frontmost browser window. And if you selected multiple files in the Finder and hit the shortcut, CloudApp would upload them simultaneously, too. Not to mention the fact that there was an option to automatically upload any new screenshot taken with the Mac’s Grab utility, and check out most recent files’ view count in the menubar. CloudApp 1.5 still has all these features, only they’re backed by a new Streaming API and a second hotkey that doesn’t require Raindrops, but simply uploads the latest item in your Mac’s clipboard, whatever it is.

As seen in the latest Cloud2go update, the Streaming API means files and shortened URLs pop up everywhere (desktop app, web, mobile clients) as soon as they’re shared, and the view count in the menubar and webapp updates in real-time as well. The app is constantly communicating with its servers to push recent items and display how many users have clicked on your links. Alongside bug fixes, however, the biggest new feature is the separation of the Raindrops’ keyboard shortcut and system hotkey: whatever you copy with the standard CMD+C action can be accessed and uploaded by CloudApp using a second shortcut that gets the latest entry directly from your Mac’s clipboard. This is incredibly handy in my opinion as you don’t have to rely on app-specific raindrops and conditions – you just copy something like you normally do and hit a shortcut to upload. It works everywhere, and it’s fast. The Raindrops are still there, though: they’ve been improved with an official SDK and update notifications, and I’m told new raindrops to upload new files from a specific Finder folder and QuickTime recordings will be released soon.

Overall, CloudApp 1.5 is a solid update that dramatically enhances the functionalities of the app. While retaining the simplicity that made the app popular in the first place, CloudApp 1.5 adds a series of new features that extend the app’s capabilities to a whole new level, making it extremely integrated with Mac OS X. Get it here.

Planetary: Your iPad’s Music Library Becomes A Galaxy

In what might be the coolest music experiment that has landed on the iPad to date, company Bloom Studio released earlier today Planetary, a new way to explore your iPad’s music library. Bloom Studio promises to deliver “playful, explorable, visually compelling views on personally relevant information from services like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and iTunes”, and Planetary is the realization of this mission statement: not only it’s based on the crazy concept of turning your iPad music library into a galaxy, it also works exceptionally well. Since I got my eyes on the teaser website a few days ago, I was looking forward to trying the actual product and see whether it could really bring a different way of exploring music to the tablet: now that I’m using the app, available for free, I have to say Planetary is one of those apps you have to try for yourself, rather than watching in some YouTube demo videos.

So here’s the gist: your music is a galaxy, artists are stars, albums are planets. In the 3D view of Planetary, no two planets are the same as the graphics are generated automatically off an album cover from the iPod app. Similarly, songs are moons: the more you listen to a song, the bigger the moon grows. And there’s more: each moon orbits at a speed related to the song’s length. Indeed, crazy stuff that doesn’t really make any sense until you try it. But on the other hand, it’s clear Bloom Studio set out to create an interesting experiment based on data visualization that merges files synced to your iPad, music, and space. I’m sure Buzz Aldrin would be proud.

While Planetary features some standard music controls like play / pause and back / forward, the key area of the app is support for multitouch gestures: you can pinch the galaxy to zoom on a star, pan and rotate a planet to check out all moons and orbits – overall, do all sorts of zooming and viewing to enjoy the pleasure of having your music available in the form of a galaxy. Like I said above, you just have to try it and see how it works with your music.

At the price of free, Planetary needs to be downloaded now and experienced with a rich iPod library synced to your iPad. Personal recommendation: for greater results, try to sync some Explosions In The Sky.

Review: Driver Feedback App Evaluates Your Driving Performances

Following recent news of Apple building a crowdsourced traffic service to launch in the next few years, it’ll be interesting to see whether competitors and third-party developers will start playing around with more car-oriented and traffic-based services for iOS devices. Insurance company State Farm – which I had never heard of before, but it turns out they’re pretty huge in the United States – released a new iPhone app a few days ago that’s aimed at monitoring your driving performances and giving you a score based on various factors like braking, acceleration and cornering. The concept is really simple: the worse you drive (severe acceleration or braking, for example), the lower score you get at the end of the test. How does the app keep track of all this? Again, simple: it uses a mix of Google Maps, iPhone accelerometer and GPS data to see where you’re going, and how you’re driving. I took the app for a spin tonight to see whether or not it would really work with the awful road that connects San Martino al Cimino to my town, Viterbo.

The app starts up with a screen that asks you to create a new user profile, although everything stays locally and it’s not sent to State Farm’s servers. You can create as many profiles as you want for all members of your family who drive and would like to try Driver Feedback. Once a profile is ready, the app will also ask you to place the iPhone on a flat surface in your car but not on the dashboard, so you won’t be distracted and the iPhone’s accelerometer can work properly to register brakes and stops. Tonight I decided to drive a little faster than I usually do (75 km/h on average instead of the usual 60 km/h on the aforementioned terrible road) to see if Driver Feedback could really give me a bad score once I arrived at my destination. Once you’re ready to go, all you have to do in Driver Feedback is wait for a sound effect (a countdown related to the iPhone being placed on a flat surface, luckily I have one in my VW Polo) and start driving.

It usually takes me less than 10 minutes to drive from San Martino to Viterbo. As I decided to drive relatively worse tonight (of course, without putting anyone to risk) to evaluate the app’s functionalities, I didn’t consider that it was raining, badly. So it turned out to be a pretty awful 7-minute car trip that I honestly won’t repeat ever again. And the app did notice after I was done: I got a 50/100 score with multiple severe acceleration and braking points, and lots of suggestions to improve my driving in the future. Driver Feedback can even keep a log of all your trips and it allows you to check out data points on a Google Map, too. In the Alerts tab, the app explains what you did wrong and why you should improve your driving style, whilst the main screen offers an option to share scores via email or text. The UI is minimal, and elegant.

From what I’ve seen so far, Driver Feedback is a well-realized product that might really help you fine-tune the way you drive. I’d like to see more factors being considered in the future (such as traffic, or weather conditions), but as it stands now State Farm’s Driver Feedback is a cool app for drivers, and a useful product to remind everyone that good driving can save gas, and lives. Go download the app here. Read more

TweetyPop Is Like Time Machine For Twitter

Released yesterday in the App Store at $1.99, TweetyPop wants to offer a different way to read your Twitter timeline and interact with status updates. While regular Twitter clients like Twitter for iPad, Twitterrific and Osfoora are focused on empowering you to read tweets in a vertical timeline which you can interact with to reply, fave tweets, or just discover cool links to check out later, TweetyPop resembles the Mac’s Time Machine in the way it operates: tweets are placed on a three-dimensional space, and you have to move the tweet “bubbles” with your finger to fling them off the screen and move forward in the timeline. Just like Time Machine, you make progress in time: only you have tweets instead of files and you can do stuff with these tweets, too.

The app’s got a traditional list view as well, but that’s not really the point. What TweetyPop wants to achieve – and I guess the reason why the developers created it in the first place – is being the alternative app that lets you sit down and explore Twitter in time. A scrollbar on the right lets you quickly move to a couple of hours ago or a just a few minutes back; big arrows at the bottom allow you to dismiss old tweets and load new ones, or go back in time again. The concept’s really simple if you’re used to Time Machine or Lion’s Versions. In fact, the app’s even got the same space-inspired background that you can’t change. Once you get the hang of it – you can scroll, move tweets around, reply, fave and follow links – you might want to check out the additional icons along the top. These buttons enable you to use Twitter’s usual functionalities like replies, DMs and favorite tweets, as well as lists, trends, or search. In every section, tweets are displayed as bubbles against a Time Machine-esque timeline like in the main page. This might be a little disorienting at first for mentions and direct messages, but I believe TweetyPop wants to disorient you, in a good way. It’s very, very different from anything else I’ve tried on the iPad in a year of existence of the platform.

I also like the fact that the app’s got some interesting options to play with. You can send items to Instapaper or OmniFocus, filter the timeline by “all tweets” or “new tweets only” and enable auto-play to let the app automatically scroll for you and create a slideshow for your tweets. The slideshow speed is configurable in the settings.

At $1.99, I’d give TweetyPop a try if only because it’s different. Sure, it won’t replace Twitter for iPad or Twitterrific, but it has the chance to become that alternative Twitter app that does one thing well and surprises you with its original ideas and interactions. Plus, the time exploration effect for tweets is just neat. Go download the app here. Promo video below.

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