I haven’t written many blog entries from my iPad, and the main reason is that inserting links and rich content like images and video embeds can be really, really annoying on the tablet. No HTML editor for the iPad nailed it when it comes to offering an interface and a set of tools that allow bloggers to rely on the device as their main blogging machine; and especially if you write for blogs with several articles every day and you need to keep up at a fast pace, wasting time trying iPad apps is impossible. But I believe also those folks that post status updates and journal entries on their personal blogs must have noticed the iPad is far from being an ideal mobile blogging device, and the lack of dedicated apps is worrying. Sure, there are plenty of iOS text editors out there, even with advanced HTML and Markdown formatting capabilities; for bloggers like me, though, that is not enough. Either with WordPress, Movable Type, Drupal or a custom CMS you might be using on your blog, there are usually a lot of writing and management options to consider that most apps don’t support. The official WordPress app doesn’t even accept custom fields and many, many other things that millions of bloggers rely on every day. The situation is almost unacceptable, and I really don’t understand why – with more than 15 million iPads out there – someone hasn’t set out to create the ultimate iOS blogging app. I really don’t. Yet we keep hoping. Read more
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dPad Is A Lightweight iPad HTML Editor for Bloggers
iBackupTunes: Copy, Backup & Share Your iOS Music Library
Released yesterday in the App Store, iBackupTunes by drahtwerk is one of the most powerful music apps for iOS I’ve recently installed on my iPhone and iPad. This time, though, I’m not talking about a new iPod replacement app that aims at enhancing music playback with Wikipedia or last.fm integration: instead, iBackupTunes is “powerful” in the way it lets you copy songs and albums off your synchronized iPod library, back them up locally on your device and share them with others, even wirelessly. Whilst the procedure of importing songs might sound a little too complicated at first, iBackupTunes provides a graphical user interface that makes it easy to choose music, listen to it, and back it up. Read more
Oldie but Goodie: Play External Audio Thru Your Mac With LineIn
If you’re one of my crazy Twitter followers, you’re already well aware that I’ve significantly reduced the role of iTunes in my life thanks to Instacast, which has been reviewed by everyone from Shawn Blanc, to Michael Hurley on Macgasm, and myself on MacStories. Though I could talk about Instacast for ages, the problem I had to solve next was figuring out how to get the audio off my iPod touch and into my office speakers. The big issue is that my setup can’t accommodate more than two audio inputs, and while audio over AirPlay is probably possible with AirFoil, I notice a significant battery drain as I stream both audio from the web and broadcast it to my local speakers in the bedroom. I wanted to avoid this in the office since outlets are scarce, so I needed a way to pipe audio from my iPod touch thru my Mac. Enter an old Rogue Amoeba goodie: LineIn. Not only is it free (who doesn’t love free), but it requires nothing more than a button press to set up and pass my iPod touch audio through the audio line in to the audio line out. There isn’t a close button for LineIn, but you can simply press ⌘H to hide the app when you don’t need it.
It’s a great find, and something that might come in handy for at least one of our dear readers down the road. Download it (and check out other Rogue Amoeba freebies) here.
Typeplace - Share Your Typeface Passion: Review and Giveaway
Serif, San Serif, letterpress, kerning - typenerds of the world know these terms and know them well. Everywhere we travel, we see interesting uses of fonts in public places. Many of us even take pictures of them for inspiration and interest. What if you could use your iPhone to share these interesting findings within your social circle?
Typeplace is a new and cool way to discover, share, fave, and even share geo-tagged noteworthy pieces of typography with friends. Like Gowalla, Typeplace also awards virtual “badges” and certificates. The app has a nice interface, a familiar bottom tab bar and subtle brown and wood color scheme.
iDisplay for iPad: An Interactive Wireless Display Still Rough Around the Edges
It’s been sometime since iDisplay had launched on the App Store, and I wanted to see if performance and friendliness had improved once the 1.3.2 update landed and brought support for the iPad 2. While I don’t yet have Apple’s iPad 2 dock, the Smart Cover provided an alternative, ample viewing orientation for a landscape extension from my MacBook.
iDisplay will universally work across your Windows and Mac boxes via a free client, though the installation process is less than friendly. Mac users are generally spoiled with easy drag and drop installs, but iDisplay requires manual installation and restart to successfully install the software. I wasn’t terribly happy that I had to stop all of my work to get iDisplay up and running, but to be fair DisplayPad which we reviewed back in December also required a restart. What bothers was that on the reboot, the resolution for my 1280x800 display changed twice before returning to normal upon the login screen. Despite a less than stellar install process, how well does the iPad app work?
Review: Take Five…For Mac!
Now I will admit, I never bought Iconfactory’s Take Five for iOS. Don’t get me wrong it’s a beautiful app but I didn’t see myself using it that much on my iPhone. I’m so use to just using the volume controls or multitasking tray. The point of the app makes a lot of sense though: it’s aimed at letting you restart music that you paused and forgot to turn back on. I received an email a few weeks ago with the subject “Take Five for the Mac Beta,” I knew right away that this would fit into my workflow on my iMac because I get more sidetracked at home with my wife, kids and the television. So now when I want to pause music, I use Take Five for the Mac. Read more
Week Calendar 3.0 Is A Powerful iCal Alternative for iPhone
In the past months, I’ve taken a look at different calendar applications for the iPhone and iPad that aim at bringing more functionalities (either through particular interface approaches, extended Google Calendar support, or other features) to a device’s built-in calendar software from Apple. The iOS calendar app, a tiny version of iCal for the desktop, is fast and elegant and works just fine for most users, but sometimes you want or need more from a mobile calendar or agenda. For instance, the possibility to have more views available (rather than the List, Day and Month ones designed by Apple) or “do more” with events and reminders. And while I know most of MacStories readers are huge fans of Calvetica and Cloud Calendar for the iPhone and iPad, respectively, I’m pretty sure some of you have been looking for a slightly more “powerful” or, dare I say, “geeky” alternative to Calendar.app. If so, meet Week Calendar.
The name says it all: Week Calendar’s biggest feature is the weekly view that’s the focus of the entire experience and undoubtedly something that Apple’s calendar app really lacks. In the app’s weekly view you can pinch & zoom vertically or horizontally to show / hide hours and days, double-tap to focus on a specific event or rotate to landscape mode to gain an even broader view. Tapping on the top toolbar allows you to select a date to jump to, whilst selecting an event opens a desktop-like popup with related information. Tap on the popup, and you get to another screen with all the details you’ve entered and buttons to share, print (that’s right, AirPrint) or create a template off the event itself. You can edit an event at any time, and even display the assigned location on a map. Something that I really like about Week Calendar (well, weekly view aside): you can link contacts from the Address Book to an event. Like I said, everything’s pretty full-featured to offer a wide array of options and choices.
“Choices” seems to be a prerogative of Week Calendar: from the main screen, an iPad-like popover lets you switch between 7 different views: List + Search, Day, Week, Month, Year, Agenda, and Today. The “Go to a Day” shortcut lets you manually enter a date to open. Switching between sections and views felt fast and highly responsive to me, although I have to say I’ve only configured the app with two calendars: my personal one, and US Holidays. The app comes with this kind of optional, built-in subscriptions that you can activate from the Settings. Speaking of which, there’s a lot of stuff to choose from in there: from Time Zone support and “Week starts at” to an auto-coloring system for events with a specific title, you can stay assured the option you’re looking for has been implemented in Week Calendar. I can see how many will prefer the simplicity of an app like Calvetica, but sometimes an application for “nerds & power users” is more than welcome. Other features of Week Calendar that impressed me for the quality of the implementation were fullscreen support (you can activate it with a single / double tap and choose what UI elements to hide), possibility to cut and drag & drop events in any view for easy re-arrangement and TextExpander integration.
Week Calendar is an app that needs to be used for weeks – even months – to be fully appreciated. There’s so much stuff to play with, configure and customize it’s not really easy to fit everything into a single article – plus, I believe all these options have the added value of turning the app into a completely different experience depending on how you use calendars. So, head over the App Store now and buy Week Calendar 3.0 – at $1.99 it’s possibly the most “serious” calendar app for iPhone I’ve seen so far. Read more
LogMeIn for iOS: Remote File Transfer Made Easy
Reviewed a couple of times in the past by our editor Cody Fink, LogMeIn Ignition for iOS has been around for a while in the App Store. In fact, in spite of popular apps like Edovia Screens and iTeleport allowing users to remotely access their computers’ screens, thousands of users installed LogMeIn’s software for the iPhone (and later, iPad) on day one and never thought of going back to another app. That’s what Cody did, whilst I settled with Screens as my go-to app for displaying my Mac’s desktop on iOS devices. Recently, however, I decided to take LogMeIn Ignition for a spin, and I was surprised to find out the new features introduced in the latest update are exactly what I was looking for.
LogMeIn comes with VNC functionalities, but I will keep on using Screens for that. It’s a matter of a personal preference, and you can read more in my Screens review. Edovia’s elegant and simple solution to remotely connect to a Mac’s screen has incredibly useful, reliable and easy to configure for me, so I won’t switch over to LogMeIn as far as screensharing is concerned. Rather, I’ve been intrigued by LogMeIn “file transfer” option added in version 2.0, which aims at offering users a simple way to copy and move files across computers and iOS devices using LogMeIn’s desktop companion. Best of all, once you spend your 30 bucks to purchase LogMeIn Ignition in the App Store, screensharing and file transfer will be offered as free services with no need to buy an additional LogMeIn Pro subscription. Read more
Fresh Feed Elegantly Puts RSS In The Menubar
There are many ways to consume RSS feeds on the Mac platform: when it comes to syndicating content from your favorite websites, apps like NetNewsWire and the Reeder beta come to mind, although many people simply prefer to keep an eye on Google Reader (the most used service nowadays to subscribe and follow feeds) in their desktop browser.
Over the years several alternatives have surfaced that enable users to read RSS feeds in different ways on the desktop. Fresh Feed, a free utility in the Mac App Store, does what many other apps have tried, but in a very elegant way: it puts RSS items in the menubar, and allows you to open them as new tabs in the browser. Where Fresh Feed really shines, in my opinion, is the user interface: it looks like a bigger iPhone app placed in the menubar, yet it doesn’t feel “weird” as several other Mac apps that try to resemble their iOS counterparts. Its “cells” for new RSS entries look sweet and polished. They’re chronologically ordered, but you can scroll with your trackpad to load as many articles as you can. A click on the “more” button loads the item in your desktop browser, automatically leaving Fresh Feed. To add new RSS feeds, you have to open the Preferences and paste a website’s feed URL.
There’s no option to set refresh times or auto-import feeds from Google Reader, unfortunately. If you just want to use Fresh Feed to stay up to date with the articles from a specific website, however, and not your entire Google Reader list, this might just be the app you need.
Looking forward to future updates with more features, Fresh Feed is a free download in the Mac App Store.