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Best Apps Of 2011: Final Chance To Vote & Enter Our Huge Giveaway

UPDATE: Voting is now closed. Winners will be announced tomorrow, Saturday 24th of December.

Last Friday we opened up the poll’s, to hear what you thought was the best iPhone, iPad and Mac App - as well as the best Game for the Mac/iOS from 2011. As part of it, we put together the biggest giveaway we have ever run on MacStories - with around 250 codes to give away.

We’ve had a great response with votes numbering in the thousands and people have loved the huge giveaway. But now we are on the home stretch, as of posting there are just 10 hours left of voting, with the poll closing at 7:00 PM EST (New York time) tonight. Click here to see how long away, exactly, that is.

So if you haven’t yet voted, get a move on and vote right now - you’ll also go in the running for some of the apps we are giving away today — the final day of the giveaway! We’re giving away some truly excellent apps today, in fact, a spectacular bunch of apps:

  • Tweetbot (iPhone)
  • Fantastical (Mac)
  • Reeder (Mac)
  • Pixelmator (Mac)
  • PDF Expert (iPad)
  • Reckless Getaway (iOS)
  • Ecoute (Mac)
  • iA Writer (Mac)
  • AirServer (Mac)
  • Triple-Pack Bundle: Mr. Reader (iPad), iA Writer (iPad), AirServer (Mac)

View more details on how to enter the giveaway
View all the short listed apps

 

Best Apps Of 2011: Vote For Your Favorite + A Huge Giveaway

iOS and Mac apps are the cornerstone of what we cover on MacStories, we love trying new apps, sharing news about them and then reviewing them for you all. The past 12 months have been a spectacular year for new apps and big app updates that have seen both the diversity and calibre of iOS and Mac apps increase significantly. It is with this in mind that we want to recognise the very best apps that were released or received major updates in 2011.

The whole team at MacStories has worked together to come up with a short list of iPhone, iPad and Mac apps as well as a short list of games that we believe were the best to come out in 2011. Now we need your help to decide which of these apps are the best from each category. To do so, we are running a poll that we want you to take, and we want you to cast your vote for what you think was the best app of 2011.

The Biggest MacStories Giveaway Ever!

However, this event isn’t just about rewarding the very best iOS and Mac developers, we want to reward you for being readers of MacStories this year and for taking the time to help us choose the best apps of 2011. This giveaway, as the header states, is the biggest we have ever run - and by quite a stretch. We’re going to be giving away over two-hundred license codes for apps that have made it into our short lists - and there may still be more to come! Some of the apps we will be giving away include:

  • Alfred
  • Fantastical
  • iA Writer
  • Instacast
  • Mr. Reader
  • Tweetbot
  • and many, many more…

How To Enter The Giveaway

There are three ways to be in the running for some of these licenses:

  1. Vote (when you vote we first ask for your email address, just enter a valid email address and you go into the running to win some free apps).
  2. Tweet about this contest (just make sure you have this article’s URL in the tweet, or just use the example tweet below).
  3. Let your friends or family know about the poll and have them enter your email or Twitter handle in the referral box that is on the voting page.

MacStories Best Apps of 2011: vote now and enter our huge iOS & Mac app giveaway! http://mcstr.net/rVDwy8

Rules & More Information

  • You can only vote once, this is why we require an email address when you vote. If you enter an invalid email address or vote multiple times your vote(s) will not count.
  • Please don’t spam your Twitter followers, friends or family, asking them to vote and add you to the referral box. It’s not nice and we don’t want to come across as being the source of this spam - if we see such spam we will ensure you don’t receive any licenses.
  • Some licences will be given out during the voting process, whilst the rest will be given after voting closes.
  • Once voting closes, no more entries for the giveaway will be accepted.
  • Because of the limited number of licences we have per app, you might not get the app you really wanted if you are a winner - but we will try to be as flexible as possible!

 

Sorry, voting is now closed. Winners will be announced Saturday, 24th.

The winning apps will be announced on Saturday, December 24th (Christmas Eve).


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Small Demons and the Indexing of Steve Jobs

Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography captures some of the mystique and intrigue of a visionary who was set apart by not only his personality, but his exquisite tastes and passion for excellence. His personal likes — minimal and beautifully designed products — pertained to brands like Mercedes and Braun. His love of Bob Dylan eventually saw the sale of a $199 box set in the iTunes Store. Of course he was a film critic, making business deals during his time at Pixar while providing colorful commentary on the works of Disney.

The book is full of references related to his personal life and Apple’s, from the places he traveled through the development of the iPod and more. All of this documentation — newspaper entries, advertisements, and even the things Steve Jobs interacted with — is being preserved and shared online in a visual browser.

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Dousing the Kindle Fire with Fire (And Cooling Down)

I don’t doubt that the Kindle Fire’s usability matches its bargain bin price tag. David Pogue was pretty clear when he said, “You feel that $200 price tag with every swipe of your finger.” Reviews, ranging from forgiving to absolutely scathing, are mixed. On one hand, you have Andy Inhatko who loves the crisp text and the reading experience on the smaller, 7” display. On the other hand, the founder of Instapaper finds the reading experience to be absolutely awful. TUAW and GigaOM both posted comparative guides for consumers on the fence about which tablet to buy, straddling the line that the Kindle Fire is good enough because of its price-point. There is a common consensus:

  • The Kindle feels good in the hand thanks to its small form factor and rubberized texture.
  • The 7” display is impressive.
  • Amazon’s digital content can be easily purchased thanks to excellent store integration.
  • OS responsiveness varies, but overall is OK in comparison with higher-end tablets.
  • The Silk browser doesn’t perform akin to Amazon’s claims. It is as fast or slower than other mobile browsers.
  • The price is really the winner here.

Where the reviews differentiate is with the experience of actually consuming content, which is likely what consumers want to do with a tablet integrated with Amazon’s ecosystem. Ben Brooks writes that the Kindle Fire’s three main experiences, which are reading, watching video, and web browsing, are simply poor in comparison to its polished rivals (the iPad). Erick Schonfeld on the other hand writes the exact opposite, even giving the Kindle Fire’s often lauded browser a pass. From what I’ve seen, the big tech press has been giving the Kindle mostly fair but favorable reviews, with independent writers chomping down on the lack of a polished experience.

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MacStories Interviews: Ryan Rigney

MacStories Interviews was a series of interviews with well-known developers, bloggers, journalists and geeks that we published late last year. We’ve revived the format to interview Ryan Rigney, author of  Buttonless, a new book about iOS games that is launching on December 13th. We’ll have a full review of the book when it is released, but in the meantime we thought it would be interesting to hear more from the author himself.

MacStories: Hey Ryan! Could you introduce yourself to the readers who haven’t heard about you or haven’t read any of your work before?

Sure! I’m a freelance writer who has written for a number of gaming outlets, most notably GamePro, PC Gamer, and Gamasutra. I’ve mostly written about iOS gaming, but I’m also a big console gamer so I’ve done a good bit of writing about those types of games as well. Just this week GamePro published my review of Minecraft!

MacStories: So tell us a bit more about your new book, Buttonless. What made you decide you wanted to write this book?

Over the past few years I’ve been so focused on iOS and written so much about iOS games that it’s become something of an obsession. I’ve reviewed hundreds of iPhone and iPad games, interviewed scores of developers, and purchased far too many apps. I pretty much came to the realization that I possessed enough experience and knowledge to write a book, and then began brainstorming ideas. It took a while for me to figure out that I wanted to put so much of the focus on “the stories behind the games,” though.

MacStories: Did you find it difficult finding a publisher willing to help you write this book given it is such a new industry that may appear very “niche”?

Actually, A K Peters/CRC Press was the first publisher I approached. In my pitch, I shared with them a bunch of numbers that I had stumbled across––how many hundreds of millions of iOS devices are out there, and how many people are buying these games. The truth is, it’s really not a niche. iOS gaming is now the most popular form of portable gaming, and it’s only getting bigger. Maybe if I had tried to write a book about 3DS games, the publisher would have needed more convincing haha!

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Nintendo 3DS From An iOS User’s Perspective

Last week, I bought a Nintendo 3DS with Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D. And coming back to “regular” portable console gaming after four years of multitouch iOS gaming felt strange.

As I explained in my Aquaria review yesterday, I started playing with a Super Nintendo Entertainment System when I was six. Actually, my home console gaming experience started with the SNES, but my parents had already bought me a Game Boy. I grew up with Game Boys (classic, Pocket, Color, Advance, and various iterations of the latter), Nintendo’s consoles (SNES, N64, Game Cube, Wii) and Sony’s PlayStation (PSX and PS2). I skipped SEGA’s Dreamcast and Microsoft’s original Xbox, albeit in 2008 I decided, for some reason, to buy an Xbox 360. I basically never touched it. In fact, I’m pretty sure my 360 still has the original Dashboard view – I don’t even know how to update the thing.

I’ve been a “regular” gamer from 1994 to 2007. Four years ago, something happened: as I graduated from high school and got a job, I found to have less time for gaming. Things got even worse after I started MacStories, gaming time-wise. At the same time, whilst my DS and PSP and 360 were catching the dust, I started playing the casual game for iPhone that you can get at $0.99 in the App Store and doesn’t make you fell all guilty about it. After all, it’s just a .99 game that you can play for 20 minutes, not hours. You didn’t spend $60 and 40 hours on a game – I bet a lot of people know the feeling. At least initially, casual iPhone gaming was the cure for ex-gamers that still wanted a quick bite off the digital entertainment scene.

So for nearly four years I bought nothing but iPhone and iPad games. I was quite happy with the results: I could play the latest hit for 30 minutes a day, and say that “I enjoyed it”. I clicked the Buy button on a lot of games: most of them I never finished. But they still gave me the illusion of enjoyment as they were little $0.99 gems I couldn’t feel guilty about. It’s easy to say you’ve “enjoyed” something that costs less than a dollar. So my iTunes library grew larger and full of half-finished, presumably enjoyed iOS games. Read more

My Must-Have iPad Apps, 2011 Edition

Last year, six months after the release of the original iPad, I published an article called “My Must-Have 20 iPad Apps” in which I collected my favorite iPad applications – the ones I used and enjoyed the most – as of September 2010. Fast forward thirteen months, the iPad’s software ecosystem has matured into something completely different from last year’s “experimentation” stage, when third-party developers, and quite possibly Apple as well, were still trying to figure out how, exactly, the iPad would change our digital lifestyles. Looking back to the iPad 1 and the App Store in 2010, it’s no surprise the list of apps I have today is so much different.

In the past year, Apple has sold millions of iPads and has seen the device being used in far more variegate scenarios than they initially expected. The whole point of the iPad: Year One video presented at the iPad 2’s introduction in March was, in fact, to showcase not only the hardware and software capabilities of the device, admittedly improved over the past months, but to demonstrate how the iPad has entered more markets than “consumer technology” alone. The iPad is being used by pilots, doctors, teachers, parents and artists who have found a whole new dimension through the tablet’s multi-touch screen. If the demographics of the iPad expanded to new segments and usage scenarios, so did the kinds of apps that are available on the App Store.

Once again, Apple itself has set new standards for developers to write their apps against. With iOS 5 and iCloud, released in October, the company is providing third-party app makers with powerful new tools to optimize their software and make it interconnected across devices and platforms. But I believe that there’s been a shift in “iPad development mentality” among developers and users alike that goes way back prior to iCloud’s announcement and launch. Sure, iOS 5 and iCloud will lead towards a future of invisible cloud backups and app connections, but Ambitious iOS Apps started making their way to the App Store before iCloud and all these latest, greatest software updates. It was immediately after the 2010 holiday season and the “second wave” of iPad apps that developers realized the iPad could be so much more. And so they wrote great, innovative, standard-setting apps that shaped the past thirteen months and are helping us transition to the next great revolution – the cloud and the post-PC device.

It’s always been about the apps. And I’m fairly certain that as long as Apple doesn’t focus on hardware specs alone and stands at the intersection of technology and liberal arts, it’ll always be about great software, rather than processors and RAM amounts. And more importantly, it will be about the people creating the apps that we use every day.

So here’s my list of “must-have” apps that have improved my workflow and ultimately made it more fun to use the iPad in the past year. And here’s to another year of iPad. Read more

iTunes Match Hands On

 

It hardly seems like it has been almost 2 years since Apple acquired LaLa.com back in 2009. Since then there has been no shortage of rumors for how Lala would be utilized until Apple officially announced iTunes Match at this year’s WWDC Keynote. iTunes Match is the future for your iTunes Library. This is an exciting time for Apple fans and music lovers alike as iTunes Match aims to make it as simplistic as possible to move your music into the cloud with native applications you are already accustomed to using, all for a price that rivals every other music storage service currently available.

iTunes Match is just one feature of the new iCloud services currently rolling out. Think of it as an optional extension to your iCloud storage. The basic premise of iTunes Match is that iTunes will collect information about each song on your computer and send the data back to Apple through iTunes. Apple then checks each one of your songs to see if it can find a match between your song and one that is already on the iTunes store. If a match is found, you will be able to listen to the iTunes version. If your music is not matched then iTunes will automatically upload the music to your online music storage.

iTunes Match is available as an automatically renewing subscription of $24.99 per year and allows you to store up to 25,000 songs on Apple’s iCloud servers. On top of that, songs purchased from iTunes do not even count against your 25,000 song limitation. Your music library is accessible from an iOS 5 device, Apple TV, or any computer running the latest version of iTunes 10.5.1. The songs matched by iTunes will not need to be uploaded from your computer and will be accessible to you in 256 kbps AAC file format regardless of your songs’ previous formats. iTunes Match only deals with songs and excludes audiobooks, ringtones, iTunes LPs and iTunes Extras. Read more

Free and Integrated

Impressive milestone reached by WhatsApp, a free cross-platform messaging solution for iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Nokia phones: [via Ben Brooks]

Coinciding with our planet crossing the 7 billion population mark this week, last week WhatsApp crossed its own milestone for the first time by sending just over 1 billion messages in a single day. Similar to the awe we feel that our planet will now hold over 7 billion people, all of us at WhatsApp are extremely humbled and excited about the future.

I’ve been using WhatsApp for quite some time to communicate for free – even though I have a pretty good text messaging plan with my carrier – with my girlfriend and some close, non-tech savvy friends (who, however, are tech savvy enough to buy apps). WhatsApp sends free messages, but it’s a $0.99 app on the App Store. Ever since the release of iOS 5, I’ve deleted WhatsApp from my iPhone because my girlfriend and those friends have upgraded their iPhones to iOS 5, thus getting the benefits of iMessage.

I have many friends who don’t use and don’t even like iPhones. But going through my Address Book today – trying to figure out how many people are using iMessage – it’s amazing to see how every iPhone user I know has upgraded to iOS 5, and how other people I didn’t know had iPhones (or iPads, or iPods) are now “turning blue” when creating a new message. Put simply: there’s a lot of iMessage going on in my Address Book.

I’m sure WhatsApp will continue to prosper, add features and bet on its cross-platform nature. Keep in mind that BlackBerry users already have BBM, iOS users have iMessage, and Google-loving Android folks are probably using the native Google+ app for some occasional free messaging. Tools like WhatsApp – and WhatsApp is admittedly the most popular “third-party free messaging app” out there – clearly still have a market when it comes to cross-platform. They’re great if you message with a lot of friends using different phones.

But I’m thinking about people who know their friends are using iPhones, and engage in conversations with them on a daily basis. Free, native and integrated beats “free and third-party” any time for the majority of users when it comes to iOS-to-iOS communication. And it’s not like iOS-to-iOS messaging is a rare scenario nowadays, with over 250 million iOS devices out there and quite possibly a large percentage of them being iOS 5-enabled (iOS 5 runs on the older iPhone 3GS, iPod touch 3rd and 4th generation). iMessage works on the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. It’s free and supports text and media. Apple has got a few minor issues to iron out, but there’s no doubt the system has been working well for most users since its release two weeks ago. This should explain my friends’ excitement in upgrading to iOS 5, and my surprise in discovering several new iMessage users in my Address Book.

There’s difference between “free and third-party” and “free and integrated”: whereas free services may have a big initial bang but often fail to make real money in the long term, Apple can leverage free iMessages – integrated in the native messaging experience – to sell more devices. iMessage is just one of the features that will make people think “Maybe I should get an iPhone” – but it’s a powerful one. “Free messages between iPhone users” is something even my mom immediately understood.

Frictionless integration. Let’s check back on third-party messaging apps in six months.