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Languages Review

Can an offline translator for iPhone be beautiful?

Translations are boring. Even Google, which has put some effort into caring more about its appearance in the past year, has seemingly forgotten that Google Translate is used by millions every day. Not only is Google Translate outdated from a design perspective, it also doesn’t take advantage of the trends and interactions that have recently defined great mobile experiences.

In a collaboration with Sonico, award-winning development studio Tapity wants to reinvent mobile translators for iPhone starting with two core concepts: multi-touch and offline access. Read more

Pocket Releases Mac App

Pocket, the “save for later” service that relaunched as a major revamp of Read It Later back in April, is launching today its first official desktop application for OS X. Pocket for OS X is available today for free on the Mac App Store.

I’ve been able to test Pocket for Mac during the past week. Michael Schneider, creator of Read Later (nèe Read Now), joined the Pocket team to create the new Mac app; you may remember Read Later as a client for Instapaper/Pocket/Readability articles that we’ve been following here at MacStories since the first version. According to Pocket, the former Read Later app will continue to work for existing users, but it will no longer be supported.

Pocket for Mac is a new app, but it borrows heavily in terms of underlying concept and flow from Read Later. On the left, there’s a sidebar listing articles and videos with thumbnails for visual previews; the actual article (or video) is displayed on the right in a clean, Pocket-formatted view that uses the same parser of the mobile app. I personally find Instapaper’s parser to be slightly more precise than Pocket’s when it comes to long articles, but I also find Pocket way better at parsing content than Readability, especially for embedded videos and images. Read more

A Conversation With Loren Brichter

Following my review of Letterpress, I sat down with Loren Brichter to chat about his latest effort, developing for iOS, other mobile platforms, and spitting into microphones. In reality, I was still in Italy and our interview was conducted on Skype, but Loren says the part about spitting was real.

Federico: Hey Loren, thanks for chatting with me today. Firstly, so we can get this out of the way: why a game?

Loren Brichter: When I left Twitter I started working on a whole slew of projects that I hadn’t had time to work on since Tweetie took off.

One of them was a game (not Letterpress), which was a testbed for some graphics ideas I was kicking around. It was pretty close to finished, just needed some more polish and content. But around that time I went out to dinner with my wife, and while we were waiting for a table, we were both playing this other (totally awesome) word game called SpellTower. But it was single player only, and I figured I could try my hand at a multiplayer word game. So I dropped the first game, and made this instead. Read more

Loren Brichter’s Comeback: Letterpress

Loren Brichter’s comeback app isn’t a Twitter client, something that works with Tent.io, or a revolutionary implementation of multitouch on the iPad.

It’s a word game. It’s called Letterpress, and it’s available for free on the App Store. I’ve been able to beta test it for a while, and it’s quickly become one of my favorite games on iOS. One I instantly reach out to whenever I have 5 minutes to kill.

Letterpress is similar to SpellTower, but it’s focused on multiplayer and has deeply different rules when it comes to assembling words. Read more

Checkmark 1.1→

Checkmark 1.1

Checkmark is the finest app to create location or time-based reminders on the iPhone. From my review:

Checkmark is smarter than Apple’s Reminders: when you add a new location, you can use your current location, add an address manually from the integrated map view, and only as a last option you can import a location from your contacts. In the map, you can drag and drop the pin to adjust the position, and choose a location radius to tweak the behavior of the geofence — should the app remind you when you’re 30 meters from home, or 250? These are functionalities that Apple’s software is still suspiciously lacking, even in the upcoming Mountain Lion (except for manual addresses, which Apple seems to have implemented in 10.8).

The 1.1 update was released last week, and I decided to test it in real-life today that I’m in Rome. I drove from Viterbo all the way here, and I set up Checkmark to remind me to call a friend when I was 100 meters away from my desired location. Among the new features, in fact, there’s iPhone 5 support with improved radius control on location reminders. The app now sports a nice slider to easily adjust the radius of your destination and control when a notification will fire off. It worked as advertised when I entered the 100-meter range.

Alongside map improvements (the app uses the native MapKit of iOS 6, and you can now drop pins wherever you want), you can also snooze reminders and create recurring ones in version 1.1. For everything else, it’s the same Checkmark I’ve been using since 1.0, only with more (clever) options.

Checkmark is only $1.99 on the App Store.

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Hazel Screencast→

Hazel Screencast

I’m a big fan of Hazel. We’ve covered the app extensively here at MacStories, and I rely on it for some of my geekiest workflows that involve scripting and automation. We had a thorough review of the major 3.0 update that came out earlier this year. If I had to name the 10 Mac apps I couldn’t live without, Hazel would be one of them.

Andreas Zeitler of Mac OS X Screencasts has put together a 1-hour video showing what Hazel is really capable of. In his description of the screencast:

The tutorial includes three chapters: basics, intermediate level, and advanced level. Chapter markers allow direct access to each of them. The video includes many useful illustrations to visualize complicated information. Additionally an ebook is included with many links and recommended readings. Presenting the information this way means that everyone can improve at Hazel at their own pace.

I have watched the entire video, and, indeed, I think it’s one of the best resources you can buy to get started with Hazel and understand all of the its potential. Screencast quality is good, with on-screen guides and labels, zoomed views on specific sections and menus, and clean transitions. The voiceover is concise and to-the-point. The video lasts an hour, but it passes quickly thanks to the provided examples and explanations – it’s definitely not boring, as most video tutorials can be nowadays.

Should you get it? Yes. If you’re new to Hazel, this will get you up to speed very quickly. And, even as a long-time Hazel user, the screencast refreshed my memory on several aspects of Noodlesoft’s app such as:

- The “Current Time” condition to execute actions at a specific time (think cron for Hazel);

- Actions and rules are always run top to bottom;

- Use a blank field for “Date Last Opened” to match files that haven’t been opened yet;

- Custom text token names;

- You can specify subfolder depth in your rules;

- You can easily convert MultiMarkdown with Hazel by running a shell script.

The screencast is available at €10 ($13). I highly recommend it.

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Apple Releases iBooks 3.0

Officially announced at Apple’s media event earlier today, iBooks 3.0 has now been released on the App Store. The new version is available here.

The new iBooks comes with a “continuous scrolling” option that, similarly to Marco Arment’s Instapaper, allows you to keep scrolling when reading a book by simply swiping a single finger vertically on screen. As many noted today, this new feature will be particularly appreciated with the likely one-handed use of the iPad mini when reading, as the lighter device makes it easy to read a book with one hand and scroll easily. Read more