Our thanks to Global Delight for sponsoring MacStories this week with Boom.
Boom goes above and beyond the speakers in your MacBook or iMac to deliver impressive sound. Boom boosts the volume of your Mac so you can hear your favorite music, movies, and games over noisy fans or background noise. Boom even boosts the volume of music files in your iTunes playlists so you can listen to tunes on the go at fuller volumes. Plus, Boom offers personalized presets through its built-in equalizer, meaning you’ll always get the best sound no matter what you’re listening to.
Earning Macworld’s Best of Show award in 2011, Boom takes your audio a whole new level. Try Boom today and get $2 off the regular price.
NetNewsWire, one of the first RSS readers originally developed by Brent Simmons and later acquired by Black Pixel in 2011, has made a reappearance before Google Reader shuts down on July 1st.
NetNewsWire 4.0 is the result of nearly two years of work, modernizing an app which was introduced in 2002 and saw its last major update to 3.0 in 2007. Before Black Pixel acquired the popular news reader, a light version of NNW 4.0 was introduced to the Mac App Store, but it was significantly paired down in features compared to the original version.
NNW 4.0 is currently focused on the reading experience, syncing RSS feeds locally to a Mac and otherwise absent of any background syncing services. During the public beta, Black Pixel plans on continuing to build out their background syncing service, and will be revisiting the core design of their iOS apps to bring them up to date the new design language introduced in iOS 7. For those wanting to try NNW, you can import your RSS feeds from Google Reader by logging into the service from the app or through an OPML file.
The latest version of NNW is focused on discovery, sharing, and a distraction free reading experience that consolidates all of your favorite web articles in a single place. In NNW, you’ll be able to subscribe to popular feeds if you’re just starting out and need recommendations, bookmark your favorite articles, mark sites as your favorites, and have multiple articles open at the same time (useful for following an unfolding story).
NNW 4.0 will be available for $20 when it launches, but those who pre-order during the beta period can get it half off. You can download the public beta and read more about the latest changes on Black Pixel’s blog.
On your keyring, in your backpack or travel luggage, or attached to your laptop, Tile keeps track of your valuables so you can easily find them wherever they may go. Tile resembles a small white square that’s only a few millimeters thick, making it both pocketable and small enough to be conveniently attached to gadgets or personal belongings. It’s small enough that you can slip it into a wallet’s pocket, or you can simply adhere it to the surface of a MacBook.
Tile will work over Bluetooth 4.0 with the iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, iPad mini, 3rd or 4th generation iPads, and the 5th generation iPod touch. A Tile app for the iPhone will let you track all of your Tiles within a 50 ft to 150 ft range, displaying a small marker to help you find lost or misplaced items. These Tiles definitely aren’t GPS aware, meaning that you wouldn’t be find misplaced luggage if it was half way around the world (more on this in a bit). But Tile is certainly useful if you forget your jacket or drop your keys in an airport terminal. Tiles can be rung so you can audibly hear where your items are, and like a metal detector, an indicator in the app points you in the right direction of the things you’re trying to find when you’re close by.
Tile is discretely social, which in theory is supposed to overcome its limitations of not being a true GPS tracking device. If a bunch of people are using Tiles and its cloud service, then it’s possible you would be able to recover something was that stolen or dropped outside of the range of your iPhone. When you mark a Tile as lost, other Tile users’ phones will be notified of the lost item, and will begin searching for it in the background. Because everyone’s phone would be inherently connected, that means you should be able to find your lost Tile by proxy through someone else. No personal information or details about what the Tile is attached to are shared - the phone simply and secretly relays back whether it’s found the lost item and where it is to the original owner.
Although a Tile is relatively affordable (roughly $20 per Tile), a downside is that Tile has no replaceable batteries, and it’ll need to be replaced on a yearly basis as it loses its charge.
Tile is currently available through pre-order, having already been successfully funded through Selfstarter, a roll-your-own crowdfunding solution that gives creators more control over the marketing and presentation of their product on their own sites. You’ll earn additional Tiles if you pre-order in bulk, and it’s expected to ship late this year or in early 2014.
I wrote some advice in an interview with App Camp For Girls recently, “Find something in your life that is broken and write software to fix it.” The best software is personal. It’s something you need. It heals a wound in your life and makes you happy.
In engineering a new laptop stand to alleviate his back and neck problems, James Olander wanted to create something that could bring the laptop to your eyes, while keeping it durable and lightweight. The result is The Roost, a laptop stand that’s inspired by mechanical mechanisms found in scissor lifts and folding chairs.
Made from Carbon Fiber and Delrin (a very strong engineering plastic), The Roost weighs 5 oz and folds into a 1” by 1.5” by 13” package that can easily slip into a backpack or laptop bag. The stand, because of the strong materials used, can also withstand a lot of punishment. In a load test, The Roost was loaded with concrete blocks and slabs, holding 132 lbs of weight without any damage to the product. Olander says that The Roost can be tilted 80 degrees and still hold onto your laptop, making the design accident proof.
Compatible with most laptops that have a hinge behind the laptop base (a laptop compatibility guide can be found here), The Roost wants to correct your posture and take your laptop to new heights. In addition to black, The Roost will be available in white, titanium, green, red, blue, orange, purple, yellow, and pink if funding is successful. In backing this Kickstarter project for $65, you’ll be rewarded with a black roost engraved with “Original Kickstarter Backer.” If you add another $5, you’ll be able to choose a colored model. The Roost has a modest goal of $9,300 in funding, but has already reached $55,465.
I don’t think Geekbench scores for this machine will be terribly meaningful. Benchmarks have the curse of trying to capture how a machine will perform under typical, or extreme, conditions. What they don’t do is give a broad perspective of the actual capabilities of the machine. They’re informed by history. If you do something new history will be less relevant.
In January, when I first reviewed Pushpin, I noted how the app didn’t look as good as Pinbook, another Pinboard client that, back then, didn’t support some of the power-user functionalities that were available in Pushpin. Many Pinboard clients have come out in the past few months; as MacStories readers know, my choices have always been Pinbook, Pushpin, and Pinbrowser – while these three apps were all made for Pinboard, each one of them had a peculiar feature that made it stand out. With Pushpin 2.0, I feel like the difference is now marginal, as the app takes important steps towards becoming the only Pinboard client you’d ever need to add, manage, and browse Pinboard bookmarks. Read more
Markdown has changed my life for the better. Not only is it easier to work with than graphical interfaces given the limitations of my vision, but it has caused me to embrace plain text for nearly all of my documents. No longer do I have to work in bloated word processors with toolbars galore, or worry about rich-text formatting. Discovering Markdown has been liberating in the truest sense of the word.
It’s amazing how the same markup we use to simply make our lives easier when writing for the web can be used to empower a writer who is legally blind.
By every visible measure, FiftyThree, the makers of Paper, are the definition of an app store success story, and this week they closed a Series A round of financing led by Andreessen Horowitz.
It’s easy to see this as a big endorsement of the App Store: startup creates a breakthrough product, gets noticed, gets funding, changes the world. And perhaps that’s the path FiftyThree is on.
But there’s another scenario that may be in play, and if I were Apple, this round of funding and FiftyThree’s plans going forward should be a yellow flag that the App Store may not be as strong as it could be.
Erica Ogg of GigaOm conversed with Impending’s Phill Ryu and FiftyThree’s CEO Georg Petschnigg earlier this week to talk about how developers are coping with App Store economics. The conversation takes us through Ryu’s thought process on deciding what’s fair to the customer while ensuring his company is able to continue developing Hatch, the soon-to-be-launched app his team has been working on for the past months. Petschnigg’s opinion on the matter is that one-time paid apps are limiting.
“In-app purchase is a tremendous opportunity to offer something (like how a) chef only puts what people want to eat on a menu, we see in-app purchase as a mechanism for paring down the feature set and offering up what people want to buy,” he told me. “It keeps the software footprint small and efficient. And from a design perspective it’s incredibly liberating.”
FiftyThree has been one of the most transparent high profile developers in the industry, often sharing what goes into the development of each of their new features on their blog. FiftyThree, starting with just five employees, has grown into a team of twenty two, becoming “a workshop for re-imagining common digital tools.” The company has made money by charging for tools through in-app purchases, but Ben points out that alone doesn’t appear to be sustainable given their quick growth. What Paper is now working on aren’t just new tools for Paper, but hardware and services that have the potential to bring in more revenue outside of the App Store.
There is so much more Apple (and the other platform owners) could be doing to improve this situation; paid updates and app-store supported subscriptions (beyond Newsstand) would be great places to start.
