When it comes to email clients, most Mac users still stick to Apple Mail as their client of choice, although there are plenty good alternatives available. The reasons for that are clear: over years of constant development, improvement and changes, Apple managed to create a powerful, but still clearly laid out program, which fits the needs of both private and professional business users. Diversified labelling options, multiple mail signatures, folders, and diversified reply and creation features are just some examples. Nevertheless, there are still some people out there demanding one specific feature Apple mail lacks: statistics. But, as you know, there’s always an app for that. In this case, it’s Mailsum by Appmasters. Read more
Mailsum Enhances Your Mail Account Surveillance
Inkflow Has One Great Idea
When we talk about hotly contested app markets for the iPad, we’re either talking about iOS text editors or sketching apps — today we’re focusing on the latter. Between Adobe, Autodesk, Paper, and Penultimate, something needs to be dramatically imaginative and different to make it stand out in a section of the App Store that is well contested and already populated with great apps. Sometimes an app like SyncPad stands out by providing new and interesting features (in this case it’s immensely useful for presentations), but very rarely does an app come along that can compete with these established tools on the iPad. Similar to how Instapaper and Pocket (once Read It Later) have captured the “read later” space, the aforementioned apps broadly cover everything you’d likely need or want when it comes to writing, drawing, and sketching.
A Web Developer’s look at Diet Coda→
A Web Developer’s look at Diet Coda
Diet Coda is great. Seriously. This app might not be your first choice to do serious work on (yet). However, if the only reason you’re taking your huge, heavy laptop with you on that otherwise relaxing vacation is just in case you get the 5-alarm-fire call from your boss because of a major bug that needs to get fixed RIGHT NOW (don’t they all?), Diet Coda and an iPad with an LTE/3G connection could be all you need.
Joesph Schmitt gives an honest perspective of the good, the bad, and what he’d like to see come down the pipeline for Diet Coda in the future. Diet Coda isn’t and shouldn’t be your replacement for a desktop app like Coda 2 or Espresso, but it is a fantastic companion touchscreen editor that it makes it relatively easy to dart around your projects and apply changes as needed. I’m trying not to take for granted having an always on-hand iPad app that lets me seamlessly implement changes as they come to mind — I think people forget that even having a tool like Diet Coda on the iPad is something special (especially when it has that quality Panic user interface behind it). If you’re looking for a reasonable review that weighs the pros and cons of Diet Coda, I’d say Schmitt does a good job of summarizing the praises and complaints — you’ll be well prepared as to what to expect concerning a mobile editor. As of now, Diet Coda is still $9.99 on the App Store, half-off during its initial launch period.
Facebook Releases Standalone Camera App→
Facebook Releases Standalone Camera App
Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram raised eyebrows and foreshadowed the launch of a Facebook branded camera app, separate from the official Facebook application just as Facebook Messenger and Facebook Pages Manager are. Combined with the dream team of developers from Sofa, Facebook’s previous talent pull seems to have paid off with Facebook Camera, a central app dedicated to taking pictures, lightly editing photos, and uploading pictures to your Facebook profile. With cropping and straightening tools, the ability apply stylish filters, batch upload multiple photographs at a time, and view your friend’s photos in fluid streams a la the camera roll, we’re left astonishingly impressed with Facebook’s latest mobile application.
Facebook’s Camera app looks great. Looks like Sofa’s @dirkstoop had a big hand in it too. theverge.com/2012/5/24/3040…
— Steve Streza (@SteveStreza) May 24, 2012
Facebook’s app makes it easy to take photographs, batch upload your images (up to 2048 x 2048 pixels), tag them, and apply up to fifteen different filters not dissimilar from Instagram. A vertical feed of large photos, expansive album views, and an engaging progression of composing photos to uploading your favorite shots makes Facebook Camera feel like a solid camera application. Many unexpected elements can be pulled and pushed onscreen to reveal or hide information, and the app is simple enough to be intuitive without feeling crowded like you would expect a management app to be. Facebook has a well balanced, thoughtful, and overall enjoyable app on their hands. Facebook users should love it.
From Ellis Hamburger at The Verge:
Facebook Camera just became instantly the best way to upload photos to the social network, just ahead of Batch and other competitors. It’s simple to take photos, tag them, and upload them en masse, which is something we’ve been asking for for a long time.
Animations throughout Facebook Camera are fluid, the app is fast, and there’s a lot of clever interaction to take advantage of throughout the interface — clearly Facebook’s acquired talents have been hard at work in making the app to not just feel like a boring extension of Facebook, but rather a necessary addition that belongs, no, deserves to be on a Facebook user’s smartphone. Facebook has made an incredibly bold statement with Facebook Camera — they’ve stepped up to the plate to deliver a solid application that doesn’t feel tacked on or only done for the sake of their platform. It’s a serious release. Just look at their landing page.
All Things D and The New York Times both have introductory pieces on Facebook’s latest app release alongside Facebook’s official announcement on their blog. We recommend trying the app for yourself by downloading Facebook Camera from the App Store. A lot of care went into this app, and we’ll have more coverage after we spend some time using what’s already given us a great impression.
Tweetbot 2.4 Brings New Search View, Keyword Mute Filters, Refinements
Following updates focused on iCloud sync and gestures, Tweetbot 2.4, released today on the App Store (iPhone, iPad), brings an updated search view with additional location features, relocated Trends and People categories, and various improvements that make the client’s search functionality more powerful and intuitive.
Search
The new Search tab unifies Trends, People, and Top Tweets under a Browse section, with Saved Searches and the classic search box still available at the top of the screen. The dedicated Top Tweets option is quite enjoyable – I have indeed found myself browsing such flow of status updates on a couple of times for the occasional laugh or remarkably snarky tweet. Top tweets now also show up in regular search results, and they are marked by a silver star indicator.
Trends, on the other hand, can be changed to another location directly from the search view of Tweetbot 2.4 – I don’t use Trends, but I assume the option will come in handy for those who, for some reason, like to check the recurring #Buongiorno trend in Italy.
The big addition in Tweetbot’s new search interface is support for nearby tweets. Here, you can view nearby tweets with the ability to change your location (just tap on the embedded Google Map), and you can perform location-based keyword searches for tweets containing specific words that also happen to be located near you. Unfortunately, Viterbo resembles a ghost town when it comes to looking for fellow local MacStories readers. I asked Tapbots, and they confirmed my town’s insistence of loading @viticci as the only local MacStories tweeter isn’t an app’s bug.
There are two more little touches I like in Tweetbot 2.4: you can double-tap the search tab to open search with the keyboard, and the search box has been optimized to let you easily jump to tweets, users, or a specific @user without additional taps.
Keyword Mute Filters
Tweetbot has been offering advanced mute filtering options for quite some time now. Version 2.4 now allows you to block specific keywords – not just users or clients – and there’s even support for regular expression if you really want to make sure you’re not reading about the latest spoilers in Game Of Thrones. Mentions can be muted as well.
Miscellaneous
There are plenty of other refinements in Tweetbot 2.4. Offline support, for instance, will ensure tweets marked as favorite or sent to a Read Later service when no Internet connection is available will get “queued”, then sent/favorited as soon as you come back online. Sure enough, while browsing my timeline in Airplane mode, I fave’d a couple of tweets, sent some links to Pocket, and Tweetbot queued them. When I turned WiFi back on, the app refreshed, the tweets were marked as favorites in my account, and they appeared in my Pocket.
On the iPad, web and map views can now be dismissed with a two-finger swipe down gesture, which I found incredibly convenient and faster than reaching out for the Close button in the upper left corner. Also on the iPad, list views show one line of a list or profile description, and when viewing an image in full-screen, you can hold down for options.
Additionally, aside from the usual bug fixes, you can now swipe to the right on profile views to go back; items sent to Pinboard are marked as unread; and last, the compose screen comes with basic smart quote support (for quotes, em dash, and ellipsis).
With powerful new features and UI refinements added to an existing set of great functionalities, Tweetbot 2.4 retains familiarity while striving to remain the best third-party Twitter app for iOS. Get it from the App Store today.
Pulp Gets Retina Graphics, iCloud Sync for Mac & iOS, Trends
Between RSS clients and read later apps, Acrylic’s Pulp has always taken a different approach at presenting news beautifully on the Mac and iPad. Combining the traditional aspects of RSS (Pulp lets you add a website’s feed through search, direct OPML, and Google Reader) with the rich visual presentation of apps like Flipboard, Pulp (nèe Times) offers a magazine-like experience for web articles, which can also be stripped out of unwanted graphics through a feature called Magic Reader. In our previous coverage, we were positively impressed by Pulp for Mac’s push sync and Lion support, as well as the iPad version’s elegant layout.
Today, Acrylic is releasing two major updates to Pulp for Mac and iPad, adding an improved interface and Retina graphics on iOS, iCloud sync across platforms, and a new “smart home page” feature that automatically aggregates trends and relevant news items from your feeds.
Retaining the same page-based layout that allows you to add multiple sources in newspaper-like columns with different display options, the new Pulp adds a “Home” start page that features popular and trending articles from your existing feeds. Using a series of algorithms that determine an article’s relevancy through keywords, date, and other feeds mentioning it, the new Home page provides a grid of fresh and popular stories for the day. In actual testing, this meant that with Pulp set to refresh every 5 minutes, the app would look at my four sections (Apple, Technology, Science, Arts & Entertainment) and bring in popular news like the Google/Oracle trial and Jony Ive’s knighthood, sorted by keyword and grouped by sources.
The concept is interesting; I was told by the developers that Pulp builds this “smart home page” completely on the client side of the app – no data is uploaded to Acrylic’s servers and social networks aren’t contacted to aggregate popular links, either. I haven’t been able to test Pulp’s algorithm during a major news break, but I believe it is safe to assume it would grab popular stories within a couple of minutes. Overall, I think the new Home page is a good idea as it provides a simple and efficient way to “see what’s important” without navigating through feeds manually; in my tests, I noticed refreshing trends took slightly longer on the iPad version of Pulp – but the results were the same afterwards.
The big new feature of Pulp 2.5 is iCloud sync. Moving from the previous Pulp Sync service, iCloud will automatically keep feeds, pages, and shelf items in sync across the iPad and Mac. For testing purposes, I updated to Pulp 2.5 on the Mac, configured my virtual newspaper, and saved a couple of items to the app’s shelf using the new browser extension. Once I updated to the new 1.5 version on the iPad, the first launch of the app made me wait around 30 seconds for an automatic import of my data, and I couldn’t experience any errors of sort. iCloud sync has been fast and reliable in my tests, with Pulp deleting and adding sources between the iPad and Mac app within seconds. The addition of synced shelf items is welcome, too, as it offers a simple way to save articles “for later” – albeit the app also comes with direct integration for Pocket, Instapaper, and Readability.
Pulp 1.5 for iPad and Pulp 2.5 for Mac are two gorgeous, solid, and clever updates. Pulp has always wanted to provide a solution in between the fast-paced nature of RSS and the laid-back reading experience of magazines, and the new version builds on that foundation, enhancing it with iCloud sync and a useful, constantly up-to-date Home page.
Pulp for iPad is available at $2.99 on the App Store; Pulp for Mac is $4.99 on the Mac App Store.
WriteUp 3.0
In my original comparison of iOS text editors, I included WriteUp, a fast and powerful Dropbox-enabled app that stood out thanks to its support for folders and sub-folders, exporting options, and versions. Prior to settling with Writing Kit for my daily iPad writing efforts, in fact, I had been using WriteUp as my go-to text editor – version 2.0 of the app was solid, but in the end not as powerful as Writing Kit.
Version 3.0 of WriteUp, released today, adds new powerful functionalities to speed up the process of working with multiple Dropbox folders and notes, bringing a new built-in web browser to augment the app’s research capabilities with split view. I have been testing WriteUp 3.0 for the past two weeks, and while I won’t completely switch from Writing Kit just yet, this new iteration of the app has stayed on my iPad because of the very specific features it introduces.
Split View
If you write on the web, split view is kind of a big deal. Being able to take notes and write blog posts while referencing a webpage on the other side of the screen is something we do every day on our Macs, yet it has been increasingly difficult to find iOS apps – especially iPad apps – that can get it right. In the past months, I have tried several applications that promised to allow me to “take notes while browsing”, yet most of them either failed at delivering a serious text editing environment to begin with, or simply didn’t function as advertised.
WriteUp 3.0 takes a nice first step on the right direction by offering a built-in web view that you can use in full-screen or split mode by hitting a Lion-like controller next to the address bar. There are no tabs, no bookmarks, no search box – just a URL field, a refresh button, icons to navigate, and an action menu. The latter is called “research actions”, and it allows you to open a link in Safari, copy it, email it, send it to Pocket or Instapaper, or “insert it into the note”. This option will basically copy the link to WriteUp’s clipboard highlighting the dedicated link button in the extra keyboard row, allowing you to open anInsert Link panel with the address already copied. Unfortunately, unlike Writing Kit, WriteUp 3.0 still doesn’t let you select words in text and only wrap those within Markdown links; I hope better Markdown auto-wrapping options will come in a future version of WriteUp. Overall, I also still prefer Writing Kit’s custom keyboard row.
The built-in web browser isn’t perfect: its performances aren’t comparable to Mobile Safari, and because of its size constraints, webpages will often be displayed partially, even when using the iPad in landscape mode. On a couple of times, I also noticed WriteUp would “freeze” a webpage without letting me reload it, and I really think there should be a dedicated Google button to relieve stress from the address bar. In spite of these few bugs and limitations, however, I can’t help but like WriteUp’s split view. It doesn’t let me drag & drop text between panels – I am not even sure that is technically possible – but it works in portrait and landscape mode, it’s dismissible with gestures, and, more importantly, it has already helped me write several news posts for MacStories when I needed to work side by side with webpages to reference quotes and other facts. It can only get better from here (idea: split view for multiple notes).
Pinned Notes, Favorites, and iCloud
The second major addition to WriteUp 3.0 is something I’ve been wanting from a Dropbox text editor for a long time, and which the app gets precisely right. WriteUp can now mark notes as “favorite” and make them available anywhere no matter the folder they are into. Furthermore, a separate “pin” option lets you pin notes at the top of any folder, and both favorite and pinned items are synced across devices running WriteUp with iCloud.
Here’s how I use this feature. As outlined in my Dropbox writing workflow, I try to keep a consistent environment of text files that are always accessible and up to date independently from the tool or device I decide to use.
Lately, I have unified all my notes, drafts, and lists inside a single Apps folder that I can access from Writing Kit, TaskAgent, Drafts, TextDrop, and my Mac. My “longer notes” are located in the root of the /Apps folder, with sub-folders for the aforementioned apps inside it. OS X and TextDrop make it easy to navigate through these as they have access to my entire Dropbox filesystem; most iOS text editors, on the other hand, typically force you within a single folder, and won’t let you move between sub-folders. Not only does WriteUp let me navigate notes and folders, it now also a) enables me to mark my most used TaskAgent list as favorite so I can see it in the main Apps folder and b) pin my Scratchpad.txt file to the top of the folder view so I’ll always know where I can quickly jot down notes and links (and if I happen to be cleaning up my Drafts folder, I can easily cut links, and copy them back to Scratchpad.txt without navigating back to /Apps).
Pinned and favorite notes have been a terrific addition to my workflow, and I found both the implementation and iCloud sync solid and reliable. It’s not for everyone – admittedly, several writers I know like to keep their Dropbox notes and folders in separate locations – but if you’ve been looking for a way to unify your text files and folders in a single view, WriteUp 3.0 should have you covered here.
Wrap Up
There’s a bunch of other neat additions in WriteUp 3.0. Markdown Extra (tables, footnotes, etc) is now supported, and the app can send notes to OmniFocus, iMessage, and publish to Tumblr. Terminology integration lets you look up or replace words using Agile Tortoise’s fantastic dictionary app; you can move “complete” folders to other locations in your Dropbox; and because Dropbox now lets you share files from any folder, WriteUp 3.0 can upload images, and give you a streamable link you can share or use as source for images in your notes. If you plan on serving images from your Dropbox account, this will come in handy.
In my tests, I experienced a few bugs with WriteUp 3.0. Sometimes, the built-in Markdown preview wouldn’t be displayed, forcing me to tap on another note, then select the previous one again to activate it; the app didn’t crash, but it failed to create a text file with “2.1” in the title (it wrongly recognized .1 as the extension, thus not creating a .txt file), and the bottom navigation bar (where the + button to create new notes is placed) isn’t displayed when using a Bluetooth keyboard. Fortunately, the developer has been extremely responsive, and I was told fixes, stability improvements, and new features are already underway now that 3.0 is available.
WriteUp 3.0 is a great update. In my opinion, Writing Kit still remains the most powerful text editor around, but, as I mentioned above, at the same time I couldn’t get myself to stop using the functionalities introduced in WriteUp 3.0 such as split view and favorite items. For those specific purposes – writing while referencing a webpage and browsing notes across folders – WriteUp 3.0 is superior to Writing Kit.
With strong sharing options, support for Versions (another feature most iOS text editors are lacking), images, custom CSS previews, and all the other features of version 2.0, WriteUp 3.0 has still some rough edges, but shows an incredibly promising, and possibly even more powerful text editing future.
WriteUp 3.0 is $4.99 on the App Store.
Apple Posts New Siri Ads Featuring John Malkovich
Following a series of “celebrity ads” for the iPhone 4S’ voice-based assistant released last month, Apple today posted two new Siri TV commercials featuring actor John Malkovich. The ads, titled “Joke” and “Life” show Malkovich casually talking to Siri with short sentences and a series of single words such as “weather” or “evening”, perhaps in an effort to showcase both Malkovich’s particular attitude and Siri’s capability of handling short commands with seemingly no context (“evening” returns a series of calendar appointments, “linguica” displays local restaurants).
According to a recent study, the previous commercials featuring Zooey Deschanel and Samuel L. Jackson fared well with viewers, who, reportedly, were highly receptive to familiar faces of celebrities illustrating the latest features of the iPhone in a familiar, almost casual setting. MacRumors has put together a number of possible responses Siri can give to Malkovich’s query – tests performed with the question asked by Samuel L. Jackson showed that, in practice, Siri was a little less accurate than its primetime counterpart.
The new Siri ads are available on Apple’s website, YouTube channel, and we have embedded the official versions below.
Read more
Diet Coda From An iPad Blogger’s Perspective
I am no web developer – I write prose, not code – but I just bought Panic’s highly-anticipated, fantastically-named Diet Coda for iPad from the Italian App Store. I want to show my support to the great independent developers of the iOS and OS X community. Furthermore, I want to help disrupting the long-standing meme that the iPad can only be used for “content consumption”, whatever that has come to mean in 2012. I didn’t know I could still find Diet Coda useful for my iPad-based writing and blogging workflow.
I can’t review Diet Coda – as I said, I wouldn’t be able to fully understand its functionalities and judge its (possible) shortcomings when compared to the (also coming today) Coda 2. But I can recognize software crafted with care and attention to detail. Diet Coda immediately stands out as one of those apps where pixels aren’t just there to fill the screen – they’re the epitome of design enhanced for function.
Take the custom text selection method Panic built. It’s not entirely custom – it’s still fundamentally based on “drag handles” and a “zoomed-in view” of the cursor – but Panic reworked it to allow for faster selection by swiping on the left (where numbered lines are) and to visualize a larger, rounded “zoom selector” (they call it the Super Loupe) when you’re moving the cursor between characters. It feels much better than standard iOS text selection – faster, and somewhat more accurate – albeit it really needs to be experienced “in motion”, rather than through the screenshot I have embedded below.
I wouldn’t mind seeing Apple drawing some inspiration from Panic’s Super Loupe and Hooper Selection for the next major version of iOS.
Or, again, search. Within a document – Diet Coda can edit files on your server with syntax highlighting for languages like HTML, PHP, or JavaScript – you can hit the search icon to initiate a query with options for Find & Replace, Case Sensitive settings, Regex, and Search in Selection. I can’t tell you how many times I wished a text editor would implement search through selected text within a document the way Panic did.
It’s about getting the details right, yet making sure the main foundation is also solid to begin with. Diet Coda features a perhaps not so innovative, yet reliable column-based navigation for browsing folders and opening files; at any time, the column view can be “enhanced” with thumbnail tabs (also called “document shelf”) displaying open files, the main Sites page, and Terminal along the top of the screen.
And if you go back to the Sites page – where you add the servers you want to connect to using Diet Coda – and enter “wiggle mode” to edit the sites you’ve configured, Panic added a nice button at the bottom to confirm you want to exit the wiggle animation. You could stop it anyway by touching anywhere on the screen, but this is a nice extra visual cue.
Same for buttons: the purple ones “glow” when tapped, and the Delete action is, again, custom by Panic, yet incredibly nice to use on iOS.
I may not write a full review of Diet Coda, but I was sure happy to find out Panic’s latest effort will find its well-deserved spot in my iPad writing workflow. Diet Coda, finally, allows me to copy the public URL for images uploaded to my FTP server. That’s a small feature, but you’d be surprised to know how many FTP iPad apps end up lacking it amidst dozens of other “power user options”. I wish Diet Coda would let me upload from the Camera Roll – hopefully that’s coming in a future update. However, together with buttons to copy the public URL and file path, Panic added options to copy an image’s HTML <a> and <img> tags to the system clipboard, making it extremely easy to paste the code into Blogsy, my blogging app of choice. The simple, yet often ignored “copy URL” action will play nicely with Writing Kit’s shortcut for inserting images into Markdown, too.
Even without fully utilizing Diet Coda’s set of features, I’m happy to see the app filling a particular void in my workflow – and even better, with style and prowess.
We will have more detailed looks at Coda 2 and Diet Coda later this week on MacStories; personally, I believe Panic’s latest iOS effort will redefine the category of web code editors on the iPad, proving once again that the platform has moved beyond “consumption” – and that’s just up to users to accept it now.
Diet Coda is now available on the Italian App Store and other international stores (same for Coda 2). Diet Coda and Coda 2 will be available here and here, respectively, on the US App Store in a few hours.