Hulu Announces a Completely Redesigned iPad App→

Last year, Hulu refreshed their website to put an emphasis on all the shows and programming you love to watch, removing much of the chrome that adorned video players and promotion carousels, and making thumbnails and artwork bigger for easier navigation. Hulu also implemented a new “Shows You Watch” feature for logged in users so you can quickly jump to your favorite show.

Today’s iPad update brings the same minimal redesign to the iPad, adding new features such a discover panel which will tell you more can you expect from a show based on your viewing history. But the coolest feature is the new minimized player, which lets you continue watching a show while browsing for something else.

You can learn more about Hulu for the iPad here.

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Vesper Review: Collect Your Thoughts

Vesper for iPhone

Vesper for iPhone

It wouldn’t be fair to judge Vesper solely by the names of its creators. A new note-taking app for iPhone released today, Vesper has been designed by Dave Wiskus, developed by Brent Simmons, and directed by John Gruber. There’s more to Vesper than the fame of the all-star team behind it, though.

Long-time MacStories readers should be familiar with the iOS apps that I like and use for taking notes, collecting thoughts, and organizing tasks. For years, my entire workflow was based on Dropbox: I would save articles, notes, random bits of text, and even tasks in text files handled by apps like Writing Kit, TaskAgent, Byword, nvALT, and Notesy. Those are still excellent apps, but my setup is more variegate now: my daily thoughts and memories are collected in Day One; longer articles are still stored in Dropbox and edited with specific text editors like Sublime Text; my bookmarks are saved in Pinboard, while everything else – from reference material to annotated screenshots – goes into Evernote. On iOS, Agile Tortoise’s Drafts plays a fundamental role in the way it launches ready to receive any text and is capable of forwarding it to multiple destinations – all while allowing power users to achieve faster, automated workflows.

Specific apps, different services, all with a common thread: sync to a remote backend that ensures my text is always available anywhere.

If you take into account the apps that I have reviewed over the past two years, Vesper may seem anachronistic and uncharacteristically simple: it’s a general-purpose note-taking app with no sync, no URL scheme, no iPad version, and no Markdown integration. When I first tried Vesper a couple of weeks ago, I was skeptical in regard to the app’s reason of existence. But now, in spite of its 1.0 nature and many missing features, I see one – and, more importantly, I believe Vesper gets several things right. Read more

Dropbox for Mac Beta Brings Automatic Screenshot Sharing, iPhoto Import, New “Move” Menu

Dropbox public betas – known on the company’s forums as “experimental builds” – serve as a field test for new features that are being taken in consideration for the app’s desktop clients. And while they don’t always see the light of day in the public release channel, they do help Dropbox collect feedback for future updates and revisions.

Today, Dropbox has released a new public beta for Mac that contains some noteworthy new functionalities to speed up the process of adding files to your Dropbox account through the Finder, and particularly images.

The first one, an automatic screenshot sharing feature, is somewhat reminiscent of tools like Droplr and CloudApp: once enabled in the Preferences, it will allow Dropbox to redirect every screenshot taken on OS X to a /Screenshots folder in your Dropbox, sharing that file and putting a public link in your system clipboard. While not as full-featured as the aforementioned third-party tools, automatic screenshot sharing could indeed make for a nice solution to quickly share screenshots on Twitter and IM – retaining control over files that are simply located in the Finder.

In line with Dropbox’s renewed focus on photos, an iPhoto import feature should let the app turn iPhoto albums and events into Dropbox albums also viewable on the web. In practice, I haven’t been able to test the import feature in spite of my MacBook meeting the requirements mentioned on the forums (iPhoto 7.0 or higher). Based on the description, it does seem like Dropbox wants to replicate the Everpix experience with an automatic desktop importer taking care of fetching files from iPhoto and organizing them in Dropbox albums.

The last new feature of the beta is a “Move to Dropbox” contextual menu that will show up “for most files or folders outside of your Dropbox”. Essentially, this allows you to right-click on any file or folder and quickly send it to your main /Dropbox folder, but without automatic sharing. In my tests, the menu worked as advertised.

Dropbox experimental builds should be taken for what they are: public betas from a company seeking feedback from its users. Features introduced in these builds are sometimes kept, often tweaked, occasionally removed and re-engineered for a future implementation. You can download today’s new experimental build here.

Introducing The Prompt Podcast

 

A few months ago, my friend Myke Hurley asked me if I wanted to launch a new podcast. There are many tech podcasts these days – maybe too many – and, back then, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I have thought about this very deeply, and I’ve come to this conclusion: the great thing about the Internet is that everyone is free to produce their own content, because the readers will eventually decide what they like and what they don’t. Or, in our case, the listeners: today, Myke, Stephen, and I are announcing The Prompt.

From Stephen’s blog post:

Each week, we’ll be looking at not only the news, but the ecosystem and culture around Apple and its products.

The real twist is what we do with guests. Instead of the three of us running around trying to cover everything, we’re building an army of correspondents.

I am extremely grateful for the opportunity, and I look forward to beginning this new adventure with Myke and Stephen. I realize that there are several podcasts about Apple and technology nowadays; my hope is that, like MacStories, 512 Pixels, and 70Decibels, The Prompt will distinguish itself because of quality, not trends. Our listeners will decide.

We haven’t recorded the first episode of The Prompt yet, but, when we’ll do after WWDC, you’ll find it on the 5by5 network. Here’s something cool: if you subscribe to the 512 Podcast today, you’ll be automatically migrated over to The Prompt feed when it launches. And, to kick off things properly, you can listen to the just-posted penultimate episode of the 512 Podcast, where I was invited to announce The Prompt and discuss iOS 7 and WWDC predictions.

I have big expectations for The Prompt, and I hope that you’ll pardon my accent. You can follow @_theprompt on Twitter, and check out the beautiful artwork by Jory Raphael above.

Camera Noir→

I bought Pacific Helm’s new app yesterday following Gruber’s recommendation, and I like it. Camera Noir’s purpose is to take “beautiful black & white photos” with three brightness adjustments. I have been taking some photos today, and I’m a fan of the high-contrast choices and the way photos taken with Camera Noir look. I think Camera Noir’s three filters are far superior to Instagram’s Willow and Inkwell.

The best part, however, is the attention to details. The camera UI is minimal and functional; I love how the app shows a green horizon line when you’re level, and I think using the native iOS share sheet for sharing photos is a good idea. And, the app’s website is just great.

Camera Noir is $1.99 on the App Store.

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Why the Studio Behind Civilization is Embracing Mobile→

Revision3’s Adam Sessler visits Firaxis Games and chats with Sid Meier, Jake Solomon, and Steve Martin (among others). Firaxis is the development house behind franchises like Civilization and Pirates, and they’re bringing their 2012 hit XCOM: Enemy Unknown to iOS this year.

It’s a good interview (as usual with Sessler’s video content). I like how Firaxis has its own skunkworks to experiment with mobile games for iOS. You can watch the video below.

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A New ProductiveMacs Bundle: 9 Great Mac Apps for $29.99

Last November Apparent Software had a fantastic and successful bundle sale. Now, they’re back with another great ProductiveMacs bundle that contains some even more excellent utilities that will help you get work done. Some of the highlights of the bundle are Dropzone (our coverage), Gemini (our review), Paperless, and Crossover. If you had to purchase all nine of these productive goodies separately they would cost $245 but this new bundle is priced at the super-low total of $29.99.

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PlexConnect for Apple TV→

A clever little hack to display Plex content on an Apple TV with no jailbreak required:

Essentially, you run a program on your computer which masquerades as the Trailer app. Next, change one setting on the ATV, and you’re up and running. It took me less than 2 minutes to install and get it running. It already uses the new transcoder (which means great support for subtitles), and I suspect it’ll support myPlex soon as well.

There’s a bit of manual configuration to do with this first version of PlexConnect. You can find an official discussion board, check out the FAQ, roadmap, or grab the source code here.

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Apple Starts Decorating Moscone West with WWDC 2013 Banners

With WWDC 2013 kicking off in San Francisco on Monday, Apple has today started decorating Moscone West for its five-day event. Last year, with WWDC starting on June 11, Apple began Moscone preparations on June 5, showing off colorful banners with app icons and, in the process, confirming iOS 6’s official new icon ahead of the conference.

So far, banners put up by Apple at Moscone West are showing the same colorful graphics of the official WWDC 2013 logo that Apple unveiled in late April. While much has been said about whether the WWDC logo may hint at a visual refresh in the next versions of iOS and OS X, the shape used by Apple is simply reminiscent of iOS app icons – something that Apple has often used for WWDC banners.

This year, Apple is using the “Where a whole new world is developing” tagline for the initial set of banners.

We’re receiving the first photos from Moscone West, and we’re including them after the break. We will update this post with more photos as we receive them throughout the week. Read more