Rdio for Mac Gets New Player

A few minutes ago, music streaming service Rdio updated its website and Mac app (which is largely web-based) with a new “bigger, bolder” player. Inspired by the iOS app’s recent redesigns, the player sits at the bottom of the window, styled with a blurred preview of the currently playing song’s artwork. As you click the list icon in the bottom right, you’ll get a larger album art view (screenshot) with a summary of upcoming songs (and a larger, blurred artwork in the background).

The new player is a big change in terms of visual appearance – it certainly is in contrast with Rdio’s otherwise clean and minimal design focused on whitespace, text, and smaller thumbnails. Last week, Rdio updated its iOS app to include a similar redesign for the sidebar.

Rdio for Mac can be downloaded here.

Tim Cook at D11

Apple CEO Tim Cook will be joining Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher tonight for D11’s opening session at the Terranea Resort in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. The Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital conference begins today on May 28th and ends on May 30th, inviting on stage several industry tech titans such as Dick Costolo of Twitter and Elon Musk of Tesla to discuss the impact of today’s technology and what’s in store for the future.

Tim Cook, having spoken at D10, has stayed the course at Apple by introducing a brand new iPhone, a more powerful iPad, and the incredibly successful iPad mini. New, industry changing Macs were also introduced in the form of the MacBook Pro with Retina display and nearly razor thin iMacs. But he’s also been hard at work pushing Apple in new directions, switching up assumed product release dates and hinting at new opportunities, suggesting new product lines during fiscal conference calls. Although Apple had an incredible 2nd fiscal quarter for 2013, publications like the Wall Street Journal have tried to rewrite the narrative, suggesting that demand for Apple products is falling in the face of strong competition and that innovation is stale due to the lack of new products. Rumor has it, however, that the company is remaining steadfast and focused on bringing to light a new look and feel for their flagship operating system, iOS, re-imaging the appearance of a core interface that’s been a mainstay on the iPhone since 2007.

Much of the interest around new product lines and iOS’ expected rethinking has been driven by Tim Cook’s management switch up that occurred last October, where Senior Vice President of iOS Software Scott Forstall and Senior Vice President of Retail were let go as Jonathan Ive stepped in to oversee Human Interface design across the company. Bob Mansfield, instead of retiring, was promoted to Senior Vice President of Technologies while Craig Federighi would take the helm of Senior Vice President of Software Engineering. It was an unexpected simplifying of Apple’s core management structure, the conclusion of which likely awaits at WWDC’s opening Keynote on June 10th.

Then there’s Apple’s doubling of the capital return program, as well recent Senate hearings, where Tim Cook has defended Apple’s tax policies concerning the large amounts of cash Apple keeps in safe havens overseas.

With these events in mind, tonight’s D11 should bring forward Tim Cook’s perspective on the current condition of Apple and where it’s headed. At D10, Tim Cook was asked about his relationship with Steve Jobs, what that meant to him, and figuring out who he was as a person. This time, we should expect a lot of talk focusing on his vision, how he’s reigning in the company as his own, and how he views the competition as it currently stands.

All Things D will not have a live stream of the event, so we’ll be following along with others in attendance. Be sure to check out: Engadget, The Verge, and MacRumors for extensive coverage.

Sponsor: Creaceed

Our thanks to Creaceed for sponsoring MacStories this week with Prizmo.

Prizmo makes scanning easy, requiring nothing more than an iPhone, iPad, or your favorite digital camera. Prizmo works like magic — it takes a snapshot of your document and transforms it into a digital format which can be used and worked on just like any ordinary file. Text recognized in more than 40 languages is pulled right from the pages and transferred to Prizmo thanks to an amazing Optical Character Recognition engine that can read every word. And that text is immediately editable, so you can lay out your scanned documents, add, and delete as you see fit. Plus, you’re not even tethered to your phone. Prizmo has apps on all of your apple devices, so you can keep your documents in sync with iCloud, or via other storage apps like Dropbox, Evernote, and Google Drive. Who needs a big, bulky scanner when you have Prizmo?

Prizmo for iOS devices is only $9.99, with the Mac version starting at $49.99. You can learn more about the Prizmo suite of software here, and try a demo of the Mac version with your portable camera from the Mac page.

Dark Sky 3.0→

Today, Dark Sky 3.0 has been released with much anticipation since the release of their own forecasting API / website forecast.io with incredibly accurate weather prediction packaged with an elegant, simple user experience.

Version 3.0 is now powered by the Forecast API and support for the UK and Ireland is now available. Gone are the brief text summaries which have been replaced by ‘intelligent’ ones that are more detailed with current conditions, next hour, and the rest of the day. They also include more than just precipitation, which is a big addition I have been waiting for.

Another new feature to Dark Sky 3.0 is the ‘Personal Weather Reporter’: any user can submit their own current conditions with a simple shake of the iPhone and then selecting conditions. You can even include a weather photo with your submission as well. The radar screen is still the same with the exception of a new magnifying glass icon in the upper left. I don’t plan on dumping the forecast.io web app or my other favorite, Today (which also uses the forecast.io API), but now that Dark Sky is more than just precipitation, I will use it for more than just alerts. It is awkward that notifications are still considered “beta”, but the Dark Sky team is still actively making changes to them.

The Dark Sky team has done a really great job with this update (and in the last few months) and they have proved their dedication to this genre of apps. Be sure to check out their other web app, Lines. Dark Sky 3.0 is $3.99 or a free update for existing users. The app is universal and available now on the App Store.

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Instacast For Mac

Back in early May, Vemedio released a first beta of Instacast for Mac. Instacast is my podcast client of choice on the iPhone and iPad, and I was eager to see whether Instacast could fulfill my long-standing wish of a proper podcast app for OS X. Instacast is officially out of beta today, and it’s my new favorite podcast app for Mac.

There isn’t much to say about Instacast for Mac that hasn’t already been explained in our review of Instacast 3.0 for iOS. The Mac version retains the same interface and episode management principles of its iOS counterpart: you can subscribe to podcasts and organize them in lists, sort them by parameters such as Title or Date, or delve deeper into subscription-specific settings for refresh times and automatic download/deletion options. Literally everything that you know about Instacast 3.0 for iOS – including the app’s design style – has been ported to OS X with this first release.

There’s some stuff that has been built exclusively for the Mac. I am particularly fond of Instacast’s rich selection of keyboard shortcuts, which fit well with the Mac’s nature and will help you save time if you’re looking for a specific command or option (there are many of them, so remembering each one of them may require special mnemonic skills).

I like when developers porting popular iOS apps to the Mac don’t simply convert their projects for a desktop window: that was the case with Tweetbot (another app that took advantage of OS X features like keyboard shortcuts and larger displays), and, fortunately, it’s happening with Instacast as well through the aforementioned shortcuts and an iTunes-like MiniPlayer. Available through the Window menu (with the keyboard, it’s ⌥⌘2), the MiniPlayer allows you to check on either the episode you’re listening to (with a widget that’s got a minimal footprint on your desktop) or to the ones that you have queued up for later thanks to – another Mac-only feature – Up Next support. Again, similarly to iTunes 11, Instacast lets you send specific episodes to a list that you can consult and modify while you’re already listening to something else.

Another feature that’s currently exclusive to Instacast for Mac is local text search: if you remember an episode that had a particular keyword in its title or description, you can look for it. This is especially useful for names of apps or services that are mentioned in podcasts, but I wish it was possible to save recurring searches.

Instacast for Mac is Instacast 3.0, responsibly and intelligently ported to OS X. It’s not a simple conversion of the iOS app as it takes advantage of the Mac in obvious, but still welcome ways. Sync with Instacast Cloud, initially spotty in the beta, has been reliable and fast for me in the last builds, making the process of switching between devices and continuing to listening to podcasts seamless.

If you’ve been looking for a solid podcast app for Mac that syncs with iOS, Instacast gets my recommendation. Until May 31, Instacast for Mac will be available at $14.99 instead of $19.99.

Opera Next 15 for Mac and Windows→

On Monday, Opera released a preview of their upcoming desktop browser that uses WebKit instead of Presto to render web pages. Opera Next 15 is built atop Chromium, and thus shares a lot of similarities with Google Chrome. The preview brings Opera on the desktop in parity with the recent update to Opera for Android, bringing over features such as Discover for browsing through local news headlines. Stash, a new feature added to Opera, is a sort of visual Reading List for saving webpages you want to look at later. Opera Mail, once built into the dated Presto-based browser, has been split into a separate application which is also now available for preview.

You can download Opera Next 15 here. A release candidate of Opera’s new email client can be downloaded here.

[via iMore]

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Kickstarter: Mutator, A Gadget That Really Mutes Your iPhone

Our iPhones are always in our pockets, making sure that we won’t miss an important conversation or opportunity by vibrating, chirping, or ringing in our pockets at a moment’s notice. Sometimes we forget, however, that music and video still plays when our phones are muted, or that holding onto the home button a bit too long still activates Siri’s beep to start speaking. Ron Adair wanted to solve the problem of knowing whether or not his phone was really muted, so he created a plug for the iPhone called the Mutator.

Mutator is a simple little pyramid that plugs into your iPhone’s headphone jack, silencing all but the most important notifications like alarms. While the iPhone’s mute switch takes care of incoming notifications and the ringer, Mutator takes care of everything else like YouTube videos and games. Cleverly, Mutator can be twisted to unmute sounds when you’re ready to listen in.

This Kickstarter has a modest goal of $24,000 to cover tooling, manufacturing, and delivery costs. Pledges start at $5, but a $16 pledge promises you your very own Mutator if the project is successful.

Learn more and back it on Kickstarter here.

[via Dan Benjamin]