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Slow Feeds Brings A Simple, Unique Innovation To RSS Apps

In the oft-abused Death of RSS debate, a common and universal truth is typically forgone: RSS is a standard, not a single entity, and as such its survival or presumed “death” should be related to the services that use it, not the standard itself.

The problem many people have with RSS is roughly the same others have with email: it’s not as real-time as Twitter, and if you don’t keep on tabs on it you can easily get overwhelmed by the onslaught of unread items demanding your constant attention. While in the past few years some amazing apps and technologies have leveraged RSS as a foundation to provide new experiences, little has been done to address the simple problem behind the possible frustration caused by RSS: that RSS can be useful for sites with fewer but focused items, but it can get annoying (like email) with hundreds of unread items. Is it possible to retain the usefulness of RSS, while ensuring its catch-all nature is relegated to a level that avoids frustration?

Slow Feeds by Stefan Pauwels is an iPhone app that does one thing well: it separates “slow” from high-volume feeds, and it lets you check out both within a single interface. It fixes a simple problem with a unique, yet totally obvious approach: it understands the convenience of RSS for either “low” and “high” volume websites, and doesn’t treat them equally.

Once logged in with your Google Reader account, Slow Feeds (whose icon is very appropriate) will take a couple of minutes on first launch to “understand” which feeds are usually slow, which ones have many posts per day, then it will break them up into two categories: Slow Feeds and High Volume. A third tab in the bottom bar is also dedicated to Starred items.

The first tab, Slow Feeds, lets you switch between All or Unread items for sites with few content every day: for instance, this is where I can find things like the iFixit Blog, Minimal Mac, or Beautiful Pixels. These are sites that I am interested in, but that because of their low-volume nature could sometimes easily get lost in the plethora of unread items (ever wondered why these sites usually don’t publish on Apple keynote day?). The app has been very accurate at picking “slow feeds” for me, going back a few months to older items it knew I might have missed – indeed, thanks to Slow Feeds I rediscovered many articles that I had unintentionally ignored.

The High Volume tab, on the other hand, displays a list of all items from all sites that publish a lot of items every day. In here, I can find MacStories, MacRumors, Daring Fireball, The Loop, and all those other publications that are very active in terms of post frequency. The results have been accurate in here as well, but I think there are some things the app could do better. For one, when compared to “regular” RSS apps like Reeder or Mr. Reader, the High Volume tab is obviously lacking: there are no sorting options, no folders, and the list of items isn’t organized by date. Slow Feeds isn’t meant for this kind of consumption – the app’s purpose is to keep “slowly updated feeds from getting lost in the fast river of news” – but I think some more options wouldn’t hurt.

Similarly, it’d be nice to be able to manually specify feeds that are “low volume”. By default, Slow Feeds automatically calculates the frequency for each feed based on the number of items per feed and time interval, but a manual option could be useful for, say, those sites that don’t typically publish a lot items, but may have exceptions (such as several Apple blogs on a keynote day). Being one of the first releases of the app, I wasn’t expecting to find the same amount of configurable options and settings as in Mr. Reader, but nevertheless, I am looking forward to having more sharing features in the article reading view (which right now only supports Twitter, email, and Instapaper).

Slow Feeds won’t replace your daily RSS app (it doesn’t want to), yet at the same time, I believe it really has a chance of becoming an app many will use alongside their RSS client on a daily basis. Slow Feeds’ core concept is so clever, and so naturally implemented, I am now wondering why, in retrospective, others didn’t come up with it first.

Slow Feeds is $2.99 on the App Store.

Facebook Messenger Updated With Read Receipts, Location, Typing Indicator→

Facebook Messenger Updated With Read Receipts, Location, Typing Indicator

The official Facebook Messenger app for iPhone was updated today, reaching version 1.7. The new version, first reported by 9to5mac earlier this week, adds a number of optimizations and new features to the standalone messaging client, including read receipts, location information for messages, and a typing indicator.

Similarly to Apple’s iMessage, the app now displays a read receipt under each message to indicate whether the person you have written to has “seen” or ignored a message. But unlike Apple’s solution, Facebook Messenger now attaches location data to single messages as well, associating each text – with the user’s consent regulated through the standard iOS location controls – with a city or area. This, combined with read receipts and a typing indicator (that, however, did not work in our tests) should contribute to making Facebook Messenger more “personal” and “contextual” than standard SMS. To further showcase the interconnected and multi-platform nature of Facebook – which now boasts over 480 million monthly mobile users – the company is now also showing the device that generated a message within the conversation: for instance, a message sent from an iPhone will have a mobile device icon next to it.

Facebook Messenger is capable of sending messages anywhere – web, desktop, mobile – as long as the recipient has a Facebook account, although according to the company today’s updates are “mobile first”.

Facebook Messenger 1.7 is out now on the App Store.

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Toggler→

Toggler

I don’t always manipulate chunks of text on iOS, but when I do, I use Toggler. Available for free on the App Store, Toggler lets you easily convert text to Sentence case, lowercase, UPPERCASE, Capitalize, and tOGGLE cASE. It lets you paste the original text you want to modify in the first tab, which is the only one that brings up the iOS keyboard to edit text. With one tap, you can manipulate text and copy it to the clipboard, send it via email, or clear it. The app also displays character and word counts, and it lets you find & replace.

I mainly use Toggler to convert sentences to headlines for MacStories, and to quickly find and replace words for my articles. Free on the App Store.

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Reading News With Hacker News ∗

Hacker News from YCombinator is a reliable and very active source of information for all things geeky. Users collect noteworthy technology news articles from all over the web, comment and discuss on them, and vote to create a top list sorted by popularity. Following the trends of the community by joining the network or just regularly visiting the site and clicking through new articles is interesting for anyone who wants to know a bit more about the latest web technologies and how to help enhancing them, from entrepreneurs to developers. In my opinion though, the HN website is cluttered, and the typography is a mess. Maximilian Mackh solved many of these issues by recently publishing his iPhone client for Hacker News. Read more

Track 8 Brings The Metro Experience To An iPad Music Player

At what point do we cross the line that separates insipid clones from genuine inspiration, uncomfortable hybrids from interesting experiments? Track 8, a $1.99 music player by Ender Labs, tries to imagine what listening to music on the iPad would be like using Microsoft’s Metro UI experience.

Following the basic principles of Swiss graphic design, the Metro design language is focused on getting rid of “superfluous” design elements such as buttons and toolbars to turn the content – words, pictures, videos – into the user interface to manipulate on screen. Originally conceived on Windows Phone 7 and being updated as the foundation of the future Windows 8 OS, Metro has struck a chord with the design community thanks to its elegant approach to modern typography, dynamic layouts, and intrinsic originality compared to other mobile platforms. But does Metro make sense as an app running on iOS, the polar opposite of Microsoft’s studies in terms of UI design and experience?

Ender Labs isn’t afraid to say that they wanted to see how Metro would work on the iPad, without excuses. So while I’ll leave the task of determining whether this is right to someone else – I sure hope Microsoft doesn’t come knocking at Ender Labs’ door for any reason – I want to to focus on Track 8 the app for iPad you’d probably interested in checking out.

Fetching music directly from the native iOS music app, Track 8 displays four tabs (home, artists, albums, playlists) on a clean canvas that emphasizes typography, solid colors, and album artworks instead of icons, buttons, and scrollbars. In pure Metro fashion, the content becomes the interface you are manipulating: tapping on an album will advance a level “into” the content of that album, and tapping again on a song will bring up the now playing view with a larger cover art, and only some basic buttons to play, pause, shuffle, and repeat. Everything is kept as minimal as possible: the volume and progress controls are two simple flat, solid bars you can slide; to go back to a previous view, you tap on a large back button in the upper left corner that “snaps back” with a nice fading animation. To move horizontally between content, you swipe.

Track 8 comes with some appearance settings to customize the look of the Metro experience on iOS. The background color can be set to light or dark, and 10 additional options are provided to set the “accent color” for selected content and UI items. The app has some wallpapers (including linen), and you can also opt to display artist backgrounds, which are pulled from Last.fm and saved in the app’s local cache for when you won’t have an Internet connection. To keep the app in line with Metro’s elegant and uncluttered paradigm, I turned artist backgrounds off and chose a simple light wallpaper.

Track 8 works and it looks gorgeous, but it is undeniable that is an app that’s not meant to be on this platform. Not just for mere aesthetics – as an iPad app, Track 8 contradicts the very underlying principles of iOS interaction and navigation. The fact that tapping on sections at the top, for instance, gets you into a single level of interface is the antithesis of the iOS tab bar, which always allows you to switch with one tap between multiple, even nested sections. Or again, alphabetical lists: on iOS, letters are placed on the right side of a scrollable view, allowing you to quickly jump to a specific letter. With Track 8, artists and albums are grouped alphabetically, sorted horizontally in a grid, and tapping on a specific letter will display a popup grid to quickly jump to any other letter.

Track 8 doesn’t want to be an iOS app by design, and whilst this can be an advantage as long as loyalty to the Metro design language goes, it is also the app’s biggest shortcoming when it comes to expecting certain elements and patterns that are standards on iOS.

Track 8 won’t win an Apple Design Award. It won’t revolutionize the market of third-party music players for iPad, and it sure is an experiment that doesn’t aim at pushing the limits of iOS forward. But that’s not to say Track 8 doesn’t look great and work well on the iPad: if you’re a fan of Metro and would like to see that kind of experience in app that also happens to have a real functionality, Track 8 is your best option. You can get it at $1.99 on the App Store.

Concept Video Shows New Text Selection Method for iPad

Remember how, before the iPad was unveiled in January 2010, speculation was running wild as to whether Apple would simply use a larger virtual keyboard on the device? Back then, some rumors claimed the bigger nature of the device would force Apple to come up with some crazy and revolutionary way to type text on screen. As it turned out, Apple simply replicated the iPhone’s soft keyboard on the initial version of iPhone OS 3.2, making it almost laptop-size. In fact, the biggest change to the iPad’s software keyboard only happened with iOS 5.0 last year with the introduction of the split keyboard.

That’s not to say everything related to the iOS keyboard is perfect and Apple should stop improving on it. As the plethora of Dropbox text editors have showed, there is a need for different, possibly customizable keyboards that give better access to text selection tools.

In my list of wishes for iOS 6, I forgot to mention I really would like to see easier, faster text selection coming to the iPhone and iPad. I believe iOS’ text selection method is one of the best around, yet Apple could do better. For writers, selecting text – not typing it – simply isn’t nearly as fast as on a laptop. And the problem is not the keyboard – the issue persists with external Bluetooth keyboards – it’s the design of iOS itself that forces you to get your hands off the keyboard to manipulate text.

iDownloadBlog has posted an interesting concept video by YouTube user “danielchasehooper”, showing an interesting possible take on text selection on the iPad. By allowing users to tap and swipe on the keyboard, this system could, in theory, allow for faster selection, also in combination with keys like Shift. Almost every area of iOS now supports taps and swipes: why not the keyboard?

Concepts are what they are – ideas – but sometimes Apple seems to consider them. I don’t know if this video will turn out to be a feature Apple will evaluate – albeit it really makes a lot of sense in my opinion, design-wise – but I sure hope something’s cooking for iOS 6 in regards to text selection.

Building Our MacStories Wiki with VoodooPad 5

In the past three years writing for MacStories, I have stumbled across several applications that I really wanted to try, but eventually put off because I didn’t have time to learn more about their functionalities and purposes.

VoodooPad by Flying Meat – Gus Mueller’s indie development shop, also behind my favorite OS X image editor, Acorn – has been one of those apps for the longest time. I’m all for supporting independent developers, and I believe that, at some point, I even purchased a VoodooPad 4.x license and the iOS version “because you never know”. I wanted to learn and use VoodooPad, but I kept reverting to Evernote, Dropbox, and you know what else. When I read about the improvements and new features coming in VoodooPad 5.0 and got invited by Gus to test the major release, I realized two things: that I needed to learn more about VoodooPad without further delays, and that version 5.0 revealed the fleeting purpose I had been missing from my quick skims through VoodooPad’s website.

Some apps are complex, but they are not complicated. The subtle difference between these mechanics is exemplified by VoodooPad, which is presented as a “personal wiki app”, but that, in reality, is so much more. In fact, starting with powerful wiki capabilities as the app’s foundation, VoodooPad can be used for just about anything as long as you can type or come up with ways to enter information into the app. All this while staying simple, intuitive, and powerful at the same time, hiding advanced functionalities under the hood alongside those little details connoisseur of great Mac software can recognize and appreciate.

If you’re looking for a list of features in VoodooPad 5.0, the website and documentation pages are the perfect place to read through. Flying Meat is well known among Mac veterans for its painstakingly accurate and in-depth docs (possibly only second to Bare Bones Software), so make sure to check them out if you want explanations and answers. In this post, I thought it’d be fun to briefly illustrate how we are using VoodooPad at MacStories, and how I think the app can make sense alongside other text-oriented syncing services like Dropbox editors and Evernote.

VoodooPad is a personal wiki-building application at its core, and we’re using it at MacStories exactly for that. Read more

Playing Devil’s Advocate, Arguing Apple Should Change Their IAP Policy

There’s been a lot of discussion in the past few days over Apple, its In-App Purchase (IAP) policy, and Dropbox after it rejected a few apps that employed Dropbox functionality because they offered links to the Dropbox website for signing up and logging in. At issue was that the option to buy a higher level of storage was also visible, and this contravened one of the App Store Review Guidelines. Some viewed this as Apple trying to kill (or at the very least, target) Dropbox – but as Federico explained, this was just Apple enforcing one of their existing policies.

After thinking about it for a while, I’ve come to the position that perhaps that policy isn’t the right one. So I decided to play the devil’s advocate, and try to argue the case for Apple adjusting their policy. Specifically my argument focuses on Apple’s policy going something like:

Apps may use external mechanisms for purchases or subscriptions to be used in an app, but only when those purchase mechanisms are undertaken in a web view within the app.

That could probably be further clarified in more simplistic language, but you get the general idea of what I’m proposing. The current policy prohibits any link to purchases or subscriptions that are undertaken through external mechanisms (ie. not IAP); I suggest that this should be allowed. So let’s quickly go through the benefits of the current policy and arguments for relaxing the policy. Read more

Reading Manga On The Retina iPad

Last month, I asked on Twitter if there was an easy and legal way to purchase manga digitally on the iPad. Unfortunately, while American comics are seeing a nice digital resurgence thanks to apps like Comixology, the situation is profoundly different and inherently worse with Japanese manga. There is no Comixology for manga – where by manga I basically mean Shonen Jump content – and the few services that do have some manga available (like VIZ) have terrible apps that don’t take advantage of the latest iOS technologies and come with risible offers on multi-volume purchases.

I have no idea why Shonen or its international publishers – like Panini Comics and Star Comics in Italy – aren’t realizing the huge potential for legal, convenient, digital editions of their manga on mobile devices. It is kind of ironic that, as of today, pirating manga you already own physically gets you better, higher quality results from some shady Internet forum than going the proper, legitimate way. Because that way doesn’t exist. It’s the same problem of old media all over again.

As I was listening to T.Rex on Spotify yesterday for my review of the app, I connected Marc Bolan’s song to Naoki Urasawa’s 20th Century Boys, and I felt the need of finding a solution to begin reading the series again. It turns out, provided you have scans for your manga ready to go (I prefer PDF and CBR, but there are several options out there), there are two interesting options right now on iOS.

Assuming you want to read manga on your iPad, Bookman is a $2.99 iPad app that’s been updated for the Retina display and that comes with fast caching of pages, great performance, and a good selection of browsing and optimization settings. Its rendering has been very good for my copies of 20th Century Boys, and I like how you can easily import content through a built-in FTP server (I transfer files with Transmit) or Dropbox. You can organize manga in bookshelves, and the app comes with various settings for tap areas, thumbnail previews, appearance, and zoom. It’s even got page resume and multiple page turning effects. $1.99 on the App Store gets you the separate iPhone app (I wish they were universal). Right now, I’m reading manga with Bookman.

The other option is Comic Zeal, which is universal, but that I haven’t tried yet as it doesn’t have support for the Retina iPad. Technically, the app displays manga in Retina resolution if higher-res images are available, but interface elements haven’t been updated for the new display. According to the developers, an update with new graphics and “other goodies” has been submitted to Apple. Comic Zeal is $4.99 on the App Store.

Here’s to hoping publishers will consider the market for digital manga someday.