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Today Weather Gets Dark Sky Alerts, Forecast.io Support

Today Weather

Today Weather

Savvy Apps’ Today Weather, my favorite iOS weather app, has been updated today to include support for Dark Sky alerts and Forecast.io, the Dark Sky Company’s recently launched weather service that comes with an API for third-party developers. Available as a $0.99 In-App Purchase, support for Forecast won’t turn Today Weather into an interface for Forecast Lines (another product from the Dark Sky Company, focused on displaying weather trends), but instead it’ll simply enable Forecast.io as a new weather source alongside Weather Underground.

While the Dark Sky iPhone app is primarily limited to North America, Forecast.io is a global weather service that aggregates data (temperature, pressure, forecasts, etc.) from various sources, statistically providing “the most accurate forecast possible for a given location”. I have been testing Today Weather with Forecast.io for the past month, and results were more accurate than Weather Underground for the Italian locations I tried: Viterbo (where I live), Montalto di Castro, and Rome. Weather Underground has been reliable in the past, but Forecast.io data had a series of minor differences that, eventually, proved to be true; admittedly, it wasn’t a major divergence in terms of temperatures and forecasts, but still accurate.

Dark Sky alerts are equally interesting: sitting in the top right corner of a location’s summary veiw, they provide a handy summary for Now, Next Hour, Next 3 Hours, and “Today and Upcoming” forecasts. I am a fan of Dark Sky’s human-readable text summaries, but, alas, temperatures haven’t been localized to Celsius (I believe this is a Dark Sky API limitation), and, at least for my saved locations, there’s not much information available for Next Hour and Next 3 Hours. I am sure that, for countries with better availability of weather tracking services and data providers, Today Weather’s Dark Sky alerts will offer even better summaries.

I like Today Weather and I’m a fan of The Dark Sky Company’s work on Dark Sky and Forecast. The $0.99 In-App Purchase is a no-brainer if you want to try Forecast.io’s data into Savvy Apps’ solid weather client.

Pocket Adds Drafts Sharing→

After an update that added support for Quotebook, Pocket for iOS has been updated today to let users send text to Agile Tortoise’s Drafts.

In the current implementation, the app will send an article’s title and shortened URL if no text is selected; if there is a text selection, Pocket will send quoted text and shortened URL to Drafts. I like it, but I wish there was a setting to send the shared link with its original, non-shortened URL.

I’m very glad Pocket added Drafts integration. In this way, you can tweak my Evernote workflows to, say, append bits of text to a single note.

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Gmail for iOS Updated With New Sign Out Option, Integration with Google iOS Apps

Gmail

Gmail

An update to the official Gmail app for iOS released today brings a series of welcome improvements that users had been requesting since the (re)launch of the client last year.

The first notable addition is support for signing out of individual accounts. In older versions of the app, users were forced to sign out of all accounts at once, a tedious process that didn’t make much sense considering the app had a dedicated section for accounts that could use better sign out options. In today’s update, you can tap & hold an account’s avatar in the sidebar to bring up a Sign Out button in a popover at the bottom.

The new version of Gmail also works nicely with Google’s other apps for iOS: from the Settings, you can now specify whether YouTube, Google Maps, and web links should directly open in Google’s native app replacements or a mobile web view. These options are available in the Settings screen for each account, but they will be enabled for the entire app, not single accounts.

The last new feature, also shown in the app’s updated walkthrough, are search suggestions as you type. While Gmail has always been able to search across all your mail, today’s version brings suggestions that (based on initial tests) should match addresses and subject lines found in your account.

You can find Gmail for iOS on the App Store.

Messages.app Primer→

A useful collection of tips for Messages for Mac by Amit Jain. I’ve always thought there wasn’t a way to add new lines or switch between conversations, so I’m glad Amit put together this post.

Unfortunately, these tips don’t fix Messages’ problems with memory usage and out-of-sync conversations – which I have been experiencing since the app’s first release.

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Opening Day Photos and Video of Germany’s New Apple Retail Store in Berlin

Berlin Apple StoreApple’s New Retail Store in Berlin

Berlin Apple Store

BerlinSidewalk has a large collection of beautiful opening day photos of Apple’s latest retail store in Berlin, highlighting the launch event amongst cheering employees and long lines. Rumors of Berlin’s Apple Store can be dated back to 2005, and the ifoAppleStore has an early picture of the building before it underwent renovation in 2011.

Also at the store’s opening was Macerkopf, whom collected a series of photos and videos amongst a brief of the store’s opening hours and weekend schedule. Opening yesterday evening at 5:00pm to a crowd of thousands, 200 staffers at the 5000 square meter retail space handed out 4,500 commemorative shirts to the first visitors. The store is Germany’s biggest amongst the eleven stores, as well as the European region’s largest, featuring a conference room and an auditorium on the second floor to showcase film, music, and photography. The store also offers expeditions for children, who are encouraged to create and share creative projects to parents and teachers. The employees at the store can speak 12 languages between them as the store is expected to be a popular attraction and showcase for Apple in Europe.

Apple has a history of both repurposing and maintaining the structural integrity of historic sites for many of their retail locations, and this store is no different. The retail store sits along the Kurfürstendamm, known locally as Ku’damm, a long boulevard in West Berlin home to many luxury fashion boutiques and businesses. Open at Ku’damm 26, the Apple Retail Store is a renovation of the Union Palast, a historic theater that’s known as one of Berlin’s first, opening in 1913.

Mojang Sells 10 Million Copies of Minecraft - Pocket Edition→

Not only is Minecraft - Pocket Edition listed as one of Apple’s All-Time Top Paid Apps for both the iPhone and iPad on the App Store, Mojang has been announcing their own incredible milestones this month. Following an astounding 10 million copies of the PC edition sold at the beginning of April, Mojang wrote on their blog Monday that the company has sold 10 million copies of Minecraft - Pocket Edition across mobile platforms. “We are very thankful to all the support that we have gotten and people playing and talking about our game,” Daniel Kaplan wrote. “We have been working hard on restructuring the backend of a lot of things for Minecraft – Pocket Edition to make future updates smoother.”

Minecraft - Pocket Edition feels very much like Minecraft its beta days, giving players a choice between simpler creative and survival modes. Mojang plans to continue updating the mobile edition of the popular franchise, with the company preparing to release Minecraft Realms as a multiplayer component by the end of May. Realms is a cloud service that will let players easily create their own Minecraft servers for friends and family, giving small groups of players an easy way to play together. For Minecraft - Pocket Edition on iOS, Mojang plans on letting players rent server space through an IAP subscription, which only hosts will have to pay.

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Goalie for HockeyApp→

Goalie is a $9.99 app that developers can use to manage their HockeyApp accounts on the iPhone.

I’m not a developer, but I use HockeyApp on a daily basis to install betas of apps I’m trying, and I know how the service works. So I asked for a test account, and played around with Goalie. The feature set is solid: you can view all your apps, get stats on versions (such as installs and crashes), view crash groups and full crash logs, manage team members, and even access the feedback area where you can delete or reply to threads. If you’ve been looking for a way to manage HockeyApp on the go, I think Goalie deserves a look. Make sure to check out the app’s website for screenshots and details.

Goalie is $9.99 on the App Store.

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