Fantastical 1.1 Brings Clipboard Detection, Multiple Alerts, Calendar Improvements

Fantastical

Fantastical

Fantastical is my favorite calendar app for iPhone. From my review of the first version:

Fantastical for iPhone gets many things right without cluttering the interface or forcing me to learn a new set of rules and menus. Like Tweetbot’s tap & hold actions, Instapaper’s footnotes, or Launch Center’s presentation of shortcuts, Fantastical’s DayTicker and natural language support made me ask myself: Why hasn’t anyone else done this before?

Fantastical was already a part of my daily workflow on the Mac; with the iPhone app, I’ve found myself using the app even more thanks to its beautiful and easy to use interface that makes it super simple to get a quick overview of a day’s events. Combined with my OmniFocus-to-Calendar system, I wouldn’t be able to go back to Apple’s Calendar app after using Fantastical.

Fantastical 1.1, released today on the App Store, adds a series of improvements that make the app even better to use.

In terms of UI tweaks, there are new options in the Settings to highlight weekend days and dim past events for the current day. Both changes are welcome as they make it easier to quickly “read” the calendar; weekend days are dimmed both in DayTicker and calendar view. Another option that has been added in 1.1 – but which I don’t use – is the possibility to hide empty days from the DayTicker. The Dock icon can now show a badge indicating the current day of the month or remaining events for the current day (I prefer day of the month).

For calendar management and event creation, Fantastical 1.1 comes with new features that I really like. Events can be moved or duplicated by tapping & holding them and choosing Duplicate or Move from a popup menu; the same tap & hold gesture can be performed on the title bar (where the date is shown) to bring up a beautiful date picker that uses the same “loupe” effect of the DayTicker (shown above). If you don’t want to manually pick a date, you can now scroll the entire event list instead of being limited to the current month; scrolling will also automatically scroll the DayTicker or calendar views.

Fantastical

Fantastical

Alongside time zone support, pending invitations management, and multiple alerts (I managed to add 20 alerts to a single event, more than Week Calendar), Fantastical now has a smart clipboard detection tool that will look for date strings in your clipboard and offer you to quickly create a new event. For me, this has been particularly useful for dates of app releases or Skype calls that I frequently receive via email; I can copy the date, open Fantastical, and the app will parse it, letting me type the name of the event and save it.

Fantastical 1.1 is a solid update to my go-to calendar app for iPhone, and it’s available on the App Store.

Textual Siri→

Textual Siri

NotSiri

NotSiri

Here’s a good article by Rene Ritchie from June 2012 about a textual interface for Siri:

If Spotlight could access Siri’s contextually aware response engine, the same great results could be delivered back, using the same great widget system that already has buttons to touch-confirm or cancel, etc.

I completely agree. Spotlight lets you find apps and data to launch on your device; aside from its “assistant” functionality, Siri lets you search for specific information (either on your device or the web). There’s no reason find and search shouldn’t be together. Siri gained app-launching capabilities, but Spotlight still can’t accept Siri-like text input.

The truth is, I think using Siri in public is still awkward. My main use of Siri is adding calendar events or quick alarms when I’m a) cooking or b) driving my car. When I’m working in front of an iPad, I just don’t see the point of using voice input when I have a keyboard and the speech recognition software is still failing at recognizing moderately complex Italian queries. When I’m waiting for my doctor or in line at the grocery store, I just don’t want to be that guy who pulls out his phone and starts talking with a robotic assistant. Ten years after my first smartphone, I still prefer avoiding phone calls in public because a) other people don’t need to know my business and b) I was taught that talking on the phone in public can be rude. How am I supposed to tell Siri to “read me” my schedule when I have 10 people around me?

I think a textual Siri, capable of accepting written input instead of spoken commands, would provide a great middle ground for those situations when you don’t want to/can’t talk in public. Like Rene, I think putting the functionality in Spotlight would be a fine choice; apps like Fantastical have shown that “natural language input” with text can still be a modern, useful addition to our devices.

Text input brings different challenges: how would Siri handle typos? Would it wait until you’ve finished writing a sentence or refresh with results as-you-type? Would Siri lose its “conversational” approach, or provide butttons to reply with “Yes” or “No” to its further questions?

Text, however, has also its advantages: text is universal, free of voice alterations (think accents and dialects), independent from surrounding noise and/or microphone proximity. With a textual Siri, Apple could keep its users within its control by letting them ask for restaurant suggestions, weather information, unit conversions, or sports results without having to open other apps and/or launch Google.

It’s just absurd to think semantic search integration can only be applied to voice recognition, especially in the current version of Siri. I agree with Kontra: Siri isn’t really about voice.

More importantly: if Google can do it, why can’t Apple?

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MacUpdate March 2013 Bundle: 10 Awesome Mac Apps for Only $49.99

We have an excellent new Mac bundle from our friends at MacUpdate! The MacUpdate March 2013 Bundle comes with a selection of top-notch Mac productivity apps, utilities, and fonts for only $49.99. The MacUpdate March 2013 bundle includes some of MacStories’ favorite Mac apps including iStat Menus 4 (our preview), DiskAid (our sponsor this week!), and the #1 way to run Windows apps alongside OS X in Parallels. If you tried purchasing the included apps individually you’d be paying nearly $618, so if you’re looking to beef up your collection of Mac apps this is a terrific deal at just $49.99.

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Week Calendar HD Review

weekcal

weekcal

Week Calendar has always been a calendar app for power users. I remember taking my first look at the iPhone version in March 2011, calling it a “powerful iCal alternative for iPhone”; two months later, I covered the release of the iPad client, which was then given a new theme to better differentiate it from Apple’s own Calendar app.1 After a long absence on the App Store, Week Calendar for iPad is back today as Week Calendar HD, which I have been testing for the past few months.

Just like its predecessors, Week Calendar is a calendar app for power users. You will find dozens of options and settings to tweak, perhaps even too many if you don’t like the idea of tweaking every font size, calendar behavior, or menu to your liking. The compromise of using a feature-rich app as Week Calendar is that there is an initial learning curve – not too steep, but definitely something worth keeping in mind if you want to get the most out of the app.

Therefore, instead of listing every single feature in detail, I’ll try to focus on the ones that I have been using on a daily basis.2

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MacHash Apple News Aggregator Gets 4.0 Update

MacHash

MacHash

I’ve always been a fan of MacHash, a service that aggregates RSS posts from Apple-related websites. From January 2012:

I’ve been a huge fan of MacHash since I started using the service last year. With a straightforward web interface that aggregates the latest Apple headlines from websites like ours, MacRumors, TUAW, Macgasm, AppStorm, iMore and many others and an iOS client that offers more customization options alongside an in-app browser, MacHash has become my go-to place to stay on the top of the latest Apple news and commentary from the community.

Released yesterday, MacHash 4.0 brings a new, cleaner interface, iCloud syncing for settings, and improved sharing.

Sites are now available in a Facebook-like sidebar that you can access by swiping horizontally on screen or tapping the list button in the top left corner of the title bar; you can pull to refresh this view, or “star” sites that you want to display in the Favorites tab. Starring a site will give you quicker access to its standalone stream of articles, which, as in previous versions of the app, is fetched via RSS: if a site doesn’t have a full-text RSS feed, it will be truncated in MacHash (just like any other RSS reader).

MacHash already had a filtering option to “mute” sites that you weren’t interested in seeing in the main stream, and in this new version filters should sync alongside sync across various instances of MacHash (say on the iPhone and iPad) through iCloud. I say “should” because, in practice, my settings are being constantly reset to default state every time I start the iPad app. I have no idea whether this bug is due to MacHash itself or iCloud, but I wouldn’t be surprised to know the latter is the culprit.

My favorite new feature of MacHash 4.0 is the tap & hold menu for sharing. You can now tap & hold any article to bring up a Copy & Paste-like menu with options to view the full website, a mobilized version, share the link on Twitter, or open more sharing actions. Because the middle button is configurable, and because auto-sharing can be activated, I can now send articles to Evernote with just two taps without having to confirm the clipping action every time. It would be nice to be able to send links to specific Drafts actions, though I understand the added complexity of specifying a Drafts URLs to send links to.

MacHash 4.0 comes with other speed and stability improvements (though the app still crashed for me once) and an overall more polished interface. MacHash continues to be my daily destination to get a quick overview of a day’s Apple news, and the app is free on the App Store (with In-App Purchase to hide ads).

Sponsor: DiskAid

My thanks to DigiDNA for sponsoring MacStories this week with DiskAid.

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DiskAid lets you transfer files to and from iOS devices via USB or WiFi. With support for files, folders, and complete file trees, DiskAid automatically detects installed apps and allows you to transfer music, movies, and podcasts (audio and video) to Apple’s apps, but also files and documents to third-party apps without having to use iTunes.

Among other features, you can access an iPhone’s call log, voicemail, and SMS history and export them to a Mac or PC. For Messages, you can generate a PDF of text messages, iMessages, or MMS that will include text and pictures formatted with iOS’ style.

Find out more about DiskAid here.

Chrome for iOS Updated With Messages Sharing, New History Menu

Chrome

Chrome

Released earlier today, Google Chrome for iOS has been updated with built-in Messages sharing and a new menu to access previously-visited webpages.

Available from the Share menu in the top toolbar, Messages integration brings up a modal Messages window to send a webpage’s title and URL to someone else. This is a good addition – I’ve long relied on bookmarklets and third-party apps to forward Chrome links to Messages – but unfortunately one I’ll make little use of, as iOS doesn’t let you quickly address a message to a pre-defined group of contacts.1

I find the new History menu much more interesting for my daily Chrome workflow. Similarly to Safari, you can now tap & hold the Back/Forward buttons to show a list of websites you have navigated to; tapping on one will take you back to that page. Like Apple’s implementation, this is a per-tab history; unlike Safari, the list of pages is shown in a dropdown menu rather than a full-screen modal view (on iPhone).

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Justnotes 1.3 Syncs Twice as Fast→

Justnotes 1.3 Syncs Twice as Fast

It’s been a little while since we’ve talked about Justnotes, but the developer has been progressively adding features and polishing the app in order to capture what makes Simplenote such a pleasure to use. Boiled down to just the essentials, Justnotes replicates Simplenote’s web experience in favor of a polished desktop app, providing more flexibility such as importing notes in OS X Mountain Lion or exporting simple text files.

Justnotes 1.3 is updated with Simplenote’s new syncing API, which is estimated to be over twice as fast as before. Shawn Blanc notes an additional useful feature that lets you hide the modification date thanks to a simple command that can be run in the Terminal.

You can download a trial of Justnotes to use for 15 days, but for a limited time, it’s available for $5.99 (normally $9.99) on the Mac App Store.

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Recovering a Lost QuickTime Recording

I recently wrote up an interview here on MacStories and although I was able to get it posted, I almost had to scrap the entire article because QuickTime crashed and I lost the recording of the interview.

I say it was a crash but to this day I still don’t know what happened. I had recorded my conversation with Ken Case on my Mac using QuickTime X player. The process to record audio with QuickTime is simple enough and it has never failed me in the past. After we got off the phone I immediately hit play on the recording to make sure the sound levels were adequate – first mistake. I should have hit Save then checked the sound levels. Not wanting to listen to the interview on the speakers in my display I paused the interview and left the room to track down my headphones. When I came back the audio recording was gone. The QuickTime application was still running but the recording window was gone.

My stomach dropped.

I frantically started tabbing through all of my open applications to see if anything else had closed, but they were all running. I checked all my desktop spaces and minimized windows but found nothing; it was gone and I hadn’t clicked save.

At this point, I hit up Viticci and started cussing like sailor at my own stupidity. He later told me that when I wrote up this recovery tutorial, I could post exactly what was said in our conversation. However it was so explicit that I decided not to.

Anyway, I started crawling the web for any information I could find on QuickTime temp file locations, Viticci and Cody contributed some suggestions as well.

Here are some of the potential locations I checked via web results:

$TMPDIR/com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX 

~/Library/Caches/QuickTime/ 

/tmp /var/folders/ 

/tmp/501/TemporaryItems/ 

/Library/Application Support/ 

etc...

Unfortunately, none of those directories turned up anything useful. As last attempt I decided to run some 3rd party recovery software.

I did a quick Google search and downloaded a demo of Disk Drill for Mac. After running it for about an hour, it found a lot of deleted files, but not my QuickTime recording. The problem was I still didn’t even know what format it would be in or what filename it might have.

I soon remembered that I had a copy Data Rescue 3 so I immediately ran it. Data Rescue 3 ran for several hours, well in to the night, and found a lot more than the demo of Disk Drill found. However I was in the same situation, I had a lot of files but none of the audio recordings it found was the interview with Ken Case and I still had no idea where I should be looking.

So I decided I would start another recording in QuickTime, stop it, then check all of those temp location suggestions I had found. Unfortunately I didn’t find anything useful doing that.

Then by either divine intervention or a stroke of genius I opened a Terminal window and dragged the little QuickTime icon from the recording window in to the Terminal window and dropped it.

Sure enough, it printed out the location and file name of that test recording.

It all became clear, I can’t believe I hadn’t thought of it sooner. Now that QuickTime is sandboxed I needed to look in QuickTime’s container for the temp recording. I finally had all of the information I needed:

In the directory:

/Users/Don/Library/Containers/com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX/Data/Library/Autosave Information

In a bundle called:

Unsaved QuickTime Player Document.qtpxcomposition

I simply had to right click on the .qtpxcompostion file and inside I found the .m4a audio recording of my QuickTime test.

Now this is where the magic ends; this next part, the actual recovery of the file was thanks to Time Machine doing hourly updates. I simply had to open the Quicktime Autosave Information directory in Time Machine to the time right after I ended the call with Ken and there was my recording in its sandboxed temp directory.

I know this probably seems like common sense – just open up Time Machine and recover the file. However if you don’t know the filename or the directory it was located in your backup is not going to be much use. Thus, I felt this was worth sharing in case you are ever in the situation of having to retrieve a lost QuickTime recording.

Now you know where to look.