This Week's Sponsor:

Textastic

The Powerful Code Editor for iPad and iPhone — Now Free to Try

Vimeo 2.0 for iOS Review

Released earlier today for free on the App Store, version 2.0 of Vimeo’s iOS app aims at making video discovering and editing more intuitive and accessible on the iPhone and iPad. With a brand new interface that was originally previewed in January, Vimeo 2.0 for iOS packs a new grid design on the iPhone that makes it easy to navigate the various sections of the site whilst retaining all the functionalities of the previous version (our review) and also adding new ones, but more importantly, it now allows iPad owners to completely manage their Vimeo accounts with options to browse videos, load subscriptions, check on the Watch Later queue, and even shoot, edit, and upload new videos straight from the device.

I took the app for a quick test this morning, uploading a video you can check out after the break. The (very) quick video was shot with a Canon EOS 550D, imported on the iPad through the Camera Connection Kit at 720p as .MOV file, edited in Avid Studio, then passed to Vimeo for upload. Interestingly enough, the Vimeo app couldn’t recognize my .MOV file in the Camera Roll, whilst Avid Studio successfully found it, allowed me to edit it, and exported it again at 720p to the iPad’s library. iMore has a good comparison of Avid Studio Vs. iMovie for the iPad. I prefer Avid Studio as well.

Vimeo for iOS puts great focus on discovery, sharing, and uploading of your own videos. Whereas the editing interface of the iPad is largely similar to its iPhone counterpart (meaning you’ll be able to easily drop media onto the editing timeline, add effects and transitions – but don’t expect the complexity of other apps like iMovie and Avid) with options to shoot new videos or load existing ones off the device’s Library, the remaining sections of the app have been reworked to fit better on the iPad’s larger screen. Upon firing up the app, you’ll be brought to the main Featured area, which lists featured videos and Vimeo staff picks, enabling you to start playing a video in the lower portion of the screen – all whilst being able to read descriptions, like a video, or save it for later. My Videos and Likes are also available in this page’s tab bar at the top.

The app works both in landscape and portrait modes, albeit I’ve found to enjoy it more in landscape given the additional screen real-estate. Videos can be played in standard definition or HD, just like on Vimeo’s website. Most of the functionalities of Vimeo.com have been ported over to the app, including comments, sharing options (for Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, WordPress, and email), Creative Commons information, and stats. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed the way Vimeo designers converted the design of Vimeo.com to a native client – I also found the iPhone’s grid UI scheme to be particularly easy to navigate.

There are a couple of interesting things about this app. For one, Vimeo has embedded a link to purchase a Vimeo Plus subscription into the app’s Settings, but this link simply points to Vimeo.com and not, say, Vimeo’s own Upgrade page. It’s still a curious choice given Apple’s history with Amazon and links pointing to external stores (which, apparently, Vimeo isn’t doing here as they simply redirect users to the website’s homepage). In the same Settings UI, you can check on your weekly upload limit, remaining HD uploads, and overall stats. You can allow only WiFi uploads, clear the file cache, and reset the app from a sub-menu in the Settings.

Whilst the Help section opens an awkwardly small Help Center webpage inside a popover menu, much better is the functionality offered by the Stats tab, which lists your Top Plays by number of views, date, and country. The Edit section, which is project-based, mirrors the feature set of the iPhone app, allowing you to import videos from your Camera Roll, edit them, then upload them to Vimeo. From this area, you can also delete projects, render and export, or simply add new projects by hitting the + button in the top right corner.

I think Vimeo’s second attempt at delivering a rich iOS experience is a good one. The iPad app still has some rough edges, and its editing capabilities aren’t obviously on par with more powerful offerings from the App Store, but it’s sufficiently good for quick edits, and pretty great at browsing and discovering new videos. It also makes for a sweet “catch-up solution” thanks to its lean back Watch Later feature integrated right into the app. The updated iPhone app, on the other hand, is cleaner, easier to use, although it could be deemed as slightly unoriginal after all the apps that have adopted a grid design in the past years. Still, the even-so-less-innovative Home screen grid implementation works fairly well for this kind of app.

Vimeo 2.0 is a great update, and an overall good app. Give it a try for free on the App Store, and check out an extremely quick attempt at capturing the essence of the app after the break. Read more

Exploring MoneyWiz: Complete Personal Finance Control On Your iPad

It wasn’t originally a New Year’s resolution to keep better track of my spending, but by the way things have turned out, it almost seems as if it was one. Early in January I began looking for a good Mac app for exactly this task. Originally I had hoped that Saver, an app I reviewed last year had since released an iPad app that I had not heard about – I really liked the app but wanted it on the iPad or Mac. Unfortunately Saver is still iPhone only, so I looked around a bit longer, asked around and tried a few apps on the Mac. I wasn’t thrilled with what I found. They all seemed a little to complex for what I wanted, so I kept looking. I forget how, but I eventually stumbled upon MoneyWiz which is available on the iPad and iPhone (at the time it was called SilverWiz). The developers haven’t yet released a Mac version (they’re working on it and expect to launch it in Spring this year), but they did give me an early look at the recent update to MoneyWiz for iPad (version 1.3), which launched late last week.

MoneyWiz for iPad does a couple of things: it keeps track of your expenses, allows you to set budgets (and track your progress), and provides you with the ability to create reports on various aspects of your financial situation. More importantly, I found MoneyWiz to be very flexible, not overly complex like some of the Mac apps I tried, and, at the same time, full of a wealth of features that should be sufficient for most individuals. Read more

Adobe Photoshop Touch Review

When I first heard that Adobe was bringing Photoshop to the iPad sometime last year, I was sceptical. I presumed it would be a very limited app compared to the powerful desktop app, or maybe just a slightly improved version of Photoshop Express. At best I thought it might give you some good editing tools to fix and correct photographs, perhaps with some layer support and effects. I didn’t think Adobe could pull off creating a great tablet version of Photoshop, and I wasn’t sure the iPad would be a good fit for the tasks in Photoshop.

So when I finally got to try out Adobe Photoshop Touch, I was intrigued to see what Adobe had accomplished. After a couple of hours playing around in the app (it accidentally went live yesterday, then Adobe pulled it) I’ve come away very impressed with what Adobe has accomplished. Photoshop Touch is a powerful and capable version of Photoshop for the iPad, without a doubt. To me, it is the latest iPad app that has demonstrated that the iPad is for more than “content consumption” — that’s just an old myth now.

It’s the apps that make the iPad great and Photoshop Touch is perhaps the prime example of the potential of the device and how flexible it is at becoming a great machine for a whole slew of different tasks, from reading, to writing, to viewing to editing and now, to using Photoshop for more than just basic photo edits. Sure, Photoshop Touch is still not as powerful as the desktop version, in fact it’s quite a distance away from reaching such parity — but it all comes down to the car Vs. truck analogy that Steve Jobs rather famously explained. Photoshop on your Mac or PC is still available for when you need to do complicated and advanced tasks, but for a lot of other tasks, you could probably migrate to the iPad and Photoshop Touch.

Enough with the introduction, let’s dive into our review of Photoshop Touch.

Read more

Apple Airs New iCloud Commercial: Harmony

Earlier today Apple posted a new TV ad on its website and YouTube channel, this time about iCloud. Carrying a new tag line “Automatic. Everywhere. iCloud.”, the commercial focuses on practically every functionality of Apple’s cloud service, from Photo Stream and Calendar sync to app downloads, Address Book sync, and iBooks. In particular, the ad shows the kind of integration that’s possible with iCloud – the video briefly touches upon Automatic Downloads from one device to another, and more prominently features Photo Stream for photos and calendar events synced across devices.

The YouTube description of the ad reads:

With iCloud, the stuff you love is everywhere you need it. Automatically.

It’ll be interesting to see whether Apple will start using this new “Automatic. Everywhere.” marketing slogan elsewhere. In the meantime, check out the video below.
Read more

MacStories Reading List: February 19 – February 26

In our longest Reading List collection to date, we’ve curated some great articles about Mountain Lion (which is still a hot topic among bloggers), Apple’s renewed “scamming apps” problem, and a variety of other subjects, including iOS-ification, the Home Screen, and third-party developers. It’s not just about quantity (more than 15 entries this week) – we think this week’s Reading List is the one with the highest quality material so far. So grab a good cup of coffee (albeit we have nothing against tea, as some of you have asked), your favorite chair, and let’s dive in. Read more

Apple Acquires “Search Engine for Apps” Chomp

According to MG Siegler at TechCrunch, Apple has acquired Chomp, app search and recommendation engine that has an iPhone app available in the App Store. Siegler reports that the Chomp team and product will be transitioned over to Apple, although details of the deal aren’t clear:

My understanding is that such deals will remain intact for now but are likely to end once the Chomp team and product transitions over to Apple. The same is likely true for Chomp’s stand-alone products.

I haven’t been able to learn the exact terms of the deal, but I hear that all the investors should be very pleased with the outcome. This is not a cheap “acqui-hire”, Apple has bought the Chomp team and technology and plans to use both to completely revamp App Store search and recommendations, I hear.

With Apple’s Tim Cook famously saying he’s not religious about holding or not holding the cash (nearly $100 billion) at Apple’s disposal, the acquisition of Chomp should be a clear sign of the company’s willingness to invest in talent and technologies from startups that have proved to care about quality of their products. Chomp in particular is an interesting choice for Apple, as it might signal important changes coming relatively soon to the App Store, especially on the side of discovery of apps with recommendations targeting a user’s tastes and behaviors. With over 700,000 apps available (per AppShopper) and thousands getting approved every day, the issue with discovery is a real one: most developers struggle to get their apps noticed and the best chance for popularity still remains Apple’s own feature in the App Store’s homepage with the “App of the week” and “New & Noteworthy” sections. Furthermore, the existing App Store infrastructure doesn’t have integrated sharing features for Twitter and Facebook, which Chomp has.

It’s obviously not clear what Apple has in store for Chomp yet, but here’s a couple of wild guesses based on the app’s existing functionalities:

Improve app discovery learning what an app does, rather than just its name. Currently, Apple seems to be basing its algorithm for discovery (part available in the Genius UI, part in iTunes under an app’s description) on categories and “what other customers also bought”. Chomp is capable of learning an app’s core functions, and find similar or complimentary apps.

Build sharing of apps for Twitter and Facebook right within the App Store. This would be a nice feature in iOS 6 – alongside a mobile wish list.

Improve search with suggestions, tags, and a cleaner layout similar to what Chomp already does.

Let App Store users create profiles and revamp the whole review system, as developers have been asking for years now. The profile option would be an interesting possibility, and it could easily work in conjunction with Ping, which has failed to gain traction. This has also been experimented by other apps that have tried to compete in the app recommendation space in the past years.

As with the recent Anobit acquisition, it’s likely Apple will confirm the acquisition of Chomp soon. It will be interesting to see if and how Chomp’s technologies will be integrated with a future version of the App Store, which keeps on growing at a tremendous pace but needs a better system to discover apps and filter out less important results.

Update: Apple has confirmed the acquisition to AllThingsD without providing further details on how the service will be integrated with the App Store.

iOS 6 Wishes

I read two great articles over the past few days detailing how Apple could improve iOS by taking a page from its competitors’ book (specifically, Android and Windows Phone 7) to enhance the way apps communicate with each other, and by looking at the way webOS handles multitasking and application windows on the TouchPad. They are good articles with some clever ideas, so make sure to check them out.

I have been writing a lot about ecosystems, file sharing and inter-app communication in the past months. After the public launch of iCloud last October, I’ve argued that Apple’s cloud solution is the platform for the next decade that might as well become the “operating system” itself, although it (and, by reflection, iOS) still lacks document-oriented functionalities to facilitate the process of creating and moving documents between apps. I have also made the case for a “universal save” option for iOS apps that might take advantage of iCloud, and, fortunately, it seems Apple is listening.

Today I’d like to go on the record with a list of features and options I’d like to see in a future version of iOS. I’m not typically huge on lists or “feature request” (last one was a series of predictions for WWDC ‘11), but I believe it’s worth discussing the direction where Apple is headed with its mobile operating system and, while we’re at it, propose solutions to improve existing apps and system utilities. I’ll check back on this list after WWDC ‘12. Read more