Apple Posts “Best Of App Store 2012” Lists

In today’s weekly refresh of the App Store, Apple posted a list called “Best of 2012”, highlighting the apps they “loved the most” this year. Day One, a journaling apps we reviewed on MacStories several times, wins as “Mac App of the Year”; “Deus Ex: Human Revolution” wins as “Game of the Year”. The Mac section is also viewable on the web here. On the iOS side, Paper for iPad and Action Movie FX win as Apps of the Year; Rayman Jungle Run and The Room win as Games of the Year for iPhone and iPad, respectively.

Over the past year, the Mac App Store was packed with impressive new apps and games. Some were dazzling debuts, while others were existing apps updated to leverage new features in OS X Mountain Lion or to take advantage of the Retina display of the new MacBook Pro. Browse the apps and games we loved most in 2012.

The list is organized in Runners-Up, Best Apps of 2012, and Best Games of 2012. Below, the full list, recompiled from the Mac App Store, iPhone App Store, and iPad App Store. My personal congratulations to the Day One team, an app that has completely changed the way I archive my memories on iOS and OS X.

Other notable winners in iTunes categories include:

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Open Google Maps Directions With Siri or Launch Center Pro

Here’s a fun experiment to launch the Google Maps app via URL scheme directly into a new Directions view.

As I detailed this morning, the new Google Maps app for iPhone lets you launch specific views and modes using a URL scheme. You don’t need to be a developer to use the URL scheme; this means you’ll be able to launch the Google Maps app from Safari, Launch Center Pro, or any other launcher using the base comgooglemaps:// URL.

Google’s URL has a scheme for directions with addresses and transportation parameters. It lets you specific a starting address with the saddr parameter, and a destination address with daddr.

Further, you can instruct the URL to open a specific directionsmode, such as driving or transit.

With these parameters, it becomes possible to set up a nice automated workflow to launch directions using Siri or Launch Center Pro. Read more

Google Maps SDK For iOS And URL Scheme→

Google Maps SDK For iOS And URL Scheme

Alongside the launch of its official Maps app for iPhone, Google has also released a developer SDK to let third-party apps embed Google Maps directly. As detailed by Andrew Foster at the Google Geo Developers blog, the SDK – which requires signing up for API access – will allow developers to integrate Google Maps with their own apps, displaying embedded 2D or 3D Maps views with markers and info windows. The blog post also confirms that the SDK will work on the iPad; Google has confirmed to The New York Times that a native iPad version of Maps is indeed coming.

The SDK features vector-based maps that load quickly, allowing users to easily navigate 2D and 3D views, rotating and tilting the map with simple gestures inside your app. Developers can also change the Google maps view to include information such as traffic conditions, and control camera positions in 3D.

In the SDK documentation, Google says that the appearance of Maps embedded through the SDK is the same of the Google Maps apps, and that the SDK “exposes many of the same features”.

However, the SDK isn’t the only way for developers to integrate with Google Maps. Using a URL scheme, developers can point to the Google Maps app and launch it from their app into a specific view or map object. Documentation for the URL scheme is available here. Developers can link to Google Maps with specific views, modes (standard or Street View), set zoom levels, and pass directions with the URL scheme.

It’ll be interesting to see how and when Google Maps-compatible apps such as AroundMe or WhereTo will support the new Google Maps SDK. The addition of a URL scheme shouldn’t be underestimated either, as it’ll enable regular users to launch the app using tools like Launch Center Pro.

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Google Releases Maps App For iPhone

In spite of “sources at Google” claiming that Apple wouldn’t accept a Google Maps app in the App Store, Google has today released its official Maps application for iPhone. The app just went live on the App Store, and it’s available as a free download here.

Following Apple’s debacle with their Maps software for iOS 6, Google was rumored to be preparing a third-party version of Google Maps for iOS devices. We haven’t been able to test this yet, and we’ll post our impressions of the software on MacStories once we’re able to properly use the app. Read more

1Password 4 Review

I got my first iPhone in the Fall of 2008. Going back through my iTunes Purchased history, I see 1Password was the ninth app I downloaded from the App Store. I’ve been using 1Password for as long as I remember having a Mac and iOS device, and I’ve come to rely on it – to trust it – as the only piece of software holding my private information securely. 1Password 4, released today on iOS, is a major update that improves on every area of the app, starting from the interface.

I’d argue that, aside from bug fixes, smaller improvements, and support for new displays and the latest iOS versions, 1Password Pro got its last major new feature with version 3.5, released in July 2010, which added Dropbox sync and support for auto-lock on multitasking. Another fundamental change of the mobile 1Password experience could be traced back to iPassword 3.0, which added a new interface for the iPad in April 2010; however, iPad apps have evolved and matured in the past two years, and 1Password – especially on the larger screen – has started to feel like an app that was designed at the beginning of the iPad era. It wasn’t inherently bad, but, combined with the iPhone app (which goes back to the early App Store days: it was released in the summmer of 2008), it was obvious that 1Password for iOS could be better.

1Password 4, in terms of design and features, is both a clean slate and an iterative improvement. It’s a fresh start, but existing 1Password users will also recognize the things that have been adjusted and added on top of 1Password 3.7. More importantly, 1Password is now a consistent experience across the iPhone and iPad that supports a platform users expect from modern iOS apps: iCloud. Read more

Gruber On AppleScript→

Gruber On AppleScript

John Gruber, in an AppleScript retrospective for Macworld:

To recap: Decidedly old-school-Apple/pre-NeXT technology. A programming language syntax that frustrated experts and failed to achieve its intended goal of empowering non-programmers to program. A technical mismatch with the Cocoa application framework. You need this historical context to understand how unlikely AppleScript’s long-term success was. Someone with access to a time machine could make a lot of money by going back to Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference 1998 and accepting wagers that AppleScript would be alive and well in the year 2012.

But alive and well it is.

Just last night I tweeted that, while Apple may still support AppleScript, it doesn’t look like it holds a spot in the list of “top priorities” for Mac OS software. And that makes perfect sense, as the company has been focusing on other areas for the past few years: removing cruft and bringing consistency across its desktop and mobile devices.

The fact that AppleScript still works on Mountain Lion after the Gatekeeper and Sandboxing changes is, alone, quite remarkable. But there’s no denying that “supporting AppleScript” isn’t generally regarded as a feature that needs to be in version 1.0 of an app. Apple itself supports only one command for Reading List – a major feature of Safari 5 – a whole year after its introduction. Of all the new third-party apps I’ve tried in the past year, only a very few of them support AppleScript: Rdio, Fantastical, PopClip. And then again, they don’t have extensive AppleScript dictionaries. On the other hand, apps that already supported AppleScript continue to offer that kind of integration: I think of The Omni Group’s apps, Evernote, PDFpen, BBEdit, or Acorn as notable examples.

You may argue that “supporting AppleScript” was never in the list of features a Mac developer had to support when shipping version 1.0 of an app. That’s probably true, but, again, my point is different.

The OS X landscape has changed. In the past two years – especially after the release of the iPad – developers have prioritized cloud sync, consistency, and gestures over inter-app communication and scripting. Those have to be priorities because those qualities have created a stronger ecosystems for everyone. When it comes to scripting and inter-app communication, you know where I stand. I don’t know if AppleScript will ever be a “priority”, because maybe it really isn’t meant to be one.

Like Gruber, I’m just glad it’s still around. In fact, I look forward to finally releasing a little AppleScript project I’ve been working on since September.

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Today Weather

As I’ve written many times here on MacStories, I’m no weather expert. I’ve used Apple’s Weather app for years, until I figured that I wanted just a little more stats and a different interface to check on forecasts and current conditions. Still, I don’t need a complex weather app with terminology I would need a dictionary for. That’s why for the past few weeks I’ve been using Check The Weather and liked its simple approach to weather data presentation.

Today Weather is a new app by Savvy Apps – creators of some of our favorite iOS apps like Agenda and Buzz Contacts – that, while similar to Check The Weather on the surface, is actually more reminiscent of Agenda. Read more

Shazam 5.5 With Better Offline Support

Shazam is, for me, one of those solutions made possible by our mobile era that, alongside Twitter and Rdio, I’d miss the most if I had to switch to a “dumbphone”. Shazam released today version 5.5 of their iPhone app, which I own in the Encore variation, and it’s got a few changes I really like.

The new icon was a bit of Home screen shock at first, but it plays nicely with the updated “listening dial” that animates and responds in real-time to audio captured by a device’s mic. It’s a nice touch. There are also other improvements such as better VoiceOver support, Google+ sharing (for Robert Scoble), and search for tagged songs. I don’t know exactly when this happened, but Shazam now properly opens tagged songs in the Rdio app, ready for listening.

The best feature of Shazam 5.5 is how the app handles offline devices or songs tagged in areas with poor reception. If unable to contact the Shazam servers, the app will queue tags, showing a count in the animated dial. When the Internet comes back, the app will automatically start tagging all previously queued item, display whether or not it has found matches, and highlight results in the My Tags screen and with a badge on the tab bar.

I’ve tagged songs using Shazam in the past, only to find out I didn’t have a 3G connection to get results immediately. This is a better solution, and judging from some first tests, it works as advertised. Shazam 5.5 is available on the App Store.