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App Journal, Episode 8: Newstream, Audium, PopClip, Read


App Journal is a new series aimed at showcasing apps we have enjoyed using on our iPhones, iPads, and Macs, but decided not to feature in a standalone, lengthy review here on MacStories. App Journal is a mix of classic reviews, weekly app recommendations, and a diary of our experiences with apps that still deserve a proper mention.

This week’s App Journal is all about reading, text, and music. With the iOS reading scene going through some interesting shake-ups with Readability announcing a free service, Flipboard for iPhone coming soon and Evernote getting into the “distraction-free reading” business with Clearly, I take a look at two little gems from the App Store that offer their own take on RSS feeds and article consumption.

As the holiday season nears, developers are putting the final touches to the apps they’ll be selling for Thanksgiving and Christmas to new iPhone and iPad owners. Stay tuned for more App Journals in the next weeks.

Newstream

While we wait for Flipboard to arrive on the iPhone, Amazing Softworks’ Newstream offers an interesting solution to turn your favorite websites into newspaper-like reading experiences. Using regular RSS feeds to fetch a website’s latest articles, Newstream allows you to create a list of favorite sources that will be turned into virtual publications on a newsstand that you can swipe through. The app loads an article’s text and images, and lets you tap on headlines to read the full text in a single-article view. When you’re done, you can go back to the main screen, and swipe to another website. Alternatively, you can tap on a website’s name at the top and instantly jump to another one through a popover menu. Articles can be tweeted, shared on Facebook, emailed to your friends or added to the app’s own reading list. Unfortunately, there is no support for Instapaper or Read It Later in the app, which means the reading list won’t sync to other devices or services. The app doesn’t even sync or import feeds from Google Reader, which means you’ll have to add your favorite blogs manually.

I think Newstream’s limited feature set might also be its strongest selling point for people looking for a simple way to load a subset of RSS feeds into a separate app with an easy-to-read format. Newstream is $2.99 on the App Store.

Audium

Developed by Michael Pringle, Audium is a beautiful, lightweight and gesture-based music player for your iPhone. Instead of imitating the Music app’s interface by adding a number of new features as many third-party music players do, Audium focuses on simplicity and ease of use. Audium doesn’t display a list for your artists and songs – instead, it visualizes artworks from albums you’ve synced on your device at the bottom of a wooden shelf. Swipe through albums, and double tap on one to start playing; double tap again to pause, swipe left or right to change song. It’s very simple. You can even swipe up or down to adjust the volume, and the app displays a tiny circular indicator rather than a classic progress bar to see how much time is left in a song.

Audium is a clever app that’s intuitive and fully takes advantage of the iPhone’s touch-based interface. It’s a $0.99 download from the App Store.

(album artwork via Aldrin)
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Apple’s Minor Tweak To iPad App Store Improves Navigation

Earlier today Apple rolled out a very minor, yet important change for the App Store’s homepage on the iPad. Previously, “New and Noteworthy” and “Staff Favorites” sections in the iPad App Store could be viewed by hitting an arrow button that scrolled the various pages inside these sections. Now, users can swipe to navigate between pages of apps listed in the sections, with page indicators similar to the iOS’ Home screen available at the bottom to indicate a user’s position.

More importantly, this little tweak has been implemented in the “Release Date” tab of the iPad App Store as well. Browsing by release date is very convenient for two reasons: it lets you see every iPad app ever approved, and it displays the total number of available iPad apps in the Store. It used to be that, because of clunky navigation, moving between pages in “Release Date” view was slow, and the iPad would often lose its position after scrolling dozens of pages. With the new swiping method, the whole view is faster, and also appears more reliable at going back and forth between results.

Here’s how “Release Date” used to look:

And here’s how it looks now, with no buttons:

At the moment of writing this Apple is still using button-based navigation in the Purchased area, and we wish changes will eventually make their way there, too.

Today’s update to the iPad App Store (Apple also updates the App Store homepages every Thursday with new Featured apps) is minor, but as the company’s attention to detail often proves, minor tweaks can incredibly improve the user experience.

U.S. Carriers Struggling To Keep Up With High iPhone 4S Demand

U.S. carriers continue to struggle with high demand for the iPhone 4S, The Wall Street Journal reports today. Apple’s latest iPhone, launched on October 14th in seven countries including the United States, has been a success for the company in early sales, reaching over 4 million units sold in the first weekend of availability. For comparison, the iPhone 4 sold “only” 1.7 million units in its first weekend last year. But according to U.S. carriers, the iPhone 4S’ popularity isn’t just a passing fad among Apple fans and early adopters: as the device’s popularity continues to build. carriers are finding themselves struggling to get inventory from Apple.

Verizon Wireless customers may have to wait more than three weeks for the device, according to the carrier’s website. That compares with as much as 21 days at AT&T and up to 14 days at Sprint Nextel. While some tech blogs have suggested Apple’s manufacturing isn’t keeping pace, the carriers point to unexpectedly strong demand for the handset.

“We are having some supply issues in the sense that demand’s huge,” AT&T’s president of emerging devices, Glenn Lurie, said Wednesday. “We have had just record-breaking sales on it.

Obviously, both Apple and the carriers prioritize in-store retail sales over online orders; Apple, for instance, is giving customers the possibility to reserve an iPhone 4S at their local store, and it’s generally easier to find an iPhone 4S just by walking into a store, rather than ordering it online. On Apple’s online store, shipping times for the iPhone 4S are now set at 1-2 weeks. Furthermore, it appears the problem with shortages isn’t due to Apple’s manufacturing process – there’s simply too much demand for the device than Apple can meet both online and in physical stores at the moment.

At the Q4 2011 earnings call, Apple CEO Tim Cook said they were extremely pleased with the initial demand for the iPhone 4S and customers’ reaction to the new model, adding that the company was confident they had enough supply to meet demand. Since its U.S. launch, Apple has been quickly rolling out the iPhone 4S in new countries, reaching 44 in less than a month and with another round of international rollouts reportedly set for later this month.

Flipboard Introduces “Flipboard Accounts” To Sync Content Across Devices

The latest version of Flipboard for iPad, 1.6, is out in the App Store and, alongside support for Tumblr and 500px, it brings a new option to create a “Flipboard Account” and start storing your favorite content in the cloud. With the upcoming release of Flipboard for iPhone, or for those users who share an iPad in the family, accounts will be the easiest way to load a user’s existing sources, subscriptions and social accounts without having to start over every time. The feature is already enabled on the iPad app, and it takes a very few steps to create an account. Enter a username, password, email and real name, and Flipboard will create an account for you. The app is even smart enough to fetch a profile picture from the services you’ve already configured, such as Twitter or Facebook.

Starting today, you can sign up for a Flipboard Account. With Accounts, your reading preferences stay with you no matter how you access Flipboard. For example, families and friends who share an iPad can log into Flipboard and find their favorite sections. And when Flipboard comes to the iPhone, accounts ensure that your Flipboard is configured exactly as you like it, with your favorite reading sources already saved and your social networks connected.

I tested Flipboard’s account management feature, and it worked flawlessly. I was able to create an account, log out after a few minutes and, upon logging into Flipboard again, all my sources and social accounts were pulled from the cloud with no errors, in seconds.

Flipboard has been previously rumored to be considering a web app, and accounts would certainly come in handy to easily load a user’s reading material on any platform. Flipboard for iPhone should be coming out any week now, and the company was reportedly considering deeper integration with TV Shows and Movies as well.

“Video Stream” App Stores and Pushes Videos with iCloud

With iOS 5, Apple introduced Photo Stream, a service based on iCloud to store your most recent photos in the cloud, and automatically have them pushed to all your devices, including the Mac (with iPhoto and Aperture) and Windows PCs. Photo Stream has been criticized by some for its lack of settings and customization options (you can’t selectively choose which photos go in Photo Stream, and which ones you’d like to keep private), but most of all many users have been disappointed by the lack of video support. Especially with the new iPhone 4S, users are finding themselves shooting decent videos with a vastly improved camera, without a way to automatically store these videos in Photo Stream and find them later on an iPad or Mac.

As we noted in our iPhone 4S review 1080p video can end up consuming a lot of space, so perhaps due to upload concerns Apple decided to focus on pictures with Photo Stream. After all, even a decent WiFi connection might require several minutes to get a 5-minute 1080p video uploaded to the cloud, and downloaded back on other devices. Yet a third-party app for the iPhone and iPad, Video Stream, aims at providing iOS 5 users with a way to store videos in iCloud and push them effortlessly to all their iCloud-connected devices.

Video Stream is a $0.99 download from the App Store, and it runs on the iPhone and iPad. The concept is simple: you can manually import videos from your Camera Roll (or shoot new ones directly into Video Stream) and the app will start uploading them to iCloud. Once it’s done, the videos will begin showing up on other devices running Video Stream, like an iPad. And because the system is based on iCloud’s Documents & Data, files will unsurprisingly become visible on a Mac as well (though the developers say that a native Mac app is also in the works). Video Stream is a third-party app, so videos won’t be automatically uploaded after they’ve been recorded with an iPhone or iPad: you’ll need to import them into the Video Stream app.

An obvious caveat of video is that even a couple of minutes can generate a large file. For this reason Video Stream needs to compress a video before it’s uploaded, and the app offers three options: Low, Medium and High quality. For instance, I chose “High” for a 1080p video I shot with my iPhone 4S, and I ended up with the following video information on my Mac (for a 28.7 MB video file).

Video Stream isn’t a permanent solution to store your video library in the cloud (just like you shouldn’t use Apple’s Photo Stream to build your personal photo library), but it gets its job done. Which means easily pushing videos across devices and offering options to reduce file size, thus cutting upload times in half.

Video Stream is $0.99 in the App Store.

Skype 5.4 Beta For Mac Gets Facebook-to-Facebook Video Calling

Back in September Skype, now part of Microsoft, released a new version of its Mac client with direct Facebook integration for Contacts, the News Feed, and text chat. Skype 5.4 was the result of a partnership between Facebook and Skype, which began earlier this year with video calls on Facebook.com based on Skype’s video technology. However, in Skype 5.4 it wasn’t possible for a user to initiate a video call from Skype, and have it forwarded to Facebook.com in the browser.

With a blog post published this morning, Skype announced that the new beta version of Skype 5.4 for Mac has added Facebook-to-Facebook video calling, meaning that, once connected with Facebook, the Skype app will be capable of placing video calls from a Mac to friends online on the Facebook website.

Initiating a Facebook-to-Facebook call from within Skype is quite easy; all you need to do is connect your Skype and Facebook accounts. Then, select a Facebook friend and hit the video call button in Skype- your friend simply picks up the call from Facebook.

Because Facebook’s video calls are based on Skype, the company has managed to interconnect video calls from the desktop app with the new video calling function on Facebook.com. In my tests, the version of Skype I had installed didn’t prompt to update to a new one, and I had to download the new 5.4 beta manually. Users of Skype might find they have version 5.4.0.1217 installed; Skype 5.4 Beta is version 5.4.0.1771.

Other than Facebook video calling, 5.4 beta for Mac brings smoother video rendering, but no interface changes or refinements. Skype has been heavily criticized in the past year for the design choices they made with version 5, and the company even launched a competition to outsource some of the message styles included in the desktop app.

You can download Skype 5.4 beta for Mac here.

“iChat for iOS” Rumors Revived With New Code Strings Found

In the past few years, Apple has been rumored several times to be building a mobile version of iChat – its desktop IM communication tool – for the iPhone and iPad. And in spite of the iMessage protocol being essentially a stripped-down version of iChat for iOS users with typing indicators, attachments and even new features like read and delivery receipts, speculation has always pointed at Apple as being developing a full-featured iChat app for iOS to integrate with IM services like AIM and Jabber, just as iChat on OS X.

New code strings found by developer John Heaton inside iOS 5 (via TUAW) are bringing new life to the mobile iChat rumors. But unlike previous speculation, this code seems to indicate Apple may integrate iChat functions with its existing Phone and Messages apps. Speculation on the “facetimeService”, “aimService” and “iMessageService” strings suggests typical IM functions like text and video chat might as well live into a single existing app, rather than be scattered around the system with standalone applications. The Messages app for iOS, in fact, already integrates regular SMS and iMessage, photo and video attachments and group messaging. On the Mac, Apple was rumored to be integrating iMessage into iChat, rather than building a dedicated iMessage app. Putting all the rumors together, could this be an indication of a unified, cross-platform and integrated Messages app coming soon to iOS and OS X with iChat and iMessage functionalities?

Code strings aren’t the most reliable indicators of new features to come, as Apple often likes to bury functionalities in code and hide them from public release, even when they’re fully working and seemingly ready to go. Speculation on iChat for iOS has been growing strong lately especially after the release of iMessage, and many think it’d only make sense for Apple to least extend iMessage’s features to the desktop.

djay For Mac Adds ‘Harmonic Match’ And iCloud Support

For those of you who are DJs or just enjoy listening and mixing music, the latest version of Algoriddim’s Mac App ‘djay’ might interest you. Now at version 4.0, Algoriddim is claiming that this is the biggest update to the app yet. The big headline new feature is ‘Harmonic Match’ a new system that allows users to “create perfectly matched mixes with a simple click”.

With the introduction of Harmonic Match, djay automatically detects a song’s key and allows to match it to songs of the same key within your iTunes music library. It allows you transpose songs into different keys, and even sort your entire music library by key, perfect for creating studio quality mash-ups of your songs.

Beyond Harmonic Match, djay 4.0 also features a new audio engine that allows high quality Audio FX on the fly, precision scratching, visual waveforms and a host of other more advanced features. A particularly useful new feature in djay 4.0 is the support for iCloud, which means cue data and other metadata can by synced across the Mac, iPad and iPhone versions of the app. Another nice touch is support for the multi-touch trackpad where a user can “use rotate gestures to adjust the EQ, or two fingers to scratch the record and operate the crossfader”.

djay for the Mac is available on the Mac App Store for a special launch sale price of  $19.99. Jump the break for a promotional video, as well as a full list of additions and improvements in djay 4.0.
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