“Developers, A Love Story”→

“Developers, A Love Story”

Gabe Weatherhead sums up the reason why I started MacStories in 2009, one that still holds true today:

While browsing my Application folder on my Mac, I noticed something. I have a fondness for some apps that I rarely use. I’m just glad that I own them. I may not use them all but I feel good about the money I’ve spent.

If I like a developer I buy their wares just to support their work. When I say “I like a developer” I don’t just mean I like their products. I mean that I like the people behind the products. I like the philosophy, the commitment, the personalities. Sure, I’ll buy software and services from people I think are ass-hats if they make polished high quality stuff. But I’m more likely to buy less awesome software from someone I like than I am to buy highly polished stuff from a jerk. This is especially true in the Indie Software scene. There are real people behind every pixel and algorithm.

We may talk about news and rumors occasionally, but ultimately the people that make the products we use are what really matters. Their stories, the choices they make in developing great software they use in the first place, the way they handle customer support and engage with the community only to make amazing apps that make us more productive every day. I could add a few names from my Applications and iTunes folders: all the app from Edovia. Hazel and MindNode Pro. Airfoil, Alfred, and iStat Menus. I’m serious when I say MacStories is here today also thanks to the Apple developer community. People I (and many others) trust. And great things still have to come.

What’s not to love about the iOS/Mac indie development scene, honestly? Go read Gabe’s post now.

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The Thunderbolt Accessories of CES 2012

The Thunderbolt ports on our new MacBook Airs and MacBook Pros didn’t receive a lot of attention in 2011, with tech demos still carrying on through the mid-year as LaCie and Promise flexed their muscles at Computex. Seven months later at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, several companies were finally prepared to unveil their products integrated with Thunderbolt technologies on the show floor (and we expect to see more at the upcoming Macworld | iWorld). Past the break we’ll take a look at ten new Thunderbolt accessories that offer connected solutions, speedy storage, and new possibilities for stellar gaming performance.

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iPad 3 To Launch In March with LTE, Retina Display, Quad-Core Processor

According to a rumor posted by Bloomberg this afternoon, production for Apple’s next generation iPad, unofficially dubbed ‘iPad 3’, has ramped up and will reach full volumes in February. Several rumors in the past months have tried to pinpoint the exact hardware features of the iPad 3; Bloomberg claims the device will sport a quad-core processor, LTE compatibility and a sharper screen with ‘greater resolution’.

Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s next iPad, expected to go sale in March, will sport a high-definition screen, run a faster processor and work with next-generation wireless networks, according to three people familiar with the product.

Since the introduction of the iPad 2 last year, many industry observers in the Apple community have noted the iPad 2 hardware wouldn’t have been able to manage an increased number of pixels on screen, which require faster processing power. A quad-core CPU, however, would enable Apple to support a ‘Retina’ 2048x1536 screen resolution (thus doubling pixels on screen as the with the transition from iPhone 3GS to iPhone 4), faster app switching and smoother video playback. Support for LTE would allow for faster data connections in regions where 4G is available, and it’ll likely be added through new chips by Qualcomm. According to Bloomberg, LTE will be introduced on the iPad first as the device has got a bigger battery than the iPhone, and LTE is widely known to require a larger amount of power than GSM and CDMA chips.

Bloomberg adds the iPad 3 is ‘expected’ to become available in March, a timeframe that would resemble last year’s iPad 2 launch with a press conference in early March and product rollout in the following weeks. From a design standpoint, recent rumors have suggested the iPad 3 will be either thicker or thinner than the iPad 2 due to the addition of the Retina display, so we’d take this speculation with a grain of salt. Bloomberg’s report seems to fall in line with several separate rumors from the past months, suggesting that the iPad 3 will be a not so minor upgrade with new screen, LTE and quad-core CPU (like A6 processor from Apple).

App Store Search Results Get “Quick Look” Previews

As first noticed by iSpazio [Google Translation], it appears Apple has introduced sometime earlier today a new “quick look” preview feature for App Store search results on iTunes. When searching for apps in the desktop application, in fact, users are now able to click on a small “i” button next to an app’s icon to get a modal preview with additional information about the app. The new preview window organizes Description, What’s New and Screenshots in multiple tabs, and separates iPhone screenshots from iPad screenshots when the app is universal, as with the example above.

You can try the new app preview system by starting a new search in iTunes (here’s a search for Instapaper).

Personally, I believe this minor addition greatly improves usability and app discovery in iTunes. Not only it makes app descriptions more readable (it’s easier to scan information and changelog with tabs), it also allows users to browse top charts and categories without having to go back and forth between the main results and a single app page (often losing view options like “sort by release date” in the refresh process). Recently, Apple also introduced a minor update to the iPad App Store that made swiping through apps more intuitive.

A Software Experiment

For the past couple of years, I’ve been using OmniFocus to keep track of my projects and tasks. I love OmniFocus: it is a trusted system from developers I respect with an amazing set of native apps, constantly updated to take advantage of the latest features Apple has to offer. Yet for as much as I’d trust OmniFocus to handle everything for me, when personal needs change, habits are re-imagined and your workflow has to be finely tuned in a different way, software that is not meant for the purpose can only cover so much before you figure out it’s time to move on.

In the past months, some things changed in my personal life, I started a couple of new projects (including the next two iterations of MacStories), hired new people, and started helping out my girlfriend more with her job, too. To keep track of all this, I used to rely on OmniFocus, which worked extremely well until I realized I wasn’t really following any GTD methodology anymore and I had tweaked the app and made compromises with the software that turned OF into a beast it really isn’t. At the same time, I realized a part of my job – writing for this site – just can’t fit into OmniFocus’ style, at least not in the way I work. Which is to say, my colleagues use OmniFocus to manage their articles, and it works pretty well for them.

I compromised because I love OmniFocus too much. I have a deep respect for The Omni Group – a piece of history in Apple’s third-party development scene – and I have spent hours just browsing the company’s forums to read more about how people use Omni Group apps to get things done. I have dedicated Evernote notebooks just for OmniFocus and OmniOutliner, full with tips, stories, AppleScripts and lots of other cool resources. But it comes a point when, even if a specific software is flexible enough to allow for a huge amount of customization, spending hours learning and tweaking isn’t worth it anymore, especially when you have actual work to get done and people to report to. And tweaking is not getting work done, although it can give you such illusion sometimes.

I’ve been working exclusively from my iPad and iPhone for the past two months. Most recently, I got back to writing full-time again and decided to use my iPad for that, too. In this short period of time, I have used a different set of tools than OmniFocus to get things done, and this ‘experiment’ seems to be working so far.

I don’t blame it on OmniFocus. Like I said that app is fantastic, and version 2.0 is on my wish list of apps I’m looking forward to this year. I kept denying this, but the way I work (and, more generally, live) has changed in the last months of 2011; the app I used to manage my tasks wasn’t the perfect tool for the job anymore. So I stopped tweaking and moved on.

I’m now using a combination of Remember The Milk, Todo.txt and iCloud calendar. This setup is very simple, really, and I can assure you it’s more straightforward then what I had done with OmniFocus over the years. Read more

iPad Handwriting Apps: Penultimate and Noteshelf Receive Major Updates

We often cover Dropbox-enabled text editors and word processors here at MacStories, but we’ve been keeping an eye on handwriting apps as well, a category of software that has seen a huge rise in popularity and user adoption since the release of the iPad. Two personal favorites of mine in this space (and admittedly the biggest players on the App Store, too), Penultimate and Noteshelf, have been recently updated with major new functionalities that dramatically improve the usability and performances of these apps.

Penultimate, which we have covered quite a few times in the past, reached version 3.3 adding direct Dropbox and Evernote integration, Dropbox backups and an “Open In” menu to send notebooks to other installed iOS applications. Penultimate can now send notebooks or individual pages to Dropbox or Evernote; in Evernote, the service’s OCR capabilities for images will make sure your notes will also be fully searchable (that is, unless you really have bad handwriting that OCR can’t analyze). The Dropbox backup option, available in Settings, allows you to always keep the most recent versions of your notes backed up the cloud.

Other improvements in Penultimate 3.3 include bug fixes and possibility of pasting ink copied from other apps (I couldn’t get this to work with either Noteshelf or Bamboo Paper). Overall, Penultimate remains a fantastic iPad handwriting app with one of the finest inks I’ve seen on the platform and now proper cloud-based features to get your notes out of your device. Penultimate is just $0.99 on the App Store.

Noteshelf, another app we’ve covered on MacStories before, has been updated to version 5.0 adding the most requested functionality: text. You can now tap anywhere on the screen, and bring up the iPad’s touch keyboard to start typing text alongside your handwritten notes and sketches. Unlike Penultimate, Noteshelf is jam-packed with features: aside from notebook themes and several page designs (also available in the in-app store), Noteshelf comes with highlighters and smiley faces that can be embedded in a document, page search (limited to typed text) and tagging (new in version 5.0). Starting from the interface, Noteshelf seems to appeal to a different kind of iPad user than Penultimate, one that is looking for many powerful functionality rather than the focused simplicity of Penultimate. Noteshelf undoubtedly comes with many functionalities, and the page toolbar UI can be a little disorienting at first. However, the new features introduced in 5.0 make up for the slightly more cluttered UI, which just needs some time to get used to.

Noteshelf is a very powerful piece of software, available at $4.99 on the App Store.

Skype 5.5 Beta Released with New Call UI, Call Answering and Quality Improvements

The folks over at Skype have been hard at work on the next version of Skype 5.5 Beta for Mac and today they have released a new version of the app that adds some very nice functionality. Among the new features you will find a tweaked call interface that provides quick and easy access to several new features.

The improved discoverability of Skype’s Call allows Mac users to easily mute their microphone, send video, share their screen, send files and even add more people during a call.

They have also added the ability to accept calls with or without video which will certainly be a welcomed addition to Mac app. Various optimizations including an increase in call quality and stabilization were also reported to have been improved in this release.

Skype 5.5 Beta for Mac is available for download on their website.