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Official Moleskine App for iOS Now Available

Moleskine, a popular brand of notebooks, diaries and sketchbooks, released its first official app for iPhone and iPad yesterday in the App Store, bringing the look and note-taking capabilities of Moleskine products to iOS devices – also adding features only possible on smartphones and tablets like geo-location and image inserting functionalities.

Once installed, you can choose between different notebook styles like ruled paper, plain, or squared. From the settings, you can set a text size, text color, or edit the cover picture that will appear upon launching the app. Moleskine uses a mix of custom UI elements and standard iOS graphics for displaying popovers and menus; the result is, in my opinion, very elegant and minimalism. Unfortunately, playing around with this first version I noticed there’s no way to sync the iPad app with the iPhone counterpart – your notes are going to stay local on each device.

Notes – or, as Moleskine calls them, “thoughts” – can be organized by category and location. The main screen, called myThoughts, displays two buttons in a bottom toolbar to visualize categories and location points. Once you create a new note, you’ll notice a clipboard icon in the top toolbar that allows you to bring up a custom, animated pop-up menu to rename the note, assign categories / colors / labels, choose paper styles and share via Twitter, Facebook or email. The animation of this menu is really nice, although it caused the app to crash a couple of times. As far as true note-taking capabilities go, you can type text, sketch and insert images. Both text and sketches can have different sizes and colors, whilst images can be zoomed and cropped before being inserted into a document. Text automatically wraps around an image as you move it around, but images (and sketches) will be removed when you share a note via email.

Overall, this app is a good first attempt to bring the Moleskine experience to iPhones and iPads. The lack of syncing might be a deal-breaker for many nowadays, and I believe Dropbox integration could come in handy and should be considered by the developers. The app is free in the App Store, and you can check out a gallery of screenshots below. Read more

Tea: An App for Tea Drinkers

Released two weeks ago in the App Store, Tea for iPhone is a beautiful app that aims at becoming a one-step solution for seasoned drinkers and tea newbies alike that have always been looking for a centralized place to manage their brewing notes, favorite teas, suggestions and timer settings. Tea clearly isn’t an app for everyone: unless you’re really passionate about tea, your collection of leaves and, overall, the knowledge you’ve accumulated over the years, I wouldn’t suggest installing Tea from the App Store. But if you love drinking tea, this is the app to have, and quite possibly one of the most beautiful pieces of software that (together with Tweetbot) have landed on the iPhone recently.

The main screen of the app gives you access to various types of tea you can brew. In the bottom toolbar, you can access the settings to change the order of teas, group by brand and enable social sharing on Twitter and Facebook. A History button in the middle of the tab bar lets you see all the teas you’ve brewed at once, whilst the Scratchpad allows you to write down all your tea-related notes in a single location. When you add a new tea, you can choose Name, Brand, Type and Amount. Types vary from  White and Green to Black and Oolong – you shouldn’t be disappointed by the options offered in Tea. The Amount tab lets you choose between different units like grams, kilograms and ounces. Once you’ve picked a tea, the Set Brew screen displays a rotating indicator that enables you to select quantity, number of cups, brewing time, and temperature. Everything is selectable with a standard iOS menu, and the interface design is really polished. Once set, tap “Brew” in the upper right corner to bring up a beautiful timer you can pause or cancel at any time. When the time is up, you can leave a note and a rating – which will be remember by the app for future brews and infusions.

With an impeccable attention to detail and a great feature set, Tea for iPhone is the best app to prepare your teas, collect notes, share your results and manage your inventory. You can find it in the App Store at $1.99 for a limited time.
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Instagram 1.6 Gets A New Filter, Speedier Performance

Instagram is available in the App Store right this second for an update to 1.6, which includes a new filter (Brannan), improved network performance for faster uploads and downloads, and stability and bug fixes related to cameras on iOS 4 enabled devices. Instagram aims to solve both memory and performance issues with subtle network tweaks and camera fixes that are minor, but keep the everyone’s favorite photo utility snappy as you take pictures and share the results with friends. The new Brannan filter offers a new effect to play with in editing your shots, offering yet another faded vintage look (reminds me of Earlybird but lighter) . You can download the newest update from the App Store.

Instapaper Adds Revamped Dictionary, Terminology Integration

An update to Instapaper for iPhone and iPad was released a few minutes ago in the App Store, and it adds a series of new features to the built-in offline dictionary that improve the efficiency of the “define” button during a reading session. First off, the design of the inline dictionary has been revamped to host more definitions, and interlinking between words. Everything’s faster, more compact, yet with more content than before. Thanks to a collaboration with Agile Tortoise, Instapaper’s dictionary can now also forward a definition directly to Terminology, which we’ve reviewed before. Terminology will automatically find the definition for the word you’ve selected, and show a button to go back to Instapaper thanks to the implementation of the the new x-callback-url draft standard.  Handoff should also be supported in version 3.0.2.

You can find Instapaper in the App Store here. Read more

New Xcode 4.1 Build Hints At Lion Developer Preview 3

Alongside an update to the OS X Lion Developer Preview 2, Apple also released a new version of Xcode 4.1 to developers, which reaches “Preview 3” status. The new build contains bug fixes and it’s available now in the Mac Dev Center.

This release requires Mac OS X Lion Developer Preview 2 Update and includes iOS SDK 4.3. Continue to use Xcode 3.2.5 or Xcode 4 on a Snow Leopard partition if you plan to submit Mac or iOS apps to the App Store.

An interesting tidbit from the release notes: Xcode 4.1 Preview 3 has been “updated to support Mac OS X 10.7 Lion preview 3” – which hasn’t been released yet. Mac OS X Lion DP 2 was seeded on March 30th, a few minutes after Apple posted an update for the Developer Preview 1.

Apple Releases Lion Developer Preview 2 Update

Apple just informed registered OS X developers that an update to the OS X Lion Developer Preview 2 is now available. The update can be downloaded from Software Update on computers that have DP 2 already installed.

From systems that have developer preview 2 of Lion or Lion Server installed, run Software Update and download Mac OS X Lion Developer Preview 2 Update. You must also download Xcode 4.1 Developer Preview 3 available from the Mac Dev Center to build apps with this version of Lion.

If you have not yet downloaded developer preview 2 of Lion and Lion Server, get your redemption code from the Mac Dev Center then proceed to the Mac App Store to redeem your code and download Lion.

Three weeks ago, Apple released an update to the original OS X Lion Developer Preview to enable “downloads of Mac OS X Lion seed builds from the Mac App Store”. It is unclear what kind of changes went into today’s update to Developer Preview 2, but we’re hearing build number is 11A430e. Mac OS X Lion DP 2 was released on March 30th.

Update: from the changelog, Apple says this update is recommended to all users running Lion Developer Preview 2.

#MacStoriesDeals - Friday

We’ll tweet the daily deals at @MacStoriesDeals as well as exclusive weekend deals too, so please follow! Here are today’s deals on iOS, Mac, and Mac App Store apps that are on sale for a limited time, so get ‘em while they’re hot!

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Apple Supplier Cirrus Reports Manufacturing Issues with New Audio Component

Cirrus Logic, a component manufacturer that supplies analog chips for audio applications in Apple’s iPad and iPhone, are reporting manufacturing issues with a new component presumably slated for its biggest customer. In May 2010, Seeking Alpha reported that the bulk of Cirrus Logic’s revenue was derived from iPad and iPhone sales, followed by September rumors that the company could be acquired by Apple. This morning, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that a new component is having initial manufacturing problems off the line:

Cirrus late Thursday said it had determined an earlier test for a particular function of a new audio product–which analysts assume is for Apple–was insufficient to guarantee that all products met a certain standard. After a more rigorous test was developed, Cirrus found fewer working chips than previously expected, with that yield loss rising as volumes increased.

Capstone Investments analyst Jeff Schreiner said the yield issue was exacerbated by the fact the device was for Apple, which ramps new products very quickly and at high volumes.

While Cirrus has told reporters that they’ve developed a fix to mend product problems, Apple shares dropped $2 to $330.24.

[Wall Street Journal via 9 to 5 Mac]

Image via: chipworks

Wired Adds Sharing and Shopping Features, Gives Away May Edition For Free

Conde Naste is set to offer its May iPad edition of Wired free for 30 days, thanks to a sponsorship with Adobe. The free edition is also being used as a way to promote the app’s new sharing and shopping features in a hope to attract, and bring back, subscribers who have fallen of the Wired iPad edition bandwagon.

The new sharing features, somewhat overdue, allow readers to share links to articles on Facebook and Twitter, including those that are not yet up on the Wired website or won’t ever be. However for articles that aren’t available on the Wired website, the link will lead to a web page that encourages others to download the relevant issue of the Wired magazine. As for those shopping features, Wired readers will be able to click a “buy now” button that opens an in-app browser (sponsored by MasterCard) displaying the relevant Amazon page for a product featured in an article, and any purchases will give Conde Naste a referral payment.

Wired’s monthly subscriber base for the iPad edition has apparently settled into the 20,000 to 30,000 range, which is considerably lower than the first issue which managed to hit over 100,000 downloads. Yet Wired is by no means ditching the subscription model, apparently determined to grow their business through user subscriptions, and ad revenue, which complements subscriptions.

However, Wired VP-publisher Howard Mittman, said that they felt it was time to show users how the Wired app has improved and making it free was a prominent way to do so. Mittman also admits that the social elements need to be enhanced, noting that “’social’ is real interactive, comment-able experiences, so that user feedback and feedback from our community creates a two-way or three-way conversation between the users and between the users and us.”

[Via AdAge]