Top-Notch GTD App Voodo for iPad Gets Reviewed, Plus A Giveaway!

If you are looking for a GTD app that works on the iPhone and iPad you have many, many excellent options that include Things, Due, OmniFocus and a multitude of others. Well now you can add Voodo to that extensive list of compelling GTD apps. Voodo had previously been available as an iPhone app but earlier this week it made it to the iPad as well and I was able to give it a go whilst it was being approved last month.

Jump the break for a review of Voodo for iPad and win one of five copies of the iPhone companion app!

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Apple Negotiating With Record Companies Over Cloud Service?

According to sources who talked to Bloomberg, Apple is negotiating with the key record companies of Universal, Sony, EMI and Warner for an improved iTunes service that would simplify access to music that users have purchased. The service would allegedly allow consumers to retrieve a backup of all their music perhaps if their originals were lost.

According to Bloomberg’s three sources, an agreement could be announced midyear which could have the potential of bringing consumers “closer to universal access to content centrally stored on the Internet.” The record companies are supposedly concerned of the gaining popularity of Internet services such as Pandora, which allow users to stream songs rather than purchase them and want to offer users who purchase music a similar convenience.

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RSS Reader Byline Updated with iPad Support

Back in the day when Reeder was not around and Google didn’t have a great optimized version of Reader for iPhones and iPod touches, RSS app Byline was the choice of many. The app featured a minimal and elegant UI following the standards of Apple’s interface guidelines (something that Silvio Rizzi’s Reeder eventually did not), synced with Google Reader and, again, was just popular. With time and the invasion of RSS apps in the App Store many users switched over to something else, some grew tired of RSS apps entirely, some stayed with Byline.

The app is making a comeback today, with a shiny new version 4.0 that introduces a couple of new features, design improvements and, finally, iPad support. As for the new features and fixes, this update introduces a new Edit button you can actually slide to mark all feeds as read. It’s a kind of neat gesture I’d personally like to see implemented in other apps. It’s not something Apple created, of course, but it feels native. Speed of Google Reader sync has been improved as well – Byline feels more responsive now and it’s almost as fast as Reeder at syncing unread feeds and caching items for offline usage. In the Settings, the old options have been kept: Twitter sharing, Instapaper and Read It Later support for articles you don’t want to check out right away. A couple of touches to the UI here and there are a welcome addition, too.

The iPad version comes bundled in the new Universal application, which can be upgraded to ad-free for a limited-time offer of $5.99 through in-app purchase. The iPad counterpart of Byline unsurprisingly follows Apple’s standards for UI approach: you’ve got a sidebar in landscape mode with all your feeds and folders, a popover in portrait with the same functionalities. The article view is as clean as before, although I would have liked to see some additional interface love here. Sometimes it almost feels too clean. But I have to say, it’s fast, reliable and definitely gets its job done. Byline for iPad looks a lot like the iPhone version – your call if this is a bad thing or not.

Byline 4.0 (universal) is available for free here.

Want To Get Rid of Twitter’s Quick Bar? There’s A Cydia Tweak For That

By now you’ve probably updated your iOS Twitter app and noticed that the iPhone version comes with a new “Quick Bar” at the top that’s meant for letting you cycle through…the popular and beloved Twitter trends. Really, that translucent bar doesn’t do anything else but putting trends and promoted tweets (thus, ads) in your timeline. It doesn’t follow you around as you scroll, but it appears every time you tap on the timeline tab or switch back and forth between, say, mentions and the Twitter timeline. We get it: it’s annoying and partially ruins the design of Tweetie – ehm, Twitter for iPhone.

But here comes a solution: if you’re running a jailbroken device and you want to get rid of the Quick Bar, go install Twizzler now from Cydia, for free. It removes the Quick Bar and gives you control back over what appears in your timeline. That’s it.

Did we say it’s free?

Localscope Is Perfect For iPod Or iPhone

It doesn’t matter whether a GPS signal is available to know what restaurants are nearby, or where the next gas station is. In fact, I’d easily trade Localscope for Google’s Places on Android (and who wants Hotpot when you have Facebook?). You’re never tethered to a single source of information with Google, Bing, Foursquare, Twitter, and Wikimapia for a combination of maps, current events, and augmented reality. Talk about holy wowza! And the thing is, Localscope is incredibly pretty. It’s the iPhone companion you’ll want on your homescreen if not in a nearby folder, and we’re going to run through some of the features that make this client worth its weight in bacon.

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MacStories Interviews: Dave Caolo, Author of “Using Your iPad as a Business Productivity Tool”

If you live in a corporate environment these days, chances are your employer has given you an iPad to try out. It is no secret that hundreds of companies are piloting or deploying iPads and iPhones, but when it comes to a machine that’s less than a year old and has created a new category of portable computing, trying to make it fit in your daily workflow can become a problem. What apps do I need to install? What about email settings? What’s the best way to manage my calendar? And Exchange?

Author Dave Caolo provides answers to these questions in his first book “Using Your iPad as a Business Productivity Tool”. The book is available now in the iBookstore for iPad at $5.99, but you can also pre-order it for your Kindle on Amazon. We had the chance to chat with Dave about the background of this book, and why he decided to focus on the iPad, a relatively young device for a business audience.

So head after the break for the full interview, and go download the book for your iPad here. Read more

CalendarBar Tucks Event Reminders In Your Menubar

Clean Cut Code is known for making beautiful apps like Cloud Calendar, and it was only a matter of time before they brought some of their talent to the OS X desktop. CalendarBar takes on the inefficiencies of a traditional calendar client by providing a quick list of events in a beautiful timeline that can grab events from iCal, Google Calendar, and Facebook. Clicking on an event takes you to the event listing in its parent application – CalendarBar removes the distraction of busy calendar utilities, but provides shortcuts so you can add entries and gather additional information. The app features a some iOS overtones in its design, most obviously via the settings and exit button that adorn the bottom of the pop-up panel. Launching yesterday, the app is only $1.99 in the Mac App Store.

Xcode 4 GM Seed 2 Released

Together with the GM seed of iOS 4.3, Apple has updated the developer center with a new build of Xcode 4 GM. The “seed 2” available for developers includes performance and stability improvements.

The first Xcode 4 GM seed was released in February. It included support for submitting iOS and Mac apps to the App Store and brought along the impossibility to build apps for OS X 10.5 Leopard. Xcode 4 is a major new version of Apple’s development suite which sports lots of new features and a new single-windowed UI.


Apple Releases iOS 4.3 GM [Update: Gestures, Home Sharing]

A few minutes ago Apple seeded the GM seed of iOS 4.3 to developers. It’s available now in the iOS Dev Center. Build number is 8F190. Updated versions of the iOS SDK and Apple TV pre-release software have been released as well. iOS 4.3 beta 3 was released on February 1st.

iOS 4.3 is set to come out on March 11 together with the release of the iPad 2. This GM build should include the new iTunes Home Sharing feature announced by Apple yesterday.

Update: We have received word from several developers that the multitasking gestures for iPad can still be activated in the GM build with Xcode. At this point it sounds like Xcode will be able to activate gestures in the final release as well, but the general public won’t have this feature – it’s exclusive to developers for testing. Read more