Thanks everyone who entered the My Artists for iPhone giveaway. We also want to thank the Top Drawer Apps developers for the promo codes they offered to MacStories readers.
My Artists Winners Announced
Courier: Great New Mac App from Realmac Coming Soon
Courier is an awesome new app from Realmac Software (which I’m lucky enough to have already tested) set to come out on OS X “in about a week”. Or at least that’s what the teaser website says.
I can’t really say what the app does yet, but as you can see in the video (embedded below, together with the final icon) support for websites like Youtube, Vimeo and Flickr will be part of the application. All I can say is that Courier is great, and will probably turn out to be one of the best apps released on Mac this year.
Check out the video below, follow @courierapp for exclusive news and stay tuned for a review on MacStories as soon as the app will be available.
Apple Launches “Hardcore Games” Section in App Store
Another week, another new “App Store Essentials” section for iPhone users. This time around the folks over at the App Store team have collected “the most positively engaging and altogether difficult games available” - the list includes gems such as Chaos Rings, Archetype and Space Invaders Infinity Gene.
You can check out the section in iTunes here.
Stash: All-in-one Private Browser & File Manager for iPad
In case you still haven’t noticed, the iPad has no default file manager. Apple decided to hide the entire filesystem on it (and on the iPhone, way back in 2007), and they’ll keep rolling with their decision for quite a while, I guess. Apps are the new folders, each app database a file manager. iFiles, 1Password, Gusto, Fast PDF: if you want files on them, you either import them from the cloud (Dropbox, anyone?) or transfer them using iTunes.
Now, if you’re a Mac user I guess you’re pretty used to hearing the term “anything bucket”. As explained by Shawn Blanc, an anything bucket like Yojimbo is an application capable of capturing every bit of information and store stuff in a single place. A place that you can organize with tags, albums, smart albums and user-based criteria. On iOS such a thing is not possible: there’s no way to quickly send data to other applications, not until Apple implements a proper services menu. As things stand now, you can forget about having stuff like OmniFocus’ quick entry panel or Yojimbo’s capture shortcut on the iPhone.
Still, developers are trying to build something similar to what we have on OS X. Stash is a new iPad app by Hedonic Software that can collect any kind of file and even lets you create multiple libraries, either public or private ones.
Meet Trackr, A RSS App Which Lets You Upload Stuff to Dropbox
Lots of review requests show up in my inbox every single day. Some of them are from great developers who produce great apps and deserve coverage. Some of them are just from weird dudes asking for “a post on your website” about their latest Angry Birds clone.
Then there are the strange ones.
You know, those apps the developers present as a “new take on something” but that, actually, they can’t explain either. I read those emails and often ask myself “How the hell did he think of doing this?”. Most of the times I don’t write about those…things. But this one, this one deserves a quick mention.
Trackr is a RSS feed reader which lets you download files and upload them to Dropbox.
Docket for iPad: Simple Checklists On The Go
I organize my tasks and notes in OmniFocus and Simplenote, respectively. I know, though, that many of you guys don’t need the complexity of OmniFocus, or Simplenote’s cloud syncing capabilities. Heck, maybe you don’t even need to take notes or embrace the GTD method.
If so, you can give a try to Docket for iPad.
Folio, Universal PDF Reader - 3 Codes Up for Grabs
When the iPad came out, GoodReader sold like hotcakes. It was one of the very few apps that allowed iPad users to read .PDF documents on their new device, and it was priced at $0.99. It still is, actually. GoodReader was full of features, maybe too much for an app that didn’t really care about having a “plesant” UI and user experience. For weeks, people were forced to use GoodReader - there was no better alternative.
Eventually Apple shipped iBooks with PDF support, and a couple of new interesting 3rd party readers were released in the market. Fast PDF, for example, is the app I’ve been using all along to transfer documents on my iPad (and iPhone) and read them.
Folio, universal for iPhone and iPad, aims at becoming your default choice for importing documents, read them and organize them.
iAd for Developers Not So Effective After All?
Last month Apple launched the “iAd for Developers” program, a way for developers to advertise their application through the iAd infrastructure by enabling the users to click on a banner and get an App Store-like page, with options to download the app (from the ad itself), see screenshots and read the description.
The iAd for Developers campaign comes at $0.25 per click (unlike iAd’s standard $2 per click fee) and, according to Apple, it should be the best way to drive a huge amount of traffic to your application. Admittedly, it sounds like a great idea: you don’t have the leave the app you’re currently in to buy another app, the system is smart and targets that app based on you. For small developers, this could be a great source of revenue at a rather affordable price.
Notified Reinvents Notifications on iOS
With iOS 4, hardcore iPhone users and bloggers (including me) expected Apple to dramatically improve Notifications. Notifications (either push or local ones) are those translucent-blue alert boxes that pop up in the middle of the screen when something happens. SMS? Alert box. Twitter DM? Chirpy notification, and so on.
Now, I don’t know if you’re familiar with Android or WebOS, but notifications on those operating systems are less intrusive and, at the same time, more useful than iOS’ ones. iOS notifications appear once and you have to do something to dismiss them. Once they’re gone, they’re gone: there’s no way to view all your past notifications, or undo a dismissal to get the last alert box back. As I said, they’re intrusive: a notification can get in your way when playing a game or watching a movie, and there are no settings to tweak to make notifications work for you. They’re just alerts going on and off when something happens.
Apple didn’t implement a new notification system in iOS 4, and that won’t happen in 4.1 either. There’s an app available in Cydia, though, called Notified, which is reiventing notifications on iPhones and iPods. Does Notified really bring to iOS the notifications Apple should have made? Read more