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Why 2Do Is My New Favorite iOS Task Manager

There’s only one thing I like more than switching todo apps: writing about it. On the surface, it surely seems like I’ve been doing a lot of both in the past year.

In reality, while I have been guilty of periodically changing the way I organize my tasks in the past – going as far as trying a different app each month – I’ve made an effort to stick with a system, learn it, and use it as much as possible over the past three years. Since 2013, I’ve only replaced my task management app of choice once – when I moved from Reminders to Todoist upon realizing that my life got too busy for Apple’s basic app.

I liked Todoist for reasons that made sense at the time: I was preparing our multi-article coverage of iOS 8; I wanted a task manager that lived in the cloud and could be used to collaborate with other people; and I was intrigued by the idea of filters. Todoist served me well for months, and I was happy to see that others were also rediscovering a service that had been around for quite some time and built a profitable business. If you’re looking for a task manager that does more than Wunderlist and is built for teams and external integrations, Todoist still is my top recommendation.

Around early July this year, I realized that my daily work routine wasn’t the same as the Fall of 2014 and that it was also about to change again with the launch of Club MacStories and my iOS 9 review. On the verge of major alterations to my workflow and personal schedule, I always want to reassess and optimize how I get work done so that I don’t end up fighting a system that’s supposed to help me. Life is ever-changing, and there’s no point in thinking that our approach to manage it should perpetually stay the same.

Primarily out of curiosity but also with a hint of app boredom, I installed 2Do on my iPhone and iPad while I was in Positano1. I had no idea it would become the task manager I’ve felt the most comfortable with since getting an iPhone eight years ago.

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  1. One of my favorite places in Italy. ↩︎

#MacStoriesDeals Black Friday & Cyber Monday 2015: The Best Deals for iOS and Mac Apps & Games

Every year, thousands of iOS and OS X software deals are launched for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. At MacStories, we handpick the best deals for iOS and Mac apps and collect them in a single post with links to buy or share discounted products directly. You don’t have to be overwhelmed by app deals; we take care of finding the best stuff for you.

Bookmark this post and come back to find updated deals starting today through Monday. Updates will be listed as new entries at the top of each category. This year, we’ve also organized iOS apps in sub-categories to make navigation easier.

For real-time updates, you can find us as @MacStoriesDeals on Twitter.

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Alive Is a Full-Featured Live Photo Manager and Exporting Tool

As I’ve written before, I love Live Photos. They can capture the fleeting nature of a moment like nothing else can, and the integration with the well-known Camera UI is seamless. Unless I’m taking product shots for reviews, I always keep Live Photos enabled.

Apple doesn’t provide a lot of options to manage and export Live Photos from the Photos app, which is why third-party developers have stepped up to the challenge with dozens of utilities to export Live Photos as GIFs, clean up their videos, and more.

Alive, developed by Clean Shaven Apps (Dispatch, Due, Clips), is a new full-featured solution that combines management functionalities with handy exporting and stitching tools for Live Photos and traditional videos.

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watchOS 2: The MacStories Review

On September 9th, 2014, Apple CEO Tim Cook took the stage at the Flint Center for the Performing Arts in Cupertino. This was the very same stage on which, 30 years earlier, a young Steve Jobs had introduced the original Macintosh to the world. The Apple of 2014 was a very different company. Loved and hated, famous and infamous, indomitable and doomed. The only statement about the tech giant that might avoid contestation was that it could not be ignored.

The 9th would be a rubicon for Tim Cook. The late Steve Jobs had helmed the company through every one of its unparalleled series of epochal products. This was the day on which Cook would announce the first new product to come out of Apple since Jobs’ passing. A product that media pundits everywhere were sure to use as a scapegoat to prove or disprove the quality of his leadership.

The words “One More Thing…” overtook the screen, met by raucous applause from the expectant audience. Uncontrolled excitement burst through Cook’s normally calm demeanor as he presented the introduction to his hard work. “It is the next chapter in Apple’s story,” Cook boldly stated before leaving the stage. The ensuing video gave the world its first look at the Apple Watch.

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    iOS 9: The MacStories Review, Created on iPad

    With iOS entering the last stage of its single-digit version history, it’s time to wonder if Apple wants to plant new seeds or sit back, maintain, and reap the fruits of the work done so far.

    Last year, I welcomed iOS 8 as a necessary evolution to enable basic communication between apps under the user’s control. With extensions based on a more powerful share sheet, document providers, widgets, and custom keyboards, I noted that iOS had begun to open up; slowing down wasn’t an option anymore.

    In hindsight, many of the announcements from last year’s WWDC were unambiguous indicators of a different Apple, aware of its position of power in the tech industry and willing to explore new horizons for its mobile operating system and what made it possible.

    Following the troubled launch of iOS 6 and subsequent rethinking of iOS 7, Apple found itself caught in the tension between a (larger) user base who appreciated iOS for its simplicity and another portion of users who had elected iPhones and iPads as their primary computers. Alongside this peculiar combination, the tech industry as a whole had seen the smartphone graduate from part of the digital hub to being the hub itself, with implications for the connected home, personal health monitoring, videogames, and other ecosystems built on top of the smartphone.

    WWDC 2014 marked the beginning of a massive undertaking to expand iOS beyond app icons. With Extensibility, HealthKit, HomeKit, Metal, and Swift, Tim Cook’s Apple drew a line in the sand in June 2014, introducing a new foundation where no preconception was sacred anymore.

    iOS’ newfound youth, however, came with its fair share of growing pains.

    While power users could – at last – employ apps as extensions available anywhere, the system was criticized for its unreliability, poor performance, sparse adoption, and general lack of discoverability for most users. The Health app – one of the future pillars of the company’s Watch initiative – went through a chaotic launch that caused apps to be pulled from the App Store and user data to be lost. The tabula rasa of iOS 7 and the hundreds of developer APIs in iOS 8 had resulted in an unprecedented number of bugs and glitches, leading many to call out Apple’s diminished attention to software quality. And that’s not to mention the fact that new features often made for hefty upgrades, which millions of customers couldn’t perform due to storage size issues.

    But change marches on, and iOS 8 was no exception. In spite of its problematic debut, iOS 8 managed to reinvent how I could work from my iPhone and iPad, allowing me – and many others – to eschew the physical limitations of desktop computers and embrace mobile, portable workflows that weren’t possible before. The past 12 months have seen Apple judiciously fix, optimize, and improve several of iOS 8’s initial missteps.

    Eight years1 into iOS, Apple is facing a tall task with the ninth version of its mobile OS. After the changes of iOS 7 and iOS 8 and a year before iOS 10, what role does iOS 9 play?

    In many cultures, the number “10” evokes a sense of growth and accomplishment, a complete circle that starts anew, both similar and different from what came before. In Apple’s case, the company has a sweet spot for the 10 numerology: Mac OS was reborn under the X banner, and it gained a second life once another 10 was in sight.

    What happens before a dramatic change is particularly interesting to observe. With the major milestone of iOS 10 on track for next year, what does iOS 9 say about Apple’s relationship with its mobile OS today?

    After two years of visual and functional changes, is iOS 9 a calm moment of introspection or a hazardous leap toward new technologies?

    Can it be both?

    eBook Version

    An eBook version of this review is available to Club MacStories members for free as part of their subscription. A Club MacStories membership costs $5/month or $50/year and it contains some great additional perks.

    You can subscribe here.

    (Note: If you only care about the eBook, you can subscribe and immediately turn off auto-renewal in your member profile. I’d love for you to try out Club MacStories for at least a month, though.)

    Download the EPUB files from your Club MacStories profile.

    Download the EPUB files from your Club MacStories profile.

    If you’re a Club MacStories member, you will find a .zip download in the Downloads section of your profile, which can be accessed at macstories.memberful.com. The .zip archive contains two EPUB files – one optimized for iBooks (with footnote popovers), the other for most EPUB readers.

    If you spot a typo or any other issue in the eBook, feel free to get in touch at club@macstories.net.

    Table of Contents

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    1. Well, technically five. ↩︎

    Spark Review: Smart Email

    I’ve had a complicated relationship with email over the years. Part of the problem has been the Sisyphean effort of third-party apps that tried to modernize email: the more developers attempted to reinvent it, the more antiquated standards, platform limitations, and economic realities kept dragging them down. I’ve seen email clients for iOS rise and fall (and be abandoned); I’ve tried many apps that promised to bring email in the modern age of mobile and cloud services but that ultimately just replaced existing problems with new ones. Sparrow. Dispatch. Mailbox. CloudMagic. Outlook. Each one revolutionary and shortsighted in its own way, always far from the utopia of email reinvention on mobile.

    Spark by Readdle, a new email app for iPhone released today, wants to enhance email with intelligence and flexibility. To achieve this, Readdle has built Spark over the past eighteen months on top of three principles: heuristics, integrations, and personalization. By combining smart features with thoughtful design, Readdle is hoping that Spark won’t make you dread your email inbox, knowing that an automated system and customizable integrations will help you process email faster and more enjoyably.

    I’ve been using Spark for the past three weeks, and it’s the most versatile email client for iPhone I’ve ever tried. It’s also fundamentally limited and incomplete, with a vision that isn’t fully realized yet but promising potential for the future.

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    A Week in the Life of Indie Developers

    We’re always trying to think of new and interesting stories to publish on MacStories, and often times they’re articles that are a complete experiment that we honestly don’t know how they’ll turn out – this is one of those articles.

    Earlier this year I published an article that was essentially just a list of indie iOS/Mac developers and we got a great reaction to it (and we promise an update is coming). Inspired by the developers featured in that article, I asked a handful of them to write a journal of what they do in a week of development, and for some crazy reason, they agreed to contribute. Those generous developers are (in no particular order) Oisin and Padraig from Supertop, David Smith, Philip Simpson from Shifty Jelly, Greg Pierce from Agile Tortoise, and Junjie from Clean Shaven Apps.

    I asked each of the developers to keep track of the work they did in the week of Sunday 22 February to Saturday 28 February. But I wasn’t specific in the format, other than to say I wanted something along the lines of a journal crossed with a time sheet. That was partly because I really didn’t know what would work well, but also because I wanted to be flexible and let the developers just write what they thought was appropriate. I had no idea what to expect, and was a bit nervous that the whole thing might fall apart because I hadn’t been specific enough about what I was looking for.

    Fortunately, the result is fascinating, I found myself not only entertained but educated as I read through each of their journals. You’ll find that each journal is quite vastly different, not just in their writing style but also how they work as an indie developer. I know it’s a long read (certainly longer than I had anticipated), but stick with it – there are some great surprises throughout.

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    The World of Indie App Developers

    Here at MacStories we write about apps. A lot. Many of those we write about, perhaps even most, are created by individuals and small teams. And typically, those hard-working individuals remain unknown to the public who just know an app as something they use. Today we want to bring a bunch those indie developers to the forefront.

    I wasn’t sure exactly where it would lead, but last month I asked on Twitter for independent developers to @ reply me and say hi. Amplified by retweets by Federico and many others, I got dozens and dozens of replies, ultimately totalling just under 200 responses.[1] That’s both a pretty huge number (trust me, it was a time consuming process documenting them all) and also incredibly tiny (there are around 250,000 active developers and over a million apps for sale).

    It would be completely ridiculous to perform any kind of analysis on such a small sample size, but it was nonetheless great to have a relatively varied spread of developers from all over the world (illustrated in the above graphic). But more valuable was the list of developers and their Twitter accounts. So I’ve created a Twitter list that includes every developer that @ replied me. We’ve also included the full table of every developer we collated, links to their apps, location and Twitter account (see below). Please note that developers and apps shown in the full list does not mean they are endorsed by me, Federico or MacStories. If a developer met some very minimal criteria, they were included.

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    Due 2 Review: Effective Reminders

    Due has been around for a long time. Created by independent developer Lin Junjie (who later went on to launch Dispatch and Clips with Hon Cheng), Due was launched in late 2010 as a simple reminder app for iPhone to never forget the things you had to do. Over the years, Due expanded to more platforms and received an iOS 7 redesign, but, at its core, it remained a streamlined utility to set reminders and always complete them. With a combination of clever design and thoughtful snooze settings, Due ensured you’d never ignore an alert (or pretend it wasn’t important).

    The original Due was, however, a product of simpler times. In five years, thousands of reminder and timer apps have been released on the App Store. As widely documented by the indie iOS dev community, it’s hard to survive in a market driven by a tendency to lower prices and to add features atop features. People’s workflows change (often, from modest to more advanced needs) but, unlike others, Junjie has shown remarkable restraint in changing how Due works. He’s an exception. I can’t think of any other 1.0 app that lasted this long.

    Four years after the original Due (which I discovered thanks to John Gruber), Due 2 launches today with a completely redesigned interface and interactions updated for the modern era of iOS 8 and larger phones. And yet, in spite of its new look, Due 2 is still unmistakably Due – a testament to the developer’s deliberate efforts to make a specific type of app that doesn’t compromise its nature.

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