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Reeder 3 for iOS Now Available, Adds Support for iOS 9 Split View, Safari View Controller, 3D Touch

Reeder 3 for iOS has just been released today as a free update for existing customers. The new version brings support for iOS 9 Split View, support for the new iPad Pro and 3D Touch capability on the iPhone 6s, amongst a number of feature improvements. Split View support enables you to use Reeder side-by-side with another app, on compatible iPads. Whilst 3D Touch support is currently limited to previewing articles when in the article list - it isn’t yet able to preview links in articles or preview article lists for a particular RSS feed.

Reeder 3 also adds support for the Safari View Controller, an iOS 9 feature which brings the native Safari experience to third party apps. For those familiar with Reeder you’ll be well aware that a key aspect of its design is the use of a number of sliding panes for your feed list, article list, the actual article itself and finally the ‘view in browser’ option. You’ll be glad to know that Reeder implements Safari View Controller in a way that fits within Reeder’s existing design and user interface. So just as you would before, you can swipe left on an article and Safari View Controller will slide in, not pop-up. Dismissing the Safari View Controller can also be done by swiping right from the left edge of your screen.

Some of the other features in Reeder 3 include the ability to add Instapaper as a sync service, options to adjust the font size for the list of articles, and additional UI tweaks throughout the app.

Reeder 3 for iOS is available as a free update for existing customers, and is $4.99 on the App Store for new customers.

Connected: Being in Charge of a Space Rocket→

This week, Federico talks about how he is changing his automation workflows with 1Writer and Workflow, and Myke talks about his Apple Pencil review.

This week’s episode of Connected is all about changes in my workflow (including posting articles to WordPress) and Myke’s thoughts on the Apple Pencil from his unique perspective. You can listen here.

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How Readdle Launched Their First Mac App→

Readdle’s Denys Zhadanov has put together a good article detailing how Readdle launched PDF Expert for Mac (which Graham likes) and got to #1 in the Mac App Store. I particularly liked this bit on how they positioned the app in the research stage:

Many people told me that it doesn’t make sense to build a product that already has some decent alternatives. But honestly, I like competition. Healthy competition indicates that there is a good addressable market out there. Having a superior product that does things better and is differentiated enough can lead to a successful and sustainable business.

Thanks to our research and preparation, we were able to position PDF Expert for Mac really well. It steps in where Apple Preview is too basic and Adobe Acrobat is too cumbersome. With PDF Expert, people can actually do their PDF work much faster and easier, including reading, annotating, form filling, and signing documents.

As I argued on Connected last week, too many developers think that making a good app is all it takes to achieve “success”. Preparation, research, and understanding the position of an app beforehand are just as essential. Denys has some other practical tips and fascinating stats, so make sure to check out his post.

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Publishing Articles to WordPress with Workflow on iOS

Posting to MacStories with Workflow.

Posting to MacStories with Workflow.

For the past two years, I’ve been publishing articles and linked posts on MacStories via Python. This inelegant solution was my only option to automate the process of publishing directly from Editorial (most recently, 1Writer): when it comes to writing on iOS, I’m too fussy to accept primitive copy & paste into WordPress’ official client. Despite its minimal GUI, crude Python code, and lack of advanced features, my ‘Publish to WordPress’ script served me well for two years.1 99% of my MacStories articles since late 2013 have been published with it.

Still, I knew that something better would come along eventually. When the Workflow team pinged me about a new action they were developing to enable WordPress publishing from the app, I couldn’t believe they were considering it. Workflow, an app that I employ on a daily basis to speed up core parts of my job, combined with the single task that powers my entire business – posting new content. It was almost too good to be true.

Fortunately, great things do happen in the third-party iOS ecosystem. Today’s update to Workflow (version 1.4.2) adds, among more actions, a brand new WordPress action to publish posts and pages to configured WordPress blogs (both wordpress.com and self-hosted ones) and which can be combined with any other existing action or workflow for deeper automaton. After using a beta of this action for the past few weeks, I can say that it’s, by far, the best automated publishing workflow I’ve ever had, and I don’t want to go back to anything else.

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Beamer 3 Launches with New User Interface, Google Chromecast Support

Following a two month public beta period, Beamer 3 was released earlier this month. Beamer, a favorite of the MacStories team, is a Mac app that allows you to easily stream video (in almost any format) to your Apple TV via AirPlay. In Beamer 3, streaming support has expanded beyond AirPlay and it can now stream to Google Chromecast.

The user interface has also been redesigned in Beamer 3, and now fits in better with OS X Yosemite and El Capitan. The new UI isn’t just prettier, it’s also more useful because it provides easier access to audio track and subtitle controls. Another new feature enables you to skip to the next video in your Beamer queue by double clicking the play button the Apple Remote. All of the new features are listed here.

Beamer 3 is available for $19.99 for new customers, and existing Beamer customers can “pay what you want” to upgrade to Beamer 3. Beamer 3 requires OS X Yosemite or El Capitan.

Square Announces New Square Reader for Apple Pay, Contactless & Chip Cards

Square yesterday announced a new Square Reader, designed to work with contactless payment services such as Apple Pay, as well as “chip and PIN” EMV cards. The new contactless Square Reader can be reserved from today for $49.

The new contactless Square Reader is a pocket sized square puck (naturally), which can be used wirelessly with the Square app on an iOS or Android device. For customers with an EMV card, there’s also a slot on one of the sides of the the new Square Reader to insert the card’s chip into the device.

For now at least, Square’s mobile payment processing for small businesses is limited to the United States, Canada and Japan. The launch of this new contactless Square Reader may help boost Square’s international expansion efforts, particularly in countries such as the UK and Australia, where EMV cards are more widely adopted.

Tokens Adds Support for Apple TV Apps→

From the Tokens blog:

Today, we’re proud to launch Tokens 1.5. This update brings support for Apple TV apps and marks an interesting point in the development of the app.

iTunes Connect (iTC) has changed a lot in the years since we first launched Tokens. The first version interacted with iTC entirely by scraping HTML. This technique was inherently slow and fragile. A chain of page requests were required for every query and minor text changes on iTC could break our scraping code. Over the last two years, iTC has improved dramatically in this respect; it is now almost entirely a modern front end web application backed by a JSON API.

If you’re a Mac or iOS developer, Tokens is a must-have. With the latest iTunes Connect changes, the app can even work for users limited to Marketing roles. Tokens is only $29 – a steal considering the time it’ll save you for generating and saving promo codes.

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Email to 2Do→

2Do is the task manager I’ve been using since August. I’m planning to write about it – the app is just so feature-rich, I’m still exploring all its possibilities. In the meantime, 2Do’s developer has announced today an optional $2.99 add-on that will soon enable 2Do users to capture emails directly from the app.

Email to 2Do is an optional one-time-only purchasable add-on that you’ll be able to buy ($2.99) and configure in zero time, starting v3.8. For those unconvinced, we’re so sure you’ll love it that it’ll come with a free trial period of 14 days (which other iOS app does that?). The possibilities are endless. You could create a special email address for 2Do and remotely forward or send emails to this address for 2Do to pick up behind the scenes and convert to tasks. You could even use this with IFTTT! Currently we plan on supporting all major IMAP service providers, including but not limited to: iCloud, Google, Outlook, Yahoo! and of course your very own custom IMAP server.

2Do has always remained true to its core goals – which has been to provide you with tools that work with services you choose for yourself, not the other way round. 2Do syncs with the service you’re comfortable with, and will now integrate seamlessly with an email address from your service provider of choice.

No todo app has ever really perfected the email capturing experience – the disconnect between email clients and apps on iOS is too big to overcome it with URL schemes or IFTTT workarounds. 2Do’s email feature sounds like an integrated approach – an actual email plugin into the app that checks for messages saved in a certain way, transforming them to tasks.

I’m curious to check this out. In the meantime, you can request access to the beta here.

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WordPress.com Goes Open Source, Launches Mac App→

Big news from the WordPress community today: WordPress.com has relaunched with a brand new interface to manage WordPress.com blogs and Jetpack-enabled websites, a new codebase (called Calypso) and API based on JavaScript, and an open source foundation:

A little over a year and a half ago, we challenged ourselves to find a fresh way to interact with WordPress, and now we’re ready to unveil what we’ve been working on. The new WordPress.com interface is built from the ground up as a single JavaScript application that relies on the WordPress.com REST API to communicate to the WordPress core.

I took the new management interface for a spin with MacStories, and it looks great. Clean, responsive, faster than ever. The people who worked on Calypso clearly put a lot of thought and willingness to start fresh into this.

As for existing WordPress users (both .com and self-hosted versions):

If you’re an existing WordPress.com user, you already are! Elements of the new WordPress.com have been progressively launched over the past eighteen months. If you run your own self-hosted WordPress site, you can install the Jetpack plugin to use the Calypso-based editing and management tools. Your site will be ready to go once you log in to WordPress.com.

A new Mac app has been released to manage all WordPress sites on the desktop, and Automattic told me the mobile apps have already been built on this backend as well.

Last, make sure to check out Matt Mullenweg (CEO of Automattic) on today’s launch and decision to go open source:

A lot of people thought we should keep this proprietary, but throughout my life I’ve learned that the more you give away, the more you get back. We still have a ton to figure out around plugins, extensibility, contributions, Windows and Linux releases, API speed, localization, and harmonizing the WordPress.com API and WP-API so it can work with core WordPress. Thousands more PHP developers will need to become fluent with JavaScript to recreate their admin interfaces in this fashion. I’m also really excited to revisit and redesign many more screens now that we have this first version out the door.

This is a beginning, not an ending. (1.0 is the loneliest.) Better things are yet to come, as all of you dig in.

WordPress is such a great success story. I’m very happy I chose to use it over six years ago.

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