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Connected: A War of Semantics→

This week, Myke, Federico and Stephen debate what’s after the Post-PC era, the future of the iPad and Federico’s true feelings about OS X.

I expect to receive quite a bit of follow-up after this week’s episode of Connected, which is also a nice preparation for today’s Apple event. Hopefully some of my iPad wishes will come true. Get the episode here.

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Reddit Acquires Alien Blue→

Alien Blue, perhaps the most popular third-party Reddit app available on iOS, has been acquired by Reddit. Greg Kumparak writes at TechCrunch:

We heard whispers of this deal going back a few weeks. While reddit isn’t disclosing terms, they’ve just confirmed to me that they’ve acquired the Alien Blue project and that its Melbourne-based developer, Jase Morrissey, will be joining their team.

Curiously, reddit seems to hesitate in calling the app their “official iOS reader” — they’re keeping the “Alien Blue” name, for example, rather than changing it to just be called “reddit” or “reddit reader” or something.

I’ve covered Alien Blue several times here at MacStories over the past five years – it’s always been a fantastic Reddit client packed with nice design touches and powerful functionalities to customize the way you read Reddit, browse sub-reddits, and interact with comments. It’s interesting to see Reddit acquiring a power-user app such as Alien Blue rather than more simplistic and minimal clients, and it makes me wonder if the company will keep on adding features for reading and user management, or if they’ll begin to simplify the app and remove its advanced features (always been a fan of subreddit grouping and iCloud sync in the app).

Alien Blue joins the dedicated Reddit AMA app on the App Store, and it’s available in two versions for iPhone and iPad; Reddit is keeping the app’s “Pro” In-App Purchase, but to ease the transition to the separate app, they’re offering it for free for a limited time.

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Drafts 4 Review

Drafts is one of my all-time favorite apps on iOS, not only for its amazing utility, but also because it was the app that got me started writing about technology, so it has a special place in my heart. However, surveying what the app has looked like since its last big update over a year ago, it’s been clear to me that an unchanged Drafts would stagnate in the post-iOS 8 world. In the face of new methods of inter-app communication such as extensions, documents pickers, and widgets, surviving on URL scheme-based utilities alone would likely not be enough to keep Drafts relevant.

This is Drafts though, an app that has been at the forefront of iOS automation since the field began. I should not have been worried. Released today on the App Store as a new, iOS 8-only, and Universal app, Drafts 4 is an evolution which boasts a huge number of improvements and represents a much needed shift in direction. With a UI refresh, a smarter and more accessible interface for building actions, a fantastic Share extension, a customizable extended keyboard, an enhanced URL scheme, and the intriguing introduction of JavaScript scripts for text manipulation, Drafts 4 is Agile Tortoise’s statement that they are ready for the challenges of a modern iOS.

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Mac Necessities→

I was reading this article by Fraser Speirs as a follow-up to Bradley Chambers’, and he made a great point about iOS devices and Macs towards the end:

I ask myself what it would take for me to completely eschew owning a Mac. I’m not there yet and I’m not even all that close to it in practical terms. Like your pal that doesn’t have a car but who can only do so because you give him a lift, I could possibly do without my own personal Mac only because I have access to Macs at school.

One of the reasons for this is that the Mac is how you recover an iOS device. If your device turns up its toes completely, one way to get it back is to plug it into a Mac and perform various incantations to revive it. If your iOS device ends up totally full of images and video, the fastest way to solve that problem is to plug it into a Mac and download them all through Image Capture.

I’ve been thinking about not repairing my MacBook Air and going 100% iOS-only with an iPad Air this year. Because in spite of trying to get all my work done on iOS, I still have to use a Mac for specific tasks that can’t be done on iOS.

I’ve been putting together a list of tasks that I still my Mac for. So far, I have these:

  • Local device backups with iTunes;
  • Photo and video extraction with Image Capture;
  • Screen recording (currently possible with either AirPlay Mirroring or Yosemite’s upcoming QuickTime player);
  • Generating GIFs from screencasts;
  • Browsing versions of documents;
  • Recording podcasts with Skype;
  • Cyberduck (for Rackspace Cloud Files);
  • Downloading torrents;
  • Installing betas of iOS;
  • Following Apple live streams and taking notes at the same time;
  • Xcode;
  • 4 GB of RAM (multiple Safari tabs that don’t time out).

There are many other reasons why a Mac could still be preferable to iOS, but, for me, these are the main limitations that force me to keep a Mac around. I believe some of them are unlikely to change (torrents and installing iOS firmware betas), others are simply missing apps (where are Cyberduck and GIF Brewery for iOS?), but, in general, it looks like I’ll have to finally fix my broken keyboard.

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Holding iOS Back→

Bradley Chambers writes about the limitations of Safari for iOS:

When the iPhone was released in 2007 with a “desktop class” web browser, it was widely praised. You could view entire websites on a mobile device. Coming from the days of WAP optimized sites on my Motorola Q, this was incredible. If we fast forward to 2014, Mobile Safari has become the app that is holding the iPad back from becoming a fully featured laptop replacement for a lot of people. While Mobile Safari is fast and loads website reasonably well, it cannot upload and download files. It can upload pictures, but that is it. Mobile Safari needs a way to upload and download any type of file into iCloud Drive (a mirrored from the Mac downloads folder).

Safari is probably my favorite Apple app in iOS, but Bradley is right – it’s still lacking when compared to desktop browsers for simple tasks such as downloading and uploading files.

I was surprised to see features such as extensions in Mail and uploads in Safari being absent from iOS 8 when it launched – and it looks like iOS 8.1 won’t introduce them either. iOS users need these features, but I wonder if part of the reason Apple hasn’t added them yet may be security-related. In particular, I had a couple of readers suggest that lack of extension support in Mail could be an enterprise security requirement, and while that could make sense, it doesn’t sound like something that Apple can’t work around. Or maybe the problem is simpler: Apple didn’t have time to turn email messages and “Upload” buttons from webpages into attach points for document pickers and extensions, so the feature was nixed.

There’s also an argument to be made about storage. How quickly would those 5 GB of free iCloud storage fill up with a full download manager built into Safari for iOS and iCloud Drive? Macs come with plenty of local storage; iOS devices still start at 16 GB and 20 GB is a paid tier in iCloud Drive.

Hopefully Apple will keep extending iOS 8, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see these features delayed until next year.

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How “Complete My Bundle” Works→

With the release of Transmit iOS and Prompt 2, we excitedly added two Panic Pack bundles to the App Store. Bundles are a great chance to reward loyal customers a little bit of a discount on our software — something that was not possible to do on the App Store previously.

Even better, customers can “Complete My Bundle” — if they’ve bought any of our apps, they can pay the difference to receive additional missing apps at a discount.

But once our bundles hit the App Store, some curious “Complete My Bundle” questions began to roll in. Pricing seemed to be weird or inconsistent. So we did a little digging and got some good tips on Twitter.

Panic just solved the mystery of obscure Complete My Bundle pricing. It makes sense after reading their conclusion, and it confirms that bundles won’t always be the most convenient option.

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BeerTab for iPhone→

My good friends and longtime MacStories contributors Don Southard and Chris Herbert have released BeerTab today, an iPhone app to keep tabs on your favorite beers, rate them, and share them.

I’m not a huge beer fan, but Don and Chris were kind enough to let me test their app, and I think they’ve done a great job. The interface is polished, simple, and it’s got nice transitions (in addition to beer-inspired themes); you can add beers by taking a picture of their barcode and enter detailed descriptions and ratings for any beer you enjoyed. I like how you can publish a beer from your library as a webpage – that’s a clever way to share with friends and it’s nicely integrated with the app.

A lot of care and passion clearly went into making BeerTab, and it shows. It’s $1.99 on the App Store, and you can read Don’s background story here.

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Apple: iPhone 6 & iPhone 6 Plus Arrive in 36 More Countries and Territories This Month

Apple today issued a press release, noting that the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus will launch in another 36 countries this month. That will make the iPhone available in 69 countries by the end of the month, with 115 countries expected to get the new iPhones by the end of the year. According to Apple this will be the fastest iPhone rollout ever.

The countries getting the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus this month are as follows:

  • Friday, October 17: China, India and Monaco
  • Thursday, October 23: Israel
  • Friday, October 24: Czech Republic, French West Indies, Greenland, Malta, Poland, Reunion Island and South Africa
  • Thursday, October 30: Bahrain and Kuwait
  • Friday, October 31: Albania, Bosnia, Croatia, Estonia, Greece, Guam, Hungary, Iceland, Kosovo, Latvia, Lithuania, Macau, Macedonia, Mexico, Moldova, Montenegro, Serbia, South Korea, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Ukraine and Thailand

As you can see from the below chart, the claim that this is the “fastest iPhone rollout ever” depends on which point you judge it. As of today (day 34) it is not the fastest rollout, but by the end of this month (day 52) and end of this year, it is.

Diagonal lines indicate that exact launch rollouts are not known, but the general projection is known (ie. 115 countries by the end of the year)

Diagonal lines indicate that exact launch rollouts are not known, but the general projection is known (ie. 115 countries by the end of the year)