Infuse 2→

Speaking of the Apple TV, the app I used to stream movies to my television wirelessly was Infuse. Developed by FireCore, Infuse is a good-looking video player with support for multiple formats, Dolby Digital Plus sound, integration with the TheMovieDB and TheTVDB for metadata, and AirPlay.

I wasn’t interested in features like trakt, social sharing, or subtitles – I just wanted an easy way to stream videos from my iPad to the Apple TV without loss in terms of quality and smoothness. I downloaded Infuse, connected the iPad to my Mac (my movies are on an external drive), and used iTunes’ file manager to drop files into Infuse. Seconds after the copy was finished, Infuse would see the video, collect metadata, and display a gorgeous artwork preview with cast information and technical details on the file.

To stream videos with AirPlay, you need to unlock the $4.99 “Infuse Pro” In-App Purchase, which I bought immediately and didn’t regret. I gave Infuse various formats including MKV and AVI at both 720p and 1080p and streaming to my second-gen Apple TV was always smooth and fast.

I’m impressed by Infuse because, once it had my videos, it didn’t require me to fiddle with any setting or file conversion – it just worked with AirPlay and videos looked great. Infuse is free on the App Store and you can read more about supported formats (for video, audio tracks, and subtitles) here.

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Apple TV Tips→

A Reddit thread with a series of great tips for Apple TV settings and AirPlay-compatible apps I didn’t know about. I could have used some of these suggestions (like Beamer and the Menu shortcut) for Christmas, as I watched movies with my family through the Apple TV every day. It takes a while to read through the comments, but it’s worth it.

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This Week 1.2 Adds iPad Support

In December, I covered This Week, a lightweight Reminders client for iPhone that displayed todos on a weekly basis, providing a simpler and more intuitive interface than Apple’s Reminders app. Since my post, the developers added three additional views to the app (List, Day, and Month) and, last week, released version 1.2 with iPad support, making This Week Universal.

On the iPad, This Week is a nice alternative to the stock Reminders app: on the left side of the screen, you’ll get a small calendar widget at the top and view filters at the bottom. Depending on the view you choose, time blocks in the calendar will be highlighted with a white selection; by default, All > Month gives you a complete summary of all your due and overdue reminders from all your lists. Tap one of the lists, however, and the app will filter results on the right, dimming unselected lists in the sidebar. You can tap reminders to view details in a popover, or tap & hold them to open the popover in “Information” mode, where you can’t edit and you’re limited to viewing details.

This Week 1.2 is a nice update but the app still has a long way to go to become a full-featured Reminders client. URLs in notes aren’t tappable and there are no settings to control font size; there’s no URL scheme for power users, and the app could use more filter and navigation tools to, say, only show repeating reminders or those with a location attached. Considering the scarcity of Reminders clients for iPad, though, This Week 1.2 is a welcome addition, and $4.99 on the App Store.

Ecoute 2.1 Adds Up Next, Queue Management

Ecoute 2.1

Ecoute 2.1

In my review of Ecoute 2 for iPhone, I noted how the app lacked a proper queue management system to replicate the Up Next feature of iTunes for Mac:

Ecoute has a “Play next” feature, but, alas, there’s no Up Next-like queue management: adding a song to the queue will put it at the top of the queue, not at the bottom after songs you’ve already queued up. On iTunes for Mac, you can either play a song next or add it to Up Next, but Ecoute can only “play next”. Furthermore, the Play Next button is based on another workaround that’s a byproduct of playback managed by the Music app: Ecoute can’t create a real queue in Music, and therefore every time you’ll add a song to the queue you’ll hear a brief interruption as the currently playing song stops and resumes itself. This is a hack, and it works, but it’s not elegant and the app doesn’t have all the queue-related features of iTunes 11, which is unfortunate.

In an otherwise excellent update that made Ecoute 2 my favorite alternative to Apple’s Music app, the lack of Up Next stood out. Fortunately, developers Louka Desroziers and Julien Sagot were already working on improvements to the queue functionality, which are available today in version 2.1 of Ecoute, released on the App Store.

When playing music in Ecoute, you can now choose between “Play Next” and “Add Up Next” from the tap & hold menu; this works for individual songs as well as entire albums or playlists. The way Ecoute’s queue works mirrors iTunes 11: you can play a song immediately after the currently playing one, or you can stack songs at the bottom of the queue.

Up Next can be accessed by tapping the clock icon in the Now Playing screen (which has been redesigned to show blurred album art in the background, like Apple’s Remote app). Songs can be removed and rearranged in the queue, and you can add more through the “+” button in the top left corner. Right now, Ecoute uses the default Music picker to add songs manually to the queue, but the developers confirmed they are working on their own solution.

There are still some bugs and hacks that Ecoute has to employ to work around Apple’s limitations for iTunes Match and queue management on iOS. Overall, though, Up Next is a solid addition to an app that I already considered superior to Music for navigation and responsiveness of the interface. Ecoute is $2.99 on the App Store.

The King Of Clash→

To those of us raised in the world before social media, it is a given that the “real” world is the one in which you sit in traffic on your way to pick up the dry cleaning. Our connection to this world is the chief measure of our sanity. But if we’re honest about it, reality is hardly so simple now. When a guy like George Yao can plow through an anesthetizing day of mortgage regulations only to return at night to a digital fraternity where he is loved and celebrated, with friends who share his daily experience, who’s to say which is real and which is illusory? If a game can make you famous, if it can yield genuine friendships and even a new career, then why shouldn’t it become, at least for a time, the epicenter of your life?

From the NYTimes’ profile of Jorge Yao, a former top player of Clash of Clans. See also: the WSJ’s article on Supercell from October.

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Simulating Multiple Cursors in Editorial

Editorial

Editorial

When I’m writing with Editorial or Byword, I miss the multiple cursors feature of Sublime Text. Seemingly an extra geeky addition with no practical utility, multiple cursors had become part of my editing workflow as they allowed me to select multiple positions in a document and act on them at once. For example, I could select multiple lines and prefix them with an asterisk to turn them into a Markdown list, or select multiple instances of a word and modify them with a single keystroke without using Find/Replace or other hacks. The feature was built into Sublime and it was great. So of course I made a workflow for Editorial.

Because it’s the end of the year and I’m feeling festive and thankful, I’m posting two workflows to simulate multiple cursors in Editorial. The first one allows you to save selections for multiple bits of non-contiguous text at once and, when you’re done, wrap them inside any character(s); it’s useful if you want to make multiple words bold/italic, or if you want to enclose them inside parentheses. The second workflow lets you add inline Markdown links for each selection, fetching a webpage URL from the Editorial browser. Read more

My Must-Have Apps, 2013 Edition→

Today, I published the last installment of this year’s “My Must-Have Apps” series. I had a lot of fun compiling these lists for the past two months, cutting them down as much as possible to only include the apps I consider essential for my iPad, Mac, and iPhone.

Because these articles have kept me busy for the better part of December, I decided, inspired by John Siracusa, to offer a quick recap with links and stats.

In each list, I named an App of the Year:

All three articles have been written and edited in Editorial for iPad. HTML output was generated from Markdown files with Marked 2. Using a couple of Editorial workflows, I compiled some stats by scanning the original Markdown version of my articles.

I started with the basics – the number of apps:

  • 33 iPad apps
  • 32 Mac apps
  • 50 iPhone apps

(115 apps listed across three articles)

Then, I counted hyperlinks (formatted as inline links in Markdown):

  • 98 inline links iPhone
  • 63 inline links Mac
  • 98 inline links iPad

(259 hyperlinks across three articles)

For prices, I first counted the total number of apps again, then split free and paid apps, and last I calculated the total and average cost of paid apps. Please note that prices have been fetched from iTunes today, therefore some apps may still be discounted for the holiday sale.

iPad

  • 33 apps. 14 free apps and 19 paid apps.
  • Total cost of paid apps: $116.81
  • Average cost of paid apps: $6.15

Mac (only Mac App Store apps)

  • 13 apps. 2 free apps and 11 paid apps.
  • Total cost of paid apps: $175.89
  • Average cost of paid apps: $15.99

iPhone

  • 50 apps. 18 free apps and 32 paid apps.
  • Total cost of paid apps: $145.68
  • Average cost of paid apps: $4.55

Last, I counted the occurrences of specific words/phrases in my articles. They were all written separately in the month of December 2013, so I wanted to see if I could find curious patterns in my writing style and editing process. Searches were case-sensitive; both links and occurrences were counted using Editorial workflows from my book.

Occurrences for…(by article)

  • “workflow”: 7 (iPhone), 8 (Mac), 7 (iPad)
  • “love”: 3 (iPhone), 2 (Mac), 2 (iPad)
  • “I don’t know”: 1 (iPhone), 2 (Mac), 1 (iPad)
  • “I don’t like”: 2 (iPhone), 0 (Mac), 1 (iPad)

You can find all my three “Must-Have Apps” articles here.

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Fantastical→

My thanks to Flexibits for sponsoring MacStories this week with Fantastical. Both on the Mac and iPhone, Fantastical lets you create and manage events using a beautiful and intuitive interface with an expressive and accurate natural language parser. With Fantastical, you can type something like “Lunch with Michael at 1 PM tomorrow” and the app will create a calendar event for it, filling all the necessary date and time fields for you. Same for reminders, recurring events, and other commands. It’s great.

I’ve been using Fantastical for years now, and I wouldn’t be able to go back to using Apple’s default apps for events and reminders. Fantastical 2, which is my iPhone app of the year, introduced an iOS 7 redesign and new features such as direct Reminders integration, a new week view, a dark theme, and more. For power users, Fantastical 2 has a powerful scheme that lets you chain it to other apps to build handy automated workflows.

For a limited time only, Fantastical 2 for iPhone is $1.99 (60% off) and Fantastical for Mac is $9.99 (50% off). You can find out more about Fantastical 2 for iPhone and Fantastical for Mac here and here.

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