Apple recently revamped its Education website with updated sections on iPad and Mac usage in education and a focus on students with special needs and Accessibility. Make sure to check out the Real Stories webpage, which provides several examples of how teachers are using the iPad in the classroom.
Apple and Education→
AgileBits Teases 1Password 4 For Mac→
Dan Moren, in his preview of 1Password 4 for Mac:
Several of the newest capabilities originated in 1Password 4 for iOS, including the ability to mark your frequently used items as Favorites, support for multiple logins on the same site, and the ability to sync via iCloud. You’ll also find new types of items to supplement existing options, such as driver licenses and reward programs, and you can add custom fields to most items, to store any other information you want. And if you want to share a specific item between the Mac and iOS apps, you can do so by sending it via encrypted iMessage or email.
1Password for Mac received its last big update in 2009 with version 3, and, following the launch of 1Password 4 for iOS, a revamp of the desktop client is long overdue. I’m particularly excited about the Back to the Mac approach – 1Password 4 is one of my favorite and most used iOS apps, and the upcoming Mac app seems to retain much of the mobile counterpart’s functionality, enhancing it with features that make sense on OS X (such as the new browser extension).
Apple will provide its own password generation and sync solution with iCloud Keychain, and that’s great news because it’ll help users have safer logins with minimal effort. However, I want more from my password manager, and I’m looking forward to trying 1Password 4.0.
The Future Of Feed Reading→
And so, could this hypothetical service take all that information, put it into a database, and then find and recommend things for me to read? I think yes. That’d be the easy part. The hard part is if the service could pick out articles for me as well as Pandora can at pick out songs, or as well as Netflix can pick out 4-star movies. Now, wouldn’t that be something?
Services like Feedly, Feedbin, and Feed Wrangler have pretty much nailed the filesystem of news idea of RSS readers (with some unique differences, as Shawn outlines for Feed Wrangler).
The next step is discovery of relevant and personalized news in an RSS-based environment. No one seems to be doing that quite right at this point and there are a lot of services and technologies that may be using RSS in the backend but that are trying different proprietary approaches. Flipboard with magazines and top stories; Zite with algorithms; Feedly with popular feeds; others with lightweight Twitter and Facebook integrations.
My primary concern is that a feature such as the one envisioned by Shawn – which I’d love, by the way – would require a tremendous amount of scale, data, analysis, time, and, ultimately, resources, which I’m not sure an independently developed feed reader could ever have (or pull off properly). But, yes, that sort of news recommendation inside a feed reader would be fantastic.
Rdio For iOS Gets Station Tuning, New Collection Options
Following the introduction of improved, personalized radio stations in early August, Rdio has today rolled out an update to its iOS app that brings a wider range of controls for stations and Collection views to iPhones and iPads.
In stations, it’s now possible to alter the selection of tracks that the service will automatically pick choosing between “Familiar” and “Adventurous” settings with three additional levels of fine-tuning in the middle. Like Rdio for desktop computers, these settings are displayed as dots in the radio playing view.
Other additions in this update are more subtle, but still noteworthy. In search results, filters allow you to easily view results for artists, albums, songs, playlists, people, or labels – a handy change to simplify the process of finding exactly what you’re looking for. In the Collection view on the iPad, you can browse with a new (and admittedly visually more appealing) album view, and both the iPhone and iPad apps get the ability to sort Collection by Recently Added – useful to get a quick overview of the artists, albums, or songs you’ve been adding to your account lately.1 In the Stations area, Rdio for iOS can now start artist-only stations, just like the Mac app.
I’m a big fan of Rdio’s recent work on UI design and stations. Rdio has been looking like an iOS 7-ready app for quite a few months now, thanks to a great use of blurs and music artworks as backgrounds – a design choice that is in line with iOS 7’s focus on deference and user content. In Stations, I’m impressed by the accuracy of the “Your FM” algorithm and the way it manages to regularly bring up songs that it knows I’ll like. I can’t wait to see what Rdio will do with the actual iOS 7, and I’m curious to see if they will (finally) bring back standard Recommendations, which briefly showed up for me, but then disappeared.
You can get the latest Rdio for iOS here.
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I personally peruse the History section on a daily basis to quickly re-listen to songs I’m currently addicted to over and over. ↩︎
New Oceanhorn Trailer→
This is the iOS game I have been excited about for months. Recently, the developers announced Nobuo Uematsu and Kenji Ito are composing music for the game. My expectations are extremely high for Oceanhorn.
Simplenote is Relaunching With Improved Syncing for Mac, iOS 7, and Android→
From the guys who make sharing notes between iOS, Android, and your desktop computer simple:
We’ve been beta testing new versions of Simplenote for Mac, Android, and iOS 7. They look a lot different: cleaner, simpler, and more lightweight. Our approach was to return to first principles and build anew.
A side effect is that some less frequently used features won’t be available, at least at first. Some people will cheer. Others, like those who adore sorting notes by reverse chronological creation date, may mourn. More details are coming soon.
Also of note are improvements to Simperium, which should make syncing between your devices faster and more seamless.
Mirimage’s Editorial Workflows for Pocket and App.net→
Great demonstration of Editorial’s scripting capabilities. First, a workflow to fetch a random article from Pocket:
I’ve made 3 workflows; two for the authentication (Pocket Auth 1 & 2), and one that fetches a random article from the user’s unread queue and opens it in the Editorial browser. The Pocket authentication only needs to run once.
And then one to post on App.net (which could be nicely chained to my Post To WordPress workflow):
If you’re an App.net Developer, you can post to App.net directly from Editorial. I integrated this workflow into Federico Viticci’s Post to WordPress workflow, to post new articles to App.net in addition to Twitter.
Side note: I’m keeping track of Editorial workflows I find over at this Pinboard tag.
ReadKit 2.3→
ReadKit, my favorite RSS/read later client for OS X, has been updated today to version 2.3, which brings a new icon, several bug fixes, and some new welcome features.
For me, the two most important additions are the improved sharing system and a global preference to group items by date or feed. The latter is available in Preferences > General, but there’s also a smart folder-specific setting that can override the general preference (so if you like to group a smart folder by feed instead of date, you can do that). Sharing is reminiscent of Reeder in that it supports services like Evernote, Twitter, Facebook, and Pinboard and it lets you assign custom keyboard shortcuts to each sharing service.
I’m a fan of the new sharing options, as they are faster to activate than drag & drop between sources (which was already supported). As the developers write:
ReadKit started out as a read later application for Instapaper, Pocket and Readability and it wasn’t so important to share articles between these services, despite the fact that it has worked with a simple drag-and-drop. Then RSS abilities has been added to the application, but the way of sharing remained unchanged. It’s time to improve this functionality, so this version introduces the new sharing menu, customizable sharing shortcuts and the ability to send articles into non-premium Instapaper accounts as well. Additional improvements and services are coming soon.
I’ve been using ReadKit every day since version 2.0 and I highly recommend it. The 2.3 update is available on the Mac App Store.
A Very Mild Defense of In-App Purchases→
In this part of his post on In-App Purchases, John Moltz sums up my feelings quite well:
What we should be asking is simply whether or not we’re spending what the app is worth. We’ve spent a lot of time decrying the race to the bottom in app pricing. Now we’re complaining because app developers have found a way to make more money.
Not surprisingly, the study cited above says the freemium model works out well for developers. Almost exclusively, of course, it’s all the wrong developers. Because the good ones, the ones we like and go drinking with at WWDC, would rather drag a nail across a Retina MacBook Pro than go freemium.
Exactly. I am complaining because the wrong developers are leveraging In-App Purchases to create “games” that nickel and dime players and keep asking for more money. Funnily, just as we thought the arcade was dead, it’s back and it’s more expensive than ever with mobile games.
My problem is with games designed not for fun, but for profit. Games that are optimized for shady IAP tactics, rather than great gameplay. But I don’t want to repeat myself – here’s what I’ve written about my bias for quality games, Apple and its culture for gaming, and the value of In-App Purchases.