This Week's Sponsor:

Textastic

The Powerful Code Editor for iPad and iPhone — Now Free to Try

Search results for "14139"

Fantastical 2.2: Interactive Notifications, Share Extension, and Today Widget

Fantastical, developed by Flexibits, has long been one of my favorite calendar apps for iOS. Since the app’s first release over three years ago, I’ve come to expect my calendar to support natural language input; after the launch of version 2.0 for iPhone, Fantastical showed me why I wanted my todo list to be integrated with the calendar with excellent and seamless support for iCloud calendars and reminders in a unified experience. Reminders, however, turned out to be a problem for me as I switched to Todoist earlier this year: I’ve started using Sunrise – which is a great app – to see my events and todos in a single list, but I’m constantly missing Fantastical’s natural language support, advanced features, and polished design.

Fantastical 2.2, available today on the App Store, brings iOS 8 features that allow the app to be more easily integrated with iOS workflows thanks to a share extension and that extend the app beyond its silo with actionable notifications and a widget.

Read more

iStat Mini

Bjango’s iStat Menus has been one of my must-have Mac apps for the past four years, but I have to admit that I don’t use all of its features. I don’t need iStat Menus’ comprehensive set of tools to monitor my CPU, fan temperature, or network usage – mostly because I don’t understand that data and just want to know how much free memory and storage I have.

iStat Mini, released last week on the Mac App Store, takes iStat Menus’ most popular features and puts them in Yosemite’s Today view with a compact widget that’s always a swipe away. iStat Mini will show you CPU, memory, and disk usage, with two smaller network indicators at the bottom for downloads and uploads. And that’s it.

If you’ve always been interested in iStat’s monitoring capabilities without the full power of iStat Menus, iStat Mini is a handy widget that covers the basics with a compact layout in Notification Center. Adopters of the app will likely ask for more features, and Bjango will have to balance requests for more options with the simplicity of the widget. A little more customization would be nice, but I wouldn’t want to see iStat Mini become as complex as iStat Menus.

iStat Mini is $1.99 on the Mac App Store.

Rdio Launches High-Quality Streams, Interactive Notifications on iOS 8→

Last week, Rdio addressed one of my longstanding criticisms of the service by launching high-quality AAC streams with a 320 kbps option for Unlimited users:

Today we’re happy to announce we’ve converted our entire catalog of over 30 million songs to high-quality AAC audio. Listeners around the world now have four sound quality settings to choose from across iOS, Android, and the web. All Rdio users can choose between data-efficient 64 kbps all the way up to 192 kbps. Rdio Unlimited subscribers now also have the option of listening in pristine-quality 320 kbps. Plus individually select your audio settings for a variety of uses, whether you’re using Wi-Fi or cellular streaming or listening to offline downloads.

Rdio is late to the 320 kbps party, but better late than never. I like how the updated iOS app has individual settings for streaming and download quality over WiFi and Cellular connections.

And speaking of the iOS app, it was also updated with new iOS 8 features and support for CarPlay. I couldn’t test the latter as I don’t have a CarPlay receiver, and the fact that Rdio is now optimized for the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus is pretty much a given with app updates at this point.

The use of interactive notifications by Rdio is clever: if someone shares a song or album with you, you can swipe down on the Rdio notification to view it or start playing it. The Play button has to launch the Rdio app first, but it’s still a nice shortcut that should remove some friction from sharing with other Rdio users.

Permalink