Finalist is a new iPhone and iPad task manager that combines elements of note-taking apps, Kanban boards, and calendar apps in a unique and interesting way. The result is a lightweight app that’s simple and quick to use but unlikely to replace a fully-featured task manager for most users.
Posts tagged with "iOS"
Finalist: A Notepad-Inspired Task Manager
Game On: Papers, Please Milestones, Netflix Eyes TV Gaming, Vampire Survivors and Rolando News, Plus an RPG for the Weekend
Lucas Pope’s critically acclaimed dystopian puzzle game Papers, Please celebrated a big milestone this week. As reported by Engadget, the game just passed its 10th anniversary and has sold 5 million copies, which is huge for an indie title. Of course, the game is on every platform imaginable these days, but if you still haven’t checked it out after all of these years, you can pick up Papers, Please for just $1.99 on the App Store for a limited time.
Netflix released an iOS app called Netflix Game Controller this week with a UI that consists of standard onscreen versions of game controller buttons and a message that the app can be connected with games on your TV. As TechCrunch’s article on the app points out, though, there are no Netflix games that connect to it yet. An in-app message notes that Netflix Games on TV are currently in beta, and the app’s description simply says the games are coming soon. Netflix declined to comment about the app to TechCrunch.
Next week, Vampire Survivors will introduce a co-op mode on all platforms, including iOS. The highly addictive 8-bit style monster shooter that beat Elden Ring, Cult of the Lamb, and God of War: Ragnarök for a BAFTA game of the year award has an extensive FAQ covering how co-op mode will work if you’re interested in learning more.
Also on the horizon, according to TouchArcade, is a Steam version of Rolando that will be compatible with the Steam Deck. Rolando was a sensation on the early iOS App Store, disappeared with the transition to 64-bit apps, but triumphantly returned in 2019 as Rolando: Royale Edition. If you’re interested in videogame history and preservation, Andrew Hayward has a fantastic article on Polygon about Rolando’s 2019 comeback.
Finally, I want to leave you with a game recommendation for the weekend: Stone Story RPG. This isn’t a new game, but it was new to me, and I was so impressed with its all-ASCII artwork that I wanted to pass it along.
The game, which is available on iPhone, iPad, and other platforms, is a classic RPG with incredible art throughout, as well as an excellent soundtrack. An AI handles most of the action, leaving you to strategize your next move and craft items to help you on your quest. If you’re looking for something a little different to play on your iPhone this weekend, Stone Story RPG is a great option.
Game On is a periodic roundup highlighting the biggest news in gaming on Apple’s platforms. From the iPhone and iPad to the Mac and Vision Pro, we’ll cover the big-name games on Apple devices, along with notable industry and developer news.
Söka: An AI Assisted App to Track Your Bucket Lists
Just before I hopped on a plane to head to WWDC, I noticed a new app called Söka, an iOS and iPadOS bucket list tracker by Roddy Munro. I didn’t have time to dig into the details or test it, but there was something about it that caught my eye, so I made a note to revisit it later in the summer. I’m glad I did because it’s one of the best integrations of artificial intelligence that I’ve seen in an app.
Söka takes the friction out of building travel bucket lists with the help of AI. I’ve been using Söka as a way to create travel lists of places I want to visit in North Carolina and Italy, for example. Whether it’s for travel like Söka or media like Sofa, there are a lot of apps built on the idea of creating ‘someday’ lists and tracking your progress. What makes Söka unique is the way it uses AI to remove the friction from the list-building part.
Callsheet Provides Movie and TV Details with an Uncluttered Native Interface
Today, Casey Liss released a brand new app called Callsheet for looking up cast and crew information about movies and TV shows. The app, which works on the iPhone and iPad, has a lot in common with movie and TV show tracking apps that I’ve covered, except for one very big difference. Callsheet isn’t a tracking app. Instead, it’s an app front end for The Movie DB, a website that offers a crowd-sourced movie and TV show database and an API for developers.
That’s an important distinction to understand. Callsheet is designed for those times that you want to know more about the people behind a movie or TV show but find the ads in apps and on websites, like IMDb, frustrating. If that resonates with you, and you’re not interested in tracking what you’ve watched, Callsheet offers a better experience for finding cast and crew information.
Game On: Pokémon Sleep, Stardew Valley+, Dead Cells, Netflix Gaming, Unity’s PolySpatial Beta, and Epic Games’ Battle with Apple
The videogame industry is huge, surpassing movies and music by wide margins. Apple has seen a lot of success with mobile games, but it’s history with desktop gaming leaves a lot to be desired. However, one thing is clear. Apple wants to expand its presence in the videogame industry and sees Apple silicon as the key to its success.
While the jury’s still out whether the company’s ambitions will succeed, beginning today, we’ll be publishing periodic roundups highlighting the biggest news in gaming on Apple’s platforms. From the iPhone and iPad to the Mac and Vision Pro, we’ll cover the big name games coming to Apple devices, along with notable industry and developer news.
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What the Golf? running on visionOS. Source: Unity.
This week, Unity announced a beta program for PolySpatial, a tool for visionOS developers that integrates with other Unity tools to help developers bring their Unity-based games to Apple Vision Pro. I wrote about the company’s announcement, which also revealed that Triband’s What the Golf? is being adapted for visionOS, earlier this week where you’ll find links to Unity’s blog post about PolySpatial and its beta program.
This week, I also covered a story by Lewis Gordon on The Ringer that takes an in-depth look at Netflix Games’ history and ambitions. It’s a fascinating look at a the video streaming company’s efforts to place a lot of small bets on mobile platforms like the iPhone and iPad, as well as console and PC gaming, in an effort to stay relevant to its subscribers.
There was big game news this week too. Pokémon Sleep, a gamified sleep tracking app from The Pokémon Company that’s been in development since at least 2019 debuted on iOS and Android. According to Ash Parish at The Verge:
Sleep works by having you place your phone on your pillow after doing any of the fifty ‘leven million Pokémon-themed activities you can do nowadays. (Back in my day, all we could do was catch ‘em all — all 151 of them — and we liked it!) The app purports to track your sleeping habits via your phone, and when you wake up in the morning, the app will tell you how well you slept and compare your sleeping style to that of other ‘mon.
If you think Pikachu might help you get a good night’s sleep, you can download the game from the App Store here.
Chronicling: A Flexible Event Tracker with Modern Features and A Top-Notch Design
Chronicling is a brand-new event tracking app for iOS and iPadOS by Rebecca Owen. The App Store is full of apps for tracking everything from the very specific, like caffeine consumption, to apps like Chronicling that can be used to track nearly anything. What makes Owen’s app unique, though, is it’s one of the best examples of modern SwiftUI design that I’ve seen that incorporates the still relatively new Swift Charts and other recent Apple technologies to deliver a great user experience.
Trackers like Chronicling are the perfect fit for the iPhone. Most people have the device with them all the time, which makes it perfect for collecting data frequently, but it’s what you do with that data that matters the most. Maybe you’re trying to learn a new language and want to track how often you practice to hold yourself accountable. Or maybe your knee has been bothering you, and you want to keep track of when it flares up to see if it corresponds to an activity in your life. The point is, whether you’re trying to form a new habit or find patterns in things that happen throughout your day, part of the process is gathering the data. The other half of the equation is breaking the data down in a meaningful way. Chronicling does both well.
Users Join Threads in Droves
Last night, by the time I called it quits and went to bed Threads, Meta’s new social network, had hit 2 million users in 2 hours. As I write this, Meta’s Adam Mosseri says the count has now surpassed 10 million in 7 hours, which exceeds Mastodon’s user base.
Currently, Threads is a pretty barebones 1.0 experience that was undoubtedly released this week to capitalize on Twitter’s latest troubles. The app is also buggy. I’ve seen posts fail to load, glitchy interactions, and other bugs, but despite the load, the new service has held up under the influx of users, which is impressive, although not entirely surprising given Meta’s scale.
TV Forecast 2.0 Adds Movie Tracking
The App Store is full of apps for tracking the media you enjoy, and at least for TV shows and movies, many use Trakt.tv as a data source and tracking service and Just Watch to list where you can watch something. That results in a degree of sameness in the category. What’s harder to find on the App Store is a well-designed TV show and movie tracker. There’s a lot of data available about what we watch, and as a result, too many apps wind up with cluttered, confusing interfaces. TV Forecast 2.0 by Matt Comi isn’t like that, which is why it’s been one of my favorite TV trackers for a long time, and with an update today, it’s one of my favorite movie trackers too.
I reviewed TV Forecast in 2020, and what I said about the app is just as true today as it was then:
When I stopped to consider what it is about TV Forecast that has made it stick for me in a way that no other TV tracking app has, I keep coming back to its balanced design. It has a simple elegance that makes tracking shows feel effortless and natural. For supporting an activity that I use as a relaxing escape, that’s exactly the type of app I value. When all I want to do is quickly check off a few episodes or add a show that a friend recommends, I can. Just as easily, though, I can wander from one linked show to another discovering new ones along the way. It’s that balance between utility and exploration that makes TV Forecast my favorite TV tracker.
For more on TV Forecast’s overall design and functionality for TV shows, be sure to check out my 2020 review.
WWDC 2023: Notes and Reminders to Gain Significant Productivity Features This Fall
Every WWDC, I look forward to what Apple’s Notes and Reminders teams have in store for the next version of the company’s OSes. Notes debuted with the iPhone itself, and Reminders wasn’t too far behind. All these years later, both apps remain actively developed, and in recent years have significantly extended their capabilities, adding new features that remain approachable for all users but also extend further to meet the needs of people who want something more.
Let’s take a look at the highlights of what both apps have in store for users in the fall.
Notes
Notes will add several new features this fall, including PDF tools, linking, new formatting, and Pages integration.
Probably the most extensive set of new features coming to Notes is related to PDF documents. With the update, you’ll be able to read and annotate PDFs and collaborate on documents with others. When you drop a PDF into Notes, it can be navigated by swiping from page to page or by displaying a strip of thumbnails above the current page. All of the markup tools available in Notes can be used to draw and type on a PDF, add shapes to it, or sign it. Notes will be able to detect fields in a PDF, so you can fill out forms with an enhanced version of AutoFill using data from the Contacts app too.
Users will also be able to collaborate in real-time when editing PDFs by sharing a note with others. As you draw, annotate, type on, or add stickers to a shared PDF, Apple says the changes will appear immediately on your collaborator’s device.
Also coming to Notes are a couple of new ways to add links. You can select text and add a hyperlink to a website, but you can also link to existing notes. I love this feature. It doesn’t automatically add backlinks to the source note the way an app like Obsidian does, but you can do that manually if you’d like, and I expect one-way linking is plenty for most users. With the new internal linking, users will be able to create tables of contents for related notes and split what might otherwise be a long note into linked sections, making the content easier to navigate and read.
Finally, Notes will add Pages compatibility in the fall. If you begin a document in Notes, you’ll be able to open it in Pages to take advantage of Pages’ more extensive set of styling tools. That will allow you to do things like use more fonts, resize graphics incorporate video, and more.
I’m excited about the updates coming to Notes. PDFs are at the heart of a lot of workflows. I don’t use them as frequently as I used to, but students, teachers, lawyers, and many others who depend on PDFs as a core part of their work, should get a much more robust solution for adding them to their note-taking setup with Notes this fall.
I’m also impressed by Notes’ addition of internal linking to other notes. The update should allow for vastly better organization of information in Notes. I’m envisioning it as a solution for our internal documentation needs at MacStories, along with project management and a lot more. I’ve used Notes for that sort of thing before, but once a note reached a certain length, it became hard to manage, especially on smaller devices. With internal linking, I expect that will be a thing of the past.