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Posts tagged with "iOS"

MoneyWell: Personal Financing Tool for iPhone

Oh, my problem with financial apps. I can’t find one to stick with, I can’t find one that enables me to achieve a decent workflow when it comes to adding transactions and managing my finances. I don’t settle. Maybe it’s beacuse I have a quite complicated setup (you know, managing multiple currencies online isn’t exactly an easy task), partially because no developer until now released the perfect iOS financial application. I mean that. MoneyBook is still the best of all the ones I’ve reviewed so far, and the developers are working hard on improving it and adding more features - especially to the web interface. I guess it’ll need a second look soon.

Anyway, today we’re here to talk about MoneyWell for iPhone. When it was released a few weeks ago it looked promising and I bought it. Oh, in case you missed my previous “finance on iOS” coverage: I don’t care about sync with Mac versions and desktop backups. I want a full-featured app for iOS. One that lets me take a quick look at my expenses, or my whole account when I need to. An app that’s flexible, good-looking, fast and easy to use.

MoneyWell gets dangerously close to that.

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Why Jailbreak Makes The iPhone 4 A Better Device: My Setup

Two months ago I wrote that jailbreak on iOS 4 still had its importance, but when JailbreakMe came out earlier this month I was very disappointed that the iPhone 4 wasn’t really supported. Sure, I could jailbreak my iPhone and install Cydia - but what for? Tweaks and apps weren’t updated for the Retina Display and new device, there was the possbility to break FaceTime and MMS and, overall, it seemed like JailbreakMe for the iPhone 4 was released just for the sake of it.

Fast forward 20 days, and I can’t imagine having a un-jailbroken iPhone 4 anymore. What happened?

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iMac Touch Finally Shows Up in Patent - And It Runs Both OS X and iOS

There’s this iMac Touch rumor that has been floating around on the internet for quite a while now: back in January Digitimes reported that Apple was working on a 22-inch touch-enabled Mac in addition to the iMac line, then 2 months ago LoopRumors claimed that Apple was developing a touchscreen iMac running iOS. I called that rumor “absurd”, and you know why? Because a desktop computer running only iOS doesn’t make sense.

But a desktop computer capable of transitioning from OS X to iOS depending on the device’s orientation? Now that’s interesting.

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Google Introduces New Ad Formats for iPad Devs

In case you can’t wait for iAds to show up on the iPad and there’s no way you’re going to charge for your free app, Google has just launched new ad formats specifically targeted to iPad apps developers. (based in US and Canada)

Google explains in a blog post:

“The new iOS SDK supports ad serving in iPad apps using three of the most common online ad formats, instantly making it easier for developers to grow their businesses and for advertisers to expand their presence to the iPad.

Advertisers whose campaigns run on the Google Display Network and include text or image ads in the above sizes can now show ads within iPad applications – provided their campaigns are targeting mobile devices or specifically the iPad.”

Here’s my suggestion, though. If you really care about the look of your application, look elsewhere. Wait for iAds. Make it paid. Think about it.

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Super Prober: Sort Of Like Chrome for iPad, Gone Wrong

Two years of App Store and I still haven’t found a decent alternative to Mobile Safari. Something I could keep on my homescreen for more than 2 days. The reason is obvious: you are not Apple. Developing a browser is not like building a Twitter client: we’re talking about the primary tool to access the web here. And if Apple ships an almost state-of-the-art mobile browser by default, well then - sorry if I don’t trust you.

Mobile Safari is a simple application that lets you navigate the web, we call it “browser”. Developing a browser for a cellphone is a difficult task: you don’t have windows, you don’t have tabs, favicons don’t make sense on a small screen. Also, the elegant interface of the iPhone makes it really hard to implement features seen in desktop browser without looking awkward.  Have you seen Opera Mini? Exactly.

But the iPad is magical, right? It’s got a larger display, it’s a tablet, you can put your hands on it! Let’s develop a full-featured browser for the iPad! Not so fast, cowboy. For as much as the iPad is indeed bigger and more suitable to richer applications, take a second look at what Apple offers: Safari for the iPad is, again, simple. Sure, it has those beautiful thumbnail previews for open tabs. Sure, there’s a bookmark bar. Still, it doesn’t overwhelm you with dozens of features that would probably look cool in the App Store description page, but kill usability. Mercury Browser, I’m looking at you.

It turns out, though, someone decided to develop some kind of Chrome-like browser for the iPad and call it Super Prober. I went into the App Store and bought it. Here’s what happened.

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Flickit Pro 2.1 Released with Background Uploading to Flickr

Flickit Pro, the Green Volcano Software client for Flickr.com, was updated to version 2.1 last night, which brings full support for iOS 4 and iPhone 4. Besides improved video quality upload and overall upload speeds, version 2.1 brings the much-request background uploading to Flickr and UI optimizations for the Retina Display.

I’ve been beta testing Flickit Pro 2.1, and it works like this: in the Settings you can choose to hide / show a notification for when the upload is complete. Choose some photos, send them to Flickr, close the app and they will be uploaded anyway. It works really well.

Personally, I think Flickit Pro is the best Flickr client for the iPhone. The new and improved version makes it even better. Available at $4.99 in the App Store.

Over-the-Air Updates for iOS Beta Apps? Yes, Please.

Writing for MacStories, I test many beta versions of new applications coming out for the iPhone and iPad. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the situation, but installing betas on iOS devices is a pain: you have to download the app’s file and the .mobileprovision profile, add them to iTunes, sync and hope that iTunes doesn’t screw up. With each version of the beta (Beta 1, Beta 2, Beta 3…) you have to repeat these steps.

Now we have a solution to this problem: an upcoming open source framework that will allow beta apps to update over the air by directly contacting the developer’s servers, without the need of syncing the device via iTunes. Pretty much like Mac applications do.

I’m seriously looking forward to this. [via Ken Yarmosh]

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