Finer Things in iOS

myself: Readability for iPhone and iPad is coming March 1. ...

chartier — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 18:45:30 -0600

Readability for iPhone and iPad is coming March 1.

The company’s native iOS app has been inexplicably caught up in App Store review hell for far too long, so for a while now we’ve been stuck with (admittedly good) third-party clients like Reeder and Longform, or a capable, though still web-hindered, HTML5 app.

Is it strange quoting myself in a post? Maybe. But who cares? Readability is finally coming to the iPhone and iPad!

Subtle Papers for iPhone Chris Herbert of MacStories made some...

chartier — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 12:46:00 -0600

Subtle Papers for iPhone

Chris Herbert of MacStories made some nice retina-friendly wallpapers for the iPhone. There are six in all, with subtle textures in light and dark colors. Click through to get the full versions.

ClickyTouch is an iPhone and iPad client for Clicky, a real-time...

chartier — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 13:05:57 -0600

ClickyTouch is an iPhone and iPad client for Clicky, a real-time web analytics service and great alternative to Google Analytics (and the service I use across all the Finer Things sites, Wind on a Leaf, and my personal blawg). A huge advantage of Clicky is that your stats have always been real-time since the company started years ago, while Google just got around to rolling out real-time for some data, and only for some users. Clicky’s interface is also intuitive, as if it were designed by fellow members of the human race who actually use it.

ClickyTouch can display a ton of your Clicky data about your visitors, where they’re coming from, and what they do at your site. A particularly useful feature is that it can also send Push Notifications for each of your sites once traffic or actions reach a number you specify. Just tap a site, scroll down to the bottom of the list of your stats, tap “View Notifications”, and hit the plus in the top right to create a new one.

You can try Clicky for free to track your first site, while monthly and yearly paid plans start after that. ClickyTouch is just $3 in the App Store.

Select an entire paragraph of text with a single tap

chartier — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 11:14:36 -0600

While writing text in almost any app, you can single-tap with two fingers to select an entire paragraph. This works in Mail, Notes, and most writing apps (Elements, Writing Kit, etc.) I’m trying.

It appears to be part of iOS 5’s native text editing features. I wager that unless an app is doing something custom, this should work just about anywhere.

via Writing Kit

Tweetbot for iPad landed today, and it has a few perks over the...

chartier — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 19:51:16 -0600

Tweetbot for iPad landed today, and it has a few perks over the iPhone version. Among them is a Settings > Navigation panel that lets you shut off sections you don’t want to see.

Photo edits made on iOS appear as reversible, non-destructive adjustments in Aperture

chartier — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 16:38:00 -0600

Photo edits made on iOS appear as reversible, non-destructive adjustments in Aperture:

iOS 5 brought some basic editing features to the Photos app. Select any photo, tap Edit, and you have options to rotate, enhance, remove red eyes, and crop. These changes are also reversible, as you can tap back into that photo at a later time and choose “revert to original.” Fortunately, Aperture, Apple’s pro-sumer photo editor and manager for the Mac, also recognizes these adjustments and even lets you roll them back.

ApertureExpert.com noted a little while ago that edits made with iOS’s built-in photo tools appear as adjustments in Aperture. If you enable iCloud’s Photo Stream feature, any photos you edit in the Photos app will appear with the adjustments badge. In Aperture, you can hide and show the adjustments you made on iOS, or revert to the original photo entirely.

How to follow just the Finer Topics you want

chartier — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 14:14:00 -0600

More and more readers are asking for ways to follow just the topics they want on Finer Things sites, and I’m happy to oblige!

Bookmark tags

One thing you can do is bookmark specific tags, because I try to stay pretty organized and thorough when tagging all posts and reader submissions. If you’re a nut for OS X icons, you can visit Finer Things in Mac, click any post tagged icons, and read about all the slick little stuff Apple and third-party developers pack into those tiny buggers.

Same goes for iPhone and iPad apps at Finer Things in iOS. A lot of people have asked for a way to follow just the iPhone since they don’t own an iPad, or vice versa since they don’t have an iPhone. That’s why I’m using the iPhone apps and iPad apps tags and added them to the main site navigation.

If you have ideas for more tags you’d like to see, let us know or submit a post.

Follow tag feeds

Every Tumblr site offers an RSS feed you can toss into Google Reader, Fever, and any other RSS/feed/newsreader. But a little-known trick of Tumblr is that it also does feeds for tags. Simply add /rss to the end of any tag URL to turn it into a feed you can follow. For example:

ios.finerthingsin.com/tagged/iphone-apps is a good tag to follow in your browser
ios.finerthingsin.com/tagged/iphone-apps/rss is that tag’s RSS feed

Naturally, the Finer Things sites are on Twitter and Facebook as well, so you can follow there too (find ‘Follow Us’ links in the sidebar)! Let us know if you have any more ideas for these sites, and thanks for reading!

Hi guys, i just discovered your blog and I love it so far. Great job. One thing though, the links at the top of your page (on my iPhone with ios5) are all broken it seems. I had to go back to your main page through one of the in content links then go through the main page to see more content. Cheers. - Joe

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 15:16:35 -0600

Thanks for the kind words and for reading!

I just gave this a look on my iPhone and things seem to be working ok. This site has a “responsive” design, which means parts of the site scale down and move around for small screens like the iPhone’s.

When you tap nav bar links like “iOS 5” and “third-party apps,” the “About” section shows at the top on an iPhone instead of in the sidebar. Scroll a little past that and you should see all the posts you’re looking for.

Does that help? If the site still seems broken, or you don’t see posts when you scroll down a little more, hit the mail link in the sidebar under “follow us” and tell me more about what’s going on.

iOS 5 recognizes UPS tracking numbers.

jxpx777 — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 13:09:00 -0600

iOS 5 recognizes UPS tracking numbers.

The iPad’s split keyboard has phantom buttons. If...

chartier — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 12:09:00 -0600

The iPad’s split keyboard has phantom buttons. If you’re used to typing Y with your left hand, you can.

To enable this keyboard, tap-hold on the “toggle keyboard” button in the lower right to get a menu, or tap-hold on it and drag upwards. Reverse that to reunite the two halves back to normal at the bottom.

Not just Visual, but Smart Voicemail

chartier — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 21:47:00 -0600

iPhone is smart about picking the next voicemail you probably want to hear.

If you have a few ‘unread’ (unlistened?) voicemails sitting below others you have listened to, then delete one of the ones you’ve listened to, iOS will automatically select the next unlistened voicemail, not just the next one in the list.

A site I only know of as “Dirt” (no author is listed...

chartier — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 10:16:21 -0600

A site I only know of as “Dirt” (no author is listed anywhere) has created an extension for Alfred, a great productivity utility for Mac, that makes it really easy to add alerts to iOS 5’s new Reminders app. Grab the extension for free at Dirt.

When a period does not necessitate a capital

chartier — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 09:42:00 -0600

If you type “etc” and follow it with [Space][Space], iOS 5 will insert a period after the word, but your next letter will not be capitalized.

via Ben Cochran

Update: Via Annette, this also for “i.e.” but not “e.g.”

Daedalus Touch is a relatively new text editor for iPad that...

chartier — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 09:18:05 -0600

Daedalus Touch is a relatively new text editor for iPad that brings some slick tricks to the table. Among them:

You organize pages into “stacks” and navigate them all with good use of iOS pinch and zoom gestures
An optional extra keyboard row has quick-access punctuation keys that are smart about opening and closing characters
If you select a block of text, the character and word counter will update to show you just what’s in your selection
A built-in browser makes it easy to do quick research without switching apps
Like Writing Kit (another great iOS editor that is universal), Daedalus Touch lets you tap with one finger in the margin to move back or forth one character, and tap with two fingers to move entire words

Due is a great little universal reminder and timer utility with...

chartier — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 10:36:05 -0600

Due is a great little universal reminder and timer utility with lots of great polish. One of its many perks is that you can email a reminder to someone else, but it’s not just a basic email. Due creates a small icon your recipient can tap to add it to Due on their device.

To do this, simply swipe right across any reminder to reveal an action arrow. Among your options is “Email reminder,” and it does exactly what you think. Your recipient gets a styled email with the name of the reminder, a Due icon, and a link they can tap to add it to Due on iPhone or iPad. For bonus points, the email you send retains any custom reminder settings you have, such as to alert you every hour or minute and repeat options.

Due is a great utility that I use daily, despite being an OmniFocus junkie.

In Pages, Apple’s excellent word processor for iPhone and...

chartier — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 08:08:00 -0600

In Pages, Apple’s excellent word processor for iPhone and iPad, you can tap-hold in the sidebar to reveal the Navigator. This magnifying tool makes it really easy to move quickly through long documents, as it displays a preview of an entire page at a time and you can scroll as quickly as you want.

Facebook recently redesigned its iPhone app and made it...

chartier — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 09:18:00 -0600

Facebook recently redesigned its iPhone app and made it universal. You also get a little more control over links you share in status updates.

Now, after you paste the link, scroll down a little to see the thumbnail + URL embed that Facebook creates. If you don’t like something about the content Facebook automatically pasted into your message, tap anywhere in that space to expand it and reveal options for tweaking the link. As of this writing, you can get rid of the thumbnail or the link itself.

Strangely, you still need to manually erase the original URL you pasted if you don’t want it to clutter up your post.

Complete email addresses more quickly with a quick tap-hold trick

chartier — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 12:04:22 -0600

When addressing a Mail message, tap-hold on the period button to get quick access to the TLD popup (.net, .com, .org, etc). This makes it easier to complete email addresses.

It’s also the same popover you get if you tap-hold on the .com button in browsers and other apps.

via John C. Welch

DBD (Delicious Bookmark Discovery) is a Pinboard and Delicious...

chartier — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 16:15:00 -0600

DBD (Delicious Bookmark Discovery) is a Pinboard and Delicious client for iPad (and the first iPad client for Pinboard if I’m not mistaken). It presents your bookmarks with style and plenty of clever options including an iOS browser bookmarklet, sharing options, and service integration so you can find what tags other users applied to that link. You can view the bookmarks of other users, add new users to your Delicious network (it seems like Pinboard doesn’t support this), and view your tags by list or even a tag cloud.

In Mr. Reader, my current favorite client for Google Reader, you...

chartier — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 08:41:45 -0600

In Mr. Reader, my current favorite client for Google Reader, you can tap-hold on a subscription for quick access to some handy management options, such as rename, reorder, and delete. You can even open the subscription’s website in Grazing (instead of Safari), the best iOS browser on the market.