I upgraded to the iPad 2 over the winter for the weight break and camera, and all has gone smoothly in 2012. I no longer bring my MacBook Air on the road, and am thrilled that the TSA doesn’t require that the iPad be removed from my carry on! Using the iPad for what I do has proven to be efficient and entertaining. And, as usual for an Apple product, IT JUST WORKS. I’ve had to put a baggie over it a time or two in a rain situation, but other than that it absolutely does the job.

Jordan Golson of MacRumors has written a fantastic report on Dave Burns, a Pit Reporter for ESPN who covers NASCAR Nationwide and Sprint Cup series races with his iPad. Burns’ use of the iPad is the focus of the story here, and he does an excellent job explaining how he ended up choosing the gear and accessories that best suited his needs on the track. Not wanting to deal with the bulk of paper, but then having to compensate for sun glare, heat, and occasional rain showers, Burns had to devise a system that helped him stay mobile yet offered the greatest potential benefit. Equally as important as the process that Burns’ shares, the report gives insight into just how adaptable the iPad is. Proven to be much more than a generic business tool, the iPad is being used in unexpected places for unique applications: in this case it’s being used to bring you coverage from pit road in America’s most exciting motorsport.

When it comes to email clients, most Mac users still stick to Apple Mail as their client of choice, although there are plenty good alternatives available. The reasons for that are clear: over years of constant development, improvement and changes, Apple managed to create a powerful, but still clearly laid out program, which fits the needs of both private and professional business users. Diversified labelling options, multiple mail signatures, folders, and diversified reply and creation features are just some examples. Nevertheless, there are still some people out there demanding one specific feature Apple mail lacks: statistics. But, as you know, there’s always an app for that. In this case, it’s Mailsum by Appmasters.

Designed exclusively for Apple Mail, Mailsum frequently scans your mail accounts for interesting information and displays the collected data in various ways. In the simple stats view in the starting window, you can set the exact range of displayed numbers (today, yesterday, last week etc.) using a menu panel at the top. Mailsum provides you the respective information in several categories; Mailsum searches exact data for total mails received and sent, how much “To” and “CC” mails you received, and the time span of the day, during which you receive the most mails. Furthermore, it also displays the average writing time you need for composing a new or a respond mail, the amount of flagged mails, and the number of contacts attached to the respective account.

Information for the current day is displayed in notepad-like panels (one for each category). Those panels are arranged in a list view, which optionally update automatically. Each panel also contains the last day’s data to directly compare the averaged data to your current activity — hover over a panel to investigate last week’s and last month’s data as well. The second method the stats view uses to display the stats are the “top 5″ lists: the recipients you send the most mails to and the people who mail you most frequently. Just to be clear: the app only scans your mail’s header information (it won’t store or upload any private data).

Mailsum doesn’t just collect and list this information, it also visualizes it as well. Click the “Graph” panel in the nav bar, and Mailsum lets you take a look at the changes of the different data over time. Just set an exact range for accounts which should be included into the visualization (so you can compare traffic between your accounts). Then up comes a graph, or, optionally, a pie chart. Mailsum has nice comparison possibilities, but enhances them by offering another, to me, pretty narcissistic and exaggerated feature: online comparison with your friends. It works as follow: you can set up an account at Mailsum.com, add other Mailsum users around you, and upload your stats (sharing them via Twitter is possible to, which I consider even more dumb). Within seconds the web app generates a list of how many mail conversations you and your friends have, with the intention of showing how productive you are, but comes off as feeling like a competition for who has the most mail friends. Honestly, it’s one thing to compare your own accounts, but it’s definitely too much to compare that data online and make users compete on how much traffic their mail inboxes can generate.

Fortunately, Mailsum has another feature, which justifies online sharing a bit: business plans. By subscribing to a plan, starting at $2 a month for 1 to 10 users for small businesses, you can have an overview of how many mails your employees sent, and to whom. That might be pretty useful to check on the frequency of emails sent against overall performance, and it’s definitely the only justifiable use of the “Top list” online comparison feature.

Before I forget: Mailsum also looks nice. It’s a pretty difficult task — formatting numbers and data graphs and embedding them into a nice UI is not easy. But Appmasters got it right and earned the right to use that name. As I already mentioned earlier, data (displayed as big violet sans-serifed characters) is framed by notepad-like panels. Those are surrounded by a custom designed, black UI, of which some elements like the checkboxes are also colored in violet, which conveys an overall coherent user experience. The top navigation bar features nice icons to indicate the various panels. Just the two on the right side (“Compare!” and “Support”) are a bit misleading: users intentionally consider them as panels but, but in reality, they are not well-indicated links to the app’s website behind them, which is pretty annoying when trying the app out for the first time.

If you’re emailing often and want to keep tabs on your use, Mailsum can provide some interesting insight. But it’s still for a very specific user base; even when you’re a “pro user”, you still do not really need the kind of statistics the app collects and displays for you. But if have that that need, it should perfectly suit your desires. Mailsum is available on the Mac App Store for $4.99.

When we talk about hotly contested app markets for the iPad, we’re either talking about iOS text editors or sketching apps — today we’re focusing on the latter. Between Adobe, Autodesk, Paper, and Penultimate, something needs to be dramatically imaginative and different to make it stand out in a section of the App Store that is well contested and already populated with great apps. Sometimes an app like SyncPad stands out by providing new and interesting features (in this case it’s immensely useful for presentations), but very rarely does an app come along that can compete with these established tools on the iPad. Similar to how Instapaper and Pocket (once Read It Later) have captured the “read later” space, the aforementioned apps broadly cover everything you’d likely need or want when it comes to writing, drawing, and sketching.

I hoped Inkflow, arguably between something like Adobe Ideas and Penultimate (its two biggest competitors) in execution, could be a standout app. With the promise of drawing smooth ink with your finger or a stylus in unlimited books, I was hoping for a repeat of Bamboo Paper (which hasn’t been updated for the iPad’s Retina display).

Inkflow didn’t stand out for me as far as a sketching, note taking app, or drafting app goes. I’m not saying Inkflow is bad, but I will say it’s pretty average. Advertised as word-processor for visual thinking, Inkflow wants to position itself as a space to write notes in books while providing you the freedom to rearrange what you’ve drawn or written on the pages after the fact.

Personally I don’t like the aesthetic of the ink itself. While it does write fluidly without lag, the ink often has a feathery or fuzzy quality to it that takes away some of the appeal (the app icon does an honest job of representing this effect). In other words, the ink never feels or looks sharp like Bamboo Paper’s ink did, and I had a hard time drawing thin lines that are much easier to slash-out in an app like Paper.

There is one really neat feature that just trumps the selection tool on Penultimate: the selection tool provides a handle that allows you to resize your selection without a loss in quality. No matter how you resize text or images, and no matter how you do it, you’ll never lose the clarity of what you put on the screen. For me, this was the standout feature in Inkflow: the idea that you can reposition, resize, and re-image your layouts as you see fit without worrying about how you’re initially how you’re going to get your ideas onto the screen. In this regard, I think Inkflow provides a lot of value for anyone willing to shell out $4.99 ($7.99 after the promotion is over) for the in-app purchase. To be clear, you can use the selection tool in the free version, but if you’re going to stick with Inkflow for that feature, you might as well unlock the remaining features.

Because Inkflow is initially free, there’s no reason why you can’t download the app and draw your own conclusions before deciding whether all of the features are worth its asking price. I am disappointed in that you don’t have an eraser tool or the ability to delete created books. I’m not sure if the inability to delete is an oversight or not, but if it’s intentional, I can’t see free users paying to fix their basic drawings or mistakes out of frustration.

I’d say Penultimate is the better choice if you’re looking for an app to jot ideas in, but I wouldn’t pass on Inkflow just yet. While other apps have had a while on the App Store to listen to customer feedback, adapt to what users want, and provide feature rich experiences for writing on the iPad, I think Inflow can grow into a specific niche by focusing on improving its great backbone: I think the features are already there, but they have to be better executed upon. Open up some extra features for free users so they don’t delete the app before sticking with it, keep improving the ink (the font in the title bar looks great compared to what you can draw in app), and make sure drawings can be shared easily between devices and social networks. As an app geared towards note takers and writers, being able to share documents with coworkers might be a priority to focus on. For now, Inkflow is a competent, but basic, sketching app that has one standout feature and nothing more. Inkflow can be tried for free from the App Store for the iPhone or iPad.

Diet Coda is great. Seriously. This app might not be your first choice to do serious work on (yet). However, if the only reason you’re taking your huge, heavy laptop with you on that otherwise relaxing vacation is just in case you get the 5-alarm-fire call from your boss because of a major bug that needs to get fixed RIGHT NOW (don’t they all?), Diet Coda and an iPad with an LTE/3G connection could be all you need.

Joesph Schmitt gives an honest perspective of the good, the bad, and what he’d like to see come down the pipeline for Diet Coda in the future. Diet Coda isn’t and shouldn’t be your replacement for a desktop app like Coda 2 or Espresso, but it is a fantastic companion touchscreen editor that it makes it relatively easy to dart around your projects and apply changes as needed. I’m trying not to take for granted having an always on-hand iPad app that lets me seamlessly implement changes as they come to mind — I think people forget that even having a tool like Diet Coda on the iPad is something special (especially when it has that quality Panic user interface behind it). If you’re looking for a reasonable review that weighs the pros and cons of Diet Coda, I’d say Schmitt does a good job of summarizing the praises and complaints — you’ll be well prepared as to what to expect concerning a mobile editor. As of now, Diet Coda is still $9.99 on the App Store, half-off during its initial launch period.

Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram raised eyebrows and foreshadowed the launch of a Facebook branded camera app, separate from the official Facebook application just as Facebook Messenger and Facebook Pages Manager are. Combined with the dream team of developers from Sofa, Facebook’s previous talent pull seems to have paid off with Facebook Camera, a central app dedicated to taking pictures, lightly editing photos, and uploading pictures to your Facebook profile. With cropping and straightening tools, the ability apply stylish filters, batch upload multiple photographs at a time, and view your friend’s photos in fluid streams a la the camera roll, we’re left astonishingly impressed with Facebook’s latest mobile application.

Facebook’s Camera app looks great. Looks like Sofa’s @dirkstoop had a big hand in it too. theverge.com/2012/5/24/3040…

— Steve Streza (@SteveStreza) May 24, 2012

Facebook’s app makes it easy to take photographs, batch upload your images (up to 2048 x 2048 pixels), tag them, and apply up to fifteen different filters not dissimilar from Instagram. A vertical feed of large photos, expansive album views, and an engaging progression of composing photos to uploading your favorite shots makes Facebook Camera feel like a solid camera application. Many unexpected elements can be pulled and pushed onscreen to reveal or hide information, and the app is simple enough to be intuitive without feeling crowded like you would expect a management app to be. Facebook has a well balanced, thoughtful, and overall enjoyable app on their hands. Facebook users should love it.

From Ellis Hamburger at The Verge:

Facebook Camera just became instantly the best way to upload photos to the social network, just ahead of Batch and other competitors. It’s simple to take photos, tag them, and upload them en masse, which is something we’ve been asking for for a long time.

Animations throughout Facebook Camera are fluid, the app is fast, and there’s a lot of clever interaction to take advantage of throughout the interface — clearly Facebook’s acquired talents have been hard at work in making the app to not just feel like a boring extension of Facebook, but rather a necessary addition that belongs, no, deserves to be on a Facebook user’s smartphone. Facebook has made an incredibly bold statement with Facebook Camera — they’ve stepped up to the plate to deliver a solid application that doesn’t feel tacked on or only done for the sake of their platform. It’s a serious release. Just look at their landing page.

All Things D and The New York Times both have introductory pieces on Facebook’s latest app release alongside Facebook’s official announcement on their blog. We recommend trying the app for yourself by downloading Facebook Camera from the App Store. A lot of care went into this app, and we’ll have more coverage after we spend some time using what’s already given us a great impression.

Search

The new Search tab unifies Trends, People, and Top Tweets under a Browse section, with Saved Searches and the classic search box still available at the top of the screen. The dedicated Top Tweets option is quite enjoyable — I have indeed found myself browsing such flow of status updates on a couple of times for the occasional laugh or remarkably snarky tweet. Top tweets now also show up in regular search results, and they are marked by a silver star indicator.

Trends, on the other hand, can be changed to another location directly from the search view of Tweetbot 2.4 — I don’t use Trends, but I assume the option will come in handy for those who, for some reason, like to check the recurring #Buongiorno trend in Italy.

The big addition in Tweetbot’s new search interface is support for nearby tweets. Here, you can view nearby tweets with the ability to change your location (just tap on the embedded Google Map), and you can perform location-based keyword searches for tweets containing specific words that also happen to be located near you. Unfortunately, Viterbo resembles a ghost town when it comes to looking for fellow local MacStories readers. I asked Tapbots, and they confirmed my town’s insistence of loading @viticci as the only local MacStories tweeter isn’t an app’s bug.

There are two more little touches I like in Tweetbot 2.4: you can double-tap the search tab to open search with the keyboard, and the search box has been optimized to let you easily jump to tweets, users, or a specific @user without additional taps.

Keyword Mute Filters

Tweetbot has been offering advanced mute filtering options for quite some time now. Version 2.4 now allows you to block specific keywords — not just users or clients — and there’s even support for regular expression if you really want to make sure you’re not reading about the latest spoilers in Game Of Thrones. Mentions can be muted as well.

Miscellaneous

There are plenty of other refinements in Tweetbot 2.4. Offline support, for instance, will ensure tweets marked as favorite or sent to a Read Later service when no Internet connection is available will get “queued”, then sent/favorited as soon as you come back online. Sure enough, while browsing my timeline in Airplane mode, I fave’d a couple of tweets, sent some links to Pocket, and Tweetbot queued them. When I turned WiFi back on, the app refreshed, the tweets were marked as favorites in my account, and they appeared in my Pocket.

On the iPad, web and map views can now be dismissed with a two-finger swipe down gesture, which I found incredibly convenient and faster than reaching out for the Close button in the upper left corner. Also on the iPad, list views show one line of a list or profile description, and when viewing an image in full-screen, you can hold down for options.

Additionally, aside from the usual bug fixes, you can now swipe to the right on profile views to go back; items sent to Pinboard are marked as unread; and last, the compose screen comes with basic smart quote support (for quotes, em dash, and ellipsis).

With powerful new features and UI refinements added to an existing set of great functionalities, Tweetbot 2.4 retains familiarity while striving to remain the best third-party Twitter app for iOS. Get it from the App Store today.

Today, Acrylic is releasing two major updates to Pulp for Mac and iPad, adding an improved interface and Retina graphics on iOS, iCloud sync across platforms, and a new “smart home page” feature that automatically aggregates trends and relevant news items from your feeds.

Retaining the same page-based layout that allows you to add multiple sources in newspaper-like columns with different display options, the new Pulp adds a “Home” start page that features popular and trending articles from your existing feeds. Using a series of algorithms that determine an article’s relevancy through keywords, date, and other feeds mentioning it, the new Home page provides a grid of fresh and popular stories for the day. In actual testing, this meant that with Pulp set to refresh every 5 minutes, the app would look at my four sections (Apple, Technology, Science, Arts & Entertainment) and bring in popular news like the Google/Oracle trial and Jony Ive’s knighthood, sorted by keyword and grouped by sources.

The concept is interesting; I was told by the developers that Pulp builds this “smart home page” completely on the client side of the app — no data is uploaded to Acrylic’s servers and social networks aren’t contacted to aggregate popular links, either. I haven’t been able to test Pulp’s algorithm during a major news break, but I believe it is safe to assume it would grab popular stories within a couple of minutes. Overall, I think the new Home page is a good idea as it provides a simple and efficient way to “see what’s important” without navigating through feeds manually; in my tests, I noticed refreshing trends took slightly longer on the iPad version of Pulp — but the results were the same afterwards.

The big new feature of Pulp 2.5 is iCloud sync. Moving from the previous Pulp Sync service, iCloud will automatically keep feeds, pages, and shelf items in sync across the iPad and Mac. For testing purposes, I updated to Pulp 2.5 on the Mac, configured my virtual newspaper, and saved a couple of items to the app’s shelf using the new browser extension. Once I updated to the new 1.5 version on the iPad, the first launch of the app made me wait around 30 seconds for an automatic import of my data, and I couldn’t experience any errors of sort. iCloud sync has been fast and reliable in my tests, with Pulp deleting and adding sources between the iPad and Mac app within seconds. The addition of synced shelf items is welcome, too, as it offers a simple way to save articles “for later” — albeit the app also comes with direct integration for Pocket, Instapaper, and Readability.

Pulp 1.5 for iPad and Pulp 2.5 for Mac are two gorgeous, solid, and clever updates. Pulp has always wanted to provide a solution in between the fast-paced nature of RSS and the laid-back reading experience of magazines, and the new version builds on that foundation, enhancing it with iCloud sync and a useful, constantly up-to-date Home page.

Pulp for iPad is available at $2.99 on the App Store; Pulp for Mac is $4.99 on the Mac App Store.

In my original comparison of iOS text editors, I included WriteUp, a fast and powerful Dropbox-enabled app that stood out thanks to its support for folders and sub-folders, exporting options, and versions. Prior to settling with Writing Kit for my daily iPad writing efforts, in fact, I had been using WriteUp as my go-to text editor – version 2.0 of the app was solid, but in the end not as powerful as Writing Kit.

Version 3.0 of WriteUp, released today, adds new powerful functionalities to speed up the process of working with multiple Dropbox folders and notes, bringing a new built-in web browser to augment the app’s research capabilities with split view. I have been testing WriteUp 3.0 for the past two weeks, and while I won’t completely switch from Writing Kit just yet, this new iteration of the app has stayed on my iPad because of the very specific features it introduces.

Split View

If you write on the web, split view is kind of a big deal. Being able to take notes and write blog posts while referencing a webpage on the other side of the screen is something we do every day on our Macs, yet it has been increasingly difficult to find iOS apps – especially iPad apps – that can get it right. In the past months, I have tried several applications that promised to allow me to “take notes while browsing”, yet most of them either failed at delivering a serious text editing environment to begin with, or simply didn’t function as advertised.

WriteUp 3.0 takes a nice first step on the right direction by offering a built-in web view that you can use in full-screen or split mode by hitting a Lion-like controller next to the address bar. There are no tabs, no bookmarks, no search box – just a URL field, a refresh button, icons to navigate, and an action menu. The latter is called “research actions”, and it allows you to open a link in Safari, copy it, email it, send it to Pocket or Instapaper, or “insert it into the note”. This option will basically copy the link to WriteUp’s clipboard highlighting the dedicated link button in the extra keyboard row, allowing you to open anInsert Link panel with the address already copied. Unfortunately, unlike Writing Kit, WriteUp 3.0 still doesn’t let you select words in text and only wrap those within Markdown links; I hope better Markdown auto-wrapping options will come in a future version of WriteUp. Overall, I also still prefer Writing Kit’s custom keyboard row.

The built-in web browser isn’t perfect: its performances aren’t comparable to Mobile Safari, and because of its size constraints, webpages will often be displayed partially, even when using the iPad in landscape mode. On a couple of times, I also noticed WriteUp would “freeze” a webpage without letting me reload it, and I really think there should be a dedicated Google button to relieve stress from the address bar. In spite of these few bugs and limitations, however, I can’t help but like WriteUp’s split view. It doesn’t let me drag & drop text between panels – I am not even sure that is technically possible – but it works in portrait and landscape mode, it’s dismissible with gestures, and, more importantly, it has already helped me write several news posts for MacStories when I needed to work side by side with webpages to reference quotes and other facts. It can only get better from here (idea: split view for multiple notes).

Pinned Notes, Favorites, and iCloud

The second major addition to WriteUp 3.0 is something I’ve been wanting from a Dropbox text editor for a long time, and which the app gets precisely right. WriteUp can now mark notes as “favorite” and make them available anywhere no matter the folder they are into. Furthermore, a separate “pin” option lets you pin notes at the top of any folder, and both favorite and pinned items are synced across devices running WriteUp with iCloud.

Here’s how I use this feature. As outlined in my Dropbox writing workflow, I try to keep a consistent environment of text files that are always accessible and up to date independently from the tool or device I decide to use.

Lately, I have unified all my notes, drafts, and lists inside a single Apps folder that I can access from Writing Kit, TaskAgent, Drafts, TextDrop, and my Mac. My “longer notes” are located in the root of the /Apps folder, with sub-folders for the aforementioned apps inside it. OS X and TextDrop make it easy to navigate through these as they have access to my entire Dropbox filesystem; most iOS text editors, on the other hand, typically force you within a single folder, and won’t let you move between sub-folders. Not only does WriteUp let me navigate notes and folders, it now also a) enables me to mark my most used TaskAgent list as favorite so I can see it in the main Apps folder and b) pin my Scratchpad.txt file to the top of the folder view so I’ll always know where I can quickly jot down notes and links (and if I happen to be cleaning up my Drafts folder, I can easily cut links, and copy them back to Scratchpad.txt without navigating back to /Apps).

Pinned and favorite notes have been a terrific addition to my workflow, and I found both the implementation and iCloud sync solid and reliable. It’s not for everyone – admittedly, several writers I know like to keep their Dropbox notes and folders in separate locations – but if you’ve been looking for a way to unify your text files and folders in a single view, WriteUp 3.0 should have you covered here.

Wrap Up

There’s a bunch of other neat additions in WriteUp 3.0. Markdown Extra (tables, footnotes, etc) is now supported, and the app can send notes to OmniFocus, iMessage, and publish to Tumblr. Terminology integration lets you look up or replace words using Agile Tortoise’s fantastic dictionary app; you can move “complete” folders to other locations in your Dropbox; and because Dropbox now lets you share files from any folder, WriteUp 3.0 can upload images, and give you a streamable link you can share or use as source for images in your notes. If you plan on serving images from your Dropbox account, this will come in handy.

In my tests, I experienced a few bugs with WriteUp 3.0. Sometimes, the built-in Markdown preview wouldn’t be displayed, forcing me to tap on another note, then select the previous one again to activate it; the app didn’t crash, but it failed to create a text file with “2.1” in the title (it wrongly recognized .1 as the extension, thus not creating a .txt file), and the bottom navigation bar (where the + button to create new notes is placed) isn’t displayed when using a Bluetooth keyboard. Fortunately, the developer has been extremely responsive, and I was told fixes, stability improvements, and new features are already underway now that 3.0 is available.

WriteUp 3.0 is a great update. In my opinion, Writing Kit still remains the most powerful text editor around, but, as I mentioned above, at the same time I couldn’t get myself to stop using the functionalities introduced in WriteUp 3.0 such as split view and favorite items. For those specific purposes – writing while referencing a webpage and browsing notes across folders – WriteUp 3.0 is superior to Writing Kit.

With strong sharing options, support for Versions (another feature most iOS text editors are lacking), images, custom CSS previews, and all the other features of version 2.0, WriteUp 3.0 has still some rough edges, but shows an incredibly promising, and possibly even more powerful text editing future.

WriteUp 3.0 is $4.99 on the App Store.

According to a recent study, the previous commercials featuring Zooey Deschanel and Samuel L. Jackson fared well with viewers, who, reportedly, were highly receptive to familiar faces of celebrities illustrating the latest features of the iPhone in a familiar, almost casual setting. MacRumors has put together a number of possible responses Siri can give to Malkovich’s query — tests performed with the question asked by Samuel L. Jackson showed that, in practice, Siri was a little less accurate than its primetime counterpart.

The new Siri ads are available on Apple’s website, YouTube channel, and we have embedded the official versions below.

I can’t review Diet Coda — as I said, I wouldn’t be able to fully understand its functionalities and judge its (possible) shortcomings when compared to the (also coming today) Coda 2. But I can recognize software crafted with care and attention to detail. Diet Coda immediately stands out as one of those apps where pixels aren’t just there to fill the screen — they’re the epitome of design enhanced for function.

Take the custom text selection method Panic built. It’s not entirely custom — it’s still fundamentally based on “drag handles” and a “zoomed-in view” of the cursor — but Panic reworked it to allow for faster selection by swiping on the left (where numbered lines are) and to visualize a larger, rounded “zoom selector” (they call it the Super Loupe) when you’re moving the cursor between characters. It feels much better than standard iOS text selection — faster, and somewhat more accurate — albeit it really needs to be experienced “in motion”, rather than through the screenshot I have embedded below.

I wouldn’t mind seeing Apple drawing some inspiration from Panic’s Super Loupe and Hooper Selection for the next major version of iOS.

Or, again, search. Within a document — Diet Coda can edit files on your server with syntax highlighting for languages like HTML, PHP, or JavaScript — you can hit the search icon to initiate a query with options for Find & Replace, Case Sensitive settings, Regex, and Search in Selection. I can’t tell you how many times I wished a text editor would implement search through selected text within a document the way Panic did.

It’s about getting the details right, yet making sure the main foundation is also solid to begin with. Diet Coda features a perhaps not so innovative, yet reliable column-based navigation for browsing folders and opening files; at any time, the column view can be “enhanced” with thumbnail tabs (also called “document shelf”) displaying open files, the main Sites page, and Terminal along the top of the screen.

And if you go back to the Sites page — where you add the servers you want to connect to using Diet Coda — and enter “wiggle mode” to edit the sites you’ve configured, Panic added a nice button at the bottom to confirm you want to exit the wiggle animation. You could stop it anyway by touching anywhere on the screen, but this is a nice extra visual cue.

Same for buttons: the purple ones “glow” when tapped, and the Delete action is, again, custom by Panic, yet incredibly nice to use on iOS.

I may not write a full review of Diet Coda, but I was sure happy to find out Panic’s latest effort will find its well-deserved spot in my iPad writing workflow. Diet Coda, finally, allows me to copy the public URL for images uploaded to my FTP server. That’s a small feature, but you’d be surprised to know how many FTP iPad apps end up lacking it amidst dozens of other “power user options”. I wish Diet Coda would let me upload from the Camera Roll — hopefully that’s coming in a future update. However, together with buttons to copy the public URL and file path, Panic added options to copy an image’s HTML <a> and <img> tags to the system clipboard, making it extremely easy to paste the code into Blogsy, my blogging app of choice. The simple, yet often ignored “copy URL” action will play nicely with Writing Kit’s shortcut for inserting images into Markdown, too.

Even without fully utilizing Diet Coda’s set of features, I’m happy to see the app filling a particular void in my workflow — and even better, with style and prowess.

We will have more detailed looks at Coda 2 and Diet Coda later this week on MacStories; personally, I believe Panic’s latest iOS effort will redefine the category of web code editors on the iPad, proving once again that the platform has moved beyond “consumption” — and that’s just up to users to accept it now.

Diet Coda is now available on the Italian App Store and other international stores (same for Coda 2). Diet Coda and Coda 2 will be available here and here, respectively, on the US App Store in a few hours.

With Coda 2 from @Panic hitting the Mac App Store this evening along with Diet Coda, we’d be hard pressed not to share this simple utility from @MediaAtelier. CheatSheet is a free Mac app that displays an app’s keyboard shortcuts in an opaque pop-up in the vein of a Quick Look preview. Holding down the command key for a couple seconds brings up the entire list of shortcuts for the active application. While holding down the command key, you can click on commands with your mouse cursor to activate that command. If you want to learn all of the useful keyboard shortcuts to get the most out of your new applications, CheatSheet will be an excellent companion — it runs in the background without taking up menubar or dock space on OS X.

You can also check out KeyCue from Ergonis and Dashkards if you prefer additional options like custom global shortcuts, themes, or if you want your keyboard shortcuts to be listed in the Dashboard. For me, CheatSheet provides everything I need in an easy-to-read interface and easy-to-use keyboard shortcut suited for OS X.

MacPaw remained makers of desktop software only, even after the iPhone came out; this is a move I personally like a lot, as you find less well-designed Mac apps than iOS utilities nowadays, and it feels good to see some guys focusing on the desktop business. MacPaw’s newest product, CleanMyDrive, is a stripped-down, menubar version of their first and most popular app CleanMyMac, and it fulfills the task of silently freeing your external HDD and flash drives from unwanted junk data or duplicates.

After installing the app, CleanMyDrives sits behind a nicely crafted hard disk icon in the menu bar. Click on it, and a dropdown window appears; from there, you can control the app’s features. The biggest advantage of making CleanMyDrive a menubar utility is that it’s invisible until you really need it. Now, every time you connect an external drive to your Mac CleanMyDrive will check its capacity and data — when it recognizes new ones, you’ll be asked whether it should check them as well in the future or not. The amount of used and free space is shown in a horizontal bar using blue and white parts.

If CleanMyDrive finds junk files on one drive (things like DS_Store, Thumbs.db, Spotlight, hidden trashes and so on), it displays their portion in red (plus the exact size in MB on hover), and you can delete them instantly. If you’re lazy and don’t want to manually delete the found junk on your drives all the time, CleanMyDrive can automatically delete junk every time you eject a drive, too.

After testing the app with my USB drives, I can say that it did not delete any of my files and folders, but still freed some space — likely related to “junk” accumulated over time.

Because the app is focused on smaller drives, CleanMyDrive firstly only scans external drives with 64 GB of storage or less. However, you can change that in the preferences to any size limitation you like and even disable it completely to also include large external HDDs. However, CleanMyDrive can’t check your internal drive for junk. One could already have guessed so from the app’s name, but as the internal drive’s storage is nevertheless shown in the app’s window, I tried to scan it as well. At this point, the developers allowed themselves some advertising for their other product: the app brazenly recommended me to scan my internal drive with CleanMyMac.

For cleaning my external drives, I’ll definitely stick with CleanMyDrive; this almost instant decision was mainly made due to the app’s fantastic and — yes, that’s the way I felt about it — cute design. The UI is clutter-free, simple, and it makes intelligent use of sliding effects and hover controls; it’s fun to use. The app’s small preference window plus the rotating cog wheel to open it up — little details, something I like very much — rounded up my impression of it as a cute little companion to ease up your workflow.

CleanMyDrive can be a very useful utility, especially when you’re using (maybe even several) external drives. Plus, its unobtrusiveness and pleasant user experience make for a very useful package which comes for free for a limited time. So don’t hesitate and grab CleanMyDrive on the Mac App Store while it’s hot.

Here are today’s @MacStoriesDeals on hardware, iOS, and Mac apps that are on sale for a limited time, so get them before they end!

Hardware & Amazon Deals

• New! Monster Beats by Dr. Dre iBeats Earbuds: $39 + free shipping
• Refurbished Apple iPad 2 16GB WiFi: $319 + free shipping

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Mac Software

• New! Stock Keeper: $19 -> $10.07
• New! Lovicons. 372 high-quality web Icons in 3 sizes: $20 or less
• New! PDF Editor Pro For Mac: $100 -> $48
• Dreamweaver Essentials Course: $154 -> $49
• Microsoft Office Bundle for Mac: $196 -> $79
• Sandvox 2 Upgrade: $79.99 -> $49.99
• Snapheal New iPad Giveaway: $700 giveaway

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iBookstore, Audio and Video

• New! Summer Kickoff Sale: MP3 Albums for $3 each, U2, Daft Punk, more: Google Play
• Paperless: $4.99 (review)
• O’Reilly’s Publishing with iBooks Author – An Introduction to Creating Ebooks for the iPad: Free
• Stephen Hackett’s ‘Bartending: Memoirs of an Apple Genius’: $8.99 -> $4.99 (review)

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Mac App Store

• New! ForkLift (Productivity): $29.99 -> $.99
• New! CleanMyDrive – clean and eject external drives (Utilities): Free
• New! Psychonauts (Games): $9.99 -> $4.99
• New! EDGE (Games): $5.99 -> $2.99
• New! Tomb Raider II (Games): $7.99 -> $4.99
• New! Toki Tori (Games): $4.99 -> $1.99
• New! DeathSpank (Games): $9.99 -> $2.99
• New! Spirits (Games): $9.99 -> $3.99
• Dropzone (Productivity): $13.99 -> $1.99
• Compartments (Productivity): $14.99 -> $1.99
• Socialite (Social Networking): $9.99 -> $1.99
• PhotoBrain (Photography): $14.99 -> $8.99
• Justnotes (Productivity): $5.99 (review)
• ColorChooser (Developer Tools): $3.99 -> $.99
• Sid Meier’s Civilization® IV: Colonization (Games): $19.99 -> $7.99
• Civilization IV (Games): $19.99 -> $7.99
• Sip (Developer Tools): $3.99 -> Free
• DeathSpank: Thongs of Virtue (Games): $9.99 -> $2.99
• MacGourmet (Lifestyle): $24.99 -> $12.99
• NotifyMe Desktop (Productivity): $9.99 -> $4.99
• Gesundheit (Games): $4.99 -> $1.99
• Bills (Finance): $9.99 -> $.99
• Due (Productivity): $9.99 (review)

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iPhone Apps

• New! Gesundheit! (Games): $1.99 -> $.99
• New! Spirits (Games): $2.99 -> $.99
• Backboard (Reference): $.99 -> Free
• Dayline – Events and Tasks: $2.99 -> 99¢
• MusicLoop (Music): $1.99 -> Free
• Bills ~ On your table (Finance): $3.99 -> $1.99
• NotifyMe for iPhone (Productivity): $3.99 -> $1.99
• DMD Panorama (Photography): $1.99 -> Free
• WeatherPro (Weather): $3.99 -> $1.99
• Podcaster 5 (News): $1.99 -> $.99
• Fotor – CameraBag (Photography): $1.99 -> $.99

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iPad Apps

• New! Swords and Soldiers HD (Games): $4.99 -> $1.99
• New! MiniatureCam for iPad (Photography): $2.99 -> Free
• New! Spirits for iPad (Games): $4.99 -> $1.99
• Bills ~ on your table HD (Finance): $4.99 -> Free
• Textastic Code Editor (Productivity): $9.99 -> $4.99
• WeatherPro for iPad (Weather): $4.99 -> $2.99

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Universal Apps

• New! Canabalt (Games): $2.99 -> $.99
• New! Dungeon Crawlers (Games): $.99 -> Free
• New! Ringtone Designer Pro – Download and Create Your Custom Ringtones! (Music): $.99 -> Free
• New! SpeedTask (Productivity): $4.99 -> $1.99
• PhotoForge2 (Photography): $2.99 -> $.99
• GPlayer (Utilities): $2.99 -> Free
• InstaMatch — The Instagram Game (Photography): $.99 -> Free

A unified document repository, modeled after the existing unified image repository, rounded out with more consistent attachment options, could be the best of all worlds. Users wouldn’t have to remember which folder a document was in, nor which app. They wouldn’t have to jump around to edit or share. Users could simply open any app capable of editing or sharing a certain type of app and go to work.

I agree with the notion that the current Open In, app-based document transfer model of iOS is broken. The simplicity brought by iOS freed average users from the complexities of the filesystem; people who like to get their daily work done with iOS devices, however, miss a unified document filing system. Paradoxically, the “simple” iOS, with its “Open In” menu and multiple copies of the same document, requires people to manually manage more.

In February, I envisioned something similar to Rene’s proposed Files.app solution:

So, I had an idea. I think the same iTunes File Sharing feature would work a lot better as a dedicated, native iCloud app for iOS devices (and maybe the Mac too). After all, if Apple is providing an iTunes-based file management utility for Mac users, why couldn’t they build an app that enabled any third-party iOS app to save and import files from iCloud? This app would be built into the system and allow users to simply collect documents, like iTunes File Sharing. Developers could easily add options to their apps to import files from “iCloud File Sharing” and export files to it. Users would have the same feature set of the existing iTunes File Sharing, only with an interface they are already familiar with, because iCloud File Sharing would resemble the existing file management workflow of iWork for iOS or iCloud.com. The only difference is that it would be integrated on a system level, work with any iOS app, and basically be an extension of the “Open In” menu that already allows apps to communicate with each other through supported file types.

After having tried the latest developer releases of Mountain Lion and putting some more thought on the matter, though, I am not so sure about the centralized repository system anymore. Namely, I am not convinced it should be a separate app.

Rene rightfully compares the possible Files.app to the existing Photos.app for iOS. Files could present document folders the same way Photos displays image albums, and it could have the same systemwide hooks to let other apps access documents from the unified repository. However, there is a difference worth noting: Photos.app gets its contents from a primary, hardware-based component of iOS — the camera. A user takes a picture, it goes into Photos. Same for videos and screenshots — the interaction is simple.

What is a file, though? Is it a text document? RTF or .txt? If so, does Files.app come with preview capabilities for those file types? Or is it about PDFs, .zip archives, folders, and .cbr files? And how do you get documents into Files.app?

Even by only slightly mimicking the Finder, Files.app could reset the past five years of “simple” iOS interactions in one big fell swoop. Photos itself, which is extremely straightforward, is criticized for its file management features. Now imagine that applied to the general concept of “files” with folders, views, sorting options, settings, and previews.

Today, I think what I wrote back in September could make for a better solution: inter-app communication.

Why can’t Apple build an invisible layer that lets Elements edit a text document from Evernote and Pages access the same file?

It turns out, a possible implementation of such layer already exists, but iOS won’t let apps communicate with it. Enter iCloud Documents & Data:

The same interface is available on OS X:

And in Mountain Lion, the standard file-saving dialog has been enhanced with the addition of an iCloud option (image via Macworld):

The design is slightly different since the first Mountain Lion Developer Preview that Macworld reviewed, but the concept has stayed the same throughout betas: Apple apps like TextEdit and Preview can “hold” documents into a special iCloud folder (located under Library/Mobile Documents/appname/Documents on OS X); these documents also show up on iOS under Documents & Data; currently, they are not available on iCloud.com, nor is Mountain Lion’s file-saving UI allowing, say, Preview to easily grab a file from TextEdit’s own iCloud “folder”. However, on Mountain Lion, Apple says that you can get your “existing documents” into iCloud by dragging them from the Finder or “other apps”.

If the system Apple has been putting in place is of any indication, I think enhancing the app-based model with better communication would actually outmatch the possible benefits of a separate Files.app. Documents & Data could become a document picker developers can enable in their apps with an API; because apps register file types they support, Apple wouldn’t have to worry about creating a Files.app capable of previewing every single format out there. GoodReader could open a PDF from Pages’ iCloud, and Pages could later access that same PDF with the changes made by GoodReader.

I am arguing that apps should become their own centralized locations that other apps can access and interact with — without creating duplicate files. Apple can’t provide the basic preview/edit functionalities of Photos for every possible format supported by Files.app, but 600,000 App Store apps might have the solution for that. Rather than creating an additional layer of management — disconnected from apps — iOS 6 could turn the interface already in place into a document picker that gives files their proper meaning: the app they belong to. Only with the addition of inter-app access and “universal save” to avoid duplicates.

Making changes to a single file with a variety of apps is something we do every day on our Macs. On OS X, there’s the Finder that acts as a glue between apps and files. By design, the technical constraints of iOS have turned non-destructive editing into a clunky and confusing experience, as we’ve seen with iPhoto. I am arguing that instead of building a “Files.app” or “Finder for iOS”, Apple could leverage the existing iCloud Documents & Data UI, and rework the iOS architecture to allow for changes to the same document from multiple apps.

The centralized Files.app idea is certainly appealing, but Apple has heavily invested in the app metaphor for the past years, and rather than replacing it with a new layer, I wouldn’t mind seeing it get smarter.

Inspired by the iPad update that was released last year, the new Google Search app for iPhone brings a completely redesigned start screen with options to sign in, search, and access Google apps. A shortcut for settings is available at the top alongside an icon to switch between search results and the search field at any time.

Searches can be performed by typing, or through two new shortcuts for voice and Goggles. These functionalities were already in place, but Google says they are now faster and more accessible thanks to the new interface. Similarly, the standard search results have gone through a major overhaul as well: as you scroll, controls are hidden and results are displayed in full-screen; like on the iPad, results open in a separate panel that you can dismiss at any time with a a single swipe. You can share results via email, open a webpage in Safari, and even search for specific text inside a page. Along the bottom, new tabs for Images, Places, News, and more allow you to easily switch between different types of Google results.

Furthermore, Google has redesigned image results to be displayed in full-screen, and a new Apps tab in the main screen allows you to load Google apps “on the web” or “from your iPhone”. As a side note, the app has also received a slightly redesigned icon, and both the iPhone and iPad version of Search can now save images to the Camera Roll.

Google Search 2.0 is now available on the App Store.

Agile Tortoise released version 1.2 of its “quick note-taking” app Drafts today, adding support for Facebook and Evernote. As an Evernote user, the addition is more than welcome, as I now have the possibility of quickly saving a time-stamped note into my account in seconds. Previously, I used FastEver for this functionality. I don’t post to Facebook much, but the integration sounds handy as well:

Like Drafts’ existing twitter features, this update adds the option to post drafts to Facebook. The first time you post you will have to go through an authorization process, allowing Drafts access to your wall – from then on out it’s a simple tap. Those of you that use the Facebook app know, launching it and waiting for it to load to post an update is cumbersome – now you have a quick alternative.

Other improvements in Drafts 1.2 include a new “new draft after success” setting, support for calendar event creation, and integration with OmniFocus notes and Due. These add to the new icon, fixes, and Dropbox support that came in Drafts 1.1.

Drafts is available at $0.99 on the App Store.

I love Keyboard Maestro. It is one of my most used OS X utilities — I use it every day, I rely on it to automate processes and tasks that would take repetitive and tedious clicks and selections otherwise, and my work is ultimately faster and more efficient because of it. I have covered Keyboard Maestro in the past on MacStories, and after using the app for over a year now, it still feels like I’m just getting started with it. Keyboard Maestro offers an infinite amount of possibilities, because it is capable of automating almost every aspect of OS X.

With today’s 5.3 update, Keyboard Maestro gets even more powerful, and adds support for one specific area that is going to dramatically speed-up my workflow once again: image manipulation. From the press release:

Version 5.3 adds a bunch of new Image manipulation actions, allowing you to create new images, flip, rotate, resize, and crop images, composite images, styled text and shapes onto images, display images, get the size of images, and even find the image on the screen. You can also capture the screen or a window to an image, or highlight a location on the screen.

Let alone the other improvements of version 5.3 (here’s the full changelog), let me quickly focus on the image capabilities of the app, as I have set up two new macros that are going to substantially enhance my screenshot-taking duties for the site. Firstly, the image above: taken with Keyboard Maestro, set it to a specific clipboard, modified with the addition of a pre-defined watermark, saved as .png and renamed with (previously copied to clipboard) front window’s file name. Execution time: 1 second.

Then, iPhone screenshots. For iPhone apps, I like to take two screenshots, place them side by side, and generate a single image. Until today, I had to manually drag the image out of Photo Stream (or use Scotty), resize them with Preview, create a new image in Acorn, drop the images in there, adjust their position, and save. I came to the point where the process took less than a minute, but still it required a manual and boring effort on my side. Enter Keyboard Maestro 5.3: I rename the images I need to use “1″ and “2″, respectively (“1″ goes on the left side); I tell Keyboard Maestro to run an Automator workflow to scale them; Keyboard Maestro creates a blank image in its clipboard, composites files 1 and 2 onto the image at a specific pixel position, and creates a new .png file on my desktop. Like this one. I don’t need to manually switch between apps anymore as everything’s automated, and takes 2 seconds, literally.

Keyboard Maestro has a lot to offer, but that’s up to you. Check out the app’s tour, full documentation, then buy it from Stairways Software for $36.

I’m a typography addict. Since I watched Gary Hustwit’s “Helvetica” documentary film, I constantly follow several type foundries and blogs (of which I consider I Love Typography and Typedia the top-notch sites) to keep myself updated on the latest news and typefaces. Hence after I saw the introduction of FontBook by FontShop (which was recently updated to version 2.1 with a Retina-optimized UI), the app was an instant-buy for me. Finally I can discover new typefaces, designers, and foundries wherever I go, offline, just with my iPad.

I usually discuss an app’s design separately at the end of a post, but FontBook has to be an exception from that, since the app itself is showing perfect use of digital typography and content curation — in no other area of design, content and design are connected as closely as in typography. FontBook is developed by a 10 person team at FontShop, one of the largest and the longstanding typeface resellers on the Internet, founded by renowned Erik Spiekermann in 1989, so it is no real surprise that it executes this need for exact design with pure perfection.

Browse and Search

The main screen of FontBook features an overview of the categories you can choose to browse typefaces: class, name, designer, year, and type foundry. Additionally, you can access the FontShop blog and look at various typefaces in use for inspiration and understanding what kind of typefaces should be used in which situation.

The window’s layout is used all over the app: short abbreviations (like ”Cl” for class) underlined with the full category name — everything in bold sans-serif typefaces — fill up squares you tap to dive deeper into the world of fonts. In this category selection process, FontBook features a nicely embedded multi-touch gesture: by pinching in, you can move one layer upwards, e.g. from a subcategory back to the main window. The larger a category is divided up, the larger is the square to tap on the screen. This is also true for all subcategories, so, for instance, the panel for accessing typefaces from Spiekermann within the designer category window is bigger than the one for Max Miedinger’s typefaces (designer of Helvetica). To keep the panels distinctive enough, some are underlined in yellow — which is also an intelligent use of FontShop’s corporate color scheme.

Depending on which category or other feature you choose, the layout subtly changes in colors indicating the new categories. Sometimes you get a fixed, black and yellow screen (like the calendar-styled year list); other times, the designer or foundry lists are displayed horizontally and sorted alphabetically. You then can smoothly scroll through the various new choices until you find an interesting one (in this UI, I personally missed an alphabet scroll selector like in the Music app to easily reach a certain letter). Every subcategory has a carefully designed UI, which is always optimized for the content it contains — typical content curation when it comes to type design: plain, simple, with only subtle changes to always keep the focus on the actual content and distinct between typography in action (for menu heading etc.) and the actual typefaces you look at in order to investigate them.

If you aren’t into discovering but rather want to search for specific fonts, FontBook also features a full-text search. Accessible from the top navigation bar in every part of the app, you can directly reach every font family the app has to offer without tapping through multiple categories.

This is very useful, because as I mentioned earlier, the font base of FontShop is impressively large, and the app provides every single bit of it. That means over 35,000 fonts in 8050 families, and 118 registered type foundries which publish the works of 1650 typeface designers. This unfortunately also results in an overall app size of 520 MB — a disadvantage which might discourage possible customers with smaller iOS devices. To keep an eye on all those typefaces, the categories and the fast search feature certainly come in handy.

Investigating Fonts

When you find or discover a cool typeface family you want to take a more detailed look at, you can do so in a single investigation window. In a fixed yellow sidebar (which also contains important information like the respective type designer of the family or the year it was published) you can choose the exact font (light, italic etc.) you want to take a look at.

This action finally brings up large font previews. To provide every necessary investigation possibility from large single letters over text view (to check the typefaces’ legibility) to the whole alphabet view, FontBook uses a panel-based layout. Starting with the standard “The quick brown fox jumps…” pangram, you can slide in four more panels by swiping, each displaying other aspects of the typeface. One of them I found very useful: by tapping a play button, FontBook starts a slideshow presenting various styles one after the other to see different text styling possibilities a family has to offer. The last panel provides more detailed information like the amount of characters included in a selected family or how many subfamilies it has.

If you really like what you see, you can do various things with a typeface using the top navigation bar: you can save it as a favorite or for later comparison, share it by posting a screenshot of the app on Facebook, Twitter or via mail, save it to you Camera Roll; and, if you like it very much, you can head over FontShop.com using Safari to buy it instantly.

Comparing Fonts

Buying a complete font family for maybe more than 200 dollars needs more consideration than just having some slight views on its design. Especially when designing websites on which you want to convey a certain feeling and attention to possible customers or readers, heading and text fonts need to be compared to others.

FontBook makes this very easy, too. After saving some fonts you like (or maybe even want to purchase), you can compare them by opening up the respective feature in the main window. After dragging the fonts you want to compare from the sidebar into the app’s main panel, a customizable text field is displayed. You can compare up to three font types at the same time. Again, the app provides panels you can slide in to display items in multiple colorization possibilities, so you can make sure your choice looks good in every imaginable situation.

News & Wrap-Up

All these features and UI details make for a very useful app for both type and web designers. However, I’m not a web designer — I’m a writer — and I’m interested in reading about typesetting. To me, the greatest feature wasn’t the comparison or searching features — it was the ”news and trends” section.

In this section, FontBook displays the latest articles from the FontShop blog, talking about current happenings in the world of type design, telling stories about the creation process of typefaces, and so forth. And since FontShop is a German product, those articles (which are displayed in a Safari Reader-styled view) are also written in my native language and they’re very fun to read. This makes the app truly complete: FontBook isn’t just inspirational and informative: it also educates you on the process and history of typesetting.

FontBook offers everything you could ask for as a typography nerd. You don’t need to be an actual type or web designer to find some interesting stuff in the app. All you need is a decent interest in typography, and some space left on your iPad’s local storage.

FontBook for iPad is only $5.99 on the App Store.

Here are today’s @MacStoriesDeals on hardware, iOS, and Mac apps that are on sale for a limited time, so get them before they end!

Hardware & Amazon Deals

• New! Refurbished Apple iPad 2 16GB WiFi: $319 + free shipping

_________________________________________

Mac Software

• New! DesignBox: $19.95 -> $9.97
• New! Uicons Scribble. 348 hand drawn style icons: $3 or less
• New! Dreamweaver Essentials Course: $154 -> $49
• New! Microsoft Office Bundle for Mac: $196 -> $79
• New! Sandvox 2 Upgrade: $79.99 -> $49.99
• Snapheal New iPad Giveaway: $700 giveaway

_________________________________________

iBookstore, Audio and Video

• Paperless: $4.99 (review)
• O’Reilly’s Publishing with iBooks Author – An Introduction to Creating Ebooks for the iPad: Free
• Stephen Hackett’s ‘Bartending: Memoirs of an Apple Genius’: $8.99 -> $4.99 (review)

_________________________________________

Mac App Store

• New! Dropzone (Productivity): $13.99 -> $1.99
• New! Compartments (Productivity): $14.99 -> $1.99
• New! Socialite (Social Networking): $9.99 -> $1.99
• New! PhotoBrain (Photography): $14.99 -> $8.99
• New! Justnotes (Productivity): $5.99 (review)
• New! ColorChooser (Developer Tools): $3.99 -> $.99
• New! Sid Meier’s Civilization® IV: Colonization (Games): $19.99 -> $7.99
• New! Civilization IV (Games): $19.99 -> $7.99
• New! Sip (Developer Tools): $3.99 -> Free
• New! DeathSpank: Thongs of Virtue (Games): $9.99 -> $2.99
• New! MacGourmet (Lifestyle): $24.99 -> $12.99
• New! NotifyMe Desktop (Productivity): $9.99 -> $4.99
• New! Gesundheit (Games): $4.99 -> $1.99
• Bills (Finance): $9.99 -> $.99
• Due (Productivity): $9.99 (review)

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iPhone Apps

• New! Backboard (Reference): $.99 -> Free
• New! Dayline – Events and Tasks: $2.99 -> 99¢
• New! MusicLoop (Music): $1.99 -> Free
• New! Bills ~ On your table (Finance): $3.99 -> $1.99
• New! NotifyMe for iPhone (Productivity): $3.99 -> $1.99
• New! DMD Panorama (Photography): $1.99 -> Free
• New! WeatherPro (Weather): $3.99 -> $1.99
• New! Podcaster 5 (News): $1.99 -> $.99
• New! Fotor – CameraBag (Photography): $1.99 -> $.99

_________________________________________

iPad Apps

• New! Bills ~ on your table HD (Finance): $4.99 -> Free
• New! Textastic Code Editor (Productivity): $9.99 -> $4.99
• New! WeatherPro for iPad (Weather): $4.99 -> $2.99

_________________________________________

Universal Apps

• New! PhotoForge2 (Photography): $2.99 -> $.99
• New! GPlayer (Utilities): $2.99 -> Free
• New! InstaMatch — The Instagram Game (Photography): $.99 -> Free

iTV Shows 2 is a handy app for keeping track of your favorite TV shows across all of your iOS devices. It has an improved interface, a slick new icon, local notifications for shows about to air, and it supports iCloud sync just to name a few of its features.

The user interface in iTV Shows 2 is extremely well done; the developers definitely hit the mark with this version of the app because not only is it gorgeous but it is also easy to use and contains all the features one would expect from an app dedicated to informing you about TV shows. To use the app, one needs only to search for (and add) some TV shows to the “My Shows” list. I immediately noticed an improved performance when simply searching for a few TV show titles. iTV Shows 2 definitely seemed snappier and more accurate with its search results. After adding my favorites “How I Met Your Mother” and “The Big Bang Theory”, I jumped back to the main screen and noticed the large beautiful icons separating out the shows. These are simply categories to help the user visualize when the TV show is going to air, if it has already aired, or if the next season has yet to announce a specific start date.

Another feature I enjoyed in iTV Shows 2 was the Genius tab which displays TV shows it thinks I might also enjoy watching. It was extremely accurate with its selections, however I am not entirely sure how it derives these suggestions. Perhaps I just enjoy very common and popular TV shows. Some of the shows it suggested that I happen to truly enjoy include “Dexter”, “Breaking Bad”, and “New Girl”. These are very different shows, but the app was spot on suggesting that I check them out.

Other features include a handy calendar view in which you can tap around and view episodes throughout the month. It also supports all of the latest iOS buzz words including universal, Retina Display ready, local notifications, and iCloud synchronization. I know people have come to expect iOS apps to be universal but I still appreciate each developer that decides to essentially give away two apps for the price of one. The iPad app seemed to have all of the love and detail that went in to the iPhone version. The iCloud sync worked flawlessly during my brief test, all of the shows I added while setting up the app on my phone were already added to the iPad version after simply launching the app on the second device.

The only issue I experienced was with the local notifications. I had received my first notification for an episode of “How I Met Your Mother” exactly 1 hour late. I immediately assumed it was a time zone setting issue in the app. Sure enough, I figured out that I had to go in to Settings > Preferences > Time Zone > and enable “Perform correction”. The note by the developers state to only use this setting if the app fails to automatically perform the time zone, so perhaps you readers will experience no issues at all. Other than this small hiccup the first day using iTV Shows 2, it has been very reliable.

I have to admit, at first I questioned whether or not I needed an app to remind myself to watch a TV show since 90 percent of the time I don’t watch TV shows live anyway, I use a DVR or stream the show on a network-connected device. This touches on what I feel is an industry wide shift in how consumers are interested in viewing TV shows – many of which are opting out of standard cable television services in favor of web services like Hulu Plus, Netflix, and Amazon Prime Video on Demand. I actually have traditional cable service but still subscribe to all three of these services (don’t ask me why), yet I was surprised to find as much value in iTV Shows 2 as I did. My wife and I enjoy watching entire seasons of TV shows at a time so checking off episodes as we watched them was a useful feature. I would be nice if the app eventually added some statistics about the number of TV shows I watch: maybe it could calculate the number hours I spend on TV (I am a statistics geek). Furthermore, I enjoyed the supplied information per show, e.g. what TV shows have seasons coming up, like HBO’s True Blood which is starting soon. iTV Shows 2 even has Twitter integration to share episode details with friends which was a pleasant surprise.

Overall, iTV Shows 2 has a sharp new user interface along with some pretty unique features. It may not be my most used app but it does serve a specific purpose and has definitely earned a permanent spot on my iOS devices.

iTV Shows 2 is available on the App Store for $2.99

Eric Slivka, reporting for MacRumors:

In line with today’s claims of taller iPhone prototypes with 3.95-inch displays, one of our sources has provided us with images of what are claimed to be new next-generation iOS device parts being carried by a supplier. The most significant of these parts is a claimed front panel from the next-generation iPod touch, with the supplier claiming that the display would be taller than the current model and measure in at 4.1 inches diagonally.

Rumors of Apple gearing up to release a new iPhone with a bigger screen have been extremely persistent, albeit discordant in the past few weeks. Last week, The Wall Street Journal claimed Apple was ordering new screens for an iPhone measuring “at least 4 inches diagonally”; Reuters, on the other hand, said the new iPhone will measure “4 inches from corner to corner”. This morning, 9to5mac published a report claiming that Apple is internally testing an iPhone (codename N41AP) with a bigger, 640 x 1136 screen “very close to a 16:9 screen ratio”.

Of course, rumors of the iPhone getting a screen overhaul are nothing new. Here’s an allegedly leaked part from February 2011; a design document from March 2011; and here’s a report that, back in April 2011, suggested Apple’s “iPhone 5″ (that turned out to be the iPhone 4S), would carry a bigger, 3.7-inch screen with a thinner design.

Since last year, we at MacStories have decided to refrain from posting the majority of “reports” and rumors that come out on a weekly basis depicting allegedly leaked parts, codenames, design documents, and theories from people familiar with the matter. Today’s photos from MacRumors, however, provide an interesting point of discussion as they effectively show a “leaked” component, and suggest Apple may be willing to increase the size of all iOS devices, not just the iPhone.

Check out the photos here.

For further discussion on the matter of iOS and bigger screens, check out Dan Provost’s mockups of a 16:9 iPhone, Rene Ritchie’s excellent roundup of possible ramifications for a 4-inch iPhone, and these other mockups from The Verge Forums.

Let’s Sing is a “social” iPhone game that you can play with your friends online, combining the traditional aspects of karaoke and television program “Name That Tune”. From the main screen of the app, a “Start a New Game” button allows you to find a friend to play against manually (by email or username), on Facebook, or through your Address Book. Once you’ve found a friend to play Let’s Sing with — sessions are private, meaning only you and your friend will play, and they won’t be shared publicly — it’s time to pick a song. If you want, however, Let’s Sing lets you pick a random opponent.

Let’s Sing is clever, in that rather than using a proprietary system to provide you with song previews — or worse, rely on in-app purchase to offer “song packs” — it simply connects to the iTunes Store to display three possible options at a time. Let’s Sing’s list of songs is manually curated by their developers in order to ensure a proper classification (easy/medium/hard), and, more importantly, to avoid items with complex names or strange characters that would be problematic to enter with the iPhone keyboard. The selection of songs is already fairly impressive, and support for the iTunes Store means the developers will be able to effortlessly add songs over time as they choose more. In my tests, I “sang” my friends hits from Beyoncè and Soundgarden, Micheal Jackson and R.E.M., and more.

Before a turn, songs can be previewed, and there is a link to buy an item on the iTunes Store if you suddenly realize you want that in your collection. From the song selection screen, you can also shuffle songs if you don’t like or know what you’re being offered, but shuffles are limited. Songs are displayed on a grade of difficulty, which will earn you and your friend more coins in case of successful streak. More shuffles can be unlocked with coins; if you’re out of coins, you can buy more with “real” currency using in-app purchases.

The singing and guessing part of Let’s Sing is what I like most about the game, and what got me hooked in the first place. Let alone that I get to hear online friends and colleagues I have never met in real life hum or whistle through their microphones, the whole process is extremely straightforward: you pick a song, whistle, hum, or like I do, “na na na na” through it, then hit Send. You can play back your recording to make sure you’ve got it right in 30 seconds, or cancel and re-record. Once sent, it’s up to your friend to guess, and the main screen of the app will reflect an ongoing game’s progress with an indicator. There is also an in-game chat to congratulate or shamelessly brag with a friend. Fortunately, Let’s Sing features push notifications, so you won’t have to wait inside the app for the next turn, but you’ll be informed by iOS.

On the guessing side, you can listen to what your friend recorded, and enter the song’s title with the keyboard. Alternatively, you can use in-game hints to reveal a song’s vowels or its artist.

I don’t typically play many games on my iPhone — I might take a random shot at Temple Run or Ski Safari while waiting in line — but Let’s Sing has turned out to be fun diversion that keeps me coming back. Let’s Sing combines my love for music (and guessing songs) with a streamlined way of embarrassing myself (in a good way) to people that wouldn’t otherwise hear me “na na na na-ing” the latest Nicki Minaj. It’s about your voice, your friends, and it’s fun.

Get it from the App Store.

Ever since my review, I have switched to Pocket as my personal go-to read later web service and app on iOS, as I thoroughly enjoy Pocket’s wide-ranging approach to saving everything for later, rather than just articles. Today, however, Readability is announcing a new service called Readlists, which might give many a reason to use multiple “read-later” services in tandem — and that’s because Readlists leverages Readability’s existing platform and engine to target a different segment of web reading: collecting multiple links together.

For decades now, Internet citizens have relied on bookmarking systems to archive links for future reference or perusal; services like Delicious and Pinboard allow users to save links in collections or tags, and share them publicly with profiles or widgets built through officially provided APIs. On the other hand, services like Pocket, Instapaper, and Readability have shifted the conversation to reading (or watching, or viewing) later, treating web links as single entities to save and process in a separate inbox, often not so easily embeddable or shareable on the web. Read later apps let you share the article you’ve just read on Twitter and Facebook, as well as other services; Instapaper implemented its own private social network to see what “friends are reading”; but what if you wanted to group multiple links together — say, reviews for the latest iPad or Tapbots app — and share them with the world all at once? That’s exactly the issue we faced with our own MacStories Reading List; eventually, we decided to build a manual widget that enables us to easily display aggregated links in our site’s sidebar.

A Readlist is a “mixtape for reading”. From a web app (the service doesn’t come with native app integration yet), you can create a list containing multiple links for articles and images. Readlist’s unique twist is that, while made by Arc90 and based on Readability, it doesn’t require a Readability account to operate — it’s a separate service with Readability integration. And because of this product division, bundles you create on Readlists aren’t simply archived to your Readability account — they can be downloaded as eBooks on any device.

Readlists is capable of generating iBooks-ready ePub files containing articles as “chapters” within what is actually a book you can download offline and read on any device. Using the service’s parser, text and images are extracted from webpages (not videos), ads are stripped out of view, and instead of generating a “read later view” like in Pocket or Instapaper (or Readability), an eBook is created. You can enter a title for your eBook, a description, and easily send it via email to your Kindle or iOS device. Links to Readlists can be shared with friends, and you can subscribe to other’s Readlists and download them for offline reading.

A Readlist can also be embedded on any webpage through an embed code, which will generate a fancy link-grouping widget with sharing/exporting options as the one you can see below. From a Readlist, you can jump straight to the original source by clicking on a link’s title, or you can send single items to Readability by clicking on “read later”. eBooks can only be opened in other apps that support the format, such as Kindle or iBooks (or Bookle on the Mac).

I have been able to test Readlists, and while I think it makes for a great differentiator from services like Pocket and Instapaper, there are also some aspects of the service I don’t like or fully understand yet. Firstly, while the service is marketed as separate from Readability (you don’t need an account to sign up, but you can use your Readability account), links saved to Readlists don’t contribute to publishers who signed up for Readability’s program. I asked Readability’s CEO Rich Ziade, and he told me that they’ll see “how reception goes” as far as further integrating with native apps is concerned; right now, Readlists is a separate web app that doesn’t require Readability to work.

Technically, that is true, but the service is clearly based off Readability’s existing infrastructure, and as such I was disappointed to find out links saved through Readlists aren’t contributing to publishers in any way. If not necessarily tracking saved links, I believe Readability could still track saved links that are also converted to ePub by Readability subscribers, and give publishers a small kickback for those. I am actually a strong proponent of Readability’s model for publisher — in spite of the controversies — but I think they should figure out a way to integrate Readability 100% with Readlists, and not just for the parser, read later buttons, and user profiles. I assume that, because the system is inherently different (Readability accounts Vs. Readlists ePub files), the old publisher program couldn’t be simply ported “as is” for the initial launch.

Additionally, I am curious to see how Arc90 will plan to monetize Readlists. Everything’s free right now in the “experimentation” phase, but from a product standpoint, Readlists seems well-suited as a long-term plan aimed at charging “advanced users” for more features like custom eBook covers, stats, or different code embedding options. This is pure speculation on my side, but I do believe Readlists’ unique concept could bode well for a paid product.

Readlists is undoubtedly an interesting experiment, and a different take on “saving content for later, offline”, which is something that other apps and services have been doing for years, albeit without the convenience of a portable file format.

You can check out Readlists here.

An Introduction to MoneyWiz

For those of you who are new to MoneyWiz, let me quickly give you the rundown of what the app does in general (this is pretty much applicable to all three versions of MoneyWiz). It’s an app that lets you take care of your personal finance situation and has features to not only track expenses and incomes for all your accounts, but also set and track budgets, set up scheduled payments and then review everything in various reports. I went into great detail with my MoneyWiz for iPad review and for the most part, what I said there is still relevant and with the Mac version too.

It certainly isn’t a very advanced finance or budget app, but for most people it should have everything they need — and that is exactly where I fall. But keep that in mind if you are coming from Quicken or a similarly advanced finance app, because if you were using some of Quicken’s more advanced features, MoneyWiz will be a little more restrictive to you. If you think about splitting the personal finance apps into “casual/simple” and “professional/powerful”, you’ll find MoneyWiz somewhere in between at the moment, but it is (by the intention of the developers) heading toward the powerful landscape, but with a design that is forgiving to those who are looking for something simple.

Introducing MoneyWiz for Mac

As I mentioned at the top of the article, MoneyWiz for Mac is strikingly similar to the iPad version – so much so that if I took a screenshot of the Mac app and displayed it on an iPad, you might actually believe it is an iPad app. The reason for all this is that the MoneyWiz developers decided to use the same UI for the Mac version as they had for the iPad. Speaking to them over email, I asked them about this and they explained that they actually had 4 designers working on 6 different designs. In the end they choose to go with the UI from the iPad — not only was it familiar to MoneyWiz users, but it had the right mix of a simple design and the flexibility of their more powerful features.

I must admit I am in two minds about this decision. Initially when I first opened a pre-release version of the app and saw the iPad design, I was a little disappointed, whilst I had liked the iPad design I was hoping for something more creative and Mac “appropriate”. To some degree I still feel that, but thinking about it rationally, I’m moving toward appreciating the decision. Perhaps the biggest reason is familiarity, everything is where I expect it because I’ve used the iPad app for months now. Not only does it look good, but the design is logical and simple to understand. From when I tried out some of the other Mac finance apps in January, they were all exceedingly boring and ugly to look at, but they were also confusing in many cases. That isn’t the case with MoneyWiz and that’s a big thing for new users to the app.

Some Negatives (that can be fixed)

But let me focus on the negatives for now, because whilst I am a fan of MoneyWiz and use the trio of apps myself, the Mac version does have some weaknesses. Firstly with the minor; despite using the iPad UI, there are some aspects of the app that are just standard for OS X, the most obvious was the drop-down for adding a new expense/income/etc. and it totally conflicts with the rest of the very custom-looking design. Compare it to the auto-fill box and you’ll see what I mean. The developers note that this decision was due to a difficult technical problem due to a few factors including maintaing compatibility with Snow Leopard – but they say they will look into fixing it in the future. Another minor issue (that is currently being fixed for an upcoming update) is that many of the icons are blurry in the app.

However the more serious issue I have with the app is the lag that I encounter when scrolling. It isn’t a deal breaker but it is disappointing. On this issue the developers note that it is due to a custom table implementation that was again due to Snow Leopard compatibility but that it is definitely something they are looking to fix in an upcoming update. On the whole, these are all fairly minor (and fixable) issues, it’s just disappointing that they couldn’t be fixed before release because they make the app feel rough around the edges.

Reports

After about five months using MoneyWiz, I can safely say that whilst I like the app a lot, the one weakness is the Reports section. Whilst they do work in effectively showing various data points (such as Net Worth, comparisons between your spending on different budgets, etc.), they aren’t particularly nice to look at. This is of course because they are rendered by the developer’s code and not by a designer in Photoshop, but I still think they could use some work as some of their competitors do a good job in this aspect. Another frustration I have is the fact that you can’t choose which reports to automatically load at the top of the Reports screen – the developer has chosen three but I’d like to change which ones are used (and preferably add some). My last concern is with the forecast report – in my experience it has been giving forecasts that are quite off the mark, the developer has noted that an upcoming update should improve its accuracy, so I’m hopeful that will be the case.

Sync

In my review of MoneyWiz for iPad, I briefly touched upon the sync service that is offered. This time around I need to go in to more detail about it, because frankly, it works perfectly. The developers implemented the sync service so that it would be painless to use the iPhone app, iPad app, and Mac app together without issue and so that you could have all your data no matter which device you had with you. Typically sync is something that is prone to be buggy, unreliable and inconsistent — particularly when it’s a custom developed sync service. So I have been ecstatic to see that sync has been 100% reliable for the five or so months that I’ve been using MoneyWiz. It’s also automatic so don’t worry about having to manually press (and remember) a sync button. Testing to see how frequent the sync pushes updates to the app, I was impressed to see that the apps (all of them) would receive any new transactions/changes within 10-15 seconds of the change occurring. Perhaps the only issue is that some people may be uncomfortable with a third party have control over syncing their personal finance information – I trust the developers enough to allow it, but it is something to keep in mind. Obviously the downside if you aren’t willing to turn sync on is that you won’t really be able to use the different MoneyWiz apps and will have to choose one version to use.

Conclusion

Now that MoneyWiz is available on the Mac, many people may be willing to give the app a go and perhaps transition over. For new users who want something reasonably powerful but simple to use, I think MoneyWiz is a great choice and one that I personally use. Having the trio of apps (iPhone, iPad and Mac) and the excellent sync service makes MoneyWiz very flexible. Just imagine going to the shops, buying something on your card and as you leave you enter the expense onto your iPhone and it’s automatically synced over when you open the iPad and Mac app up at the end of the week to check on your budgets for the month.

MoneyWiz for Mac is available on the Mac App Store for $24.99.

If you want an AirPlay receiver on the cheap, you can’t go wrong with Apple’s AirPort Express, a $99 dollar portable wireless access point (great for an apartment or traveling business person) that has a 3.5mm minijack for an audio or optical connection to a pair of speakers or your home receiver. For another hundred bucks (as a part of being an early adopter), you could fair even better with playGo’s audio-centric playGo AP1: an AirPlay and DLNA receiver that can output lossless audio through analog RCA outputs, a 3.5mm minijack, or TOSLINK to your preferred thumpers of choice.


The playGo AP1 supports AAC, Apple Lossless, MP3, FLAC, WAV, and WMA files over AirPlay, Microsoft Play To, USB (i.e. directly connected to your iPod or iPhone), UPnP and DLNA. A fast ethernet port can provide network connectivity from your router or wireless access point, or you can connect wirelessly on B/G compatible wireless networks.

The face (or top) of the playGo AP1 features your standard playback controls via capacitive-touch buttons and allows you to tap the volume up or down as you see fit. The “filling” between the top and base of the unit consists of an RGB LED indicator that indicates audio playback status (glowing green in the screenshots). Inside it all is an IR receiver that will probably work with your Apple Remote to control playback functionality if desired.

If you want to back the playGo AP1 for $10, you’ll get a playGo TOSLINK digital audio cable. $199 gets you your own playGo AP1 if you’re one of the first 1,000 backers (as a limited reward), while $225 gets you the playGo AP1 once the first 1,000 are taken. A $399 backing will get you the playGo AP1 plus hi-fi speakers to seriously enhance your wireless experience. Lots of other options are available too if you want to to furnish a living room, get an invite to playGo’s launch party, or buy a bundle of playGo AP1s to sell at your retail store. While it’s an expensive little gadget, it’s the first relatively small receiver I’ve seen that works wirelessly with almost anything you might have in your home. More than AirPlay compatible, the playGo AP1 can connect to high quality speakers or your high quality living room stereo system. Be sure to check out the project on Kickstarter.

The biggest reason for why I always wanted to become a writer is because I’m not good at creating visual art. I like to look at any kind of great art — from the old masters to talented dribbble users — and this love for well-crafted visual arts helped me getting to write here at MacStories. I’m better at talking about cool pixels than creating them. However, three days ago I bought my first iPad, and Procreate by Savage Interactive is considered one of the finest apps when it comes to using all the capabilities of the new Retina display.

After testing it for some time, I have to say that Procreate seems to be a perfect companion for artists when it comes to digital sketching and painting on the road. It’s a full-featured creation app, not forcing the user to cut back in functionality at all. Before I dive in deeper into its feature set, let me shortly recap the app’s main elements and controls.

The initial launching screen of Procreate displays all your works in a miniature preview gallery. Here you can create new art canvases, organize them in stacks, and delete or duplicate single ones. You can also share them by sending them via mail, posting them on Twitter or export the best ones to iTunes or your device’s camera roll. The app provides three stunning sample artworks from which you can learn both Procreate’s basic UI structure and see the quality of potential outputs. Although those creations would definitely be very eye-pleasing, my screenshots will feature a poor attempt at painting a water droplet as a sample artwork to show exactly how a workflow in Procreate can look like.

To create a new canvas, just tap the plus button in the top right corner of the gallery view. Since last month, when Procreate got updated to the newest version (which includes the already mentioned Retina UI) you can choose between standard or high definition (960x704px or 1920x1408px, respectively). Afterwards, the main drawing interface with a white canvas and a top and right toolbar comes up. On a first glace, the app seems to have less features than Microsoft Paint — there are just five tool options and two sliders available — but as you know, appearances can be deceptive.

Colors and layers

Before I delve into the manual input using brushes, let me start with the two features that make Procreate seem like a mobile, stripped-down version of Adobe Photoshop: color selection and layers. You can find these in the top navigation bar. The right bar contains two sliders to change the pressure power and the thickness of the brushes in use (more on this in a bit), plus undo/redo buttons which let you undo/redo up to 100 steps — so you’ll never lose any creative spark.

The color that is currently is use is displayed in a small square at the top. Tapping on it brings up the color selection interface, including a state-of-the-art color field to select colors by dragging a small magnification lens, plus three additional sliding bars (intensity, more black or white, and the whole spectrum from red to violet) for an even more precise selection. You can also save up to 21 favorite colors; the only feature I missed was the possibility of entering specific RGB values to get exactly the color I wanted; otherwise, I was pretty satisfied with what Procreate offered in this area.

Left to the color selector there’s another Adobe-like feature: layers. Although the interface is stripped down to the most essential features, it contains everything you need to professionally style layered effects: within one drop-down panel, you are able to create and re-arrange layers plus changing their individual opacity and hiding them. You can also assign different layer properties (normal, multiply etc.), so you can link multiple layers to create more detailed effects. Overall you can apply up to 16 (!) HD layers to one single worksheet. The layer features are Procreate’s most unique ones; they make the app a serious competitor to real sketchbooks you may already take with you: on a sheet of paper, you obviously cannot add new elements to an already finished sketch.

Brushes

Which finally brings me to the ways to fill these layers: paiting colors and creating visual forms with Procreate. This is completely done with one tool set: a broad variety of brushes, from real painting brushes over ink to special air or grid brushes. You can also import or take photos to use them as a foundation of your work, and erase or smudge certain areas using the brushes and the specific forms too.

In theory, this doesn’t sounds really flexible as the only way of creating art with Procreate — after all, other apps offer way more tools like color fill or text panels. But Procreate doesn’t need those tools, as it only focuses on painting images, and for that, you only need brushes, and nothing more. This is why the app concentrates on providing an astonishing amount of brushes: they come in 12 different sets of 8 brushes each (6 come pre-installed, the rest is available via In-App Purchase at $0.99 each) for all kind of workflow stages (sketching, inking, airbrush etc.).

If this is still not enough to satisfy your mobile creation desires, you can also modify brushes in small details like stroke opacity or grain behavior to create your personal favorites. They are saved in a separate brush set as your self-created painting tools.

Settings, Tutorials and UI

For people like me, who are completely new to the game of creating digital art using nothing but a touch interface, Procreate provides extensive explanations and how-tos for more or less every possible feature. These can not just be found in the settings area (where you can also change the canvas orientation and the eyedropper align), but also within the creation process. Single brush properties are explained within the aforementioned brush creation process, from grain to opacity. For everything else, Savage Interactive has got a great collection of tutorials from professional artists on their website and also provides a downloadable PDF user guide. With this immense amount of tutorials and learning resources, the developers provide a more than just a decent learning foundation, and thus make their product very amenable for beginners like me.

From the actions/settings panel in the top left corner, you can also export your work for future editing on your standalone devices. Here, the “pro” prefix of the app justifies itself again: you can export single images as JPEG files, and create a PSD if you want to continue on your desktop. Files can be transferred to your computer using iTunes.

Although Procreate was not the first Retina-optimized app I installed on my new iPad, it was the first one that really stunned me. The custom controls, the sharp, but functional and unobtrusive background grid, the elegant colorization, and the blue LED effects really caught my attention. With this UI, Procreate offers a really good and inspiring environment for creating digital art.

If you consider yourself an artist, Procreate can be the one and only solution if you want to create on the road. It’s designed both as a standalone product or as a starting point in a creative process that can be finished in Photoshop. Just remember that it’s a creation app, not a photo editor. If this fits your needs, Procreate is a must-buy. Get it on the App Store for $4.99.

In TaskAgent, I keep lists of apps I want to buy or update, and lists of stories I want to work on. These lists can be archived and retrieved later, and they exist as standalone .txt files in my Dropbox. If I want, I can add items to my lists using TextDrop, GoodReader, or TextEdit on my Mac; I guess it’d be nice to have a dedicated TaskAgent Mac app with the possibility of entering items with keyboard shortcuts.

See, on my computer and iOS devices, I keep lists. I have the aforementioned work-oriented lists of apps and posts I’d like to work on. I have lists of apps I want to recommend for our Inspiring UI series, and I have lists of developers I want to interview. But I also keep lists of podcasts I want to check out, movies I want to buy, groceries I need to pick up, and ideas I want to submit to a developer as feedback for his beta app.

In my mind and in my workflow, lists and tasks are separate entities. A list may contain items that will become tasks; my OmniFocus keeps the things I know I have to do — neatly organized and synced to the cloud. Over time, I have found the separation of lists and tasks to be necessary to properly divide my organization skills in two distinct areas: remembering Vs. doing. And I have found TaskAgent 2.2, released today, to be the best app at enhancing this text-based setup on the iPhone and iPad.

From a core functionality standpoint, TaskAgent 2.2 isn’t too dissimilar from the versions we have previously covered here at MacStories. However, alongside a much simpler formatting syntax and a slew of new features, TaskAgent 2.2 impressed me thanks to its completely redesigned interface and Dropbox sync engine.

On the iPad, large “notebook thumbnail previews” adorn a sidebar that can be dismissed with a button in the upper toolbar. On the iPhone, lists are shown through a Facebook-like panel that also contains shortcuts to create a new lists, enter the Settings, or open Archived lists (which aren’t permanently deleted). TaskAgent 2.2 cleverly uses these new list previews to bring up functionalities that would have otherwise been buried in sub-menus within the main interface. A tap & hold on a list will reveal options to quickly delete, rename, duplicate, or archive a list. To avoid the guilty remorse of having too many items in a list, TaskAgent now lets you hide the “0 out of x completed” description, so you’ll focus exclusively on managing your lists without feeling bad about having too many items inside them.

One of TaskAgent’s previously often criticized feature was its New Item dialog. Version 2.2 does away with uninspired blue alert boxes and introduces a new quick way of entering items one after the another: on the iPad, that’s a popover, while on the iPhone the menu has been rendered as another panel on the right. Depending on your settings, new items will be added at the top or bottom of a list, and you can enter multiple ones in a row without having to tap Done every time. The overall workflow is incredibly faster.

TaskAgent 2.2 is unarguably a better version of the app, and, to me, the best solution to manage lists on iOS while retaining the capability of editing them anywhere as long as I can open a .txt file. I can access my lists from my browser with TextDrop or from iOS using GoodReader and ReaddleDocs. I can associate TaskAgent’s folder (which can be moved anywhere inside Dropbox) with a text editor and start editing right away. I can quickly append new items to a specific list file using Alfred, and if I want, I can share a list to Evernote as well, as TaskAgent supports that service, too.

TaskAgent makes lists “open” and available anywhere. Only $1.99 for a limited time.

My favorite Reddit client for iPad, Alien Blue by Jason Morrisey, was recently updated to version 2.1, adding a number of functionalities (including iCloud sync, which will work alongside an upcoming update to the iPhone version) aimed at increasing the app’s Reddit-based discoverability features.

From Alien Blue’s subreddit:

Inside Alien Blue, you’ll now find a well curated and up-to-date list of active subreddits ranging across a wide variety of topics. This list is maintained and updated nightly. If you see something missing, you can make a recommendation in any of the categories and they’ll be live soon after.

To better leverage Reddit’s wide-ranging amount of information available every day, Alien Blue now lets you easily organize similar subreddits (sections of the site) into groups that are synced to iCloud, and will automatically carry over to the iPhone once the new version comes out. At first I didn’t get the usefulness of groups – I was used to accessing my most-visited subreddits through Alien Blue’s sidebar, which, by the way, in version 2.1 seems to be more reliable at switching between “compact navigation” and extended panels depending on whether you’re holding the iPad in landscape or portrait mode.

Subreddit grouping, however, has changed the way I use Alien Blue. Aside from the convenience of neatly categorizing similar subreddits in the app’s sidebar, each group can be turned into a “front page” collecting all the most upvoted links of each subreddit. This means that, for instance, I was able to create a “Learn” group within Alien Blue, throw TodayILearned, HistoryPorn, Wikipedia, and ExplainLikeImFive in there, so that when I’m in the mood of learning new things and cool facts, I can enjoy my own “Learn” Reddit front page made of the subreddits I grouped. It’s incredibly smart.

Check out all the improvements in Alien Blue 2.1 in the official announcement post, and download the app at $3.99 on the App Store.

Mobile search is and has ever been a very problematic area. After nearly five years of iPhone, developers are still discussing iOS browser search functionality, speed, and the right way of implementing it into the devices workflow. When it comes to services other than Google or Bing, Apple took the easy way by dividing its mobile OS into multiple apps with each one having its own searching capability (Safari for websites, YouTube for videos, etc.). This trend did not stop after the launch of the App Store: third-party apps like Articles and more recent examples like Spotify rely on their own search engine implementation. Bang On by Derek Kepner might be able to change that.

This new search app, which works universally on both iPhone and iPad, is built upon the independent search engine DuckDuckGo, which we also use to provide search through the MacStories archives. DuckDuckGo is a pretty innovative and ambitious search engine, which distinguishes itself from big competitors with accurate, plainly listed and pre-sorted search results, diversified search suggestions, and an extensive amount of useful shortcuts to quicken the search process. Bang On focuses on one specific of those syntax shortcuts: !bang. With this exclamation mark syntax, you can search specific sites like Google, Wikipedia or YouTube by entering for instance “!google” with you search.

To avoid a lot of typing, Bang On is designed around the ability of choosing “!”-hotkeys below the search panel and adding them to your search query. So, as an example: you heard something about that cool band called The Arcade Fire and you want to find out more about them. Fire up Bang On, tap the Wikipedia hotkey, then enter “Arcade Fire” afterwards into the search panel, and Bang On will immediately search Wikipedia and display the respective article using the in-app browser. What I personally found very useful is the ability to change the “!” parameter without changing the actual search query, so you just need to tap the “!youtube” hotkey and Bang On will replace the “!wikipedia” command (those commands are called “!bangs” within Bang On) with it and start searching for Arcade Fire videos instead of Wikipedia articles. Not extraordinary, but still pretty sweet.

What is extraordinary though is the custom hotkeys feature — at least the App Store description told me so. Ben Brooks seemed to understand how to build custom hotkeys to search through specific websites that are not come pre-installed with Bang On. Initially, I couldn’t figure out how to do it. In the app’s Preferences, you can create custom hotkeys by entering a custom !bang-name plus the search command of a website. I tried with MacStories, but couldn’t get the app to work with our site’s search interface.

It turns out, because we at MacStories have implemented DuckDuckGo search on the site, there’s a little bit of extra work to do to configure it properly with Bang On. We use our own search parameters for customized searches through DDG, and that required me to add a specific URL to Bang On for a new MacStories command.

Add this to Bang On (also pictured below):

http://duckduckgo.com/?sites=macstories.net&kj=%23252525&k7=%23eee&k8=%23555&k9=%23b90000&kaa=%23555&kt=h&q=%@

Try it, hit the bang button and enter a search term, and enjoy nice, mobile-formatted, DDG-powered MacStories site search.

I think it’d be perfect if the developer provided a way to auto-detect site searches or even sites that have implemented DuckDuckGo, especially considering the app’s reliance on the service. Right now, it’s pretty nerdy, and although I consider myself a nerd as well, I had to ask our Cody and Federico about the correct URL for DuckDuckGo search. I’m sure it’s easier with standard WordPress-based blogs with default WP search, however.

Bang On offers an impressive amount of supported services, from Amazon and Spotify to more special or even unknown ones like FreshMeat.net or Netcraft. While searching with Bang On is fast, the app sometimes froze on my 3rd-gen iPod touch when switching between websites. As the website’s URL is obscured by the !bang, it’s sometimes frustrating to tell what site I was on or how to troubleshoot custom !bangs. A lot of websites have mobile views that look similar, and it’d be better if you could view the URL or open the page in Safari.

Bang On’s design is not that noteworthy, but it is not bad either; it just serves its purpose, and the purple loading bar gives the app a very specific colored touch. Also nice in Bang On is support for Siri dictation with the keyboard — I wasn’t able to test this as I don’t have a third-generation iPad or iPhone 4S, but judging from other reviews, the app simply makes use of iOS’ standard microphone key to speed up the process of searching through voice recognition.

Bang On does one thing right: it centralizes search. You don’t need to fire up different apps to search music on both YouTube or Spotify for instance — just use Bang On. You don’t have to switch between Pandora and Articles to get more information about your new music discovery anymore — launch Bang On, and you’ll get both in parallel. In a future update, I personally would like to see support for multiple tabs to get even better comparison possibilities.

Bang On is definitely worth a try. Get it at $1.99 on the App Store.

As a reminder, the deadline for sandboxing your apps on the Mac App Store is June 1. We’ve made the process easier with new sandboxing entitlements and APIs now available in OS X 10.7.3 or later and Xcode 4.3.2.

If you have an existing app on the Mac App Store that is not sandboxed, you may still submit bug fix updates after June 1. If you have technical issues that prevent you from sandboxing your app by June 1, let us know.

Previously pushed back from November 2011 to March 2012, and then again from March to June 1, 2012, sandboxing is a new technology aimed at limiting an application’s access to certain areas of OS X through a system based on entitlements. As we wrote in February:

Sandboxing is a new technology in OS X Lion that limits the functionalities of Mac App Store applications to a list of “entitlements” that cover various areas of the operating system an app can access, such as networking, printing, or a user’s files. A sandboxed application would be unable to harm the system outside of its operational scope (managed by the entitlements), and this has caused some concerns as apps would lose access to the Mac’s entire filesystem, which is required by some functionalities of certain applications that aren’t necessary malicious or “compromised”. Similarly, inter-app communication would be a technical issue with sandboxing, as apps like TextExpander, Keyboard Maestro and CoverSutra — utilities that perform actions in the background without asking for user’s interaction in some cases (user-initiated actions can override the sandbox) — couldn’t get past the sandboxing requirement for the Mac App Store.

With today’s reminder, Apple has confirmed that new apps submitted to the Mac App Store after June 1 must adopt sandboxing, whilst existing apps that are not sandboxed will still be available to receive bug fix updates. Earlier this week, a report suggested that, in relation to the upcoming sandboxing deadline, Apple was also looking into “banning” new apps with “hotkey” functionality, though it appears that such policy won’t take effect, according to several sources. Recently, several OS X developers expressed their wish for Apple to further delay the sandboxing deadline to the end of June in order to better explain the ramifications of the technology at the upcoming WWDC. Unfortunately for those developers who were hoping for a revised deadline for apps that have proven to be incompatible with sandboxing, WWDC kicks off on June 11 — 10 days after the sandboxing deadline.

A number of Mac applications using Sandboxing are already available on the Mac App Store. Most notably, 1Password by AgileBits implemented the technology back in September 2011, and others like Edovia’s Screens for Mac and, recently, Pixelmator were updated with support for sandboxing as well.