Following the “Photos Every Day” commercial first aired last month, Apple today posted a new iPhone 5 ad called “Music Every Day”. As the name suggests, it is a follow-up to the previous commercial, this time with a focus on music.

Music Every Day doesn’t show music apps — instead it puts the spotlight on people enjoying music with their iPhones and Apple’s distinctive white earbuds. The commercial includes a variety of everyday situations — from exercising and waiting in line to a DJ set and a group of friends listening to music in their car. It’s not about the playback feature itself, it’s about music as a life companion.

Apple only briefly shows the iOS Music app in the commercial. The spotlight, unlike the Photos commercial, isn’t strictly on the iPhone’s display itself — rather, it emphasizes how music can seamlessly fit in our lives thanks to a device that’s often carried in a pocket, put on a table or outside of the shower, or shared with friends. The protagonist of the ad isn’t the iPhone per se: it’s people relying on it to enjoy their music.

The iPhone qualities that Apple subtly implies (intuitiveness of the interface, sound quality, portability) are important, but secondary. The voiceover sums it up at the end: “Every day, more people enjoy their music on the iPhone than any other phone”. With an elegant juxtaposition, the ad fades to black.

Apple hasn’t uploaded the new commercial to its website yet, but you can watch the official YouTube version below.

Sean Korzdorfer shares a Tweetbot tip that I didn’t know about: you can construct complex searches with boolean operators and filters and launch them with a URL scheme, both on OS X and iOS. And not just regular searches — you can apply a query to look for specific keywords inside a Tweetbot search.

Basically, Sean is using Tweetbot searches to replace RSS feeds. By saving searches that filter out RTs, mentions, and tweets in foreign languages, he receives a stream of tweets containing links from a specific set of users. Sean has turned his searches into Alfred workflows for Tweetbot on the Mac, and I thought I could do the same on iOS.

Sure enough, here’s a Launch Center Pro action to launch a Tweetbot search for links (no RTs, no mentions) from users I care about:

tweetbot:///search?query=from%3Amacrumors%20OR%20from%3Averge%20OR%20from%3Adaringfireball%20OR%20from%3Apolygonall%20OR%20from%3Akotaku%20OR%20from%3Amacdrifter_feed%20OR%20from%3Areneritchie%20OR%20from%3Amattalexand%20OR%20from%3Anateboateng%20OR%20from%3Adujkan%20OR%20from%3Amarkgurman%20OR%20from%3Apanzer%20filter%3Alinks%20-filter%3Amentions%20-filter%3Aretweets%20lang%3Aen%20[prompt]

And here it is decoded for reading purposes:

tweetbot:///search?query=from:macrumors OR from:verge OR from:daringfireball OR from:polygonall OR from:kotaku OR from:macdrifter_feed OR from:reneritchie OR from:mattalexand OR from:nateboateng OR from:dujkan OR from:markgurman OR from:panzer filter:links -filter:mentions -filter:retweets lang:en [prompt]

The URL action ends with a [prompt] for Launch Center Pro, but that can also be a [[draft]] for Drafts. You’re not forced to launch the search URL with a keyword — if you don’t enter anything in the prompt, Tweetbot will display all links from the search (which is why you probably don’t want to use Drafts for this, as it can’t launch an action from an empty draft). Also, you can see that the first portion of the URL isn’t percent-encoded, but the one after the query parameter is. For this, Launch Center Pro’s encode/decode actions can come in handy.

I am subscribed to a series of Twitter lists to discover interesting links on a daily basis, but these complex searches have the advantage of filtering out RTs and mentions, providing a cleaner, links-only experience.

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As first reported by John Paczkowski at AllThingsD, Apple has confirmed its WWDC ’13 keynote for June 10 in San Francisco. Speakers haven’t been revealed yet, but it wouldn’t be a surprise to see CEO Tim Cook kicking off the keynote, with other executives following up on news and announcements during the event.

WWDC ’13 was announced on April 24. Running through June 14, the conference will allow Apple to show developers “the latest advances in software technologies and developer tools to help them create innovative new apps”; Apple has also confirmed new versions of iOS and OS X will be seeded to developers. WWDC will feature more than 100 technical sessions presented by over 1,000 Apple employees. As usual, there will be hands-on labs where developers will be able to seek advice from Apple engineers for “code-level assistance, insight into optimal development techniques and guidance”.

Tickets for WWDC ’13 went on sale on April 25 and sold out in two minutes in a new record for the company. Full-time or part-time students over the age of 13 had the chance of winning one of 150 scholarships to attend this year’s WWDC. As in previous years, Apple will reward outstanding achievement and excellence for well designed and innovative apps with the Apple Design Awards.

We’ll update this post with more information about WWDC schedule and keynote as the story develops.

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Shazam is one of those things that has always felt entirely magical. With a tap of a button, usually any song playing from a static filled speaker is correctly tagged, and sorted into a tab where you can revisit it on your accord at a later time. It’ll pluck songs out of the air in a noisy bar, identify what’s playing on TV, and even tell you whether MSTRKRFT’s remix of Monster Hospital is playing before the keynote starts. And Shazam is always in my pocket, ready to settle disputes on what band is actually playing and what the name of the song actually is.

There’s a social element to Shazam which I personally don’t find appealing. I don’t want to see what people are tagging locally, nor do I care about Facebook integration or top tracks. They’re discovery tools, but I don’t care about what you’re tagging from your radio station. Rdio’s Heavy Rotation provides the most intimate kind of feedback between friends as does Spotify with their social features. Shazam wants me to share, to gather demographic data and to get people really using their sharing tools, but what I’m hearing right now is really the only thing that’s relevant.

So the exploration features, the maps and the social sharing, I’m entirely disinterested in. I mean, locally, we’re all listening to the same radio stations or watching the same television shows in company anyway. I use Shazam as my own personal list of things I’ve heard and want to know more about. What I do care about is tagging — the blue spinning circle and thumping waveform, as well as the immediacy of the feedback it provides. Auto tagging is entirely about this.

Auto tagging is a core component of the new iPad app, reminiscent of something like Yahoo’s IntoNow. The iPad, with its big battery, can sit on your coffee table or beside your media center, sipping battery while listening to songs playing in the background from your favorite television shows. I’ve had Radium running in the background this morning, and Shazam quietly but quickly identified the music that was playing from a local radio station. It automates what previously required a button press, even if does raise an eyebrow concerning privacy at home. As you launch the app and turn on the feature, Shazam pops up an alert that says (and definitely not verbatim), “We aren’t listening to what you say! Just identifying the music :-D.” Yeah, but… And until you close the app, Shazam will continue listening in the background even when the iPad’s display is off.

Possibly trading personal privacy for this kind of convenience obviously depends on your own comfort level. The same people who find Chrome’s “Ok, Google” or the Xbox One’s voice features will probably find this feature unsettling. Keep in mind that Shazam does listen every few seconds in the background even when auto tagging is off to help it more quickly identify music that’s playing, and I imagine the company feels that the only time you’d turn on Shazam is when you’re actively wanting to figure out what’s playing. I’m personally ok with it — I can’t wait to try it during a YouTube concert live stream to see how it fares there. I’ll probably just end up using it when watching press events and keynotes.

Shazam is free to use, the company making money from advertisements and purchases made from tagged music. You can, however, pay a $6.99 IAP (or purchase a “pre-paid” version) to remove advertisements.

Download Shazam for the iPad here.

In the years I’ve spent using and recommending Evernote, I’ve always noticed a chasm between people who rely on the service to store reference material and notes, and those who want to also use Evernote as a “getting things done” system to keep track of their todos. The topic has been widely discussed on the Internet, with smart folks such as Sven Fechner and Fraser Speirs delving deeper into the subject of Evernote as a GTD system. Tutorials and eBooks have been published with tips on how to use tags and saved searches to turn Evernote into an app capable of equally handling documents, notes, and todos under a single, searchable archive. Clearly, there was a demand for a task management feature built right into Evernote.

Today, Evernote is releasing updates to its Mac and iOS clients to introduce a major new feature: native reminders. I have been testing the new versions of the app, and I believe reminders are a good addition that fit well with Evernote’s focus on remembering everything through a unified, polished interface.

First and foremost, you won’t find the complexity of OmniFocus or the feature set of Due in Evernote’s reminders. While aimed at solving a common problem – reminding you to do something – Evernote reminders are decidedly simple and devoid of settings. You’re not looking at a GTD app inside Evernote; reminders are simply a way to associate a reminder with a note.

Rather than shipping a standalone todo app – something you’d expect from the company that acquired Evernote-based todo manager Egretlist – Evernote built a reminder layer on top of its existing note architecture, which, for the most part, remains unchanged in spite of reminders. On the Mac, a new reminder icon (a clock) has been to the top toolbar of the note editor: by default, the clock icon is grayed out, and you can click it to add a reminder to a note. Currently, there are no contextual menus and no keyboard shortcuts – the clock icon is the only UI element to assign a reminder to a note.

Upon clicking the clock icon, a Reminders section will appear above the note list, showing a summary of the reminders you’ve added; and, the clock icon will show a mini popover that allows you to add a date. If you don’t add a date/time, the note will simply stay as a generic reminder that is pinned in the Reminders list; if you add a date, you’ll receive a notification (on the Mac, through Notification Center) when a reminder is due. Reminders can be marked as “done”, or they can be “cleared” away from the Reminders list, becoming “normal” notes again.

Choosing to add a date will bring up a taller popover that embeds a calendar, a custom date field, and buttons for “tomorrow” and “in a week”. In the beta version I tried, the default date setting for new reminders was “8 AM”, with no possibility to tweak it. A trip to the application’s Settings reveals a new Reminders tab that contains an option to receive, besides notifications, email summaries for reminders.

In my tests, I was particularly surprised by the lack of any natural language input for the custom date field: on the Mac, I am used to typing dates using a natural format like “tomorrow at 5” or “next Friday”, pioneered by apps like Fantastical and Due. While I wasn’t expecting to find the same parser in Evernote’s date field, I think having to manually type exact dates and times with a specific format considerably cuts down the efficiency of the calendar popover. Even basic commands like “4 PM” would suffice to make the date field slightly more usable; right now, if you want to enter a specific date, your best option is to click a day in the calendar, then change the due time manually.

A key aspect of this Evernote update is that regular notes and reminders aren’t two distinct pieces of content: you add a reminder to a note. You don’t “create a reminder” – you create a new note with a reminder attached to it. This is exemplified by how reminders and notes are displayed in the app: on the Mac, Reminders get their own dedicated area at the top, showing titles of the notes you gave a reminder to; at the bottom, you’ll still see your traditional list of notes[1]. This caused some confusion at first – effectively, you’ll see a note’s title twice – but it makes sense once you understand what Evernote is doing. Rather than including a GTD app with its own todos alongside notes, reminders let you mark some notes as “more important” with optional alerts.[2]

Evernote can keep reminders in sync with the iOS apps, which have also been updated to enable users to add and manage reminders directly on an iPhone or iPad. When viewing a note, you’ll see a clock icon at the bottom that you can tap to add a reminder (if none has been added), add a notification time, or clear/mark as done/change date like on the Mac.

Instead of using the default iOS date picker (the one you see in apps like Calendar), Evernote built its own interface for picking years/months/days/hours that is, admittedly, great-looking.

Evernote’s date picker shows two columns: on the left there’s the date you have picked, on the right the one you have to pick; as you make your choice, a “piece” of the date jumps from the right column to the left one and gets stacked below your previous choice. So, for instance, picking “June” from the month list will move June under 2013 on the left, and so forth for days and hours. It is a beautifully layered interface that fits well with the Evernote app.

I have two minor issues with Evernote’s clock button and the date picker. In spite of its good looks, I believe that the date picker is slower than Apple’s uglier, but faster default system. It takes too many taps to move between entries in Evernote’s picker, whereas Apple’s one allows you to quickly swipe to tweak days and times. As for the note editor, I would have put the clock icon in the top toolbar, not the bottom one. When I create a new note and start editing text, the bottom toolbar disappears, taking the clock icon with it. If I want to add a reminder when I’m writing, I have to dismiss the keyboard, then swipe up to reveal the bottom toolbar again. I realize that it’s a minor annoyance, but I only bring it up because I care.[3]

Notes with reminders will get a blue clock indicator in the note list and, on the iPad, Recent Notes section. In the Notebook and All Notes areas of the app, you’ll see an additional clock icon in the title bar showing the total amount of reminders you have in a notebook or across all your notes. Alas, you can’t tap that number to reveal the Reminders list automatically.

Reminders are displayed differently on the iPhone and iPad. On the iPhone, a clock icon at the top of the note list will open (with a folder-like animation) a list of reminders with sorting options (also available on OS X) and an Edit button to re-arrange reminders, add new ones, and mark them as complete; on the iPad, the clock icon is available in the bottom left corner, and you can pull it to reveal a sidebar containing your reminders. On both devices, tapping a reminder will open its note (same with the Mac), and you can swipe right to mark a reminder as complete, or swipe left to add a notification date/time.

Overall, Evernote reminders worked well with no sync issues across the Mac, iPad, and iPhone; I particularly appreciated the UI choices made on the iPad, as the Reminders sidebar and note editor make for a solid navigation experience when moving across multiple notes with reminders.

There are several features that I’d like to see in reminders. On the Mac, I couldn’t find a data kind for reminders to create saved searches: I’d like to set up a saved search for notes created in the past week, that are tagged “macstories”, and that have reminders, but there doesn’t seem to be an option to create these kinds of searches just yet. Similarly, the Mac version I tried didn’t have any support for an updated AppleScript dictionary with reminders integration, which means automation geeks won’t be able to script reminders in this first release.

On iOS, I think it still takes a bit too much to assign a reminder to an existing note, or to create a new one from scratch. It would be nice to experiment with a tap & hold gesture on the “+” button to create a new note that has already a reminder associated with it; for existing notes, I would like to see more buttons available in the new action bar that appears when you swipe over a note (right now, there’s only a Trash icon in there). As with other todo apps, Evernote would benefit immensely from the possibility of refreshing reminders in the background, so that you’ll always get the right local notifications on your device.[4]

If you’re already happily using apps like OmniFocus or Due, I can’t recommend switching to Evernote as your main todo app. There are several third-party todo apps on the App Store that support more advanced features such as URL schemes[5], and if you’re looking for something simpler, I still believe that Apple’s Reminders app is a solid, reliable solution.

However, I do see the appeal of Evernote reminders for people who used to keep track of todos manually by using notes and lists in Evernote. It’s a bit curious to see Evernote avoiding a standalone todo app, but I understand the choice of reminders for notes. Admittedly, they work quite well in this release, and I like how you can set up a reminder without necessarily giving it a due date. There’s lots of work to be done in my opinion, but reminders are a step in the right direction. They won’t turn Evernote into a GTD system or even a moderately powerful todo/list app, but they’ll still contribute to making Evernote a better solution to keep track of things you have to do – through text, photos, and attachments to notes.

Evernote for iOS is available on the App Store, and you can download the updated Mac app from Evernote’s website.

Mailbox on the iPad doesn’t offer any distinct advantage over its iPhone counterpart, the app being the same right down to the compose view. Oddly, Mailbox is locked to the landscape orientation, meaning that your email is stuffed into a narrow space next to the sidebar. Personally, I think this is a glaring omission. My guess is Orchestra felt that seeing the big picture — the entirety of the inbox — would be better for previewing and triaging email over opening individual messages as you’d have to in the portrait orientation.

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Rdio 2.2, released earlier today, includes — besides an improved interface and label search — a new URL scheme for launching searches from other apps (thanks, Adam). The URL scheme is fairly simple:

rdio://search/[search term]

In the past, I relied on a hack made possible by Bang On to redirect Rdio web URLs to the Rdio app. The problem with that solution was that it was a finicky process that couldn’t launch full, native searches directly in the Rdio app. The new version enables just that: you can now use the URL scheme to create search actions that will display pre-populated results in Rdio for iOS.

The new URL scheme means it’s easy to set up actions that trigger Rdio searches in apps like Launch Center Pro or Drafts. For this kind of quick search, my pick is Launch Center Pro, which I already use to launch Chrome and Pinbrowser searches. Until the Launch Center Pro team adds support for Rdio search in the Action Composer (they’re aware of it), you can create a custom action with the following URL:

rdio://search/[prompt]

Then, every time you want to search for something on Rdio, instead of opening the Rdio app and manually heading to the search field you can just open Launch Center Pro, type your search terms in a keyboard prompt, and tap a button to be redirected to a search inside the Rdio app.

I’ve been looking forward to a Rdio URL scheme for search for a long time. If you don’t want to use Launch Center Pro, you can build a custom action for Drafts, Mr. Reader, or any app that supports launching other apps via URL scheme.

Voice Search, already available through the standalone Google Search app, will be activated in Google Chrome by tapping on a microphone button above the iOS keyboard:

Over the coming days, we’re rolling out an update for iPhone and iPad as well. You can now speak your searches into the omnibox. Touch the microphone, say your search query aloud and see your results (in some cases spoken back to you), all without typing a single letter.

Interestingly, the screenshot shown by Google displays the microphone button in the same additional keyboard row that’s currently occupied by buttons aimed at enabling users to more easily type URLs. Because Chrome for iOS, unlike Safari, uses a unified address bar for URLs and web searches, the extra keyboard buttons were necessary to let users quickly insert URL-related characters. It’s possible that Google will figure out a way to show both keyboard rows — the buttons and the new microphone — by letting users swipe horizontally above the keyboard.

Alongside performance improvements, Google also notes that “iOS apps can now give you the option to open links in Chrome and then return to the app with just one tap”. Assuming that Google is referring to the Chrome URL scheme with support for x-callback-url, that wouldn’t be new as it is already used by a variety of iOS apps (and as I showed today, users can play with it as well). However, Google has been quite vocal about its existing support for URL schemes lately, and it wouldn’t be surprising to see the company advertising the feature as new again.

Chrome for iOS, free on the App Store, was last updated in April.

In my Mountain Lion review, I noted that I didn’t like clicking on Twitter notifications because they were taking me to Twitter’s website instead of an app (they still do). It’s good to see Twitter updating their Mac app again.

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Rdio 2.2, released today for the iPhone and iPad, brings a series of important new features such as label search and improved user search, plus a revamped look for the slide-out navigation.

A feature highly requested by Rdio’s userbase, label search allows you to view top albums and artists of a specific label; if you want to see more artists or records, there are links to view a complete list — which, surprisingly, doesn’t support the tap & hold menu for quick actions that was introduced a few updates ago.

In the refreshed sidebar (also available on the iPad) a new Find People functionality allows you to find friends and artists you can follow by simply tapping on their profile pictures. It’s unclear how Rdio is determining user suggestions, but it’s likely that the service is looking into data provided by Twitter and Facebook accounts configured with it.

Today’s new version follows a series of updates that streamlined the app’s interface and enhanced its sharing capabilities. Rdio 2.2 is available on the App Store.

Announced in December 2012, The Omni Group has today started the public rollout of OmniPresence, their new free automatic document syncing solution for OS X and iOS. OmniPresence, based on open web technologies, is available inside OmniGraffle, OmniGraphSketcher, and OmniOutliner for iPad, and it also comes with a companion Mac app that runs in the menubar.

“The way we are doing it is not to hook it up into some backend proprietary service”, The Omni Group CEO Ken Case told us in an interview during Macworld|iWorld earlier this year. As a long-time user of Omni products such as OmniOutliner for the iPad and Mac, I was eager to see whether Case’s promises of a fast, reliable automatic syncing technology would grow into a stable product capable of fitting seamlessly into my daily workflow. After nearly two months of testing, I’m glad to say that, in some ways, The Omni Group has even exceeded my (already high) expectations.

The key to understanding OmniPresence is that it’s a system that runs on open web server technologies, with The Omni Group providing the syncing logic either as a Mac app, or directly embedded into their native iPad apps. Starting today, customers will be able to turn any compatible Apache web server[1] into an OmniPresence location, effectively hosting their own clouds, retaining control on documents that will be stored in OmniPresence. The Omni Group’s Omni Sync Server will also be offered as a free OmniPresence location for those who don’t want to set up a web server. However, Ken Case told me, OmniPresence’s rollout in Omni Sync Server will be gradual over the next few weeks.

Rather than building document syncing on top of a proprietary service that might not be available to you in five years, we built OmniPresence on top of open server technologies so that anyone can run their own service. If you’re headed to Mars or Antarctica and want to be able to sync documents between devices while you’re there, all you need is a run-of-the-mill server and OmniPresence.

In the past months, I have been able to try OmniPresence both manually (with standalone web servers) and through my personal Omni Sync Server account. Setting up OmniPresence with Omni Sync Server is easy: you download the Mac app or updated iPad apps, you sign in with your existing Omni account, and you start syncing documents. There are some differences between the two experiences that are worth explaining, though.

On the Mac, OmniPresence works as a menubar utility that “monitors” a local folder and syncs it with the cloud. Upon first run, OmniPresence will ask you to pick a location where you’ll want an OmniPresence folder with your synced documents. If you, for instance, pick the standard Documents folder, you’ll end up with an OmniPresence folder inside it; the OmniPresence folder will be synced with the cloud, and it’ll have a custom icon as well.

You can drop documents inside the OmniPresence folder to sync them, and those documents will be available for editing anywhere: while The Omni Group has a specific set of apps, anything – like TextEdit files or photos – can go into OmniPresence. It’ll be up to native apps, especially on iOS, to check which documents they can open and edit. In my tests, I used OmniPresence primarily for OmniOutliner files.

On the Mac, the menubar utility serves the double purpose of acting as a shortcut for OmniPresence folders and checking on sync status. When OmniPresence is syncing changes with the cloud, its icon will show three animated dots; you can click the icon at any time to show a popover containing clickable shortcuts for your Finder folders that are configured with OmniPresence. Multiple folders can be configured – separately – with OmniPresence through Omni Sync Server or your own web server.

OmniPresence supports standard WebDAV servers such as the one included with Mountain Lion Server; alongside my own Mac mini, I tested OmniPresence with CloudSafe, a storage service that offers encryption, WebDAV access, and a free tier. The setup for OmniPresence with a custom server is slightly more complex: the app will ask you to provide a server URL alongside username and password, and then it’ll check whether the server you want to use is compatible or not. In CloudSafe, I simply had to create a “personal safe”, enable WebDAV access, paste the login credentials into OmniPresence, and the app connected right away.

As Case told us three months ago, Omni Group sees the possibility of running OmniPresence off any web server as a feature that’s not only appealing for enterprise customers: people with small teams for instance, will be able – after some necessary research and setup – to configure OmniPresence for their specific needs, possibly creating multiple accounts for sharing documents, all while using OmniPresence’s syncing engine and compatible apps. But as Case added, “particularly for businesses that do not want to host their data on someone else’s cloud, we think this will be a great solution”.

The Omni Group’s iPad apps have been updated to support OmniPresence. By tapping on the title bar of the apps’ document library, you’ll now a get a popover with shortcuts for local documents, the trash, and OmniPresence locations. If you don’t have any, you can tap on “Cloud Setup” to enter the same setup screen of the Mac version with options for Omni Sync Server and your own web server. There are also options for sharing OmniPresence settings via email and de-activating cellular data – useful if you have a 3G iPad and don’t want to consume data to sync documents (which can get large with inline attachments such as images or audio recordings).

I had a great experience with running OmniPresence on my Mac and syncing documents with the iPad apps. Because sync is automatic, you don’t have to worry about clicking sync buttons to send changes to the cloud, and you’ll always be able to keep an eye on OmniPresence’s status by peeking at its icon in the menubar or title bar on the iPad. Switching between multiple OmniPresence locations was made easy by the title bar popover, and OmniOutliner for iPad even asked me if I wanted to move my outlines from the Local Documents area into OmniPresence; I declined, and I moved the documents manually using a new Move menu.

I tested OmniPresence primarily with OmniOutliner for iPad and the private beta of OmniOutliner 4 for Mac (the app will be released later this year). I also tested OmniPresence with the current version of OmniOutliner 3 for Mac; I set up a WebDAV server using CloudSafe, and then I ran OmniPresence with both Omni Sync Server and my Mac mini. With every combination (OmniOutliner 3 and CloudSafe, OmniOutliner 4 and Omnni Sync Server, etc), OmniPresence performed admirably: changes were synced every time a document was saved, and doing so required around 2–3 seconds both on WiFi and 3G. In my tests, I noticed that CloudSafe was perhaps a fraction of a second faster than Omni’s Sync Server at receiving and pushing changes to other devices.

More impressively, The Omni Group built OmniPresence in a way that documents are updated in real-time when an app is already running: in testing OmniOutliner for iPad alongside the Mac app, changes I made to a document were synced after seconds to the other app with the open document simply refreshing itself. It worked exactly as shown by The Omni Group in this video:

OmniPresence was also quite capable when it came down to handling conflicted copies of the same file. When testing, for instance, Dropbox-enabled apps and editing the same document simultaneously on multiple devices, it’s a common occurrence to end up with conflicted copies for changes registered on separate devices but not yet saved to the cloud. With the final version of OmniPresence, I only ended up with a conflicted copy once when typing on two devices at the same time; in normal usage (edit on the Mac, pick the iPad when getting out of the house), I didn’t run into any issues thanks to OmniPresence’s frequent (and fast) syncing. Overall, I found OmniPresence to be fast and well-integrated both with the Finder and The Omni Group’s iPad apps.

After years of no sync, it feels good to be using iPad apps from The Omni Group that sync with the cloud automatically without having to manually export and import documents. OmniPresence is free and reliable, but there are some questions that need to be asked for this first version. Is OmniPresence worth it after three years? Why not Dropbox? How will it work with other iOS apps?

OmniPresence’s biggest problem right now is that Omni Sync Server accounts will receive OmniPresence support gradually, and that, while available in the OS X Finder, iOS’ sandboxing will force third-party developers to manually add OmniPresence support to their apps (through an open-source SDK). This means that, today, customers will likely have to configure OmniPresence with their web server or a free service like CloudSafe if they want to try it – with a limited choice of supporting iOS clients. It would be nice to have support for OmniPresence in apps like CarbonFin Outliner[2], Readdle Documents, or GoodReader – but I guess that will take some time.

Unlike Dropbox, OmniPresence doesn’t come with a full-featured web app to access and monitor your files from anywhere. This may sound problematic when considering how Dropbox lets you browse and restore old versions of a file through its website, but because OmniPresence is a Mac app that saves files to the Finder, it also means you’ll get support for native OS X Versions just like any other document on your Mac. As you can guess, another downside of the iOS apps is that lack of Versions support won’t let you see older revisions of documents directly on the iPad; the Dropbox SDK is more advanced in this regard, with apps like WriteUp having shown how to implement Dropbox revisions on iOS.[3]

I believe The Omni Group is doing the right thing with OmniPresence: they looked at Dropbox and iCloud, but they decided to build their own sync using open web technologies, publishing their source code so that other developers will be able to integrate it in more iOS apps. And while Dropbox may be more popular and widespread, if its sync wasn’t suited for Omni’s documents, then the only possible move was to develop a new system from scratch. The fact that OmniPresence can run on any compatible web server – not forcing customers into The Omni Group’s cloud – is a fantastic plus for the extra security and control it offers.

OmniPresence is off to a very solid start, and I’m looking forward to future integrations with other third-party apps. You can download the OmniPresence Mac app for free from The Omni Group’s website, and check on the status of your Omni Sync Server account here.

I’m a big fan of Flipboard’s magazine feature, which was introduced earlier this year with version 2.0 of the app. By leveraging Flipboard’s existing presentation style – capable of re-formatting web articles, videos, and photos with a beautiful print-like layout – magazines allow anyone to put together a collection of interesting links that others can subscribe to, read, and share. I am subscribed to dozens of Flipboard magazines and I send links to my Games one on a daily basis.

Most of my automation tips stem from minor annoyances with default solutions, so yesterday I decided to create a simple, yet effective Drafts URL action to easily open Flipboard’s share interface without having to read a webpage in the browser.

With the launch of version 2.0, Flipboard also introduced a “Flip It” bookmarklet that you can use to send a webpage to one of your magazines. The bookmarklet works by storing your Flipboard account credentials in the browser, and – both on OS X and iOS – it appears through a popup menu. As fellow Chrome for iOS users know, the way Google’s browser treats bookmarklets on iOS is especially tiresome in that it forces you to type a bookmarklet’s name and launch it from the address bar. Every time I stumble across a webpage that I want to save in my Flipboard magazine, I have to type the bookmarklet’s name, tap it, then head over the newly-opened tab and choose the magazine I want to send the link to. It’s not the world’s best workflow, but it’s not my main issue either.

The problem is that I’m not always reading or watching videos in Chrome: I may find an interesting link in Pinbrowser, a video in FoxTube, or read a longer piece in Pocket. Until yesterday, every time I wanted to “flip” a link I copied it, launched Chrome, pasted it, typed the bookmarklet’s name, and “flipped” the link from a new tab. Last night, I realized that what I was doing didn’t make any sense.

If you take a peek at Flipboard’s code for the bookmarklet, you’ll notice a bunch of JavaScript variables and settings around a base URL that launches the service’s share interface, located at:

https://share.flipboard.com/flipit/load?v=1.0&url

The url parameter requires a link that Flipboard can fetch and “flip” into one of your magazines. Launching a webpage by adding a portion of text to a URL is an easy task for Drafts, and I’m surprised I didn’t think of this possibility earlier.

In Drafts, I created a URL action that sends a link from the current draft to Flipboard using Google Chrome. With Chrome’s URL scheme, we can assemble a URL that will take us back to Drafts through a Back button enabled by x-callback-url; you can see how the Flipboard URL alongside the [[draft]] parameter is enclosed in curly brackets, which is Drafts’ way of URL-encoding text.

googlechrome-x-callback://x-callback-url/open/?url={{https://share.flipboard.com/flipit/load?v=1.0&url=[[draft]]}}&x-success=drafts://&x-source=Drafts

Once you have a URL in Drafts, you can hit the “Flip” action to open Google Chrome[1] directly in the Flipboard share interface.[2] You can download the action by tapping this link in Mobile Safari.

For me, this is a more convenient, streamlined workflow for sending links to Flipboard. Drafts is in my dock, and it’s integrated in third-party apps that I use for reading such as Pocket[3] and Feed Wrangler[4]. Until Apple figures out a way to enable system-wide services across apps, Drafts remains a great solution to receive URLs and send them elsewhere.

Google Now style voice search has just went live in the latest Chrome stable version for the desktop (Version 27.0.1453.93). As far as we can tell from playing around testing things, the full contextual search isn’t running like we saw in the demo during the Google I/O keynote, but the basic voice search and response is ready to go.

Announced and demoed at I/O last week, Voice Search for the desktop mimics the experience launched on Google’s Search app for iOS last year. Voice Search for the desktop lets you dictate search queries to Google, which will transcribe them in (almost) real-time and take you directly to results, powered by the Knowledge Graph. Like on iOS, certain queries will trigger a voice response by Google itself, whereas others will display cards of information or regular results.

It appears Google is rolling out the feature this morning, as the new voice interface is available in Chrome but leading to frequent “No Internet connection” dialogs; I was able to try Voice Search twice, and it worked as expected.

You can watch a demo of Google’s Voice Search for the desktop from I/O 2013 here; an announcent will likely be posted on the official Google Chrome blog.

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Apple rolled out a series of design changes to its online Store overnight, bringing a cleaner, more subdued style for graphical elements and larger, image-centric spots for products and accessories.

The most notable change is the front page of the Store, which now eschews a sidebar to present a full-size view of products with varying sizes. The old design featured evenly-spaced thumbnails for Apple products and third-party accessories with two sidebars with additional navigation options and information; the new one employs larger images, retaining navigation for the main “Shop” sections at the top and in the footer. Interestingly, in the refreshed homepage launched today, the only image showing a Mac is the “Shop Mac” link at the top.

Design tweaks have also been rolled out in several other areas of the Store, such as the Accessories page. The old design relied on a main product list with small thumbnails and a sidebar containing clickable links on the left side; the new one takes a more visual approach with a landing page featuring larger tiles of products, a new sidebar on the right, and a larger grid for accessories in each category.

The Apple Store follows a series of recent design tweaks Apple brought to some of its products and services — notably, the company sent new iTunes promotional emails with a cleaner look and more focus on content yesterday.

For comparison purposes, we have captured screenshots of the old online Store design using the Internet Archive. You can view the full-size images by clicking the links below.

- Online Store homepage: old/new

- iPad Accessories page: old/new

In fact, many of my macros are utterly simple and obvious — I could type “cheers… -Adam” at the end of every email message I send, or I could press Control-period. Just because I’m saving only a few seconds doesn’t mean that it’s not worthwhile, when added up over tens of thousands of messages. Similarly, much as I love LaunchBar and use it heavily for many things, because I set F1 to open BBEdit via Keyboard Maestro, switching to BBEdit via F1 is a third of the work of LaunchBar’s Command-Space, B, Return. Those infinitesimal bits of time are like the energy drain from glowing lights on otherwise inactive electronics — meaningless in the individual instance, but vast in their overall impact.

According to Keyboard Maestro, I have saved 420 hours since I started using it 635 days ago.

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Our team spent many hours with the accessibility zoom, and looked at the best implementations of zoom across a range of apps. One thing that became clear in our testing and observation was that the time spent in zoom while drawing is typically pretty short. You go in and add the eyelashes or write something funny on your character’s t-shirt, and you’re out. In the vast majority of cases, zoom is task specific and tasks are region specific. This discovery supported our idea that zoom is a tool that’s activated on a particular region instead of globally on the canvas.

It seems to me that they also wanted to remain mindful of the idea that there is no infinite canvas and that the pages you’re drawing on have this real finite space. Paper is an app that is carefully restrained, making the point of realizing what the available tools can actually do. Their implementation of Zoom allots just enough freedom to clarify a drawing, but not enough to obsess over the perfect stroke or modify a drawing beyond disbelief. Paper provides an interface that naturally transfers what’s possible with physical tools onto a touchscreen.

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Make sure to read the documentation to see all the options Sean considered.

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Chrome’s App Launcher, now available for preview in the latest Chromium build on the Mac, can be found on Chromebooks and is currently available in beta builds on Windows. It’s Google’s take on Jump Lists on Windows or Stacks on OS X: grids of web services are presented to you as grids of apps, with search available for narrowing the available choices.

[via iMore]

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…for the professional who runs a small business, or individuals who do scan documents, just not so many every day, I’d seriously suggest considering Scanner Pro on the new iPad. The device’s camera will give you decent images — especially with good lightning and background — and the app works with the services many are already using for document storage and archival.

I have been experimenting with different paperless systems (I still haven’t settled on a specific one), but Scanner Pro was and will remain at the core of my mobile scanning workflow. Every day when I get home, I fire up Readdle’s app on my iPhone/iPad, take the receipts and paper documents I’ve collected during the day, scan them using Scanner Pro, and send them to one of the services built into the app (such as personal favorites Evernote and Dropbox). With today’s 4.5 update, which I have been testing, Scanner Pro gets even faster and more intuitive thanks to real-time border detection.

It used to be that Scanner Pro let you take a photo and adjust borders for cropping a document by manually moving a series of controls around the area you wanted to scan. Scanner Pro did a decent job at guessing where it should place the borders, but they still needed tweaking most of the time. In version 4.5, the Readdle team has completely reworked the algorithm behind border detection to make it smarter and bringing it into the camera view as well.

When taking a picture of a document, Scanner Pro 4.5 will overlay borders directly on top of the object, with impressive results. In my tests (a screenshot of which you can see above) Scanner Pro capably recognized borders of paper documents against dark and light backgrounds, in both normal and low-light conditions. Because borders are detected in real time, you can move objects or place other items in the shot and view borders update within a fraction of a second without leaving the camera view. It’s incredibly cool – but, fortunately considering the app’s utilitarian goal, also efficient.

While Scanner Pro tries to automatically detect borders and offer its best take in the Save screen, you can still tap Back to adjust borders manually. This is a welcome option – the app now defaults to the Save screen after a picture has been taken and processed, but you still want to retain manual control in case the new border detection algorithm doesn’t work properly.

It’s not a replacement for full-featured hardware such as Fujitsu’s ScanSnap, but for people who, like me, don’t have exorbitant amounts of paper to digitize every day, Readdle’s Scanner Pro remains a reliable, powerful iOS scanner app with tons of useful options. The new automatic border detection is a simple feature – but a handy one that’s uniquely suited for the iOS camera.

Scanner Pro 4.5 is available on the App Store.

Long-time MacStories readers know how deep-seated Keyboard Maestro is in my OS X workflow. I use it every day, constantly, to automate my Mac to speed up writing, resize images, save PDFs, execute scripts, and more. Version 6.0 is out today and it brings over 100 new features. Unfortunately, I have only been playing with the app for a few hours, so an in-depth review will be published in the coming weeks.

Keyboard Maestro 6.0 retains the same interface and design principles of its predecessor while adding powerful new features that are exclusively built for Mountain Lion. For owners of multiple Macs, the good news is that Keyboard Maestro can now sync macros using Dropbox or any other sync service; in my initial tests, sync worked as advertised.

There are, of course, new triggers and actions to build macros that can automate (almost) any aspect of your Mac. You can now specify triggers for USB devices that are attached/detached to a computer, volumes, and wireless networks that your Mac connects to. This will be useful to build workflows (possibly to run at a specific time of the day) that handle backups or move files from one folder to another (the triggers can also be used as conditions in a macro). When you’re building a macro, you can now take advantage of a Macro Debugger that shows every action with completion status and breakpoints; this will come in handy to better understand why a macro isn’t working and, if so, how to fix it.

I’m personally excited to play around with the new actions for Safari and Google Chrome. As most of my workflows revolve around doing research in and grabbing text/URLs from a web browser, I have created dozens of macros that leverage AppleScript to store a webpage’s name and URL in variables to include in actions that output Markdown for my articles. With Keyboard Maestro’s new Safari and Chrome actions, you can eschew AppleScript entirely and let actions open and select tabs, get URLs and titles, submit and reset web forms, click links, wait until a browser has finished loading – while obviously accessing the same data as text tokens in your actions. On top of this, you can execute JavaScript in Safari and Chrome – which means activating bookmarklets from Keyboard Maestro with custom keyboard shortcuts is now easier than ever. I have already rewritten my actions for Markdown links to take advantage of the new browser actions; I have eliminated every instance of AppleScript, so there’s less manual saving to variables, the actions look more elegant, and I’m using built-in tokens.

There’s a lot of new stuff that I haven’t had time to properly test. You can now interact with styled text from Keyboard Maestro; you can write your own actions; there’s improved support for showing menus from installed apps (essentially enhanced GUI scripting); you can capture components of a regular expression by searching inside a variable or named clipboard – a power-user functionality that I am extremely curious to try with my regex to capture groups of Markdown inline links.

From what I’ve seen so far, Keyboard Maestro 6.0 doesn’t revolutionize the app but adds welcome (and needed) features such as syncing and browser actions while broadening its automation scope with intriguing new triggers, conditions, and actions. I look forward to seeing how I can update my macros to take advantage of the new functionalities introduced today.

Keyboard Maestro 6.0 is a paid upgrade. The app is available at $36, with an upgrade price of $25 for owners of the older version. A free trial of Keyboard Maestro 6.0 can be downloaded from Stairways Software’s website.

I rely on Smile’s TextExpander to save keystrokes on my Mac on a daily basis, but the iOS counterpart, TextExpander touch, has always felt vastly underpowered due to limitations imposed by Apple on the iPhone and iPad. Today’s major update, TextExpander touch 2.0, aims at rising the app’s grade of efficiency by introducing several new features that have become must-haves for TextExpander on the Mac. I have been able to test the update for the past month, and it’s already become part of my workflow in interesting (and powerful) new ways.

TextExpander, for those unaware, is a text expansion utility: it takes a pre-defined abbreviation and outputs the full text associated with it. You can use TextExpander to type sig and be presented with your full email signature, so you don’t have to type it every time; adddr for your home address, useful for web forms; or, you can create a snippet called cccard that will be expanded with the number of your credit card. While alternatives have surfaced over the years, I believe TextExpander is the premiere text expansion utility thanks to Smile’s excellent support, frequent update cycle, and advanced feature set on the Mac.

In TextExpander 4, originally released last year, you can go beyond basic abbreviations and text expansions and create complex fill-in snippets that implement macros, optional selections, and even popup menus to generate text boilerplates that are actually based on variables, such as dates. Combined with the app’s support for standard strftime timestamps and script execution, a single TextExpander snippet can trigger visual menus, handle multi-line fill-ins, and manipulate the cursor position or text selection in a current document. If you’re often dealing with text on OS X, I have no doubt you can come up with TextExpander ideas for your workflow.

Prior to today’s update, TextExpander touch could only support a fraction of the Mac version’s functionalities. Due to iOS’ sandboxed nature, TextExpander touch cannot work in any app that accepts text; this is why you can’t type a TextExpander abbreviation in Safari or Apple Mail and receive the full text. To overcome this limitation, Smile created the TextExpander SDK, which has so far enabled over 150 apps to integrate with TextExpander to offer snippet expansion natively on iOS. Some of my favorite iOS apps such as Drafts and Day One allow me to save keystrokes – something that’s even more convenient on iOS.

The problem with TextExpander touch 1.0, however, wasn’t strictly related to its sandboxed nature – it just didn’t have the same amount of features of TextExpander for Mac, resulting in a crippled experience for users who, upon seeing the app on the Store, thought it would work exactly like on OS X. TextExpander touch 2.0, while still limited by sandboxing, takes important steps towards being more similar to TextExpander 4.

The big new feature of TextExpander touch 2.0 is that it allows to more easily create complex snippets directly on an iOS device. The snippet creation process revolves around a new “Insert” menu that lives, alongside the (also new) “Format” option, in the copy & paste menu. Like TextExpander 4, the Insert menu can be used to manage macros for date, time, date/time math, snippets, clipboard, cursor position and selection, and – another fantastic addition of this update – fill-in snippets.

Fill-in snippets are, in my opinion, the most useful feature of TextExpander for Mac. A fill-in snippet takes the basic idea of expanding an abbreviation and augments it with the possibility of mixing a pre-defined string with a “fill-in field” where you can manually type. Essentially, whenever a variable doesn’t cut it and you know the variable depends on you having to type, you can use a fill-in field to, literally, fill in the information yourself. Or, if it’s not about typing but having more than one option, you can use a fill-in snippet to present multiple choices in a popup menu.

Take, for instance, an email template for customer support. If you deal with customers on a daily basis, you likely receive emails that require replies with variables (the customer’s name) and a large amount of recurring text (introductory sentence, signature, product description, answers to common issues, etc). Instead of writing a full email from scratch every time, you can set up a TextExpander fill-in snippet that contains arbitrary text (perhaps with optional sections) and text fields where you can supply the missing information manually. The same idea applies to another task that can be sped up by templates, such as meeting notes. With TextExpander, you can type an abbreviation, such as xmeet, to bring up a popup window containing a dynamically-generated timestamp, a selection of the participants’ names, sections, and a cursor positioned where you need to type your meeting notes. There are some great examples of TextExpander fill-in workflows on the Internet, which I recommend checking out.

In TextExpander touch 2.0, basic features related to text expansion and cursor position remain unchanged. What this update obviates is the need to remember TextExpander’s syntax (which can get confusing with percentages signs and slashes) thanks to a list of macros to choose from. You can use the Date and Time macros to pick a format for timestamps instead of having to type and try strftime-based combinations; in this version, you can select text and use the new “Selection Range” value to tell TextExpander to select a specific portion of text after an expansion.[1]

The same visual approach has been used for formatting expanded snippets, also a new feature in TextExpander touch 2.0. Available in a Format menu next to Insert, snippets can be formatted choosing from a variety of fonts supported by iOS, font weights and sizes, and colors. Because the implementation is native, you can copy rich text created by TextExpander and paste it into apps like Mail without losing your special formatting; the Notes section of TextExpander (where you can try out abbreviations and receive expanded text) now allows you to copy and send rich text via email as well.

I personally have no use for rich text because all my writing is done in plain text, but I imagine users who have been requesting it will appreciate the app’s Format menu, which is concise and easy to use.[2]

I have been able to test TextExpander touch 2.0 in combination with Agile Tortoise’s Drafts, my favorite iOS apps for building automated workflows that involve text and inter-app communication. Thanks to the updated TextExpander touch SDK – released last week – third-party developers can integrate with TextExpander to take advantage of the new fill-in snippets, which, at least based on what I tested, will be handled by the TextExpander app itself. Other regular, non-fill-in snippets will still be expanded inline in the app that supports the TextExpander SDK.

In Drafts 3.0.4, typing an abbreviation for a fill-in snippet will delete the abbreviation and take you to TextExpander automatically; in TextExpander, you’ll be presented with a window for the fill-in snippet where you can type or select options from popup menus; after you hit Done, you’ll be taken back to Drafts, which will display the full expanded text of the fill-in snippet. In the new SDK, communication between apps is built on top of the x-callback-url protocol.

I am still experimenting with ideas for fill-in snippets on iOS, but I have already set up three that I use constantly. They are all activated by Drafts, which was the only app that supported the new TextExpander touch SDK during my testing.

My first two fill-ins prepare a template for a daily summary that I can send to Day One using Drafts. Day One is one of my favorite apps for OS X and iOS, and while I have tried to scrupulously write down my thoughts for each day of my life, there’s always the day when I forget to write my log or simply don’t have time to jot down thoughts on my iPhone or iPad. At the same time, since I started exercising every day, I wanted a way to keep track of my workout stats without having to rely on another app. Day One was the perfect candidate for a fill-in snippet aimed at assembling a daily template.

The first fill-in prepares a three-line summary of my day: the first line lets me specify what I did (“stayed at home”, “went to Rome”, “went to the doctor”, “worked a lot”, blank option), asks me what kind of day it was (“normal”, “good”, “bad”, “excellent”) and repeats that value as a hashtag that Day One recognizes as a tag.

There’s a couple of tricks worth noting in this fill-in. The cursor is positioned after a space at the end of the first line so that, after expansion, I can start typing right away if I have anything to add (and I usually do); if I choose the blank option (because my day didn’t meet any of the fill-in criteria), I only have to hit backspace and type (two spaces will be inserted with the blank option). Second, note how the TextExpander syntax allows you to set default options for popup menus that will be pre-selected when you fire off a snippet; I default my fill-in to “good day” both in the second line and hashtag, because I’m always optimistic.

To remember to write my Day One entry, I use a Launch Center Pro scheduled notification that launches Drafts every day at 10 PM.

A limitation of the TextExpander SDK in Drafts 3.0.4 is that abbreviations need to be manually typed by the user in order to trigger a snippet; you can’t launch Drafts with a URL scheme that contains your abbreviation (pre-filling the Drafts compose area) because that won’t be expanded (and won’t launch TextExpander if it’s a fill-in). Recognizing abbreviations in strings passed by URL schemes would contribute to better integrating TextExpander in iOS workflows for sharing and manipulating text across apps[3]; considering how Greg Pierce had to enable a similar option in Drafts 3.0[4], my hope is that developers will find a way to eschew the need of typing abbreviations. For now, I have to remember the abbreviations I have to type, so I have added Day One’s in the name of the Launch Center Pro notification.

The second Day One template uses a fill-in to keep track of how many crunches I do every day. The first line generates a timestamp to see when I finished exercising; I use the Time macro here, and I don’t care about Date because Day One takes care of that anyway. The following lines contain two single-line fill-ins to enter the amount of crunches and side crunches I did. Alas, TextExpander doesn’t let you specify the kind of keyboard you want to see by default – in this case, it would be perfect to have a Launch Center-like numeric keyboard for fill-ins. The last line of the snippet uses another hashtag that I can later browse in Day One to see how consistent and diligent I am with my exercising. Last, the full text is sent back to Drafts, which forwards it to Day One using the built-in action to create a new entry.

I am quite fond of the fill-in snippets for Day One. I’ve gotten used to them extremely quickly and it’s hard for me to think that TextExpander touch didn’t support this kind of functionality before. These simple snippets are helping me use Day One more on iOS, facilitating text input and removing friction without compromising the nature of the things I want to write in Day One.

My third fill-in snippet helps me launch site-specific Google searches through Chrome. Using a sss abbreviation, I can launch TextExpander, type my Google query, choose from a list of sites that I typically read, go back to Drafts, and open in Chrome.

Alongside string expansion in URL schemes, another improvement that I’d like to see in Drafts 3.0.4 would be the possibility to chain actions to snippet expansion. Right now, I am forced to type an abbreviation, get back to Drafts, and tap an action; in the future, I’d like to build workflows that can tell Drafts “after you receive the expanded text, launch this action automatically”.

Similarly, now that TextExpander uses x-callback-url, it would be nice to enable users to build their own URLs to launch TextExpander and pass expanded text to other apps or actions with x-success. And speaking of actions, I would go a step further and suggest that I would also welcome an option to call TextExpander’s built-in Mail and Copy actions via URL scheme (they are not scriptable in 2.0).

There are some things that I don’t like in TextExpander touch 2.0. UI polish was never Smile’s strong suit, but the look of fill-in snippets clashes badly with the standards we’re used to on iOS; I would like to see a revamped look for both the title bar and fill-in snippets themselves. The snippet editor, while improved, isn’t as functional as the Mac’s one, primarily because of the lack of smart recognition for macros, which still forces you to manually edit text of macros inside a snippet.[5] Looking ahead, I would like to see a way to build popup menus using variables as options, not just pre-defined text.[6]

TextExpander touch still isn’t as powerful and polished as TextExpander 4, but it’s gotten closer with today’s major update. Some of its limitations can’t be overcome unless Apple makes profound changes to iOS’ architecture; others could be fixed and improved by Smile.

Fill-in snippets and a new editor make TextExpander touch 2.0 a fantastic new version of TextExpander that I highly recommend. I look forward to seeing how third-party developers will integrate with the new SDK – TextExpander is now an impressive time-saving utility, but its strength lies in the developer community.

TextExpander touch 2.0 is available on the App Store.

Instead of producing a separate article, I thought it would be best to keep the same URL so that people revisiting the tutorial would immediately see what’s new. Most of it has been completely rewritten and updated with the latest information on how to get the most out of Outlook with your Gmail account. I’ve substantially streamlined the article, cutting out filler such as the introduction and extended outro.

The new how-to is divided into two major sections, one of which is completely optional. You can read the updated guide by clicking the link below.

How To Wrangle Outlook 2011 To Work With Gmail

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We have many great deals for #MacStoriesDeals today. You can find us as @MacStoriesDeals on Twitter.

Staff Favorites

• Last week’s sponsor: Smile Software
• New! Checkmark: $4.99 > Free (review)
• New! Google Hangouts for iOS: Free
• Skala Preview for Mac: $4.99 > Free & Skala View for iOS: Free
• Pixelmator 2.2: $14.99

________________________________________

Hardware & Online Deals

• New! Used Apple iPad 2 16GB WiFi Tablet: $499 > $250
• New! Refurbished Apple MacBook Pro Laptops: from $1,269 + free shipping

________________________________________

Mac Software

• New! DMG Canvas: $15 -> $7.50
• New! Corel Painter: $429 > $229
• New! Awesome PSD templates of hands holding iPhones: $5
• Envato Mini Bundle – 10 Landing Pages for $19

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Books, Audio and Video

• New! Learning to Love Evernote – A collection of 10 DRM-free Evernote screencasts: $4.99
• Daft Punk “Random Access Memories” Album streaming on iTunes for free
• Core Intuition Podcast with  Manton Reece and Daniel Jalkut: Free
• The Loop Magazine for iOS: Free with IAP

_________________________________________

Mac App Store

• New! Any Music Converter: $4.99 > 99¢
• New! Slink: $24.99 > $12.99
• New! Vector 2 – Audio Recorder & Editor: $19.99 > $14.99
• New! SmartBackup: $12.99 > $4.99
• New! Ravensword: Shadowlands: $12.99

_________________________________________

iPhone Apps

• New! Ninja Wrath: 99¢
• New! STREET FIGHTER IV: $4.99 > 99¢
• New! MoneyWiz – Personal Finance: $4.99 > 99¢
• New! Gravity Guy: $.99 > Free
• New! Staccal: $2.99 > $1.99

_________________________________________

iPad Apps

• New! Gravity Guy HD: $2.99 > Free

_________________________________________

Universal Apps

• New! N.O.V.A. 3: $6.99 > Free
• New! Karateka: $2.99 > $1.99
• New! Little Viking Dungeon Of Doom: 99¢
• New! Jacob Jones and the Bigfoot Mystery Ep 1: $2.99
• New! Karateka Classic: 99¢
• New! Gravity Guy 2: 99¢
• New! Mech Guardian: $1.99 > Free

But how are we going to know Apple has finally fixed iCloud syncing for developers and is really serious this time? And I’m not just talking about Core Data syncing, I’m also talking about the APIs developers are given to push document data back and forth. The broken stuff, the things developers laugh at Apple about and have given up on.

Here’s my short and inconclusive list of things that will let us know iCloud might be ready for real world developer use.

Gus has been trying to work with iCloud for VoodooPad since 2011. Some of the features he proposes have been requested by developers for over a year now.

I don’t think that “the Dropbox way” is a panacea for Apple’s syncing woes with third-party apps, but I do believe developers should get new tools, improvements, and fixes for iCloud.

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The initial release of CriticMarkup included a preprocessor for Marked 1.5+, but given the uncertain release date of the next incarnation of Marked, I wanted to make it work with the standard custom processor feature of Marked 1.4. A few adjustments to the existing script and one dependency later it’s good to go.

I use CriticMarkup whenever I need to track changes in a MultiMarkdown document. I launch Marked (from Sublime Text 2) on a daily basis to preview my articles and generate HTML, so it’s good to know the two systems can work together now.

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An iBooks version for iPad is also available.

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This is a particularly welcome addition as it has been requested by users willing to script iTunes’ speakers for years now. Previously, the best option was to rely on GUI scripting to enable/disable speakers; as I wrote in December, it’s good to see Apple is still actively supporting AppleScript on OS X.

Doug Adams has already put together a basic AirPlay script for iTunes 11.0.3.

In the 11.0.3 update for iTunes released today, Apple included a new “Updates” area for iOS apps. As noted by MacStories reader Graham Robson, the Apps area of iTunes now comes with a new “Updates” tab that lists available app updates (if any); if there are no updates, the screen will say “All Apps Are Up to Date”. As with previous versions of iTunes, you can press Command+R to check for updates both in the main Apps area, as well as the new Updates tab.

When updates are available, iTunes 11.0.3 will display a red “Update” ribbon on an application’s icon, similarly to how iOS displays a blue ribbon for “New” apps on the Home screen. In iTunes 11.0.3, updates are handled by the Updates area without requiring users to open the iTunes Store anymore.

After the launch of iTunes 11 in November 2012, the Updates screen remained surprisingly unchanged. The new app updates system is a welcome change — particularly because it doesn’t force users into an iTunes Store view anymore.

Update: Two more screenshots showing a contextual menu for apps that have an update, and the way iTunes 11.0.3 shows the changelog for an update with the same style of music albums.

Released in late November 2012, Apple today updated iTunes to version 11.0.3. The new version, available through the Mac App Store’s Software Update panel, brings a redesigned MiniPlayer, an improved songs view, support for multi-disc albums, and performance improvements.

The biggest change of iTunes 11.0.3 is the new MiniPlayer. Sporting a progress bar, the MiniPlayer now also comes with a larger artwork view that can be activated by clicking on the artwork thumbnail in the bottom left corner. The new artwork view will turn the MiniPlayer into a widget reminiscent of desktop music controllers like Bowtie and CoverSutra, with the usual controls to adjust volume, hide/view Up Next, and access an additional contextual menu. In the image above, you can see a composited screenshot of the new MiniPlayer views.

iTunes 11.0.3 is available now on Software Update and through Apple’s website.