Straight outta Leipzig comes the latest update to Soulmen’s Ulysses III, the writers’ text editor for the Mac. As ever with Soulmen updates, the fact that this is a “mere” point update shouldn’t fool you. Ulysses III 1.2 is the kind of thing many folks would ship as a v2.0.
I keep a movie to-watch list, a plain text list somewhere in my Dropbox. And as you may have guessed, I never read it. What I probably need is an app like Moviedo, a to-do list for movies that runs on your iPhone.
The iOS Kindle app just got an update, and it’s a good one. The left sidebar that you can summon while reading now has direct access to the table of contents, and you can access X-Ray info just by tapping on a word.
CloudConvert, the web-app that lets you convert almost any file format to any other file format, now comes as an iOS app. It still uses CloudConvert’s great web service as its engine, but adds a native iOS interface.
You know what that means? It means you can send any file to CloudConvert using the standards iOS “Open In…” dialog. Got a Word DOCX file in your webmail and need to send it to someone else as a PDF? No problem.
Eye-Fi – the company that makes the Wi-Fi-enabled SD cards we use for covering trade-shows – has launched a Eye-Fi Cloud, a new app and service that stores all your photos in the cloud, whether you took them on your iPhone or a big fancy camera.
In the past, when Apple has grown the screen of an iOS device — for example, with the transition from the iPhone 4s to the iPhone 5 — Apple has taken pains to keep the pixel density the same. The Retina Display on the iPhone 5 is 326 pixels per inch, just like the iPhone 4s. This makes it easier for developers and helps prevent the widespread fragmentation seen in the Android operating system.
With many rumors pegging the forthcoming iPhone 6 as having a much bigger 4.7-inch display, a practical issue presents itself: what would that mean for resolution and pixel-density? If Apple increases the display size, will they increase the resolution to compete with the likes of HTC and Samsung’s 1080p Android smartphones? And if so, what does that mean for app developers?
You might as well delete all the layer-blending apps on your iPhone or iPad right now, becasue Union is better than all of them. It comes from Pixite apps, the developer behind Unbound, LoryStrips, Flickring, Tangent and more, and it lets you stack images, then blend and manipulate them to stunning effect. How stunning? Take a look:
I have a Libratone Zipp speaker, and it works great – within five line-of-sight meters of my router that is. Any further and it just goes nuts, shows me a red light and refuses to play.
What I need is a way to extend my network throughout my apartment, but without spending a fortune on AirPorts Express. If only there were a $30 box that not only extended my network but came in a package so tiny I could dot them around the house.
Wait, what’s that? The Gramofon?
I must admit, I got pretty excited just now when I got an email from Amazon telling me that my Kindle documents had been integrated with my Cloud Drive. At last, I thought, I can easily upload personal documents and have my reading progress synced between all my Kindle devices and apps.
But guess what? Disappointment.
Ever since Office for iPad launched a few weeks ago, folks have been claiming that it costs $100 just to use it. This isn’t true at all. And as of now, with Microsoft’s new Office 365 Personal plan for $7 per month (or $70 per year), it’s even less true.
Oh man. It looks like “fairly well designed photo-storage and viewing services” are the new black. Or something. Now Amazon is back in the game with an updated version of Amazon Cloud Drive Photos, an app with a name only a Microsoft worker drone could love.
What’s new? Nothing less than the return of enjoyment.
Effect Stack is an OS X image editor that costs just $10 and weighs in at 3.9MB. It’ll process any image your throw at it, including RAW files, and its gimmick is that you can stack effects (hence the name) and shift the layers of this stack to switch things up.
It’s not bad.
Cups is an amazing proposition, and it’s going to be fascinating to see if it works. The app/service gives you unlimited coffee in NYC, from $45 per month. Yup, subscription coffee, just like Netflix or Spotify.
Folks who work with words have Drafts. People who want to capture a quick picture have a home-screen shortcut to the built-in camera. But what do musicians have to remember a tune when it pops into their head? Now they have Hum, an iPhone app for capturing song-writing ideas.
Remember Brett Terpstra’s Total Numbers service from last week? Good, because now it’s available in and even more useful and labor-free form as a PopClip Extension.
Now all you need to do is highlight a bunch of numbers with the mouse, and the new “Sum” extension will add them all up for you.
Gusto is yet another iPhone email app that promises to fix your email, and it looks pretty good. It’s Gmail-only and iPhone-only, and its gimmick is that it separates your mail messages into categories according to their attachments. It also has killer search capabilities.
Here’s how to do Spotify voice search on the iPhone or iPad.
Alternatively you can buy the new Vela app for $0.99, and skip all the tedious screen tapping.
Oh man, I just can’t wait for this week to be over. First the entire Internet turns out to have been broken for the last two years. Then Dropbox hires Condoleezza “Cruella de Vil” Rice to help out with security. And now Amazon has bought out ComiXology, the digital comic book store/platform.
I’m ready for the weekend.
Apart from “correct horse battery staple,” the most secure passwords aren’t words, they’re phrases. You don’t even need crazy symbols or hard-to-determine numerals (is that an l or a 1, a 0 or an O?) – just a good, longish phrase made out of words.
And now you don’t even have to make one up. Using the XKPasswd generator, based on but not associated with Randall Munroe’s amazing comic strip XKCD, you can generate secure pass phrases easily.
PhotoFlip has the beginnings of a great idea, let down by poor implementation. Here’s the idea: The app lets you add notes to the photos you have in your iPhone camera roll, without copying those images. That is, the pictures stay in your regular photo library, and the app just displays them with your text note added underneath.
It’s a great idea right? It uses almost no storage, and doesn’t double up on picture libraries. You can even snap photos from within the app and they’re saved ion the regular camera roll, and everything is synced via iCloud (if you want anyway).
So what’s wrong?
Ever been on a plane and seen some suit squished into his chair, browning his ThinkPad’s screen with his office breath and lining up some pictures and text on a PowerPoint slide? “Jeez,” you think. “Not only is this dork-o inflicting yet more PowerPain on the world, but he thinks it’s important enough to do on a plane.”
Next time you see one of these sad specimens, you might point them in the direction of Deckset, a slideshow maker that works using Markdown.
Lightroom for the iPad is here. It’s called Lightroom Mobile, and it runs smoothly on anything down to an iPad 2 (or first-gen mini). You can use the app to edit and organize any photos in your Lightroom collections, and it syncs automatically (and near instantly) with Lightroom on your desktop (you’ll need to upgrade to v5.4).
And the price? It’s free, but only if you already subscribe to Adobe’s $10-per-month Photoshop Photography Program, which also gets you the desktop versions of Photoshop and Lightroom. There’s also a 30-day free trial to check it out.
So how does it work? Lets take a nice long look.
Growthy is an app that finally – finally! – replaces the biro-etched notches on your kitchen door frame with a series of in-app purchases, codifying your precious memories as stars on your iPhone screen. Welcome to the future.
Of all the ambient noise apps I’ve tried, myNoise is the best. Based on the well-regarded website of the same name, myNoise for iPhone is a “noise generator,” not just an app that plays recordings of rain and coffee shops.
And it also looks as good as it sounds.
Evernote’s web clipper extension for OS X Safari is a thing of beauty. The Evernote bookmarklet clipper (on iOS and OS X) is a slow piece of crap.
Phillip Gruneich’s bookmarklet, however, is a thing of beauty, a concerto features some of your favorite players: Drafts, Markdown, Readability, and some plain old clever thinking.