We’ve already enthused at length about Mailbox, Orchestra’s incredible new e-mail app for the iPhone, but if you want to see it in action or don’t have the time to read our full review, we’ve got you covered. Here’s a quick five minute walkthrough of Mailbox in action.
The problem with inboxes isn’t just that the mail piles up in them. Without constant vigilance, inboxes fester.
That message you meant to get back to gets buried in a pile of PR pitches, or deal mailers, or unsolicited spam, until the prospect of doing something as simple as writing back to an email from a week ago becomes as onerous a task as snorkeling in a sewage tank. In a day and age where walking away from a computer for just a few hours can result in dozens of emails piling up, all of which have different priorities, email has undergone a horrible mutagenic transformation in the minds of most users: from a supremely useful communication tool to a digital black hole where information, once trapped, inescapably leaves the universe forever.
The idea behind Orchestra’s new iOS emailing app, Mailbox, is simple. As we know, inboxes fester without constant vigilance… so why not make remaining vigilant as easy and satisfying as ticking off items on a to-do list? That’s what Mailbox is in a nut shell: an app that takes the GTD ethos and gesture-based interface of an app like Clear and applies it to your inbox.
How well does it work? So well that we’re comfortable saying that if you get any volume of email, Mailbox is worth throwing any other iOS email client in the trash.
It’s finally here! Mailbox — the incredible new e-mail client from Orchesta, that is one part Sparrow and one part Clear — has finally dropped on the iTunes App Store after months of buzz. And boy, is it worth it.
I was thinking that I’d make an incredibly clever play on the Wash’n’Go ads here, drawing a comparison between the new Horizon app, which lets you check the weather and your calendar at the same time. “Use two apps when you leave the house?” I would ask, before wrestling with the punchline, and somehow turning the original “Not me – I just want to Wash… And Go!” into something clever and calendar/weather related.
But as you can plainly see, I failed. I made a cup of delicious coffee instead, and then typed the code to add the break to this post…
Some have the mad iPhone movie-making skillz of an Anderson or a Scorsese. Others, not so much. If you fall in the latter category, don’t worry — just jam some fancy graphics in there with the free Jollyfy app and you’re good to go.
It’s a pretty simple process. Fire up the app, pick a theme (the app’s App Store page says there are hundreds to choose from) and start shooting.
BlackBerry — previously Research in Motion — launched the new BlackBerry Z10 last week, the first smartphone to run the company’s new BlackBerry 10 operating system. Originally set to launch in late 2012, the Z10 has been a long time coming for BlackBerry fans, and it’s a hugely important milestone for the Canadian company.
Many see this as BlackBerry’s last hope of survival in today’s cutthroat smartphone market. It’s been rapidly losing market share to Android and iOS devices over the past five years, and it hasn’t evolved quick enough to put up any sort of a fight. But it’s better later than never.
BlackBerry 10’s here now, and with the help of the Z10 — and later the Q10 — it’s going to be trying to persuade you to give up your iPhone or Android-powered smartphone in favor of a brand new platform. But is it good enough?
I’m a long-time iOS user who recently made the switch to Android, and I’ve been really curious to see if the Z10 is any good. I’ve been using the device almost exclusively since its release; here’s Cult Of Android’s review.
MultiMarkdown, the (surprise!) MultiMarkdown editor for OS X, has just launched its new 2.0 version, and it’s fantastic. If you write articles in MarkDown on your Mac, or even on your iPad, then you should probably just go spend the $5 right now.
Pinbook is an excellent iOS client for the excellent paid anti-social bookmarking service Pinboard. Imagine if De.licio.us had never been sold to Yahoo and had instead started charging money to keep your bookmarks tagged and organized online. Further, imagine that the developer kept a Twitter stream that read something like the crotchety ramblings of your drunken (and outspoken) uncle. That service would be Pinboard.
The (non-affiliated) Pinbook client has just been updated to v1.3, and with the update come some fantastic new features. Let’s take a look:
If you took the plunge and jailbroke your iPhone yesterday, you may have noticed that the Weather app in iOS doesn’t really work anymore. Like, at all. When you try to open the app on iPhone it just crashes, and then crashes some more.
Evad3rs figured out that the jailbreak screws up some files like com.apple.mobile.installation.plist. It’s not a big deal, and every jailbreak has its little quirks, but if you can’t wait for evad3rs to push their fix to Cydia you can fix the problem on your own manually.
Here’s how to do it:
The new 128GB iPad with Retina display is now available to order from the Apple online store. The device is priced from $799, and it’s currently shipping in 1-3 business days. You’ll also be able to find it in your local Apple retail store.
I have a history of losing money when I bet on my own predictions, so if you’re smart you should probably ignore this one: Vine – Twitter’s video-sharing app – will wither and die. Animated GIFs, on the other hand, have already managed to outlive MySpace and GeoCities, so it’s a safe bet (even for me) that they’ll keep on keeping on.
Which is all a rather roundabout way of introducing VineGifR, a Mac app which will take your futureless Vines and GIF-ify them.
If your iPad doodles are a little primitive, there are a few apps that can get you canvasing the art greats from Caravaggio to Picasso and creating some deft original strokes of your own.
So says Sumit Vishwakarma in a talk for Macworld/iWorld 2013, adding that if you’re willing to forgo one cinnamon latte at Starbuck’s, that money spent in apps will take your work to the next level.
Vishwakarma is an iPad art advocate whose work has been featured at the first Mobile Art Festival in Los Angeles, the Apple flagship store in San Francisco, and the Mobile Creativity & Innovation Symposium. He also teaches free workshops to promote iPad art and animation to kids, teens and adults.
Here are his top picks:
Along with Evernote’s big Penultimate announcement yesterday came another big update. Evernote Hello, the person-remembering app, is now at version 2.0. It adds two great features: business-card scanning and a tie-in with social networks.
Yes, you’ve seen both these before, but not quite as slick as this.
Pocket, the link-saving service formerly known as Read It Later, has been updated on iOS with a few new additions. Most notably, Facebook sharing has been added and tied into iOS 6’s direct Facebook integration. That means zero setup required inside the Pocket app.
A couple workflow-related improvements have also been made.
SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD/iWORLD 2013 – Maintaining a Mac is a lot easier than a PC but it still requires some work. After a few years of use, your hard drive space starts to shrink and finding the right files to delete isn’t always obvious.
MacPaw is releasing a new app to help people free up more space on their Macs. It’s called CleanMyMac 2 and it will dive deep into your harddrive to clean out all the crap you don’t need.
Writing Kit is one of the best text editors on the iPad (and iPhone), but it can be a little confusing at first. It’s made for people who write for a living, and specifically for those who write for the web. To this end, Writing Kit contains not only a world-class Markdown-friendly text editor, but a web browser, quick-research tools and connections to an embarrassment of other web services.
Once you get used to it, Writing Kit will quickly become your writing app of choice. With that in mind, here’s a guide to help you make the most of it.
Are you the kind of person who jumps up at the end of a movie, skipping the credits to get to the parking lot (or restroom – thanks, giant soda tub) before everyone else? If so, you’ve probably missed some pretty neat after credit experiences, called stingers. These are extra little bits of movie, teasers, or even bloopers, that are shown after the credits roll to reward the die-hard movie goers for their patience. The recent run of Marvel movies, for example, all teased the eventual Avengers movie at the end of Captain America, The Hulk, and Iron Man. If you left early, you’d have missed it.
Luckily, now, there’s an app to make sure you never do, and, conversely, you don’t sit around for an entire credit roll for no reason.
You’ve probably seen quite a few headlines today about Twitter’s new Vine iPhone app displaying pornography. Vine went live in the App Store last week, and the video sharing service has garnered quite a bit of attention due to its parent company, Twitter.
Vine was made an Editors’ Choice by Apple in the App Store, but the app has been de-promoted following all the porn hubbub. Apple has yet to give an official comment on the issue or pull Vine from the App Store completely.
What does all this mean for Vine, and more importantly, the App Store’s policies on porn?
Jailbreaking your iPhone gives you the ability to tweak and customize nearly every facet of iOS, but new jailbreaks are few and far between these days. For example, there still hasn’t been a full jailbreak for iOS 6 from last summer, although one is on the distant horizon.
People jailbreak their iPhones for all sorts of reasons, whether it be free tethering, themes, or quick access to settings. The most common reason to jailbreak is actually more of a philosophy. There are millions of iPhone owners out there who want to be able to have greater control over their iOS experience. What if you want to hide stock apps you don’t use, or even just get rid of your carrier logo?
Fortunately, you can actually do those last two things on a non-jailbroken iPhone with relative ease, and here’s how:
Cyclemeter, long my favorite iPhone app for tracking and recording my rides using GPS, has been updated to support the iPad. This makes it — as far as I know anyway — the only app which will natively turn your iPad mini into a dash-mounted in-flight computer for your bike.
You should probably check if your cash is still in your wallet… ’cause according to Apple’s recent earnings call, they just made all the money. We put some perspective on just how huge Apple’s Q1 cash hoard was on our all-new CultCast, then expertly deconstruct Tim Cook’s cryptic words about new and unannounced products.
But wait, there’s more! From iOS 7, to bigger-screen iPhones, to our favorite Mac apps, we answer your Facebook questions in our newest segment, CultCast Q&A.
Get a fun weekly dose of all things Apple! Subscribe to The CultCast now on iTunes, or easily stream new and previous episodes via Apple’s free Podcasts App.
The Bookcase is a three-dollar pocket database for your book collection, one that takes its role very seriously and might be best suited to people with a professional requirement to manage a large library.
App.net might be quickly turning into the recumbent bicycle of internet services, frequented only by anorak-wearing beardoes, but a new ADN client has a feature so neat that it should be included in any app which logs into a third-party service.
It’s called Riposte, and when you log in for the first time, it has a button that will send you straight off to 1Password.
Apple has pulled the apps of popular photo-sharing site 500px over concerns that it is too easy to search for nude photographs within the app. This, despite the fact that 500px’s method of dealing with searches for nude images is even more prohibitive than that of the official Flickr iPhone app. Could Flickr be next?
Thread is a contacts app for the iPhone and iPad which follows the current trend in flat, minimalist interface design. If you’re a fan of the latest Twitterific, or Letterpress, then you’re going to love the look of Thread.