If you write in Markdown on your Mac, then you should buy Brett Terpstra’s Marked 2. It could be described as a tool for previewing Markdown files, but that would be like calling an iPhone a… well, a phone.
According to Derek “beefcake with a brain” Morgan from Criminal Minds, “sitting is the new smoking,” and too much of it will kill you. But who wants any boring old standing desk? Yes, you could put a couple of milk crates onto your regular desk and prop your MacBook on top, but why do that when you can spend $3,900 on the Stir Kinetic Desk, a standing desk with a touch screen?
If you have a router (no, not that kind of router), a chunk of plywood and some mad craft skillz, then you could make your own Undulating Contours charging station. If you are missing any one of those, then, it’d be better to spend the $24 on the real thing, hand-hewn in Louisiana.
Speaking of snapping photos and saving them in Evernote, Notograph is a beautiful new iPhone that will do just that, as well as syncing with Dropbox and iCloud.
The Evernote iOS app has gotten another big update, barely a week after it was revamped for iOS 7 and made useful again. The news today is the new Post-It camera, which now lets you scan the yellow sticky squares right into your Evernotes.
Earlier this morning in the Cult of Mac chatroom, Killian told me that “iOS 7 as a whole is little more than a lick of paint.” He was baiting me of course (I hope so anyway, or I have some punishment to administer), but it’s a common enough view. However, as we shall see, there’s plenty going on under the hood too.
Exhibit A: Mail app now lets you look right inside ZIP attachments and open the individual documents direct.
Warning: Sarcasm follows.
“Are you drinking enough water?” asks BluFit. Well are you? This is how to tell:
If the answer to the above question is “yes,” then you should drink some water.
I’m kidding, of course: BluFit is in fact a totally legit gadget that makes it easy to track how much water you drink. What is it? It’s a water bottle that connects wirelessly to an app on your iPhone.
Seriously.
Strava Run, the fitness-tracking app that records your runs and lets you compete against strangers who have use the same routes, might be the first fitness app to take advantage of the M7 Motion Coprocessor (MoCoPro) in the iPhone 5S.
Now the app will not only run for longer thanks to saved battery power, it’s more accurate too.
Here’s an idea to file in your Evernote app under “Why didn’t anyone do this before?”: Evernote Post-It notes. That’s right; Evernote has teamed up with 3M to offer multi-colored, Evernote-branded sticky notes which can be scanned into the app to save, well, forever.
There’s a funny fact in the world of iOS apps: Whereas one-man shop can manage to have a radically new version of its app available day and date with a big iOS update, giant software companies seem to take years to get things done. Spotify took (literally) years to come up with a ho-hum iPad app, and Instagram still isn’t on the iPad. One can only assume it will never be designed for the tablet.
And speaking of Instagram, this new iOS “update” is a sham.
Vesper, the iPhone note-taking app made by the all-star team of Brent “NetNewsWire” Simmons and John “Daring Fireball” Gruber, was already pretty iOS 7-friendly at launch a few months back. Now it has received an actual proper iOS 7 update, and it’s even better.
If Apple made a notebook (a paper notebook, with paper pages) then it would probably look something like the Baron Fig notebook: The design is understated, obvious even, but it’s chock-full of tiny details that should make it a pleasure to use.
Oh, man, this is an invention likely to make it impossible for me to ever leave the house. It’s called the Brewbot, and it’s an iPhone controlled machine which brews “high quality craft beers” without leaving your armchair.
Is nothing sacred? I had thought that paper airplanes might be the last holdout for fully-analog toys. After all, all you need is a sheet of paper, a pair of functioning hands and a place to throw stuff. Even in jail these things can be found, and while your first attempts might not fly so well, the joy of the game is in the tuning and improving of your designs.
But now even that simple pleasure has been ruined by technology: the PowerUp 3.0 iPhone-Controlled Paper Airplane is a thing which will soon be available.
Up until today, my page scanner of choice has been Scanner Pro from Readdle, a universal app which uses the iPhone/iPad camera to snap pictures of your documents and send them off to any and every cloud service.
But after today, my new favorite might just be the new PDFPen Scan+, a universal app from Smile Software that not only scans but turns your images into searchable PDFs using OCR.
While we’re all looking over here at the big, bulky, ruggedized mounts that let us carry our iPhones on our bike handlebars, over there in Austria they’re making a minimal mount that you can leave on the bike or carry in your pocket. It’s called the Finn, and according to at least two of my German friends, it’s excellent.
Cult of Mac reader Rishi Kaneria e-mailed to tell us about his amazing slow-motion video, shot on – you guessed it – the iPhone 5S, at 120fps. Not bad, huh?
When our own Rob LeFevre reviewed the Earskins, he was surprised to find them to be an “essential accessory” for his EarPods. I decided to give them a go too. And guess what? They really are essential: I actually have a spare set, because now I can’t imagine using my EarPods without them.
There’s one feature in Adobe’s new Photoshop Elements 12 which demonstrates exactly the market that the app is aimed at: Pet Eye Correction. That’s right: if you’re the kind of person who takes flash photos of their pets with a shitty compact camera, and yet is willing to spend around $100 on an application which will help organize and edit your photos, then Elements 12 is for you.
Maybe I’m a big dummy, but I always thought that the whole point of “read later” apps was that you could shunt long-form articles off the desktop and onto a device that was better suited for reading for extended periods. After all, on the desktop a combination of bookmarks and Safari’s Reader view takes care of things.
But what do I know? Clearly there’s a place for reader apps on the Mac, and the $10 Words looks to be a very nice example.
The Plicopá is a cardboard iPad sleeve which unfolds and refolds into a sturdy tablet stand, ready to support your iPad for poking, or just to prop it up while you tap out words on an external keyboard. It looks to be pretty much ideal for travelers.
Marshall’s beautiful Stanmore brings some retro styling to the Bluetooth speaker game, looking a lot like one of the company’s classic combo amps or – if you want to really rock out – like the front of a speaker from a stack, with the head-unit controls concealed on the top.
Oh man, I love feeding pets, and they love it too. After your little friend has finally dragged you out of bed (by attacking your feet with sharp claws [cat] or nuzzling you with his disgusting wet nose [dog]), you both head to the kitchen together. He’s all around your ankles, excited for breakfast. And you? Totally up early – again! – and ready to make a delicious cup of coffee with plenty of time to enjoy it.
Now, though, there’s a new way to feed pooch or moggy: the Pintofeed. Here’s how the morning goes with a little iPhone-controlled automation:
Your loyal companion scratches at your closed door. You hear him and reach for your phone, irritated. You tap a button, and the Pintofeed in the kitchen dumps another load of dried meat pellets into its dusty bowl. Your pet goes to the kitchen, alone, and half an hour later you wake up, rush into your clothes and pick up a Starbucks on the way to work. Nice going, you lazy, selfish creep.
The Magnefix book case for the iPad mini solves two problems: first, it protects the edges and corners of the little iPad like the Smart Cover never can, and second, it converts into a stand that doesn’t suck – the opposite of the iPad Mini’s own Smart Cover.
And, as all future-looking gadgets do, it works with the help of frikkin’ magnets.
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The case, which costs £36 (or $58) is made with an polypropylene core and a TPU outer, with a microfiber lining to keep the screen nice and clean. To turn it into a stand, you open it up, flip the cover round back and the magnets take over, snapping the cover into place to make a sturdy stand. Compare this to the Apple case which collapses like a house of cards the first time you tap the screen.
That said, I will remain a loyal user of the official cover as it does what I need (screen protection, sleep/wake) and weighs almost nothing. Plus, it’s a pretty great tool for killing mosquitos (when removed from the iPad of course).
The new Magnefix is available now.
Source: C6
I thought that iOS 7 was ready to go on the iPad, but today I’m actually trying to do some work, and my cloud of optimism has been quickly dispelled. It’s a combination of OS-level bugginess and apps which have been too-hastily updated, and it’s causing all sorts of trouble.
The biggest problem? Using an external Bluetooth keyboard. So it’s pretty ironic that this post is about the excellent new keyboard shortcuts in iOS 7. Especially in Safari.
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The Tao of Mac blog points us to three great new shortcuts, lifted straight from OS X:
Cmd+L to move the focus to the location bar
Cmd+T to open a new tab
Cmd+W to close a tab
This is surprisingly useful, although I’m ungrateful enough to wonder why there’s no way to navigate between tabs. I’ve rattled away at my Logitech K811 and no combo of arrow key or square brackets and modifiers seems to work.
Another great side-effect of that Cmd+L shortcut is that you can now trigger an in-page search from the keyboard: just hit Cmd+L and type your query. At the bottom of the list that pops up are the in-page results, and because you’re using an external keyboard, there’s no on-screen keyboard to get in the way.
Also, double-tapping the Logitech’s home button takes you into the app-switcher view, and in iOS 7 that means that the previous app’s screen thumbnail pops into view. Combine this with the fact that any keystrokes are passed to the current app (even though you can’t see it), and you can now copy-type from one app to the next. Very nice indeed. Sadly, you need to reach up and tap the screen to actually switch to the app.
Source: Tao Of Mac