iOS 7 is much more than a pretty face. Early “news” reporting focussed on the new look provided at the last minute by Jony Ive and team, but the inner workings of the new OS have clearly been under development for a lot longer. So, try to look past the bright colors, blurred popovers and beautiful parallax for a moment, and join us as we take a tour of the best new features of iOS 7.
Tasket is a service that syncs your Google Tasks list with your iOS Reminders list. It performs this magical feat pretty much flawlessly, using a Microsoft Exchange server to do the syncing, and letting you add and remove tasks from pretty much anywhere.
It’s our own fault. We all asked Apple to dramatically change the look and feel of the iOS operating system, which, until yesterday, remained largely unchanged since the introduction of the original iPhone back in 2007. And we all complained when it didn’t do that with iOS 6 this time last year.
But I can’t help but feel the Cupertino company is now punishing us for all those requests, and all that complaining we did before about its skeuomorphic designs.
When it comes to design, iOS 7 is vastly different to its predecessors. It still functions in much the same way — though there are some new features you’ll need to get used to — but it looks completely different. As soon as you power it up for the first time the minimalistic feel is staring back at you, but it isn’t until you’ve completed the setup process and arrived at your home screen that you want to vomit in your own lap.
Today’s the day, folks! In just a few hours, Apple will kick off WWDC 2013 with a first look at its next-generation iOS 7 operating system. We’re expecting big changes with this update, and according to sources for The Wall Street Journal, those will include a brand new look, new ways to share your photos and videos, and a new music streaming service.
You can also expect to see a glimpse of OS X 10.9 and new notebooks at the event.
Brett “I just built this” Terpstra has been at it again. Inspired by Evernote’s new reminders feature, launched last week, Brett decided to add something similar to his app NValt, itself a fork of the notable Notational Velocity. It’s called “nvremind,” and it’s pretty awesome.
Now, just by tagging a note with “@remind,” you’ll be sent a notification or an e-mail at the chosen time, and in Mountain Lion, clicking the notification will take you to the note in NValt.
Evernote has today rolled out a new Reminders service to its clients on the Mac, iOS, and the web. The new service rolls three of Evernote’s most-requested features into one, delivering in-app and email alarms, quick note-based to-do lists, and the ability to pin notes to the top of your note list.
Six months after taking responsibility of software design, Jony Ive is hard at work overhauling Apple’s upcoming iOS 7 operating system. And according to sources for Bloomberg, the changes he is making are so significant that they run the risk of delaying the update’s release.
Drafts 3.0 for iPad and iPhone launches today, and it turns an already useful text-wrangling app into a note-taking powerhouse. Added are organization tools for your old drafts, way better Evernote integration, great compatibility with iOS native Reminders app plus an all-new Actions Directory. Let’s take a look:
iCloud is a pretty neat system, working in the background across a ton of different apps without much input needed from us users, except our login name and password. It lets you sync Notes, Reminders, save documents, keep game saved-states, and even manage your music collection
Got a holiday or b-day wish list you’d like to share with significant others, making sure they never need to directly ask you what you want ever again? How about a grocery list that you can add to, secure in the knowledge that your husband or wife will know to stop and get garlic at the store on the way home from work? Or even a shared task list for your work teammates, guaranteeing you can hold them responsible for stuff on “the list”?
Sounds pretty handy, right? Well, you can make it happen fairly easily: use Reminders on the Mac, an app that comes with Mountain Lion and syncs via iCloud to iOS devices, as well as with iCloud.com. Here’s how to set it up.
Things, one of the most popular task management applications for Mac, has had its price tag slashed in half until the end of January. It’s the first time Things has been reduced since it hit the Mac App Store in July 2011, but you can now pick it up for just $24.99. If you already use Things on iOS, it’s a must-have.
We all should back our stuff up frequently and often. With the advent of iCloud and Time Machine, keeping your Mac and the important things on it backed up has gotten easier, but there’s always a good reason to back stuff up when you can.
Reminders often have a lot of important data about us, our schedules, and things we really need to do. Keeping these backed up separately, in addition to the system wide backups we all should do, is probably a good idea as well. Here’s how to back them up, and to restore them when you need to get them back.
Here’s a fun little extra for those of you that use the Reminders app on OS X.
Sometimes you just like to feel a bit more accomplished, a bit more successful at your day. One of the cool things about keeping a list of things you need to remember to do is actually checking them off as you do so. Heck, on a particularly frustrating day, you might want to know how many things you’ve actually completed, right?
Using the Reminders app, this is fairly simple to do.
One of the better Yuletide traditions is the venerable holiday Advent Calendar, in which each day of December leading up to Christmas is marked off on a special calendar by opening its corresponding door to find a small gift, toy or chocolate squirreled away inside.
This year, we here at Cult of Mac decided we wanted to give our readers their very own Apple-themed advent calendar, filled with the year’s best apps, gadgets, stories and other curios. So each day in December, we’re going to lovingly peel back the door on the Cult of Mac 2012 Advent Calendar to reveal another delicious morsel, something really special that came out this year that we think every one of you should enjoy.
We’re running a little behind, so playing catch up today by posting our first and second day picks along with our choice for December 3rd.
Our Day 2 choice? Clear, iOS’s best and most beautiful list-maker.
Here at Cult of Mac, we love Checkmark, the terrific task management app for iPhone. In fact, we think its awesome location-based reminders make it the perfect alternative to Apple’s own Reminders app. If you haven’t already discovered it yourself, then now’s the perfect time, because Checkmark is on sale for $0.99 just this week.
Ah, Reminders. They’re boring, but essential. Keeping track of the crazy number of things I have to do on a daily, weekly, even hourly basis relies on my remembering them, first of all, and a reminder now and then is essential.
One of the cool things about Apple’s Reminders app is that it allows you to set due dates and times with each task you enter. You can set these times and dates manually, or you can use natural language expressions with the app to set up your time-sensitive tasks a lot more quickly.
Here’s how to do it.
Wonderful Day is a different sort of one-dollar reminders app. It’s there to remind you of the things you’d like to get done, not the things you have to do. Although it sports an attractive visual design, it suffers from a handful of crucial failings that make it less useful than it could be.
Skeuomorphism, or the tendency to deliberately make something new look like something old and familiar. Some people love it, some people hate it and think it’s tacky.
No matter how you feel, his love for skeuomorphism is one of many reasons that former iOS chief Scott Forstall was fired yesterday. Replacing him is Apple’s Senior VP of Design, Jonathan Ive, who will lead a new Human Interface Group in Apple… and whom reportedly loathes skeuomorphism with every fiber of his being.
All that fake leather stitching, those hideous textures, those bizarre font choices in iOS’s stock apps? If Ive gets his way — and we think he will — they’re all about to change.
Here are the eight skeuomorphic apps in iOS 6 we hope Jony Ive is going to change in iOS 7, along with some third-party apps we hope he takes inspiration from.
While most of Apple’s stock iOS apps are pretty handy, there are a few that the large majority of us probably never open. I’m talking about apps like Stocks, Voice Memos, and Weather (which always seems to be inaccurate in the U.K.). Unfortunately, the Cupertino company doesn’t allow us to remove these, so the only way to do it was to jailbreak. Until now.
Thanks to a nifty new web app, you can temporarily remove stock iOS icons from your device without jailbreaking. Here’s how.
Got a birthday wish list you’d like to share with significant others, making sure they are never wanting for just the right gift to give you for the next celebration? How about a grocery list that you can add to secure in the knowledge that your husband or wife will know to stop and get garlic at the store on the way home from work? Or even a shared task list for your work teammates, guaranteeing that you can hold them responsible for stuff on “the list?”
Sounds pretty handy, right? Well, you can set this up using Reminders on the Mac, an app that comes with OS X Mountain Lion and syncs via iCloud to iPhones, iPads and iPod touches, as well as with iCloud.com Here’s how to set it up.
A wonderful new news app from Reuters kicks off this week’s must-have apps list, providing you with an “unprecedented photography experience” that allows you to immerse yourself in the biggest news stories from around the world. Also included in the roundup is a terrific app for making mobile websites from your iPhone, a new weather app, and more.
Checkmark, the supper-slick location-aware reminders app for the iPhone, has gotten a feature bump in its newest update that almost (almost!) makes it a new app.
And if you don’t already have Checkmark, then shame on you — the $2 app not only makes location-based reminders on your iPhone way easier and way better than the built in reminders, but it also works on your iPad.
Users of OS X Mountain Lion have been able to share reminders with other users since the new OS was released, but now Apple is giving iCloud.com users the ability to share their reminders even when they’re not on a Mac.
An update to iCloud’s Reminders app has added the Shared Reminders ability for users, making iOS 6 the only Reminders portal that can’t share reminders with other users.
Lots of folks might like to remember to follow up on specific emails. I know my life is full of email that, honestly, I don’t care much about, but really need to get back to at a certain point. Or that one email that needs a return reply but gets forgotten in the deluge of other, equally important emails during the day.
Unfortunately, there’s no “official” way to do this in Mail. There should be, of course, but there isn’t. Outlook has this functionality within a contextual menu, and there is a service for Gmail that lets you do something similar, but Apple’s Mail does not.
Luckily with a little ingenuity, we can get around this missing feature in Mail.
While the App Store has listed Things as an “amazing app” for iPhone 5 for the past week or so, the app didn’t actually support the new handset’s larger display. But it does now, thanks to a brand new update, which also delivers the ability to create new to-dos using Siri.