How you present information is often as important as what you present. Instead of relying on the same menu of tools every other professional uses, you can make yourself stand out with a clean, refined digital book.
FlipBooklets lets you create interactive PDF flip booklets that can be read on any device. And right now, the app’s on sale for $99 (regularly $360).
With custom web dashboard Start.Me, you can turn your web browser’s startup page into a highly customizable portal. You can add all the tools and data you need to get things done, making everyday tasks easy.
It’s a total game-changer for productivity. And right now, you can get a Start.Me Pro lifetime subscription for just $49. That’s more than half off the regular price of $100.
Text-to-voice software doesn’t have to sound like a robot reading a script. Text-to-speech app TexTalky uses artificial intelligence to produce amazing results. And right now, a lifetime subscription to TexTalky is on sale for $37 (regularly $540).
Apple’s first iOS 15.4 beta, rolled out to registered developers last week, lays the groundwork for web apps to deliver push notifications.
The feature, long available in Safari for macOS, always stood out as a notable omission on iPhone and iPad. Fortunately for those who use mobile web apps frequently, that looks set to change in the near future.
A lot of the work in web design is just figuring out where to put everything. You have the information, the visuals, the links, and everything else, but actually arranging it all in a pleasing way can take so much longer than creating the content itself.
Zen Wireframe Pro generates blueprints of websites, apps and more in an instant. And right now, you can get a lifetime subscription on sale for just $65 (regularly $1,080).
The iPod’s iconic click wheel had a good run, launching in 2004 with the iPod mini. It joined the fourth-generation iPod’s design later that year. It even auditioned in the odd product concept over the years. Finally, in 2014, the company phased it out with the iPod Classic.
But nothing great is gone forever, as a free new web music player app shows.
Microsoft has already begun internal testing of a cloud-based version of Xbox Game Pass playable on an iPhone or iPad. Public beta test is scheduled to begin in the spring.
This week we collaborate on songs in the “Google Docs for music,” edit video in Darkroom, block the Touch Bar from accidental taps, and gain other essential tools. These are the best apps and updates of the week.
Apple has released Speedometer 2.0, a benchmark that lets you test your browser’s web app responsiveness. The tool is part of Apple’s contribution to WebKit, a collaboration between Apple, Adobe Systems, Google, KDE, and others.
Speedometer 2.0 works by simulating “user interactions.” Essentially, it runs 480 tasks and then measures how long it takes your browser’s speed in carrying these out, before providing you with a report.
These days you can easily share data and collaborate on almost anything, from Rdio playlists to photo streams. But when it comes to plain old written text, your options are terrible. You’re pretty much caught between working on a shared file in Google Docs or shuttling versions of your work back and forth via email. Add more than one collaborator and this becomes a total nightmare.
Thankfully, tools exist to smooth the process of collaborating on writing projects. I’m currently editing the second draft of a novella, and I’m looking for a way to work with “beta” readers. I’m testing several pieces of software, and so far one called Draft is in the lead. Not only does it let you share a document with other people, it lets the team comment on any part of the source document and also allows them to edit a copy. Then, when they submit their versions, you can preview any changes before accepting or rejecting them.
Better still, because Draft can sync with a document in Dropbox (as well as several other cloud services), you can sync the edits from your beta team with a local app, like Scrivener. Here’s what you need to make the collaborative magic happen.
