ReadKit initially answered the requests for a proper Instapaper and Readability desktop app, including Pocket and later adding support for popular bookmarking sites like Delicious and Pinboard. Bringing together the multiple places where people are likely to save stuff on the web, ReadKit 2.0 adds offline support for RSS to the mix, and also includes support for Fever and NewsBlur. But by far, my favorite feature is smart folders.
I have a big backlog of articles I have to read through in Pocket, but I’m only interested in a few topics at the moment. Smart folders act as ReadKit’s playlists, bringing forward articles based a set of rules. For example, I can make sure I’ve caught up on all the games I like by looking for keywords in the title.
ReadKit 2.0 also adds a few new options for readers in the preferences, such the option to save and restore reading positions and to cache images locally. Under the hood you’ll find improve sync performance and various other bug fixes.
Today, Google announced new features for Gmail that sorts your inbox into various categories for social network notifications, receipts and shipping updates, and promotions from your favorite shopping sites. While Priority Inbox made an attempt to surface only the stuff that really mattered, categories breaks the inbox down to a series of tabs that should help cut down on some of the clutter. Categories and tabs are basically pre-defined filters and labels with training wheels.
On the desktop, the new inbox groups your mail into categories which appear as different tabs. You simply choose which categories you want and voilà! Your inbox is organized in a way that lets you see what’s new at a glance and decide which emails you want to read when.
Categories for Android, iOS, and the desktop will be gradually rolling out to Gmail users and their respective app stores over the coming weeks. In the meantime, be sure to check out The Verge, who have an initials hands-on with the latest features.
One of the best methods of taking photos of stars, planets and satellites is with a webcam, like the old Toucam Pro, and processing with Registax. That’s not the easiest method though, and when you want photos of the moon, an iPhone does the job very well.
Jared Earle captures spectacular photographs of the moon by attaching an iPhone to a spotting scope with an interesting set of accessories and offers up some tips on how to get the perfect shot. So cool.
Through a simple card, Analog Camera introduces itself with a short tutorial and animated image, explaining how to set exposure and autofocus. Personally, I wanted to fool around with the app before I read the manual, seeing if I could discover which gestures did what and whether I could navigate the app without having getting frustrated or lost. I took the same approach with Clear, Realmac Software’s earlier collaborative effort on iOS, and ultimately determined that there was enough feedback and freedom to figure it out on your own. So I dismissed the card, and would have to do so a few more times as I got around to viewing different parts of the app.
Apple CEO Tim Cook will be joining Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher tonight for D11’s opening session at the Terranea Resort in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. The Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital conference begins today on May 28th and ends on May 30th, inviting on stage several industry tech titans such as Dick Costolo of Twitter and Elon Musk of Tesla to discuss the impact of today’s technology and what’s in store for the future.
Tim Cook, having spoken at D10, has stayed the course at Apple by introducing a brand new iPhone, a more powerful iPad, and the incredibly successfuliPad mini. New, industry changing Macs were also introduced in the form of the MacBook Pro with Retina display and nearly razor thin iMacs. But he’s also been hard at work pushing Apple in new directions, switching up assumed product release dates and hinting at new opportunities, suggesting new product lines during fiscal conference calls. Although Apple had an incredible 2nd fiscal quarter for 2013, publications like the Wall Street Journal have tried to rewrite the narrative, suggesting that demand for Apple products is falling in the face of strong competition and that innovation is stale due to the lack of new products. Rumor has it, however, that the company is remaining steadfast and focused on bringing to light a new look and feel for their flagship operating system, iOS, re-imaging the appearance of a core interface that’s been a mainstay on the iPhone since 2007.
Much of the interest around new product lines and iOS’ expected rethinking has been driven by Tim Cook’s management switch up that occurred last October, where Senior Vice President of iOS Software Scott Forstall and Senior Vice President of Retail were let go as Jonathan Ive stepped in to oversee Human Interface design across the company. Bob Mansfield, instead of retiring, was promoted to Senior Vice President of Technologies while Craig Federighi would take the helm of Senior Vice President of Software Engineering. It was an unexpected simplifying of Apple’s core management structure, the conclusion of which likely awaits at WWDC’s opening Keynote on June 10th.
With these events in mind, tonight’s D11 should bring forward Tim Cook’s perspective on the current condition of Apple and where it’s headed. At D10, Tim Cook was asked about his relationship with Steve Jobs, what that meant to him, and figuring out who he was as a person. This time, we should expect a lot of talk focusing on his vision, how he’s reigning in the company as his own, and how he views the competition as it currently stands.
All Things D will not have a live stream of the event, so we’ll be following along with others in attendance. Be sure to check out: Engadget, The Verge, and MacRumors for extensive coverage.
On Monday, Opera released a preview of their upcoming desktop browser that uses WebKit instead of Presto to render web pages. Opera Next 15 is built atop Chromium, and thus shares a lot of similarities with Google Chrome. The preview brings Opera on the desktop in parity with the recent update to Opera for Android, bringing over features such as Discover for browsing through local news headlines. Stash, a new feature added to Opera, is a sort of visual Reading List for saving webpages you want to look at later. Opera Mail, once built into the dated Presto-based browser, has been split into a separate application which is also now available for preview.
Our iPhones are always in our pockets, making sure that we won’t miss an important conversation or opportunity by vibrating, chirping, or ringing in our pockets at a moment’s notice. Sometimes we forget, however, that music and video still plays when our phones are muted, or that holding onto the home button a bit too long still activates Siri’s beep to start speaking. Ron Adair wanted to solve the problem of knowing whether or not his phone was really muted, so he created a plug for the iPhone called the Mutator.
Mutator is a simple little pyramid that plugs into your iPhone’s headphone jack, silencing all but the most important notifications like alarms. While the iPhone’s mute switch takes care of incoming notifications and the ringer, Mutator takes care of everything else like YouTube videos and games. Cleverly, Mutator can be twisted to unmute sounds when you’re ready to listen in.
This Kickstarter has a modest goal of $24,000 to cover tooling, manufacturing, and delivery costs. Pledges start at $5, but a $16 pledge promises you your very own Mutator if the project is successful.
Shazam is one of those things that has always felt entirely magical. With a tap of a button, usually any song playing from a static filled speaker is correctly tagged, and sorted into a tab where you can revisit it on your accord at a later time. It’ll pluck songs out of the air in a noisy bar, identify what’s playing on TV, and even tell you whether MSTRKRFT’s remix of Monster Hospital is playing before the keynote starts. And Shazam is always in my pocket, ready to settle disputes on what band is actually playing and what the name of the song actually is.
There’s a social element to Shazam which I personally don’t find appealing. I don’t want to see what people are tagging locally, nor do I care about Facebook integration or top tracks. They’re discovery tools, but I don’t care about what you’re tagging from your radio station. Rdio’s Heavy Rotation provides the most intimate kind of feedback between friends as does Spotify with their social features. Shazam wants me to share, to gather demographic data and to get people really using their sharing tools, but what I’m hearing right now is really the only thing that’s relevant.
So the exploration features, the maps and the social sharing, I’m entirely disinterested in. I mean, locally, we’re all listening to the same radio stations or watching the same television shows in company anyway. I use Shazam as my own personal list of things I’ve heard and want to know more about. What I do care about is tagging — the blue spinning circle and thumping waveform, as well as the immediacy of the feedback it provides. Auto tagging is entirely about this.
Auto tagging is a core component of the new iPad app, reminiscent of something like Yahoo’s IntoNow. The iPad, with its big battery, can sit on your coffee table or beside your media center, sipping battery while listening to songs playing in the background from your favorite television shows. I’ve had Radium running in the background this morning, and Shazam quietly but quickly identified the music that was playing from a local radio station. It automates what previously required a button press, even if does raise an eyebrow concerning privacy at home. As you launch the app and turn on the feature, Shazam pops up an alert that says (and definitely not verbatim), “We aren’t listening to what you say! Just identifying the music :-D.” Yeah, but… And until you close the app, Shazam will continue listening in the background even when the iPad’s display is off.
Possibly trading personal privacy for this kind of convenience obviously depends on your own comfort level. The same people who find Chrome’s “Ok, Google” or the Xbox One’s voice features will probably find this feature unsettling. Keep in mind that Shazam does listen every few seconds in the background even when auto tagging is off to help it more quickly identify music that’s playing, and I imagine the company feels that the only time you’d turn on Shazam is when you’re actively wanting to figure out what’s playing. I’m personally ok with it — I can’t wait to try it during a YouTube concert live stream to see how it fares there. I’ll probably just end up using it when watching press events and keynotes.
Shazam is free to use, the company making money from advertisements and purchases made from tagged music. You can, however, pay a $6.99 IAP (or purchase a “pre-paid” version) to remove advertisements.
As I said in my own review, Mailbox helps me get rid of all the unimportant stuff before I even sit down at my computer. I’ve described Mailbox as a complement to the inbox, not a replacement, and that continues to be true. I still log into Gmail when I need to compose a message or search for an invoice, but otherwise I flick through and browse notifications and messages when I’m away from my laptop or PC.
Mailbox on the iPad doesn’t offer any distinct advantage over its iPhone counterpart, the app being the same right down to the compose view. Oddly, Mailbox is locked to the landscape orientation, meaning that your email messages can only be viewed in half the space next to the sidebar. My guess is Orchestra felt that seeing the big picture — the entirety of the inbox — would be better for previewing and triaging email over opening individual messages as you’d have to in the portrait orientation.
