This Week's Sponsor:

Washing Machine X9

Spring Clean Your Mac Effortlessly

Posts in reviews

Echofon Releases Photofon: See Photos From Your Twitter Timeline

Released a few minutes ago in the App Store, Photofon is a new app by Echofon, makers of a popular Twitter client for Mac and iOS devices, that strips away all content from your Twitter timeline to display photos shared by people you follow. More often than not, especially if you follow hundreds of users, there’s a chance photos are skipped when checking out news on Twitter because either a) you don’t care about what people are eating or b) you’re just following that guy for the news he posts, and you don’t want to see his cat. For as much as we like cats (and puppies in general) here at MacStories, I agree that sometimes people I follow share photos I really don’t care about or don’t add anything to the experience of being on Twitter to discover interesting new content, and not kittens. But other times, these people share some beautiful iPhone photography that I don’t want to miss, yet I do because I don’t have a proper client that’s solely focused on media, rather than tweets.

Photofon is a Twitter client built around photos. Whether they’re shared on Instagram, img.ly, the omnipresent Twitpic, Flickr or yfrog (I haven’t been able to test other services), these photos will show up against a minimal dark background that doesn’t distract, and makes colors truly shine on the iPhone 4’s Retina Display. The original tweet is displayed alongside buttons to fave and retweet, so you won’t forget about sharing or saving that photo you really loved. Pinch and zoom gestures allow you to see a photo in greater detail, and pull-to-refresh at the top does just what you expect. I’ve noticed the app loaded around 30 photos from my timeline, and I’d definitely like to see a button to load more, because if I’m going to fire up a client only to see photos, I want to see them all.

Photofon is free and available here. It’s not universal, but it’s a neat way to check out Twitter’s photography on your iPhone without getting lost amidst news and trends.

QuickCal Mobile: Fast Calendar Entry On Your iPhone

Last night I reviewed QuickCal for Mac, a menubar utility that works in conjunction with the desktop iCal to provide a simple way to add new events to your calendars using plain English as natural language input. Unlike Fantastical, QuickCal can’t sync back to any calendar in the cloud if iCal isn’t running because of its lack of native CalDAV support (though it’s got built-in Google Calendar integration), but still it offers a cheap and easy to use way to create new events without having to deal with iCal’s menus, popups, and checkboxes. As I mentioned in my review, QuickCal also comes with an iPhone counterpart called QuickCal Mobile that, just like the Mac version, allows you to quickly jot down events using nothing but plain English.

QuickCal Mobile for iPhone may look like a stripped down version of the Mac app, but I was surprised to see it’s actually the same app, only integrated with iOS standard calendar features. This means events displayed in a list or monthly view can be edited and deleted with the same interface of Calendar.app for iPhone, and everything from alerts to location and availability status can be modified in-app without launching Apple’s Calendar. QuickCal Mobile recognizes all calendars already configured out of the box, allows you to specify a default one and comes with the same Smart Reminders functionality of QuickCal for Mac – you can set a default reminder, one for events that are weeks away, and another one for things you’ll have to take care of in the next months. The app’s icon badge can visualize the current day of the month, or you can disable it and enjoy the icon on your homescreen with no red badge.

QuickCal Mobile’s biggest feature is obviously support for natural language input, and I was pleased to see it works just like on the Mac. You fire up the app, start typing in a single text entry field, and QuickCal will recognize your words as values for a new calendar event. It’s really fast and results update as you type – again, like on the Mac. At this point, I wish QuickCal would also run natively on my iPad – most of the times I check on my calendar from the tablet, and being able to quickly enter events there would be nice.

QuickCal Mobile is available at $0.99 on the App Store, and if you’re fan of the Mac application you should definitely give it a try. The app won’t replace your Week Calendar or Calvetica, but it’s a very convenient way to add events in seconds.

ConvertIt Makes Image Conversion Simple From The Menubar

If your work consists of dealing with lots of image files on a daily basis, you know how much time is usually spent converting images from one format to another. While OS X provides a great built-in application called Preview that takes care of converting and swapping formats with a few clicks (alongside many other features), you’ll still need to open multiple files in it, manually select a new format, choose a destination, hit save, make sure the conversion went correctly, and trash the original files. Could the process be more straightforward, especially when trying to batch-convert multiple files at once? ConvertIt, a $0.99 utility from the Mac App Store, offers a simple solution to the problem.

Now, I’m sure there are hundreds of free and paid utilities for Mac out there that can handle image conversion just fine, and even offer batch-processing for when you need to get things done faster. However, I was impressed by ConvertIt’s super-simple interface that lives in the menubar, doesn’t get in the way when you don’t need it, and is capable of converting images to different formats with drag & drop. With ConvertIt, you can drag as many images as you want from the Finder onto the app’s menubar icon, and choose from a popover a new format for the files. The default location for the new files is the Desktop, but you can change this in the Preferences. To convert, you just have to select a new image format, wait a few seconds, and you’ll end up with the new files in your desired location; it works with a single file, as well as multiple ones dragged at the same time. Unfortunately, ConvertIt doesn’t have an option to delete the original files once conversion is over – I’d also like an option to convert existing files, rather than creating new ones. However, it was very nice to see ConvertIt could easily transform a PNG in a PDF document in a matter of seconds.

ConvertIt does one thing well, and it’s available at $0.99 on the Mac App Store. Go get it here.

QuickCal: A Simple iCal Add-On with Natural Language Input

When I reviewed Fantastical, a new calendar utility by Flexibits that lives in the OS X menubar, I was impressed by the design of the app and the support for natural language input, a feature that allows you to write down your calendar events quickly using nothing but plain English – say you have a meeting tomorrow at your local coffee shop, with Fantastical you don’t need to click on checkboxes and date fields to get your new event set up. You can just write “meeting at coffee shop tomorrow at 5.30 PM”, and Fantastical will know how to handle it. After my Fantastical review, several readers pointed out in the comments and via Twitter that QuickCal, another calendar app that works from the menubar, does more or less the same things of Fantastical, only with a more simple and standard UI and at $0.99 in the Mac App Store, as opposed to Fantastical’s $14.99 introductory price. Because I’m a sucker for new software I love to play with and I care about my readers’ app recommendations, I decided to download QuickCal for Mac and take it for a spin. There’s also an iPhone version available, but after the break I will take a look at QuickCal for Mac – the review of the iPhone version will follow later this week.

Surprisingly, QuickCal works a lot like Fantastical. That is not to say the Fantastical developers “copied” the main features of QuickCal – I’m just surprised I didn’t know about this app before. QuickCal is indeed very similar to Fantastical in how it enables you to write down events using simple, plain English, and it’s got some additional functionalities that integrate the app with iCal, or directly with Google Calendar’s online interface. QuickCal is also fundamentally different from Fantastical in how it lets you start adding a new event, and the design of the event list in the menubar has a simpler look that, unlike Flexibits’ app, doesn’t embed a full monthly calendar, bur rather only shows upcoming events in a vertical list. Both apps have some features in common, but the implementation is ultimately different and exclusive to each one of them. Read more

Daedalus Touch for iPad

I’ve started to shy away from the bulk of text editors that hit my inbox since few bring something different to the table. There’s only so many ways you can rewrite a text editor, and while I’d love to cover everything the ones I really want to showcase have to offer something truly unique for me to sit down and crank out a review in TextMate. It’s terribly difficult to find something that stands out, but I think those disappointed with the App Store’s current offering may find something of interest here. Daedalus Touch for the iPad is different in part because of how it allows you manipulate documents in a hybrid stack & coverflow style that takes advantage of gestures, and not lists, to organize your ideas. There are no lists or hierarchy of folders, but rather stacks of sheets that contain your text. Of course it has Dropbox and TextExpander support (a must nowadays), which means you don’t have an excuse not to check Daedalus past the break.

Read more

Byword for the Mac, Now with Markdown

Byword might be your text editor of choice thanks to its choice of colors in white or black shades, the intuitive and consistently convenient formatting pop-over, or its writer-esque text preview that lets you focus on just a few lines of text. If you’re not yet a convert for Byword’s good looks alone, Markdown support has been added under the hood for the many of us who prefer the popular, readable language over tag-numbing HTML code. Byword’s latest update to 1.2 brings Markdown and more, all reviewed just after the break.

Read more

Dragontape for iPad Lets you Browse, Share, and Edit Video Mixtapes

We traditionally think of the classic mixtape as an audio compilation of power songs and remixes that we’ll then share with friends or pass along to the cute girl two seats behind you in math class. Recently brought to my attention was Dragontape, a website that takes the concept of the mixtape further by combining YouTube and SoundCloud, effectively allowing you to create video & audio playlists of music, concert, and related promotional videos for your favorite artists, gigs, and tours. With Dragontape for the iPad you can watch the latest mixtapes, browse through what’s popular, and revisit favorites all without the need of your web browser.

While it’s obvious you can preview the collections of video, not-so-obvious is the ability to edit movies iMovie style to clip and cut your way to the perfect mixtape. You can save and edit mixtapes to your liking, though I didn’t find the controls initially intuitive (you’ll also need a Dragontape account to save any edits you make to a mixtape). Too, the iPad app is still reliant on sometimes fussy YouTube videos, which may not play on the iPad. “Not optimized for mobile,” it says. What’s interesting to me, however, is how Dragontape handles the integration with SoundCloud with YouTube video. For a clip, Dragontape displays a synth-y, pixelated equalizer that bounces to the beat of the music that’s used as a placeholder for video.

There are some quirks about Dragontape, as pinch-to-zoom for video has been replaced with simple taps, and the background image displayed when browsing mixtapes ends up being a pixelated, centered mess that attempts to be cool, but is unfortunately unappealing. Otherwise, the menu and video controls look incredibly sharp: perhaps Dragontape is aiming for distinctness between the interface and background album art in their own, weird way. Simply changing the fading between tracks prompts users to save the altered mixtape: you’ll quickly develop that dismissive “Cancel” reflex. The app has crashed for me a few times, but I’m interested in Dragontape’s mobile interface enough to keep me from deleting the app off my homescreen as others may do.

There’s flaws, and the app icon doesn’t make clear the that name is Dragontape (and not Drag On Tape), but this is a novel idea that needs to be explored. Those YouTube playlists you peruse can all be intermixed for a better browsing experience, and I sense an opportunity for discovery as Dragontape moves out of beta and integrates with other popular video sites. I personally enjoyed watching lots of promotional tour videos with Dragontape, but maybe you’ll have a much more creative use for it. The price for admission is free on the App Store. You can learn more about the service and create a Dragontape account on their official website and iPad landing page.

Tap to Chat 2 Launches with New Design, Google Talk Support

When I first reviewed Tap to Chat back in December, what I stumbled upon was a very simple app with a nice and clean design to access Facebook chat and talk to your buddies without all the clutter of the Facebook website or other similar applications for iOS. The app was driven by simplicity in the way it put contacts on a grid, and let you simply tap on one to start chatting. No additional screens or options, just a tap and a chat. On top of that, notifications enabled me to keep up with the conversation even if I was busy doing something else on the home screen or another app. Tap to Chat 2, released last week, builds on the factors that made the original version so great and popular on the App Store, adding support for Google Talk but retaining the fundamental concept that online chat should be easy and accessible.

First and foremost, the app has got an updated UI to switch between Facebook and Google Talk: there’s an iOS-like multitasking dock at the bottom to switch between the services, but if you don’t like the dock idea you can hide it and simply swipe horizontally to change buddy lists. Friends available for chat are still displayed on a grid, though this time the design has been greatly improved to show better contact pictures, inline previews and a button to mark a person as “favorite.” Favorites will be placed on top of your lists when they’re online for quick access, and you’ll also receive a Growl-like notification on screen when they log in. These notifications are displayed for a few seconds like Growl on the desktop, but they obviously only work inside Tap to Chat as iOS doesn’t allow for other notification systems to be injected in the main Springboard. However, when you’re chatting with multiple contacts at once, the notifications make it super simple to jump from one chat to another, as does the aforementioned dock at the bottom – switching between services and chats is a real pleasure in Tap to Chat 2.0.

As for the chat itself, it’s really just a box with a text entry field and buttons to clear the conversation or go back to the grid. If you want, you can also tap on a friend’s profile pic to rename the contact, remove it, or open his Facebook profile in Safari. From the settings icon in the upper left corner, you can change your online status, account names, or color theme for the whole app. General settings include options to turn off sound effects, chat alerts and session alerts – if you really don’t want to be bothered unless you’re actively using the app, you can even turn on auto disconnect to make sure you’ll go offline once you close the app.

Tap to Chat 2 is simple, fast, incredibly reliable (I didn’t see a single connection error on Facebook or Google Talk) and it runs both on the iPhone and iPad. You can get it here at an introductory price of $0.99.

BlueNube Is The First CloudApp Client for iPad

If you love CloudApp as much as I do and you own an iPad, you’ve probably been looking for a way to upload and share items from the tablet without having to use Safari and the web application. There’s no shortage of CloudApp-enabled clients on the iPhone – the excellent Cloud2go is a staff favorite here at MacStories – but the iPad hasn’t seen a real native CloudApp client so far. BlueNube is a $1.99 app I bought a few months ago but never really used because it was only focused on letting you see uploads to your CloudApp account from the iPad, without letting you send an actual file or URL to the service from the device. I was told the next version would include full upload support and other features, so I decided to leave the app in my iTunes library and wait for it. Version 1.1, released yesterday, indeed adds upload capabilities to BlueNube, thus making it the first CloudApp client that runs natively on the iPad.

The interface design of BlueNube isn’t as delicious as the one I’m currently testing in the upcoming Stratus for iOS, nor does the app support live streams and other fancy things as in Cloud2go, but it sure is functional to the main purpose of uploading files and bookmarks to CloudApp using the iPad and third-party applications. The biggest feature of version 1.1, in fact, is the possibility to upload anything from any other app thanks to the “Open In” menu integration that allows you to select a file from 3rd party apps like, say, iFiles or GoodReader and send it to BlueNube, which will start uploading automatically and paste a link to the file in your clipboard.

You can also upload photos and videos within BlueNube with Camera Roll support, upload an image or link from your pasteboard as you open the app thanks to clipboard detection and even cache entire images and other files so BlueNube won’t have to download them every single time to display them. Cache size can be modified and reset from the settings; items uploaded to CloudApp can be shared on other social networks like Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter.

Overall, BlueNube may not be as sexy as other apps but it gets it job done when it comes to integrating with CloudApp on the iPad to offer uploads and smart URL detection from the system clipboard. If you need CloudApp on your iPad, this simple and lightweight app is a $1.99 purchase here.