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OmniFocus for iPad Gets Calendar Integration

The Omni Group’s flagship GTD application, OmniFocus, received an update earlier today in its iPad version to include a number of new functionalities, bug fixes, and miscellaneous improvements to the interface. Widely regarded as the best version of OmniFocus currently available on all platforms, OmniFocus for iPad managed to win the hearts of The Omni Group’s loyal user base thanks to a clean and elegant design, a powerful sync engine that keeps tasks, projects and contexts always available across the Mac and iOS, but most of all the Forecast view, a slimmed down version of the popular Due perspective, which on the iPad has been completely reimagined as a timeline of sorts with the upcoming week’s days sitting in a top toolbar, listing all your next actions for quick reviewing and rescheduling. Coming soon on the iPhone as well and rumored to be part of OmniFocus for Mac 2.0 big upgrade (expected later this year), the Forecast view in OmniFocus 1.3 for iPad now allows you see items with a start date and, more importantly, calendar events.

Calendar integration in OmniFocus for iPad will display all events for one day through a bar along the bottom that, among other things, allows you see events in popover menus, and change your availability status. You can’t edit events within OmniFocus, as I guess the developers wanted to offer a way to see what’s going on. The addition is very welcome for users like me, who keep an organized set of tasks and projects in OmniFocus, but save other things like reminders and meetings in iCal. At first, however, I was a little disoriented by the changelog of version 1.3 that illustrated the new feature:

OmniFocus for iPad 1.3 updates Forecast Mode: Never spread yourself too thin. Enable Calendar integration to see your hard landscape events alongside your overdue and due soon OmniFocus actions. Use the View options menu to show your items with a start date. Reschedule your projects and actions—with just a tap or two—to keep your days balanced.

Forecast mode now integrates calendar events into a convenient timeline. Use the View options menu to configure which calendars appear on the timeline, and the range of hours for which events are displayed.

Because I keep my OmniFocus for iPad in sync with the Mac version through the Omni Sync Server beta, I initially thought enabling calendar integration would require me to open the desktop app and fiddle with the iCal tab in the Preferences. I clearly read the changelog wrong (and didn’t really remember iCal’s send-to functionalities on OS X), because OmniFocus for Mac doesn’t let you import events, it lets you publish tasks and contexts to a calendar. Instead, what The Omni Group is doing here is different: they’re letting you see calendar events in OmniFocus for iPad alongside tasks in the Forecast view. How does it work? Simple: by relying on the iOS calendar API, any calendar that’s already been configured on an iPad can be displayed out of the box in OmniFocus. Just tap the view icon in the upper right corner, select Calendar Events, and choose a calendar from the Calendars tab. Select a day’s start and end times and you’ll be able to view events at the bottom. Events are color-coded depending on your calendar’s settings, and like I said above you can’t edit them. I wish the developers implemented a way to see events for the next weeks as well (as I treat events differently than most of my tasks and I need to know with weeks in advance about that meeting in Rome), but I guess that breaks the whole purpose of the Forecast view. Anyway, well done.

OmniFocus for iPad 1.3 also packs other interesting features. For one, I love the new fullscreen mode for editing notes in a task’s panel. Or the fact that the app’s badge counts due, overdue and flagged items, but items that are both overdue and flagged aren’t counted twice anymore. Another new neat functionality is video mirroring: by taking advantage of the iPad 2 hardware, The Omni Group now allows you to mirror OmniFocus on a second display, with viewers being able to see gestures, taps and swipes on screen. This will be huge for OmniFocus users like Merlin Mann having a presentation about OF in the future – and it’s something more developers should support.

OmniFocus 1.3 is a huge update with lots of additional fixes and enhancements you can check out in detail here. The app is available at $39.99 in the App Store – it was worth it before, and with calendar integration in the latest version it’s simply become a must-have.

Fantastical: Your Personal iCal Assistant

 

In my preview of Fantastical, a new Mac application by Flexibits, I noted how developing a new calendar utility for OS X wasn’t an easy task at all: not only does the competition offer some great alternatives, Apple itself bundles the free iCal into the main installation of Mac OS X Snow Leopard, giving users a relatively powerful tool to manage appointments, invites, to-dos and all sorts of calendar needs. Whilst iCal – and on iOS, the Calendar app for iPhones and iPads – makes it super-simple to see all events at a glance with the supported Google Calendar, MobileMe, CalDAV and other protocols, it appears Apple didn’t really focus on letting users quickly and easily add new items with a few keystrokes and commands. To enter a new event in Apple’s default iCal, you have to open the app, head over the day you’ve chosen (or hit a keyboard shortcut) and type in every single field for the new event. That includes things like name, location, all-day checkbox, date and time, repeat, invitees and status.

Being forced to manually type all info and move the cursor around every single time is boring, and annoying; that’s exactly what Flexibits wants to fix and improve with Fantastical.

As I highlighted in my initial preview, Fantastical’s biggest feature lies in the way it allows you to enter events with natural language. Plain English, that’s it. Once the app is configured with your calendars and up and running in the menubar, you’ll be able to invoke its main window with a shortcut (or by clicking on the menubar icon), be automatically focused in the text entry field, and start typing. Before I delve deeper into this, a quick note about Fantastical’s calendar support: being the app an external tool that can be integrated with iCal, the app perfectly supports all the protocols already supported by Apple out of the box. That means MobileMe, Google Calendar, CalDAV, shared calendars – anything, really. In my tests, the app (and iCal, set as my default calendar app, more on this in a minute) worked just fine with a personal Me calendar, two Google Calendars, as well as a shared cal configured through Exchange both on Mac and iOS. As far as calendar support goes, there’s nothing to worry about if your calendars are already working in iCal. In fact, the app looks directly into it to fetch local and online calendars you might want to use, and iCal doesn’t even need to be running for Fantastical to add new events. Furthermore, the app also supports Outlook and Entourage, Yahoo! Calendar accounts as well as delegates both on Google and Yahoo.

Fantastical’s natural language system is without a doubt the most important feature that sets it apart from other calendar utilities for Mac and Apple’s own iCal. As I noted in my preview, writing “Meet with Cody tomorrow at Apple Store, Viterbo 5 PM to 6 PM” in iCal does nothing, in spite of the sentence being correct and relatively simple to understand for a computer. Writing the same sentence in plain English in Fantastical adds a new event with all the fields already filled in. I’m talking about the event’s name (Meet with Cody), location (Apple Store, Viterbo), relative date (tomorrow) and time (from 5 PM to 6 PM). Fantastical understand what you’ve written, and leaves room for typos such as “Thrsday” or “tomorow.” The system implemented by Flexibits is very powerful and, as the company’s name reflects, flexible, allowing you to enter an event’s name in almost any way you want with the app still recognizing it correctly. Why is it a big deal? Because it’s smart and it helps me save time. Instead of having to move my cursor to select checkboxes and repeat the same actions over and over again, I just write a quick sentence like I’m used to and the app does the job for me. Indeed, Fantastical is the closest thing to a “calendar assistant” the Mac has ever seen. More importantly, the system is smart in the way it knows when I’m referring to people already in my Address Book. In the screenshot below, you can see how I wrote “Meet with Cody” and the app knew “Cody” was an entry in the Mac’s Address Book. From there, it fetched the two email addresses saved with Cody’s contact information and enabled me to send an invitation without leaving the app or having to open a browser. Overall, Fantastical’s natural input technology is the best thing that ever happened to a calendar application, for all the reasons listed above.

Fantastical, however, is also a great utility because of its intelligent and clever design. Let alone the fact that the app looks beautiful (just take a look at the screenshot or download the trial and play with it for 5 minutes), the design is functional to what a user has to accomplish: entering events quickly, in seconds, without opening a full-featured calendar app. Fantastical is unobtrusive, sits in the menubar and can be launched with a keyboard shortcut. If you feel like you want to look at it all the time, you can pin the app to stay above other windows. I don’t do that, but the feature might come in handy when adding events from other applications. The calendar design is minimal, tasteful, and allows you to navigate between months with ease. Marked days and events are done the right way with subtle indicators and graphics overlaying the main calendar. Nothing about Fantastical is “too much” or redundant: events can be previewed in a small popup if you head over them with your mouse, and if you double-click them iCal will launch. Events can’t be deleted from within Fantastical, but the app allows you to enter a new one from any app or browser – as you can see in the screenshot below. The system-wide service is incredibly useful when dealing with receipts and expenses in PDF documents, or just about any date displayed on screen. It’d be nice to be able to delete events in Fantastical, but I think the focus for the developers now is to let users add events in any way they want, as fast as possible.

There are other functionalities worth mentioning, too. From Fantastical’s window, you can decide how many “next events” or “next days” to show, so you’ll always be focused on the right amount of time and events. From the same menu, you can jump to today’s view. There are some things to tweak in the Preferences as well: you can choose a default calendar and calendar app, which will be the one that handles event management in the background as you add new stuff in Fantastical. The keyboard shortcut for quick entry can be customized, alongside the menubar icon that can show date, date and weekday, or date and month. Calendars can be managed in the preferences’ second tab, and you can set default alarms for timed and all-day events so you’ll always end up with a standard alarm for every new event – very useful.

Fantastical is the calendar assistant to install on every Mac that has to deal with calendars. Not because Fantastical is more powerful than other solutions like iCal and Outlook, but because is smarter and different. Fantastical wants to be the best, fastest and most intuitive way to add new events, whereas other desktop applications focus on letting you manage your calendar, sometimes packing features that slow down the whole process of adding new events. Fantastical is available on the Mac App Store at an introductory price of $14.99, with a free trial available here. Read more

MacStories Product Review: Wicked Reverb

In the search for an affordable yet comfortable pair of headphones that could replace Apple’s earbuds (at around the same price), I was led to a pair of over-the-ear cans fit for any teenage snow-border who already didn’t own a pair of Skullcandys. The Wicked Reverb, fit for hoodie toting hooligans ready to faux-rock to 128 kbit mp3s, arrived at my desk in an oversized box littered with the kind of graffiti that speaks marketing over value. However, I didn’t want first impressions to ruin what could possibly be a charming relationship, so I’ve spent a couple week’s worth of alone time with my hot-rod red headphones just to see if something Wicked can actually sound, “wicked.” Past the break, a few pics and our conclusive review on whether these are an ample replacement for your worn out buds.

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Palimpsest for iPad Aggregates Hand-Picked Magazine Articles

I love Instapaper. Whether I’m finding cool links on Twitter or I simply mark items for later in Google Reader, Instapaper provides a unique and beautiful way to keep all my reading material together and synced across the web, iPhone and iPad. In fact, Instapaper has changed my reading habits, and especially on the iPad, it gives a whole new meaning to the tablet as a tool for text consumption. Yet sometimes, there are those days when you feel like you haven’t found anything new worth saving in the queue, and the more you keep looking because you’re hungry for new articles in your inbox, the more you keep hitting things you’ve already archived in Instapaper. With version 3.0, Instapaper developer Marco Arment added a new feature to find articles your friends are “liking”, thus making the app more social and better suited for discovery. In the past week, I’ve also been using a new iPad app called Palimpsest to find great material from sources like The New Yorker and The New York Times to send directly off to Instapaper.

Palimpsest aggregates articles from popular online magazines and presents them in a beautifully formatted view. The original webpage is preloaded in the background so you’ll be able to send it to Instapaper, or read it as the author intended. Articles are sourced from popular curators like Arts & Letters Daily, Longreads, LongForm, and many others, in addition to the developer’s own picks. This curation aspect gives the app a personal touch that I think is pretty cool considering we often stumble upon automatic link-tweeting bots online. But because the developer’s and curators’ tastes might be different than yours, Palimpsest also includes like / dislike buttons to tell the app articles you’ve found interesting, and others you won’t like to see the next time. The app fetches around 50 articles on first launch, with 5-10 new articles every day, and roughly 10 saved for offline usage in the app’s cache. In my tests, I was given articles about politics, the death of Osama bin Laden (quite obviously), technology, food, and economy. The articles came from top-notch sources, so basically if you’re a Longreads user you’ll feel right home using Palimpsest, only this app also aggregates content from other websites and curators.

At $1.99, Palimpsest is a neat way to find a fresh feed of great articles every day (and send them to Instapaper), although it could really use an iPhone counterpart. Get the app here.

Cloud Connect for iOS Gets 3.0 Update, Brings Finder Integration

When it comes to remotely accessing your computer, AirPort Extreme station, FTP, Dropbox or WebDAV servers, Cloud Connect Pro is a staff favorite here at MacStories. Not only the app provides a full-featured solution to connect to all kinds of machines, servers and online services, it also offers a neat way to browse files and media in a Finder-like view for iPhones, iPod touches and iPads. We have covered the app a few times in the past, and I was impressed when Antacea managed to port the whole tablet experience to the iPhone.

The latest 3.0 update, however, makes things look much better with some UI refinements, a new audio player, a proper PDF viewer and some stability enhancements. The app retains all the functionalities of the previous versions, but introduces some welcome features and little touches throughout the whole package that add a new layer of accessibility, communication with iOS built-in tools, and more. For example, Cloud Connect 3.0 can directly play music stored in the iPod.app library, or visualize photos and videos from the camera roll. Songs can be sent to the new audio player’s playlist, which sits at the bottom of the app and displays album artwork, a list of songs waiting in the queue, as well as an AirPlay button to beam music to external speakers. Speaking of which, gone is the hideous Mac-like dock, leaving room for a more minimal bar of icons. Browsing files and folders in Cloud Connect has been improved, too: alongside the (great) column view, the developers have implemented icon-based navigation to tap your way around the filesystem. What’s cool is that you can switch between views with a tap in the toolbar, and a new button in the column view allows you to bookmark, copy, download & compress or delete any file or folder. On top of that, this new version allows you to browse songs and media from the camera roll using your Mac’s Finder by connecting to the “iPad” device under the Shared tab once Cloud Connect is running. This is by far the easiest way to import photos and music off an iOS device and onto an OS X machine I’ve tried, with Cloud Connect acting as a bridge between the two. It works great.

The app could still use some UI polish (I personally can’t stand those blue and grey tones), but I can see why Antacea decided to focus on adding and refining features for now. The lack of a serious PDF viewer, for example, was a major disappointment in Cloud Connect 1.0: the new PDF viewer introduced in version 3.0 is quite fast and responsive, lets you create bookmarks and search for text within a document.

Other features in Cloud Connect 3.0 include Google Picasa support, possibility to use a Mac or PC as a gateway to connect to other Easy Connect computers, and RDP for HP printers only. At $24.99 in the App Store, Cloud Connect doesn’t come cheap but it’s powerful, easy to use and works both on the iPhone and iPad. The app keeps getting better on each release, and I’m looking forward to some serious design improvements in the next version. For now though, Cloud Connect surely is one of the best ways to manage your remote and local connections. Read more

Shine Is A Beautiful Weather App for iPhone

If you’ve found yourself struggling to find the perfect weather app that looks great and it’s packed with functionalities at the same time, you might want to take a look at Shine, the latest entry in the weather software panorama that, at $0.99 in the App Store, provides a neat way to check on your current location’s weather, forecasts, temperature and wind speed. Shine wants to keep things simple, and for someone like me who’s no weather expert at all, the promise of offering readable weather data in a beautiful and intuitive design sounds like a major selling point, especially considering the price of one buck.

The app’s main screen lets you see your location’s weather conditions at a glance. Current weather is displayed above in a large calendar-like view with temperature, icon and wind speed, whilst a today / tonight / tomorrow forecast is embedded below with the same stats. You can assign multiple locations in the settings, and re-fetch your location by tapping on the crosshair icon in the top right. Switching between locations is as easy as sliding your finger on the location bar on top. Another feature of Shine is the extended forecast view you get by pulling up the screen with a verticals swipe; the only problem is, the app seems to be US-centric in the way it gets weather information – it relies on SimpleGeo and the National Weather service, and I wasn’t able to get forecasts or correct wind speeds in Italy. Perhaps the developers should implement Yahoo Weather data or something else to make sure Shine works across countries outside the United States.

As it stands now, Shine is a simple, beautiful weather experiment that I’m sure works perfectly in the US, but lacks the necessary data to be a hit internationally. Perhaps the developers will fix this in a future update (I sure hope so), so if you live in the US and have $0.99 to spend, give it a try. Otherwise, wait for an update.

BreakTime Helps You Step Away From Your Mac

Where Take Five remembers to unpause music that you seemingly forgot about, BreakTime is your queue to get up off your butt and take a brisk walk around the office or grab a bottled water. Featuring a beautiful interface that carefully counts down (perhaps you could use it as a Pomodoro timer in your menubar), BreakTime will carefully interrupt your session so you don’t lose any progress on what you’re working on, while encouraging you to rest your eyes or stretch at your desk.

If you happen to walk away from your Mac for a while, BreakTime has Magic Rescheduling™ built in that monitors your keyboard and mouse usage – the next time your return to your Mac, BreakTime will start the timer and smartly determine when it’s appropriate to take a break. Available for $2.99 in the App Store, BreakTime reminds you that sitting all isn’t healthy.

PNG Compressor for Mac Optimizes Your Images for Web

Most of the time (not all of the time), I run my iPod and iPad screenshots through an optimizer before tossing them onto the web. Usually I do this via a script I’ve set up with LaunchBar, but I wanted to take the extra step of running that command after dragging-and-dropping to just the dragging part. If you’re looking for lossless PNG compression in a simple utility, PNG Compressor for the Mac is a utility designed for quickly dragging a folder or group of images into the icon or onto the window for seamless, instant compression. As a wrapper for optiPNG (with support for Pngcrush and AdvPNG coming soon), PNG Compressor is a classy way to reduce the file size of your images before uploading to the web. Currently on sale for $0.99 in the Mac App Store, a quick buck gets you a gorgeous icon and a useful utility.

Search Ninja Gives Your iPhone A Better Web Search

If you’re familiar with Swearch, a neat iPhone web app that allows you to search for a specific query on multiple websites at once, then you’re most definitely going to be interested in Search Ninja, a $0.99 app that allows you to flick through search engines, star search results, and start typing in seconds to find exactly what you’re looking for. Search Ninja’s concept is simple, but the execution is powerful in the way it meets a user’s expectations when it comes to mobile search. Upon opening the app, you’re immediately greeted with a Google search field, and the iOS keyboard ready to type. No need to tap on buttons to start searching, no need to do anything before performing a regular Google Search. If you, however, want to customize the search experience and have those extra seconds to make sure you’re navigating to the right webpages, Search Ninja features an intuitive swipe interface to switch between search engines in seconds. Both on the main screen and in the embedded web view, you can swipe to change from Google to Bing, Twitter, Wikipedia, IMDB, Youtube, Flickr and many, many more. You can even add other engines if you really feel like your favorite one is missing, although the process requires a 2-step wizard screen.

Two features I particularly appreciate about Search Ninja are favorite searches and the History section. They’re very straightforward, but come in handy if you find yourself looking for the same things on your iPhone over and over, or simply want to look up an old subject again.

Search Ninja strikes me for its simplicity and clean design. Gestures to switch engines are a plus, and a very useful one. Get the app here at $0.99.