Posts in reviews

MobileRSS for iPad Comes with New UI, Feed Management, Article Downloads

Deeply criticized by the iOS community in the past months for being too similar to Silvio Rizzi’s Reeder, MobileRSS by NibiruTech recently went under a major update and facelift. When I was told a few weeks ago to give a try to the app again, I was a little skeptical: how could there be an improvement when the previous version was so clearly inspired (to an extent, one could have called it a “rip-off”) by another app? Fortunately, my skepticism – while reasonable – couldn’t do anything about the fact that the new MobileRSS HD for iPad is a well-crafted application. Sure, it still hints at Reeder and Twitter for iPad in some interface schemes and navigation methods, but who doesn’t nowadays, honestly? The new standards created by popular apps like Twitter (panels, sliding actions, pull to refresh), Reeder (more vertical panels, popups) and Apple itself (landscape sidebars, popovers) can now be seen in hundreds of different applications from the most variegate categories. And if we refer to some of these features as “standards”, there’s nothing much to rip-off at this point.

MobileRSS Pro perhaps won’t replace Reeder and Mr. Reader on my homescreen, as the developers still have some issues to iron out (specifically with the unread items list not removing a selected read article after a refresh) and some interface changes to refine around the edges. From what I’ve seen so far, though, the app provides a very solid alternatives to the feed readers mentioned above: MobileRSS HD has got support for multiple Google Reader accounts, it lets you add and remove subscriptions thanks to full feed management (like Mr. Reader), and it’s got plenty of sharing options to forward interesting articles to Twitter, Facebook, Instapaper, Read It Later, Delicious, and email. The app allows you to choose fonts from a popup menu, as well as change font size for optimal reading. On top of that, you also have classic Google Reader options like mark as read / unread, like, share, and note. Most of these functionalities have been implemented through popup menus that, with the new default dark theme, look really good on the iPad’s screen. The app is stable, fast and reliable – pretty snappy on the iPad 2, too.

Two features that particularly impressed me in this new version of MobileRSS are swiping actions and the possibility to download full articles for feeds that only come with excerpts. In the settings, you can select websites that have truncated feeds, and tell the app to always download the full content upon opening a new unread item. MobileRSS will then display an indicator showing that the full article is being fetched, and after a few seconds you’ll be able to read the entire article without jumping to a web view. On the other hand, navigating between feeds in MobileRSS looks a lot like Twitter for iPad: the main list displays unread items, and tapping on one of them will open a second panel on the right with the RSS view. The unread list will overlay the left sidebar, and with a right swipe you can go back to the main view. A toggle on the left allows you to switch between “all items” and “unread items.”

Overall, I think NibiruTech is doing a good job in differentiating MobileRSS from other RSS apps for the iPad, yet implementing concepts and UI elements that have become standards on the platform thanks to third-party software adoption. MobileRSS HD is available at $4.99 in the App Store, and you should give it a try. Read more

Radium Revisited: Review & Giveaway

If you listen to the B&B Podcast, Ben Brooks & Shawn Blanc arrived at a topic that would make for a good ice breaker over a cup of Caribou Coffee. If MacBooks weren’t yet on the table, the question of, “What are your five quintessential Mac Apps,” would quickly lead to a scurry of charging cables and open lids. If you asked me, I’d have a difficult time choosing three of the four (if the fifth includes OS X), but I’d have no problem in preceding that answer with Radium for the Mac.

You might ask me of what value Radium delivers that it can potentially keep FastScripts, TextMate, TextExpander, or some other key productivity app off of my MacBook. And the answer isn’t that these other apps aren’t as good, but rather that Radium sort of defines everything I grew up with in music. There are a lot of trends when it comes to curated online playlists, but nothing can top a good radio station playing all of my favorite singles. Package all the music I grew up into a delightful app that fills the room with great tunes, and Radium defines my sort of superhero theme songs. It’s the one app that will always start with my Mac and goes to sleep with it.

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Cloud2go Is The First CloudApp iPhone Client With Streaming API [Giveaway]

If you use CloudApp as much as I do, you know that being able to upload files or links from an iPhone adds a whole new layer of sharing possibilities to an amazing service that was born with the Mac in mind, but it’s rapidly extending to other platforms and services with support for Windows machines, and direct integration into apps like Tweetbot. CloudApp makes sharing files (like screenshots, text documents, PSDs, and even audio files) and shortening links a real pleasure: not only the app is well integrated into the Mac’s ecosystem with great keyboard shortcuts and “raindrops” plugins, the developers also built a full-featured web application that allows you to set up your own custom domain, delete files, or check on stats.

How about the iPhone? Over the past year or so, I’ve been using Cloud2go by Matthias Plappert to quickly upload files from my iPhone and share them thanks to the app’s custom URL recognition. The fact that Cloud2go also packs full access to your CloudApp account and is neatly organized in sections based on your file types helped along the way as well. But the latest update to Cloud2go, released a few minutes ago in the App Store, makes things so much better: the new version introduces a Twitter-like swipe bar to delete / rename / make private / share files and links, as well as the possibility to watch files and stats update in real-time through CloudApp’s streaming API. This means that if you’re uploading a file from your Mac and you watch Cloud2go on your iPhone, you’ll see the file automatically pop up in the list as soon as the desktop upload is finished. Same applies to view counts: as people click on your links, you’ll see the counter go up in real time.

Cloud2go 1.1 also brings improved error handling, a faster sync algorithm and better navigation between uploaded items. Go download the app here, as it’s the best CloudApp client you can have on your iPhone right now. Read more

Rubbernet Monitors Your Mac Apps’ Network Usage

If monitoring bandwidth and network usage on a Mac is your thing, Conceited Software’s latest app might just be what you need. Rubbernet is a €30 tool that can be installed on a local machine and networked Macs (unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be support for Hamachi computers just yet) and provides an easier solution to more complex applications like Little Snitch, which besides network monitoring also offers firewall functionalities and lots of settings to play with on an app-by-app basis. Rubbernet, powered by a nice interface design and a daemon that runs in the background all the time on your Mac, allows you to see what apps are consuming bandwidth on your computers, and what kind of connections to remote servers are being established.

The app supports multiple accounts (as you can see in the screenshot above), but I haven’t been able to test it with another Mac on my local network. The Summary app gives you a glimpse of all the active apps that are connected to the Internet, including upload and download rates. The Connections and Activity tabs, on the other hand, will show you all the single IP addresses your Mac is connecting to including, in the case of single applications under Activity, a breakdown of all remote hosts, open ports, and a graphical visualization of downloads and uploads over time. These graphs update in real-time, with a minimal footprint on your Mac’s memory.

You can download Rubbernet here. A free trial is available, so you should check it out and see whether the app can recognize your networked Macs and improve the way you keep network usage under control. No one wants to let Dropbox eat all the bandwidth during an Apple event.

[Disclaimer: Conceited Software’s Rubbernet is a MacStories advertiser. This is not a sponsored review, as it’s entirely based on my personal experience with the app.] Read more

QR Code Reader Scan for iOS is Fast

Scan for iPhone & iPad

Scan for iPhone & iPad

If I have to pull out my mobile device to read QR codes, I want an app that’s fast, locks on, and scans codes quickly without any fuss. While there’s a plethora of QR code scanners on the App Store, one in particular I’ve fallen in love with is Scan. Maybe it’s because Barcode Scanner on the Android Marketplace is so damn slow (I’m tired of how long it takes the camera to focus), and I was blown away by how fast Scan was… on an iPod touch (which comparatively has a pretty crappy camera). As soon as I opened the app, I simply placed the QR code inside of the sights and just as instantly it opened a web page in its own browser. If it can’t scan a QR code (which is rare), Scan won’t complain. Just relocate your device or find a higher quality image: how painless Scan is to use is fantastic. Plus, it saves a history of everything you scanned in a simple list that’s perfect for how often I use it. Sure there are other apps that let you generate QR codes or offer a lot more features, but for sheer simplicity and fast scanning, Scan has become the mainstay reader on my device. You can download it for free on the App Store.

Robick: Visual Audio iPhone App for Learning Music By Ear

Previously, we’ve covered the Capo range of apps for the iPhone, iPad, and desktop that help students learn music by ear via setting repeating segments, altering the tempo & pitch, and giving students the ability to adjust an equalizer. When we previously covered these apps, the Capo mobile applications were more limited in some respects compared to it’s older desktop sibling - not a bad thing, but it would be nice to bring over the ability to adjust highs and lows for example instead of just only pitch and tempo. Robick is an alternative take on plugging in tracks from your iPod’s library, and altering them in such a way that helps you learn parts of a song. The developer noted to me it was primarily designed for learning Jazz (I’m assuming for Japanese students), and the interface reflects a modern edge and a shifting paradigm that’s quite neat.

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Twitterrific 4.1 for iPhone & iPad Unifies Mac, iOS Experience

Launching late last night, Twitterrific 4.1 is now available in the App Store for immediate consumption! I’d consider this a milestone update for the iOS version of Twitterrific, as it greatly improves usability on the iPhone and continues the march towards feature parity with the desktop app. I’d say now, Twitterrific has unified their ecosystem such as that replies for example are now handled similarly. This change is most noticeable on the iPhone, where users are no longer taken to the single tweet view to perform actions. Quite frankly, that change alone should address the main complaint many had when wanting to perform simple actions: what used to take three taps now only takes two. 4.1 is a significant update and brings much requested features into the spotlight.

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ListBook: A Simple List App for iPhone

ListBook, a new iPhone app from the developers of MoneyBook, wants to be the simplest solution to create lists on an iPhone, and check off completed items with ease. The App Store is full of apps that enable you to create lists: just think about Simplenote, the popular note-taking application for iPhone and iPad (and the web) that, among other things, also allows you to convert notes to lists. Not to mention the hundreds – if not thousands – of Dropbox-enabled apps that you can use to set up quick shopping lists, todos and reminders and have them always available anywhere you go. The ListBook’s developers, though, recognize that setting up a Dropbox account and having to mess with plain text files, folders and, why not, Markdown support might be a pattern average iPhone users aren’t ready to learn. We, as geeks, love to fiddle with OTA sync, filenames and tags: the majority of iPhone users, however, might not want to do that. And that’s why ListBook doesn’t come with any of these features, but still enables you to create lists, with a beautiful interface and a clever use of gestures.

In ListBook, you create lists and assign new items to them. There are no due dates or tags – you just check off an item once it’s been taken care of. Every list can have a name, as well as a badge on the homescreen to tell you how many tasks you still have to complete. There is no sync or iPad version, no web app or Dropbox integration. You can navigate between lists in a Safari-like UI that displays lists as “pages” in the browser; you can also pinch & zoom to reveal a list and close it.

ListBook won’t satisfy the geeks, but it should be a good alternative to Apple’s Notes app for most iPhone users. Get it in the App Store at $0.99.

Sleipnir Browser Comes To The iPad With Gestures, Bookmark Sync

When I originally reviewed Sleipnir, an alternative browser for the iPhone, back in December, I was impressed by how the app managed to innovate in a market – the one of alternatives to Apple’s MobileSafari – that was saturated and full of apps that were just trying to offer the same set of functionalities over and over again – that is, tabs and Dropbox integration and, overall, some UI schemes that were aimed at porting the classic browsing desktop experience to the iPhone. Like Portal, Sleipnir was one of the very few apps that truly wanted to innovate on the platform. Rather than just copying the desktop and trying to squeeze a Mac-like experience into the iPhone’s screen, Sleipnir provided a series of features like touch-based tab management, tab groups and fullscreen mode that showed everyone how it was indeed possible to innovate with a mobile browser. And now Sleipnir wants to do the same on the iPad.

Released last night in the App Store, Sleipnir for iPad looks a lot like the iPhone version but it makes much greater use of multitouch gestures and tabs to offer a unique browsing experience like no other on the tablet. Instead of placing tabs as “panels” under the top app toolbar, Sleipnir for iPad follows the path traced by its iPhone counterpart and visualizes open pages as thumbnail previews at the bottom. The larger screen of the iPad allowed developers to further play around with this concept and implement a larger bar that shows more open websites at once. The refined cache management in version 1.2 also makes it possible to keep more pages open at once without losing your scrolling position and being forced to reload a page – although I’ve noticed after a dozens of tabs running in the background Sleipnir will refresh a page anyway. However, it works as well as Safari on the iPad 2, if not better: I rarely stumbled upon the page reload issue, and when I did Sleipnir refreshed the page in a way that my exact position was maintained. But there’s more: this new version introduces “TouchPaging”, a new feature that allows you to navigate between tabs with a horizontal swipe (think of the iOS 4.3 multitasking gestures, or the “back” animation in Lion’s Safari) and close a single tab by tracing a “L” on screen. I love these gestures, as they make browsing on the iPad so much natural it’s incredible to think Apple didn’t come out with a similar idea on Safari.

Just like on the iPhone, tabs can be organized in “groups” with drag&drop support, and you can close a tab with a vertical swipe on its preview. You can also drag a tab to the trash, and move as many tabs as you want inside a group. Again, the iPad’s bigger screen allows for a more convenient tab management that truly shines on Sleipnir for iPad. Last, bookmark sync: I still don’t like how Sleipnir handles the creation of bookmarks and the assignment of labels, but with a free Sleipnir Pass account the app lets you keep bookmarks in sync across the iPad and iPhone. The lack of bookmark importing features is annoying, but OTA sync across devices is just great.

Sleipnir is available for free on the App Store, and it’s one of the most innovative browsers ever released on iOS. Give it a try. Read more