Posts in reviews

News.me iPad App Launches To Take On Social Magazines

News.me, a new social reading experience for the iPad developed by technology incubator Betaworks and The New York Times, launched on the App Store a few minutes ago after much anticipation and speculation on whether or not the service could take on well-established “social magazines” like Flipboard and Zite. There’s no doubt the iPad has created a new market for this kind of applications: rather than presenting a series of links pulled from the top Google News or Techmeme, apps like Flipboard aim at showcasing content being shared by your friends on Twitter and Facebook. But while Flipboard simply collects all content shared in your timelines without applying any sort of filter for relevance and popularity, News.me wants to change the rules of tablet-based social reading experiences by offering a “smart” system that, thanks to data provided by popular URL shortener bit.ly, can filter out the most relevant items appearing in your Twitter timeline – and in someone else’s as well.

That’s the key point of News.me, the feature that will need to be tested in the long term to see if the experiment has a chance to survive in this crowded digital and social newsstand. Not only does News.me enable you to see what your friends are sharing (through tweets), it also lets you see what they are reading. And from this standpoint, logging into Twitter within News.me gives the app a whole new meaning when it comes to “Twitter integration.” It’s a huge bet for Betaworks and The New York Times: can the bit.ly-backed algorithm provide an efficient way to distribute personalized news to iPad users? More importantly, is it enough to convince people to pay $0.99 a week, or $34.99 a year? Read more

RemoteTunes Brings iTunes Home Sharing to Back to My Mac

When I reviewed Hamachi for Mac a few weeks ago and called it a great, free alternative to Apple’s Back to My Mac, I noted how Hamachi – among other things – managed to successfully enable remote iTunes Home Sharing between two Macs. The iTunes Home Sharing functionality, introduced on iOS 4.3 for iOS devices and Macs on the same local network (and a long-time favorite of iTunes desktop users), allows you to share your entire iTunes library locally, wirelessly, between computers and iPhones or iPads. But wouldn’t it be great to have the same feature available on Macs connected remotely to each other? Hamachi does that out of the box, but Back to My Mac doesn’t. RemoteTunes, a $5 utility, fixes this.

Once installed, RemoteTunes will find Macs that are sharing the same Back to My Mac credentials on your network. If Back to My Mac is correctly configured, you should see a machine pop up under the Shared tab in your OS X Finder. RemoteTunes will find the remote shared library (makes sure to activate iTunes Home Sharing on the remote machine), and let you stream music between Macs using MobileMe as the communication tool. It all works in the background, and it’s basically a graphical user interface for complex SSH and DNS commands most users don’t want to mess with. I’ve tried this on a friend’s iMac (I’m no longer a MobileMe user), and I was pleased to see connections happening through RemoteTunes were stable, and reliable.

If you’re a MobileMe subscriber, at $5 RemoteTunes is a no-brainer. It won’t work with iOS devices, but it will stream music between Macs just fine.

Seamless: Transition Playing Music From Your Mac To Your iPhone

I’ve been there before: I’m working, I’m listening to some Oasis or Death Cab for Cutie on iTunes on my Mac, and iCal reminds me I have to go out. I take my iPhone, I quit iTunes, and I realize I was really liking the song I was listening to. So I’m forced to fire up the iPod app on my iPhone, find the song again, and start listening from the beginning of the track. I could manually move the on-screen cursor to the exact position the song was on iTunes, but it’s quicker this way, plus I really have to go out. Seamless, a new iPhone app by Five Details, provides the simplest solution to this problem: a button.

Once installed on the Mac (for free) and on your iPhone ($0.99 in the App Store) Seamless will communicate with your Mac to see what song is playing. If the song is found on your device’s iPod library and you’re ready to leave your computer, tap “Transition Music” and the song will quickly fade on your Mac, and magically start playing on the iPhone. Same position, same song, one button. You can do the opposite, too: you’ve just got home, with a song playing on your iPhone. Tap the button, and music will start playing on your Mac . This happens in less than a second, provided that both devices are on the same local WiFi network.

While Seamless is intriguing, clever and almost magical in its concept, there are some execution issues to iron out. For instance, I couldn’t get the app to work last night (it kept saying the “song was not present” on my iPhone, but it was) and the developer told me it’s because of a bug that won’t find songs on a synced device unless you’re playing from a playlist – not just the Music library. So I created a playlist, synced it to my iPhone, and now the app works just fine. This bug will be fixed soon with an update, I was told. And of course, the app won’t work at all if you don’t sync music – don’t expect Seamless to be able to transition music you haven’t synced on your iPhone.

As long as you keep in mind that this version might require syncing a playlist and that you can’t just transition music you don’t have on your iPhone, Seamless is a great idea. It’s simple, and it’s only $0.99 in the App Store. Check out the promo video featuring the omnipresent Adam Lisagor below.
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UpdateBar for Mac Sends Status Updates To Multiple Social Networks

If you’re tired of using the browser to post the latest Steve Jobs spoof video on your Facebook wall, or don’t want to send quick updates using a full-featured Twitter client because you’re afraid of being distracted by the amount of content in your timeline, a new app called UpdateBar provides an easy way to post status updates on multiple social networking sites at once. Released at $0.99 in the Mac App Store, UpdateBar does one thing well: it displays an unobtrusive popup from your Mac menubar, allowing you to send a status update to Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and Identica. You can configure these services in the settings, and choose which one to use from a dropdown menu that lists all your available accounts.

The app can shorten links using is.gd and goo.gl, and you enter your custom URL shortening service as well. There’s no way to trigger the popup window with a keyboard shortcut yet, and I hope this will be implemented in a future update. The possibility to quickly drag photos from the desktop onto UpdateBar’s window would also be a nice addition.

UpdateBar makes it easy to post updates to Twitter and Facebook. Get it at $0.99 in the Mac App Store.

Enhance Your Mac’s Clipboard with CmdVees

When it comes to quickly jotting items into my Mac’s clipboard and being able to access them later in a neatly organized folder view, Clipmenu is my app of choice. I’ve been using the app for years, it’s free, and it provides a lightweight yet powerful way to copy anything into your OS X clipboard – text, images, URLs, you name it. Clipmenu, also thanks to snippets and keyboard shortcuts, makes it super-easy to retrieve at any time information you copied with the standard Cmd+C. The application, however, is limited in the way it enables you to paste multiple items at once: say you’ve copied three different URLs for the ultimate Rebecca Black rickrollin’ tweet, you’ll have to hit Clipmenu’s shortcut three time (and navigate with the arrow keys) to paste those items. Open, copy, open, copy – you get it. The app keeps track of your clipboard, but it’s not aimed at letting you paste all at once with ease. CmdVees, a $0.99 app available in the Mac App Store, wants to fix this.

CmdVees’ concept is really simple: as you copy items into your clipboard, the app creates a stack. This stack lives in your menubar. Once you’re done copying and you want to paste all these items in a single location (say, a TextEdit window), you don’t need to invoke the application with a specific shortcut for every single item. No, you just keep hitting the default Cmd+V until you’ve pasted all the items. The cool thing is, as you hit Cmd+V the app will remove the most recent item from the stack and go to the next one – by default, hitting Cmd+V on OS X over and over simply pastes the most recent clipboard entry. CmdVees is meant for those users (like me) who copy a lot of material on a daily basis, and would like to be able to paste things all at once.

But there’s more: if you don’t feel like pressing the Cmd+V shortcut several times, you can “join” items with a single paste through a keyboard shortcut you can configure in CmdVees’ preferences. You can also swap items in the stack with a shortcut, or clear your queue entirely. Older items are accessible from a dropdown menu, plus you can specify how many items to keep in CmdVees’ history and set a time out for copied items.

At $0.99, CmdVees is a no-brainer if you’re looking for a utility that collects your clipboard items and is able to paste them all at once. I’ve noticed some compatibility issues with Clipmenu while using it, but I think customizing the settings a little bit should fix that – just in case, download a free trial here.

Doodle Over Your Desktop with Deskscribble

Deskscribble in use Example

Deskscribble in use Example

If you want to mark up, highlight, or simply doodle on your desktop and all of its open windows, Deskscribble for the Mac is a nifty onscreen utility for sketching over interface elements and sharing your drawings to Facebook, CloudApp, or Flickr. While I don’t find Deskscribble as useful with a trackpad or a mouse, those with a Wacom tablet in hand (the simple Bamboo would do) could have available a palette containing a highlighter, marker, and sizing tools to quickly sketch and note items on top of open windows. See a paragraph you want to emphasize? Circle it - highlight it - and upload it using a the quick shortcuts provided in the corner-positioned utility. Deskscribble offers a fullscreen implementation which hides the menubar and Object Dock, can be hidden when not in use, and allows you to doodle in any color you desire thanks to quick color shortcuts and the color wheel. While doodle’s don’t transfer between open spaces and resizing your pen size is tricky (large by default and the sizing tool is small), you can erase mistakes, undo & redo drawings, and upload a screenshot to Mac friendly online services. Deskscribble is fun to use, and lets you easily regain control of your pointer when finished so don’t have to quick the app to browse around. If you’re familiar with Cockpit and related Green & Slimy software, you’ll see how the developer’s stylings translates into new this new creation with futuristic & round design cues, and friendly icon highlights. The sketch anywhere app will set you back a cool $9.99 in the App Store.

Presence Puts Your Mac In The Cloud, Lets You Connect from iOS

Over the past few months, I have tried several iOS apps to access my Mac’s filesystem and screen while away from my home office. These apps, either standalone VNC clients like Screens or all-in-one solutions like Cloud Connect Pro, usually relied on a Mac’s built-in sharing and remote login capabilities to create a secure connection between the machine and iOS devices trying to access its contents. To work with these apps, I simply had to set up a global DynDns hostname or a VPN server so that I could log into my Mac, view files, and control its screen. The VPN method, for instance, was actually based on the same DynDns hostname I had already configured in Edovia’s Screens, Cloud Connect Pro, Plex, FileBrowser and many others. For as much as I loved being able to remotely connect to my OS  X machines with a standard web address (DynDns allows you to create a custom URL), now I can’t use it anymore. We have recently upgraded our Internet connection to a new ISP, and whilst the speed bump is noticeable and generally useful when it comes to downloading large files, the new router provided by the ISP doesn’t offer a public IP address (without entering all the details, it’s based on NAT), thus preventing me from using all those neat Mac and iOS apps that needed DynDns to be working correctly. I can access my Mac’s content locally, but as soon as I go out DynDns becomes useless thanks to the new router. This means Here, File File doesn’t work anymore in 3G, as well as Screens (through DynDns), Plex and Cloud Connect. I may have a faster Internet connection now, but the lack of DynDns support changed the way I can access my machines from outside my home network.

So I tried to come up with new solutions to work from anywhere in these past weeks. Screens comes with an optional Screens Connect option that lets you set up a hostname that works through Edovia’s servers (and it’s not blocked by my router) and LogMeIn comes with its own Mac application that handles connections independently. From what I’ve seen so far, apps that provide their own connections through a “server” Mac app and don’t require me to enter a global DynDns hostname are working just fine. But this also means that apps based on OS X sharing features and lacking proprietary remote access capabilities won’t work unless I change my ISP again. Presence, a new version of the popular FarFinder tool by FlyingMac, allows me to access my Mac – all its files, folders, and drives – through a web service that puts the computer in the cloud and makes it accessible from any web browser, iPhone, or iPad. Read more

Tickle Your Brain With Puzzle-Logic Game Woozzle

A good time-based brain teaser takes considerable skill and mental coordination to solve, and with Woozzle you’ll be shifting colored orbs around a series of mazes to complete the colored wheels and earn your right to a perfect 3-ball’d perfect score (the equivalent of earning three stars in Angry Birds). Woozzle spits out a series of colored orbs which fall into open slots on wheels that can be spun and aligned with maze-like ramps where you can swipe the orbs onwards to the appropriate destination. Becoming increasingly complicated as you progress, you’ll soon have to manage several paths that change direction thanks to levers, while managing incoming orbs and competing to solve the puzzles as quickly as possible. The puzzles aren’t terribly difficult to solve (you can take as long as you need to get through the sometimes grueling levels), but the faster you complete the objective, the higher score you’ll obtain. Excellent management skills are a must: you’ll have to control multiple wheels at once to prevent orbs from bouncing back and to compete for the best times.

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Printopia 2.0: AirPrint From iOS To Your Mac Apps

When I first reviewed Printopia by Ecamm back in November, I was impressed by how easily the app allowed me to send documents from an iOS device to a shared printer on OS X via AirPrint. The problem with AirPrint we discussed in November – which Apple hasn’t fixed yet – is that unlike the first betas of OS X 10.6.5 and iOS 4.2, the final versions of these OSes didn’t ship with AirPrint support for shared printers. AirPrint works out of the box with a bunch of HP printers, but Apple promised last year that it would also work with any printer previously configured and shared on a Mac. No need to install additional drivers on iOS: as long as a printer was shared on OS X, it would show up in AirPrint. With 10.6.5 final, that wasn’t the case. AirPrint support for shared printers was pulled at the last minute, and a series of unofficial hacks surfaced to re-enable it without reverting back to a beta of 10.6.5 (Mac OS X has reached version 10.6.7 since then). Among those hacks and apps, Printopia was without the doubt the most elegant one because it provided a GUI in System Preferences to manage shared printers, and allowed you to print a document to a virtual location on your Mac or Dropbox.

Version 2.0 of Printopia, released yesterday, builds on the great virtual printing functionality by adding support for unlimited printers in any location (could be your Downloads folder, the Desktop – you name it) and PDF workflows and applications as well. The feature is more exciting than it sounds on the changelog: with Printopia 2.0, you can send a document from your iOS device (through AirPrint) to any app on your Mac that can preview, say, PDFs. Example: I’m on my iPhone, and I find a PDF I want to read on my computer. Both devices are on the same local network (but it should work with this kind of VPN setup as well), and Printopia is running on my Mac. I take the PDF, and “print it” to Evernote. The document will automatically open in the Evernote app on my desktop. I tested this with Google Chrome, Preview, DEVONthink, Yojimbo, Numbers, Pages – it works really well. But there’s more. Not only you can print to applications, you can also print a document to an Automator workflow that supports the file type. Here’s another example: last night, I sent a PDF document to CloudApp’s own “Upload with Cloud” workflow, and AirPrint sent the document to CloudApp, automatically returning the file’s URL on my desktop.

Printopia 2.0 opens the door to a lot of possibilities for virtually printing documents anywhere on your computer, and of course support for physical shared printers is still there. Printopia 2.0 also introduces support for passwords you can assign to any virtual or real printer and settings for paper size / tray and colors.

If you want to get the most out of AirPrint and you have a Mac, Printopia is the utility to install. With support for real and virtual printers and system-wide integration with apps and Automator, Printopia is a full-featured solution to get any document from iOS on to the desktop. A demo version is available, and a full license can be purchased at $19.95. More screenshots below. Read more