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Review: Mr. Reader Takes On Reeder For King of iPad RSS Apps

I read a lot on my iPad. Either with Instapaper, Read It Later, Flipboard or iBooks, there’s lots of content to consume and these apps made specifically for the tablet are a real pleasure to use. I don’t reckon I read as many articles saved from the web or discovered through social media on the iPhone as much as I do on the iPad. But of course, Instapaper and Twitter aside, there’s another category of apps I’m constantly going back to: RSS readers. Both for work and personal purposes, RSS plays a huge role in my workflow that requires me to stay on top of news, save items for later, and forward them to my colleagues. Google Reader is my RSS service of choice.

On the iPad, there’s no doubt Silvio Rizzi’s Reeder has become the most popular RSS app currently available on the App Store. I love Reeder, and I use it on the Mac and iPhone as well. Reeder is beautiful, fast, stable, has lots of options and syncs with Google Reader. Ever since it came out on the iPad last year, I haven’t looked back. But you know I’m always curious to try out new things and alternatives, because you never know what might be coming out from the minds (and Xcodes) of thousands of iOS developers out there. Mr. Reader, an iPad app released last week in the App Store, is a new Google Reader client that I’ve been testing for the past 3 weeks. I was impressed by the quality of the app, so I took it for a spin on my homescreen. Read more

Instadesk: The First Instagram Client for Mac

Thanks to Instagram’s huge success and the release of an API that allows third-party developers to plug into the service to fetch images, user information and much more, in the past weeks we’ve seen the quick rise of dedicated Instagram clients for iOS that don’t focus on shooting and uploading new images (the API doesn’t allow that, yet) but instead turn Instagram’s social aspect into a central part of the experience. Apps like Instagallery for iPad or the popular Flipboard make great use of Instagram’s API and third-party tools by letting you browse popular photos and read comments directly from the tablet’s larger screen; they also let you like and comment on pictures, see your own photos and profile or follow other people. Photo taking capabilities aside, these apps are proving that there’s a whole world of social interactions and media behind “a simple iPhone app” that deserves to be studied and implemented through native software for iPhones and iPad. Not to mention other clever experiments with the Instagram API we have covered on MacStories, such as printed photos and web apps.

But what about the Mac? When you follow a link to an Instagram picture from, say, your Twitter client of choice, the photo will open into the web browser. Instagram’s website lets you see the photo at higher resolution and check out the author’s details, but there’s no “social backend” to browse photos and people just yet. Instadesk, a new app available in the Mac App Store, wants to bring Instagram’s full experience to the desktop. The app has a clean and nice design with thumbnail previews and beautiful icons in the top toolbar; it enables you to create local “albums” to save photos for later; it lets you share photos from you or others through a variety of social networks supported by Instagram.

Instadesk is a full-featured Instagram client built specifically for the Mac. Once you’ve authorized the app with your credentials and granted permission to access your account through the API, Instadesk will place a link to your profile in the sidebar, right below links to the feed, most popular photos and tags, and status updates. In the profile tab you can check out all your photos, people you follow and your followers. As you click on a thumbnail in Instadesk, the photo is automatically brought in the foreground with a slick animation and a new screen that shows the author on the right (with buttons to follow / unfollow) as well as comments and likes,  and a box to leave a new comment yourself. You can like a photo or open it in the web browser, download it locally on your computer or hit the Share button to share the instagr.am link with your Facebook friends, Twitter followers and email contacts.

The popular section offers a selection of the most viewed photos and tags, whilst the Feed displays items posted by you and the people you follow. Instadesk also comes with a slideshow functionality and a “find user” option to manually search for a person on Instagram.

Instadesk provides a nice way to browse Instagram from your Mac. At $1.99 in the Mac App Store, it’s not a bad deal if you’re a loyal (and addicted) Instagram user. More screenshots below. Read more

dPad Is A Lightweight iPad HTML Editor for Bloggers

I haven’t written many blog entries from my iPad, and the main reason is that inserting links and rich content like images and video embeds can be really, really annoying on the tablet. No HTML editor for the iPad nailed it when it comes to offering an interface and a set of tools that allow bloggers to rely on the device as their main blogging machine; and especially if you write for blogs with several articles every day and you need to keep up at a fast pace, wasting time trying iPad apps is impossible. But I believe also those folks that post status updates and journal entries on their personal blogs must have noticed the iPad is far from being an ideal mobile blogging device, and the lack of dedicated apps is worrying. Sure, there are plenty of iOS text editors out there, even with advanced HTML and Markdown formatting capabilities; for bloggers like me, though, that is not enough. Either with WordPress, Movable Type, Drupal or a custom CMS you might be using on your blog, there are usually a lot of writing and management options to consider that most apps don’t support. The official WordPress app doesn’t even accept custom fields and many, many other things that millions of bloggers rely on every day. The situation is almost unacceptable, and I really don’t understand why – with more than 15 million iPads out there – someone hasn’t set out to create the ultimate iOS blogging app. I really don’t. Yet we keep hoping. Read more

iBackupTunes: Copy, Backup & Share Your iOS Music Library

Released yesterday in the App Store, iBackupTunes by drahtwerk is one of the most powerful music apps for iOS I’ve recently installed on my iPhone and iPad. This time, though, I’m not talking about a new iPod replacement app that aims at enhancing music playback with Wikipedia or last.fm integration: instead, iBackupTunes is “powerful” in the way it lets you copy songs and albums off your synchronized iPod library, back them up locally on your device and share them with others, even wirelessly. Whilst the procedure of importing songs might sound a little too complicated at first, iBackupTunes provides a graphical user interface that makes it easy to choose music, listen to it, and back it up. Read more

Oldie but Goodie: Play External Audio Thru Your Mac With LineIn

If you’re one of my crazy Twitter followers, you’re already well aware that I’ve significantly reduced the role of iTunes in my life thanks to Instacast, which has been reviewed by everyone from Shawn Blanc, to Michael Hurley on Macgasm, and myself on MacStories. Though I could talk about Instacast for ages, the problem I had to solve next was figuring out how to get the audio off my iPod touch and into my office speakers. The big issue is that my setup can’t accommodate more than two audio inputs, and while audio over AirPlay is probably possible with AirFoil, I notice a significant battery drain as I stream both audio from the web and broadcast it to my local speakers in the bedroom. I wanted to avoid this in the office since outlets are scarce, so I needed a way to pipe audio from my iPod touch thru my Mac. Enter an old Rogue Amoeba goodie: LineIn. Not only is it free (who doesn’t love free), but it requires nothing more than a button press to set up and pass my iPod touch audio through the audio line in to the audio line out. There isn’t a close button for LineIn, but you can simply press ⌘H to hide the app when you don’t need it.

It’s a great find, and something that might come in handy for at least one of our dear readers down the road. Download it (and check out other Rogue Amoeba freebies) here.

Typeplace - Share Your Typeface Passion: Review and Giveaway

Serif, San Serif, letterpress, kerning - typenerds of the world know these terms and know them well. Everywhere we travel, we see interesting uses of fonts in public places. Many of us even take pictures of them for inspiration and interest. What if you could use your iPhone to share these interesting findings within your social circle?

Typeplace is a new and cool way to discover, share, fave, and even share geo-tagged noteworthy pieces of typography with friends. Like Gowalla, Typeplace also awards virtual “badges” and certificates. The app has a nice interface, a familiar bottom tab bar and subtle brown and wood color scheme.

Read more

iDisplay for iPad: An Interactive Wireless Display Still Rough Around the Edges

It’s been sometime since iDisplay had launched on the App Store, and I wanted to see if performance and friendliness had improved once the 1.3.2 update landed and brought support for the iPad 2. While I don’t yet have Apple’s iPad 2 dock, the Smart Cover provided an alternative, ample viewing orientation for a landscape extension from my MacBook.

iDisplay will universally work across your Windows and Mac boxes via a free client, though the installation process is less than friendly. Mac users are generally spoiled with easy drag and drop installs, but iDisplay requires manual installation and restart to successfully install the software. I wasn’t terribly happy that I had to stop all of my work to get iDisplay up and running, but to be fair DisplayPad which we reviewed back in December also required a restart. What bothers was that on the reboot, the resolution for my 1280x800 display changed twice before returning to normal upon the login screen. Despite a less than stellar install process, how well does the iPad app work?

Read more

Review: Take Five…For Mac!

 

Now I will admit, I never bought Iconfactory’s Take Five for iOS. Don’t get me wrong it’s a beautiful app but I didn’t see myself using it that much on my iPhone. I’m so use to just using the volume controls or multitasking tray. The point of the app makes a lot of sense though: it’s aimed at letting you restart music that you paused and forgot to turn back on. I received an email a few weeks ago with the subject “Take Five for the Mac Beta,” I knew right away that this would fit into my workflow on my iMac because I get more sidetracked at home with my wife, kids and the television. So now when I want to pause music, I use Take Five for the Mac. Read more

Week Calendar 3.0 Is A Powerful iCal Alternative for iPhone

In the past months, I’ve taken a look at different calendar applications for the iPhone and iPad that aim at bringing more functionalities (either through particular interface approaches, extended Google Calendar support, or other features) to a device’s built-in calendar software from Apple. The iOS calendar app, a tiny version of iCal for the desktop, is fast and elegant and works just fine for most users, but sometimes you want or need more from a mobile calendar or agenda. For instance, the possibility to have more views available (rather than the List, Day and Month ones designed by Apple) or “do more” with events and reminders. And while I know most of MacStories readers are huge fans of Calvetica and Cloud Calendar for the iPhone and iPad, respectively, I’m pretty sure some of you have been looking for a slightly more “powerful” or, dare I say, “geeky” alternative to Calendar.app. If so, meet Week Calendar.

The name says it all: Week Calendar’s biggest feature is the weekly view that’s the focus of the entire experience and undoubtedly something that Apple’s calendar app really lacks. In the app’s weekly view you can pinch & zoom vertically or horizontally to show / hide hours and days, double-tap to focus on a specific event or rotate to landscape mode to gain an even broader view. Tapping on the top toolbar allows you to select a date to jump to, whilst selecting an event opens a desktop-like popup with related information. Tap on the popup, and you get to another screen with all the details you’ve entered and buttons to share, print (that’s right, AirPrint) or create a template off the event itself. You can edit an event at any time, and even display the assigned location on a map. Something that I really like about Week Calendar (well, weekly view aside): you can link contacts from the Address Book to an event. Like I said, everything’s pretty full-featured to offer a wide array of options and choices.

“Choices” seems to be a prerogative of Week Calendar: from the main screen, an iPad-like popover lets you switch between 7 different views: List + Search, Day, Week, Month, Year, Agenda, and Today. The “Go to a Day” shortcut lets you manually enter a date to open. Switching between sections and views felt fast and highly responsive to me, although I have to say I’ve only configured the app with two calendars: my personal one, and US Holidays. The app comes with this kind of optional, built-in subscriptions that you can activate from the Settings. Speaking of which, there’s a lot of stuff to choose from in there: from Time Zone support and “Week starts at” to an auto-coloring system for events with a specific title, you can stay assured the option you’re looking for has been implemented in Week Calendar. I can see how many will prefer the simplicity of an app like Calvetica, but sometimes an application for “nerds & power users” is more than welcome. Other features of Week Calendar that impressed me for the quality of the implementation were fullscreen support (you can activate it with a single / double tap and choose what UI elements to hide), possibility to cut and drag & drop events in any view for easy re-arrangement and TextExpander integration.

Week Calendar is an app that needs to be used for weeks – even months – to be fully appreciated. There’s so much stuff to play with, configure and customize it’s not really easy to fit everything into a single article – plus, I believe all these options have the added value of turning the app into a completely different experience depending on how you use calendars. So, head over the App Store now and buy Week Calendar 3.0 – at $1.99 it’s possibly the most “serious” calendar app for iPhone I’ve seen so far. Read more