Zite 2.0→

Zite 2.0

I’ve always liked Zite. A “personalized social magazine” like Flipboard, Zite has been focusing since the first version on building an algorithm to “understand” the topics you’re interested in, trying to provide better choices of articles and topics every day. From my review of version 1.0:

On the surface, Zite’s recommendation system seems pretty simple and clever. The design of the app encourages tapping around and discovering articles, giving a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” to certain types of articles, authors, or categories. Don’t like a post about Apple rumors? Give it a thumbs down. Like a post from Shawn? Choose to see more articles from Shawn Blanc within Zite. How about selecting iPad, iOS and App Store as recurring sections in your daily publication? You can do that, too, by adding new tags to Zite’s “Sections”.

Last week, Zite – owned by CNN – launched version 2.0 of the app, featuring a complete redesign and a wider range of topics to choose from. According to a company’s blog post, Zite now “knows” about 40,000 different topics, has a new option to enable Facebook integration in the Explore page, and should present more articles in the Top Stories view.

I like the new Zite, especially because of the new design and touch-based interactions in the app’s sections. The updated UI is very clean and minimal, putting the focus on text and images; there are nice animations for loading “blocks” of sections and images, and I like how you can now give a thumbs up/down by simply pulling up or down an article’s preview. On the iPad, Zite has new “widgets” to navigate “Top Stories” and “Headline News” directly from the main section, using arrow buttons to check out the articles in a gallery before opening them.

While Flipboard started as a social aggregator and later added an intelligent discovery feature called “Cover Stories”, Zite has always been focusing on algorithms and understanding a reader’s tastes both automatically and through a simple voting system. I’m looking forward to seeing how more and more data will allow CNN and Zite to provide even smarter algorithm as the one I imagined earlier this year.

Zite 2.0 is free on the App Store.

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Sponsor: Orbicule

My thanks to Orbicule for sponsoring MacStories this week.

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Undercover is Find My Mac done right. After a very simple installation, Undercover will run in the background, constantly monitoring the location of your Mac. If your Mac gets stolen, in addition to tracking location Undercover will also snap mugshots through the computer’s built-in camera and capture keystrokes.

I personally use Undercover 5 because I like its web-based interface better than Apple’s Find My Mac. If you’re looking for a more powerful Find My Mac, I highly recommend Undercover 5.

Find out more about Undercover here.

From Instapaper and Pythonista To Dropbox and Evernote As PDF

I’ve already expressed my preference for archiving webpages as PDFs rather than simple “bookmarks” on an online service. When I come across a webpage that I know I want to keep for future reference, I like to generate a clean-looking PDF file with selectable text that I can rely on for years to come.

Lately, I have become obsessed with turning longer articles I find on the Internet also into PDFs for long-term archival. For as much as I like Instapaper, I can’t be sure that the service will be around in the next decades, and I don’t want my archive of longform and quality content to be lost in the cloud. So I have come up with a way to combine Instapaper with the benefit of PDFs, Dropbox, and automation to generate documents off any link or webpage, from any device, within seconds.

Yesterday I put together an iOS and OS X workflow to generate PDFs remotely on my Mac, starting from a simple bookmarklet on iOS. On an iPhone or iPad, I can simply hit a button in Safari, and wait for Pythonista to turn a webpage (that’s already been passed through Instapaper’s text bookmarklet) into an .html file in my Dropbox, which is then converted to PDF and added to Evernote. It sounds complex, but in actual practice I can go from a Safari webpage on iOS to a PDF in the Evernote app in around 30 seconds. Hopefully you’ll find this quick solution useful; feel free to modify it and/or send suggestions. Read more

Pinbook 1.2 Gets iPad Support, Editing, Title Auto-Complete

Pinbook by Collin Donnell is my favorite iOS app for Pinboard. From my previous review of version 1.0:

I think there are several additions the developer could make to Pinbook to make it a more complete app with a faster workflow. Firstly, I’d like to have a bookmarklet that sends a page’s URL and title to Pinbook; for as much as Launch Center support is handy, it doesn’t allow me to copy two arguments simultaneously to the iOS clipboard. The great thing about the Pinboard bookmarklet is that it grabs a link’s URL and title automatically, and then offers suggested tags with auto-completion: Pinbook should do the same.

An iPad version and more navigation options would also be welcome. Like I said, I don’t just use Pinboard to add new bookmarks, but also to discover new ones added by someone else. Access to Popular page and user profiles would be a start.

Today, Pinbook has been updated to version 1.2, which introduces a native iPad app and some new features that I really like. The iPad version features a standard Mail-like layout with a sidebar for bookmarks on the left, and website previews on the right. I find Pinbook for iPad to be a much more pleasant experience to sit back and check on saved bookmarks without switching back and forth between lists and multiple views. On the iPad, Pinbook retains the speed and interface polish that led me to write a positive review of version 1.0: the app takes less than 3 seconds to fetch over 500 bookmarks from my account.

The experience of adding new bookmarks has been improved as well. Aside from the tag suggestions of version 1.1, Pinbook can now also auto-complete titles: independently from the way you send a bookmark (from Launch Center Pro, bookmarklet, or by simply pasting a URL), Pinbook will now automatically fetch the title of the webpage and insert it in the Title field of the Add Bookmark screen.

Personally, I either save bookmarks by pasting a URL saved from somewhere else (usually Tweetbot) or by sending directly to Pinbook. I used to rely on a Pythonista script to save items to Pinboard, but now that Pinbook runs on the iPad and has a more reliable URL scheme I prefer to use this rather than Python. Here’s a bookmarklet to send the current page from Safari to Pinbook:

javascript:window.location='pinbook:///add?url='+encodeURIComponent(location.href)

Last, while Pinbook still doesn’t have any social/discovery features for Pinboard – I am not sure whether the API allows this – it does come with bookmark editing now. Simply open a bookmark and tap on the compose button in the toolbar to start editing.

Pinbook 1.2 is available on the App Store, and I recommend it to every Pinboard user looking for a native and great-looking iOS app.

OmniFocus Mail Drop Beta→

OmniFocus Mail Drop Beta

As noted by Sven Fechner, a post by The Omni Group on the company’s forums publicly describes a new feature of Omni Sync Server: Mail Drop. An enhancement to OmniFocus’ existing support for Mail.app, Mail Drop is a proper way to email tasks directly to your OmniFocus inbox.

We call this new feature the “OmniFocus Mail Drop”. Unlike previous mail-processing features, we wanted a method that wouldn’t require any of your devices to be present in order to add items to OmniFocus, we wanted to add the much-requested better attachment support, and we wanted to reduce the amount of extra work you had to do in order to get your items into OmniFocus as much as possible.

To this end, we implemented the feature as part of the Omni Sync Server. Accounts on the server can now have a special email address generated. Any message forwarded or sent to that address will be processed (including attachments) and added to your OmniFocus database right there on the server. (If a spammer gets ahold of your Mail Drop address, we give you a way to generate a new one.)

I have been testing Mail Drop for the past few days, and, indeed, it works as advertised. Once generated in your Omni Sync Server’s account page, you’ll get a unique email address you can send tasks to. Unlike previous solutions, this is a real “cloud capture” tool: you don’t need a Mac to be always running to turn emails into tasks, as everything will be processed server-side by Omni Sync Server.

Right now, Mail Drop doesn’t seem to support OmniFocus’ email syntax for adding tasks, but it’s really fast. In my tests, tasks sent via email using Mail Drop were added in seconds to my Omni Sync Server account.

Personally, I think this is the right path to follow. As our devices become increasingly interconnected and “always-on”, it doesn’t make sense anymore to make task management – arguably a fundamental part of many’s workflows – simply “local”. People have been asking for a real web-based OmniFocus for years, and Mail Drop is a good start. I have been running my own OmniFocus server using Drafts’ email actions to quickly add tasks, but I welcome the user-friendliness of Mail Drop as a promising indication of OmniFocus’ cloud future.

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Kotaku’s “Everything You Should Know” Primer on Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition→

Kotaku’s “Everything You Should Know” Primer on Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition

Released through Beamdog on the PC last week and developed by their gaming division Overhaul Games, BioWare’s 1998 classic RPG Baldur’s Gate makes its return as an Enhanced Edition that includes the Tales of the Sword Coast expansion pack, a new adventure, and a few new characters. Now available on the App Store for iPads running iOS 6, I’d recommend reading through Kotaku’s explainer of the isometric remake, as well as Mike Fahey’s 13-year-old review of the original game.

If you ask me, Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition should be played traditionally with a keyboard and mouse. I’d recommend waiting for Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition to arrive on the Mac — expected later this month. But if you’re so inclined to play on a touchscreen, I’d wait for a proper review (say, from the folks at Touch Arcade) before embarking on your next adventure in the Forgotten Realms.

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Transloader: Download URLs On A Mac From iOS→

Transloader: Download URLs On A Mac From iOS

Nice new utility by Matthias Gansrigler (creator of Yoink and ScreenFloat, among other apps): Transloader is a $2.99 Mac app that can download URLs remotely. What this means is that, from an iPhone or iPad running the free companion app, you can send a URL to download on your Mac using iCloud.

Have you ever stumbled upon a Mac demo, a zip or dmg file, an image or a movie on your iPhone and wished you could download it to your Mac right away? Transloader uses your iCloud account to transfer URLs you enter on your iOS device to your Mac for download. Once you’re back on your Mac, your downloads will be ready for you.

The idea is interesting, and it reminds me of the old NoteTote app based on Simplenote. In my tests, Transloader has worked as advertised with .zip archives and PDFs, but I’d like to see an option to download webpages as .html files as well. iCloud took a couple of seconds to beam URLs from my iPhone to my Mac, but I have to mention iCloud has been far from reliable for me lately. Transloader’s concept is executed well in this version; I’d also like to have support for notifications for completed downloads and Preferences to set a specific destination folder; on iOS, it’d be nice to have automatic recognition of URLs already in the clipboard.

Transloader for Mac is available at $2.99 on the Mac App Store; the iOS app is free and Universal.

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Mapping Apple’s Retail Expansion

Apple opened its first retail stores on May 19, 2001 - one in Virginia and the other in California. In the Steve Jobs biography, author Walter Isaacson wrote how Jobs had wanted Apple to have its own stores so that their iMacs didn’t have to “sit on a shelf between a Dell and a Compaq while an uninformed clerk recited the specs of each”. Despite initial criticisms and comparisons to Gateway’s failed retail stores, Apple Stores not only continue to exist today, but are regarded as one of Apple’s greatest innovations - one that now contributes to more than 10% of Apple’s revenue.

“Unless we could find ways to get our message to customers at the store, we were screwed.” - Steve Jobs

I’ve previously written about the coverage of Apple’s entertainment services in international markets (including how they compare to Google, Microsoft and Amazon), so I was similarly intrigued by how Apple’s stores have expanded into countries outside the US. Whilst researching all this, I came across other questions such as whether Apple had a particular preference for when they opened new stores and how the expansion of their retail network would affect visitors and profits. What I have found isn’t particularly groundbreaking, but there are certainly some trends and fascinating tidbits that I’ve come across, all of which is detailed below the break.

A note to RSS readers: This article includes an HTML5 diagram that likely won’t display in your reader, view this post in your browser (it works on iOS devices) to view that diagram. Apologies for the inconvenience.

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Instacast 3 Review

Instacast 3 is both iterative and something different. No longer divided into separate iPhone and iPad apps, Instacast 3 is universal, also eschewing the in-app purchase model introduced with Instacast 2. And at its core, iCloud sync has been gutted and replaced with Vemedio’s own syncing solution that’s faster and less error prone (an in-house solution that works with WebDAV.). On the iPad, Vemedio has completely redesigned their Twitter-for-iPad inspired interface in favor of a more parallel experience with the iPhone. Just as Apple makes small iterations to their hardware, Vemedio has made small iterations to their software.

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