Month: December 2013

The Best App for Managing, Editing, and Reading PDFs on Your iPad  →

Ben Brooks, in our latest review on The Sweet Setup:

We slogged through seventeen different PDF apps to try and find the one PDF app that would change your life — well, at least change your iPad usage. And the best PDF app for managing, editing, and reading PDFs on your iPad is PDF Expert 5 by Readdle. PDF Expert is delightful and easy to use, it offers the fastest PDF reading experience, it works with many syncing services, and it has the most robust toolset available on the iPad.

PDF Expert is a truly fantastic app, and is a great example of how the iPad can take certain tasks which can be cumbersome or complicated on a Mac and make them easier on a touchscreen device. For example, want to merge two PDF documents into one? Just tap, hold, move, and drop — it takes 3 seconds.

The Best App for Managing, Editing, and Reading PDFs on Your iPad

First Thoughts on Writer Pro for iOS

The iPad makes for a fantastic writing device.

A cup of hot coffee, my bluetooth keyboard, and my iPad makes for one of my favorite ways to write. The one-app-at-a-time mentality along with the relatively difficult way to switch between apps (when compared to the Mac’s CMD+Tab) make iOS a pretty good “anti-distraction writing enviroment”.

Moreover, there are some truly exceptional writing apps for the iPad.

Over the years I’ve spent a lot of time with a lot of writing and note-taking apps. The ones that have stood out to me the most?

  • Simplenote (which I don’t really use for long-form writing, but I do use often because I have lots and lots and lots of notes in there).
  • iA Writer: For whatever reason, I never got into iA Writer all that much (neither on the iPad, iPhone, or Mac). Mostly because, as silly as this may sound, it didn’t have a “night theme”.
  • Byword: What I use on the Mac for all long-form writing.
  • Writing Kit: I used this app for quite a while because of its built-in web browser and several other nifty features.
  • Editorial: the iPad markdown writing app that changed the world.

Now, I am, of course, writing this text in Writer Pro on the iPad. It just came out a few hours ago and so naturally I can’t say too much about it yet. But iA Writer has a well-deserved fantastic reputation, and this new version of the app — Writer Pro — promises to take things to the next level. And, clearly, it does.

Is Writer Pro a significant upgrade from iA Writer? Absolutely.

Writer Pro has all the simplicity and charm of its predecessor but now applied to the whole workflow of writing process — from idea to done.

What’s special about Writer Pro is its obsessive focus is on the writing process. There are four “sections” your documents can be slotted in to: Notes, Writing, Editing, Reading. Each section has its own typeface and cursor color. The “Writing” section is, more or less, what the whole iA Writer app used to be.

This is an organization structure I could get behind. I follow this concept loosely already by keeping all of my notes and ideas in Simplenote and all of my “currently writing” articles in Dropbox (where I use Byword on the Mac and Editorial on the iPad). No other app that I know of has this sort of persnickety focus and structure.

So, after poking around and doing some typing, do I find Writer Pro awesome enough to pull me away from my current apps? It’s early to say, but I don’t think so…

I have three quibbles:

  • Unfortunately, Writer Pro on iOS has no auto-markdown completion, nor markdown syntax highlighting.

  • Secondly, there is no document storage option like iA Writer had (in iA Writer on iOS you could chose iCloud or Dropbox for document syncing). Writer Pro syncs with iCloud or nothing. Which means your documents are sandboxed into the app. And there is no export option to get out all the documents at once. (You can email individual documents out of the app.)

And, from what I can tell, if you use iCloud document syncing for both iA Writer and Writer Pro, the two apps do not have access to one another’s files. But, since Writer Pro on the Mac can access documents you have in Dropbox, if wanted to use Writer Pro on your Mac you could keep it in sync with iOS apps that have access to Dropbox (such as Byword, Editorial, etc.).

  • Third, when writing in Writer Pro with a Bluetooth keyboard (as I am now) the custom keyboard row does not persist at the bottom of the screen. And so to get access to the custom Editing and Syntax highlighting buttons you have to bring up the entire soft keyboard, tap your options, and then dismiss the soft keyboard.

Update: Anton Sotkov points out that the keyboard shortcuts in the Mac app work on iOS as well.

Update 2: The Writer Pro team told me via Twitter that many of these issues will be gone in future updates. I understand that you’ve got to draw the “1.0 line” somewhere, and I have a lot of appreciate for opinionated software like iA Writer and Writer Pro.

Is Writer Pro an impressive, beautiful, and useful piece of software? Absolutely. Is it going to find a place in my iPad writing workflow? I don’t think so.

First Thoughts on Writer Pro for iOS

It’s Possible to Use Social Media Mindfully  →

John Dickerson:

We all know how to spot the obsessives. They’re blocking views at concerts as they hold up their phone to capture distant singing blobs of blurry light onstage. They text and drive, putting other people at risk, or they’re the ones at dinner who photograph every course change.

These people are a chore.

I can’t remember where I stole this phrase from, but I very much like the idea of “work-life boundaries” rather than “work-life balance”. Because it’s all life, isn’t it? The same could go for “connected-disconnected boundaries” instead of balance. Checking Twitter at the stop light doesn’t mean you’re too connected, it means you have unhealthy boundaries.

It’s one of the reasons I like Day One. Because with Day One I can toss photos and text tidbits in there, as well as long-form stuff — it’s great for capturing the moment, as Dickerson is talking about, without broadcasting to a social network. And, finding stuff in Day One is far easier than finding something in my Twitter or Instagram archives.

It’s Possible to Use Social Media Mindfully

Misunderstood or Double-edged?  →

Rob McGinley Myers also has some excellent thoughts on Apple’s latest ad, Misunderstood.

During lunch, I showed the commercial to my wife, Anna. Our first reactions were both along the lines of: Gosh, I don’t want to let my kids grow up to be reclusive teenagers addicted to their phones like that.

But, as Rob points out, what if the teenager in the commercial was instead walking around with a DSLR or reading a novel or writing/drawing in a journal?

The iPhone can be any of those things and more, so why do we look at someone face down in their phone differently than someone immersed in a book? Because if they’re anything like me, they’re not reading on their iPhone, they’re checking Twitter or something.

That’s the double-edged sword of the iPhone that Meyers brings up, and also I think that’s the turn Apple is playing with its commercial: We are moved by the kid who is actually creating something for his family (and not playing Candy Crush). But also, as parents, we feel that we’re not alone in the “kids and technology” battle — other families with iPhones and iPads are facing the exact same scenarios, questions, and concerns that we are…

The commercial gives us hope that our kids — who are growing up in “an iPhone generation” — will use their devices to make something that’s awesome and beautiful instead of getting even more hooked on Candy Crush and Instagram than we, their parents, already are.

Misunderstood or Double-edged?

Ben Thompson on ‘Misunderstood’  →

Ben Thompson has a great take on why Apple’s new holiday iPhone ad, Misunderstood, is so great:

What make this ad so powerful is that it is so, so real. Oh sure, the perfection of the recording and the happy coincidence of the grandparents having an AppleTV is perhaps not so plausible, but the idea of a teenage son being disconnected, yet ultimately, deep down inside, still caring, will touch the soul of parents — and young adults — in a way few ads ever will.

Ben Thompson on ‘Misunderstood’

VSCO Cam Interview with Kyle Steed  →

Kyle is a fantastic photographer. He and nine other mobile photographers went to Israel for a week to document their travels for the Israel Ministry of Tourism and the non-profit called Stand With Us. His interview here on the VSCO Journal has some great photos from the trip and some behind-the-scenes info about the trip. You can see more of Kyle’s Israel photos on his Grid page.

I talk a lot about how much I like my fancy-pants mirrorless camera, and here guys like Kyle are taking incredible shots with their iPhones. Proof that tools and rules, in and of themselves, do not an artist make.

VSCO Cam Interview with Kyle Steed

2013: The Year ‘the Stream’ Crested  →

Alexis Madrigal:

The Stream represents the triumph of reverse-chronology, where importance—above-the-foldness—is based exclusively on nowness. […] And now the Internet’s media landscape is like a never-ending store, where everything is free. No matter how hard you sprint for the horizon, it keeps receding. There is always something more. […]

And now, who can keep up?

If you have a Facebook account, Twitter account, Instagram account, Pinterest account, ADN account, and/or an RSS reader, then you’ll appreciate this article.

2013: The Year ‘the Stream’ Crested

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* * *

My thanks to Webydo for sponsoring the RSS feed this week. Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

Sponsor: Webydo — Professional Website Design Software

Degradation or Aspiration  →

David Smith:

I think the App Store is arriving at a place where Apple faces a pronounced decision point.

The App Store currently contains over a million apps, each of which has been reviewed by Apple at least once. Apple has spent a tremendous amount of time and energy to make the App Store what it is today. The road to get here hasn’t always been easy but I think Apple has done a commendable job to bring the Store thus far. The challenge they now face is that to continue to maintain high standards will require exponentially more and more effort.

I think apps like Diet Coda, Editorial, 1Password, Fantastical, OmniFocus, Day One, et al. are some of the quintessential examples of apps that really push the boundaries of what iOS devices can be capable of doing.

Naturally Apple cannot get every app and every developer to “play nice” and stop gaming the system, but if they can keep the App Store in a place where the aforementioned powerful and thoughtful apps are able to thrive then it will encourage other developers to build their app at the same caliber.

However, when an app like Tiny Tower gets picked as the (2011) Game of the Year, that doesn’t spark confidence.

Right now Apple mostly promotes apps that fit in with the latest design trends, use the latest APIs, and/or are popular with mainstream media. Yes, of course we want our apps to stay up-to-date with the latest designs and APIs, but a bland app can do that just as well as a forward-thinking app.

And so where is the incentive for a developer to spend the additional thousands of hours it takes to build a powerful, thoughtful, delightful app? And, on the other side of that coin, what is Apple doing to educate its user-base that these apps are worth their “whopping” $3 price tag?

Degradation or Aspiration

My iPhone App Playlist

The iPhone changed everything. It redefined what “delight” in software means. It pushed the needle of mobile and touch computing far forward. It opened up a massive ecosystem of apps and services and has been a key player in the boon of social networks.

I’ve had an iPhone within arms reach since 2007 — it is one of the most important gadget I own (if not the most important). As the software and hardware have evolved over the years, here’s a look at what apps have settled in as the ones I use every day to get things done and communicate with other people.

Let’s start with the apps I use on a regular basis for work and for play, these are my Mission-Critical Apps

  • Simplenote: My thoughts on Simplenote always start along the lines of how it’s the app I’d chose if I had to pick just one app only for use on all my iOS devices. For me, hands down the most important “workflow thing” is to have text in sync between my iPhone, my iPad, and my Mac. There are a lot of apps which do this well, but for my needs, Simplenote is the best.

When it comes to my writing workflow, I’ve basically got two buckets for all my text. First there is my bucket of ideas, lists, thoughts, and all sorts of other miscellany. And second is my bucket of current articles I’m working on. The former is what I use Simplenote for; the latter is a Dropbox folder filled with markdown files.

What makes Simplenote my favorite here is its search functionality. Simplenote has amazing and fast search. Searching for a note searches both the note’s title and the contents within. Then, tapping on a search result from the list takes you the search results within that note where you can the see all instances of that term within the note’s contents.

  • Byword: Byword is my next favorite text app on the iPhone, and it’s the app I use for my second aforementioned bucket. For any article I’m currently working on, if I want to edit, add to, or create a new one from my iPhone, then I use Byword to access my “Currently Writing” folder.

Byword has some awesome features that I wish Simplenote did — namely, fantastic Markdown support and a dark theme. Byword’s search functionality is also fantastic — better than any other app I know of, save Simplenote. Byword would make a great app for all my “little notes”, but it doesn’t (yet?) show search results for terms within the note’s content (though it does search a note’s content when searching at the list level).

For more about why Byword is awesome, read our review at The Sweet Setup (written by Federico Viticci) where we crown it the best Markdown Writing App on the iPhone.

  • Fantastical: I’ve spent hours and hours testing, trying, and using many different great calendar apps for the iPhone. And Fantastical is the best. Natural language entry for creating new events is the easiest way to go about it, and Fantastical has the best natural language engine. Not to mention Fantastical has several excellent design layouts (day ticker with list view; month view with list view; and landscape mode’s week view) as well as reminders support. The only thing I dislike about Fantastical is that it lacks an iPad version.

  • OmniFocus: I’ve been using the OmniFocus suite of apps (Mac, iPhone, and iPad) for over three years now. Once a year, usually around the New Year, I like to step back and consider if the tools I’m using are still the best tools for me. If the answer is “yes” then I leave things alone and get back to work. But if the answer is “no” then I try to consider if its my use of the tools or the tools themselves that are flawed.

Lately, I have been wondering if OmniFocus is now too complex for me now that I’ve somewhat settled into a grove with my work-from-home schedule. But as I’ve considered other alternatives, I just can’t conceive of quitting OmniFocus because it’s a task management system that I trust — I know that if and when an important task becomes due, OmniFocus will show it to me.

This is something that I will be revisiting in the near future but for now, OmniFocus remains one of my “mission critical” apps (on all devices).

  • Day One: This is certainly the best journaling app out there. I keep Day One on my iPhone’s Home screen and write in it often. I have no rules for how I use Day One, nor for how often I use it. My entries are all sorts of things, including photos, one-line milestone mentions about my kids, deep thoughts, brain dumps of ideas, and more.

  • Tweetbot: My go-to Twitter app, and arguably the best Twitter client on the iPhone. I’m a huge fan of the big update Tweetbot received a while back and look forward to that update influencing the iPad and Mac versions as well.

  • 1Password: I sometimes like to refer to my iPhone as “Command Central”. It’s great for a lot of things, and then okay at a lot of other things. And while it may not be the best device for some tasks, I can still do pretty much anything from the iPhone if and when I need to. And since I have my iPhone within arm’s reach pretty much 24/7, it makes sense that I should be able to access critical information when I need to. And that’s why 1Password is so great.

1Password is far more than just a password manager. If that’s all it was then the updates to iCloud keychain sync would have negated the need for 1Password. However, 1Password also stores secure notes, bank information, and pretty much anything else I can think of.

  • Rdio: This is the app I use for listening to music on my iPhone, iPad, and Mac. The $10/month plan is well worth it for getting unlimited access to pretty much any album I want.

  • Instapaper: It seems everyone is using Pocket these days, but Instapaper continues to be my go-to Read Later app. I love the design and I’ve got an IFTTT recipe that takes all of my Instapaper “liked” articles and drops them into Pinboard for me. Since having kids I now use the iPhone version almost as much as the iPad version. There are often times I’ve got just one hand free and it’s a great time to catch up on some reading.

  • Poster: This is the app I use to post links to shawnblanc.net; alas it’s no longer available for sale because the developer, Tom Witkin, now works for WordPress. Fortunately for those who already have Poster, it is still being updated.

  • Scratch: If you consider yourself an “iPhone toting power user” in any level at all, then you probably want a quick-capture text app such as Scratch or Drafts. I’ve gravitated towards Scratch on my iPhone mostly because I like the design, but that in no way means Drafts is an inferior app. In fact, Drafts does a lot of awesome things that Scratch does not. I use Drafts on my iPad, and have a cool URL-scheme workflow thing that helps me get links and text from Instapaper to Poster (with Drafts as the mediator).

  • TextExpander Touch: Though it’s not really an app that I launch, many of the apps I use support TextExpander snippets.

  • Dropbox: This app/service could go without saying, but yet, at the same time, it’s worth mentioning because Dropbox is such a critical back-end component to so many of the apps I use. I use Dropbox to sync my 1Password database between my iPhone, iPad, and Mac. I use it to keep all my “Currently Writing” articles available to me on all my devices. I use it sync Day One, and my TextExpander snippets. Moreover, since all my current projects have folders in Dropbox on my Mac, I can access those files at any time via the Dropbox app on my iPhone.

And now let’s talk briefly about the apps I don’t use all the time, but which I use often enough and are awesome

  • Check the Weather: This is my favorite weather app. It’s very easy to read, and I like that it has a radar and Dark Sky’s short-term precipitation forecast.

  • Google Maps: It’s just more reliable than Apple’s maps, and it’s far better at finding the place I’m searching for.

  • PCalc: PCalc is one fine calculator app. I use it not because I’m an engineer nor am I an amateur calculator nerd, but because it looks great and it’s fast.

  • Reeder: My favorite RSS reader, though I mostly use the iPad version.

  • VSCO Cam: My go-to app for editing photos I take with my iPhone.

  • Riposte: The best iPhone client for App.net.

  • Mileage Log: For years I used Trip Cubby to track all my business, medical, and charity-related driving. That app was recently retired and out of the ashes arose Mileage Log. I haven’t used any other mileage tracker so I don’t know how this one compares to the others, but I do know that Mileage Log is awesome and it complies with the IRS’s regulations for tracking miles driven for tax purposes. I’ve used the app to log 62 trips so far this year for more than 1,300 miles.

  • QuickShot: I use this to take photos of business-related receipts for tax purposes. QuickShot names them with the date and uploads them to Dropbox. Then I have a Hazel rule that moves those images to my receipts folder and I throw away the physical receipt. It’s faster than scanning them all in at once (especially since receipts are good at getting all wrinkled up in my pocket), and it’s a great way to keep track of receipts when traveling.

  • Loom: After Everpix shut down I switched to Loom at Bradley Chamber’s recommendation. There are a lot of things I like about Loom (such as its design and auto uploading of images from my Mac) and it’s still better than Photo Stream when it comes to don’t-make-me-think-about-it photo syncing from all my devices to all my devices.

  • Paprika: I’ve recently migrated all my recipes out of Simplenote and into Paprika. I don’t have a lot of recipes, but the ones I do have are so very delicious and it makes a lot more sense to keep them in a nice recipe app. Paprika is truly quite great, and having a 3-app suite across the Mac, iPhone, and iPad has proven to be quite helpful. Over on The Sweet Setup we tested quite a few recipe apps and found Paprika to be the best.

  • Checkmark: I don’t use location-based reminders on a regular basis, but when I do then Checkmark is the best there is. It’s fast and reliable.

  • Delivery Status: This is a swell app that keeps track of packages and deliveries I’m expecting.

  • Dropvox: This app is extremely dated, but it still works and I still use it to record Shawn Today episodes whenever I’m away from my Mac. And, so far as I know, there are no other apps which take a voice recording and pipe it to Dropbox.

  • Pinbook / Pushpin / Pinswift / Pinner: There are a lot of good Pinboard apps out there right now. Pinbook was my favorite for a while, but it’s in desperate need of a good update. Pinswift is new and pretty great. Pinner is also nice. The jury is still out on this one, but needless to say, there are quite a few nice options for anyone in want of a good iOS Pinboard client.

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About 9 months ago I began taking monthly screenshots of my iPhone’s Home screen so I could track, over time, how my usage of apps evolved and changed.

This is what my Home screen looked like on March 1, 2013 compared to how it looks today:

Shawn Blanc iPhone Home screen comparisons

As you can see, aside from the visual change iOS 7 has brought, not much has changed for me in terms of my most-used and most-important apps.

I find this awesome and yet also a bit curious. It’s awesome because I feel comfortable with my current arsenal of 3rd-party apps; they do pretty much everything I could ask of them, I know what they’re capable of, how they work, and how to use them efficiently. However, on the other side of the coin, there are some apps I use that don’t have any other top-shelf alternatives which interest me.

Is that a bad thing? No, I don’t think so. Naturally, I want 1Password to stay the undisputed champion of password management apps because not only am I familiar and happy with it but also because I’ve invested a lot of money on it. However, on the other hand, competition breeds innovation. When an app sits as king of the hill, with little to no competition, I can’t help but wonder if it’s the best version it could be or if it’s just the best when compared to everyone else.

But let’s not end on a sad note. To wrap up, let me say that I find my iPhone as interesting, curious, and wonderful today as I did in 2007. My kids will grow up thinking iPhones and iPads are normal, and who knows what this stuff will look like when they’re my age. But I’m glad I’ve had the opportunity to be right here, living and working in the midst of what is undoubtedly one the most significant evolutions of personal computing since the 1980s.

But now I’m crossing into iPad stuff. And that’s a post for next week…

My iPhone App Playlist