It’s been almost two years since I began using Backblaze. If you don’t have an off-site backup solution, I highly recommend them.

Recently, Backblaze released an iPhone app for accessing all the files from your computer which have been backed up. I’ve often wished there were an iOS app available so I could view and access my Backblaze data — a great way to get at non-Dropbox’d files when I’m away from my computer. Alas, the Backblaze app leaves some things to be desired.

When you launch the app you’re prompted to sign in with your Backblaze account info. You then select the computer whose data you want to view, enter the encryption key for that computer, and you’re in. You now have full access to every file which Backblaze has backed up from your computer.

Note that every time you leave the app and come back you’ll have to re-enter your encryption key and then re-navigate through the file system. I very much appreciate the security this brings, but it’d be nice if I could set a timer for how long I want the app to wait before re-asking for my encryption password.

Since Backblaze backs up regularly in the background, you’re theoretically looking at exactly what’s on your computer (or nearly identical). For situations where you just need to get at a particular file, this is a much quicker and easier way than screen sharing or remoting back to your Mac.

When you navigate to a file, you can then download it to your iPhone. From there you’re able to preview it, and, through the “open in” button, you can save it to Dropbox, open it in another app, send it as an email attachment, etc.

Unfortunately, if you download a file type the iPhone doesn’t natively recognize (such as .zip files), you cannot do anything with the file. For example: though I can download a zip file to my iPhone, tapping that file gives me an error dialog box. And without being able to preview the document Backblaze doesn’t show me the “open in” options. Thus, I cannot even email the zip file from my Backblaze backup.

This to me is the app’s biggest shortcoming. The advantage of getting at my Backblaze data is that it gives me the opportunity to find and then do something with virtually any file that’s on my Mac. But being limited to files which my iPhone can natively handle severely limits the usefulness of the Backblaze app.

Shortcomings aside, I’m glad Backblaze has shipped something. And I trust that, like the Backblaze service itself, the app will only get better over time.

Riposte is an iPhone app for App.net (ADN). It first launched in January this year and quickly became my personal favorite ADN app. In March, Riposte got even better when it brought support for private messages (individual and group) as well as granular control over push notifications (meaning you can select what you want to get a push notification for).

Today, Riposte 1.2 is available and brings a handful of new features and improvements, as well as a host of new “Pro” features.

The Pro features include customizing the app using one of several new typefaces, including Avenir; an auto-saving of drafts; a Private Messages quickview button; auto dark and light mode depending on time of day; a 3-finger gesture to control brightness; option to hide the Status Bar; and more. These features become available after a $5 in-app purchase.

Riposte is now a free app, but it hasn’t always been. When it first launched it was a $5 app, and about 2 months later it went free. If, like me, you were one of the users who bought Riposte when it first launched, to get the new pro features you’re now looking at a $10 app. But Riposte is one of the premier iPhone apps for ADN — it is fast, feature rich, packed to the rafters with clever and helpful details, and is on an active development cycle. Even if you paid full price when it first came out and now chose also to upgrade the Pro features, I consider $10 to be a fair price for Riposte.

Riposte doesn’t need the Pro features to be a great app — it already handles the core functionality of ADN with aplomb.

When Riposte first shipped, the two things which most stuck out to me were its inclusion of a 1Password shortcut button on the login screen, and its use of the hamburger / basement menu design. Though some advocate against this sort of navigational design, I think it’s great when used in a good setting. And for an app such as Riposte it especially makes sense because the primary view is just the unified timeline.

A few months after its initial release, Riposte 1.1 came with support for Private Messages and granular settings for push notifications. The granular push notification setting means you can enable or disable push notifications for many different types of interactions — I like this because it means I can choose to only get a notification when someone sends me a Private Message.

Private Messaging in Riposte is great. The app supports individual chats or group chats, and since ADN doesn’t require following for PMs, anyone can send and be a part of a private message. It’s more like a private reply versus a public reply. I’m thinking that ADN group messaging will be the new Glassboard for me this year at WWDC.

One of Riposte’s new Pro features is the option to enable a quickview button for private messages. This button hovers at the bottom-left of the screen and offers one-tap access to the messages pane from just about anywhere in the app (as opposed to having to drill down to the Menu screen to switch to the Private Messages view).

If you have any unread PMs, the icon will be filled in with blue; otherwise it will be more transparent.

Similarly, if you have the Full Screen mode enabled (as shown above — a setting you can toggle under Riposte’s General Settings), the button for creating a new post hovers in the bottom-right corner of the screen at all times. By turning on the Full Screen mode, the common “back” button (for returning to previous screens if you’ve drilled down into a conversation view or a web page) is gone.

Riposte gets past the missing “back” button by using a swipe-left-to-right gesture for going back. Pretty much from any screen you are in, swiping left to right will take you back one level.

This has become one of those gestures I find myself using in many other apps — similar to how I was always trying pull to refresh in apps that didn’t even support it, I’ve begun swiping right to go back in apps that don’t support it.

Jared Sinclair, one of the developers of Riposte, said:

We take push/pop transitions at face value: swiping to go back is like pulling yourself back to where you were before. If I can’t picture an app as a set of cards laid out in a grid on a table, I can’t understand it.

It’s clear the Riposte guys thoughtfully implemented this swipe gesture. For example: on the screen for composing a new post, swiping left-to-right or right-to-left moves the cursor one character respectively. Thus there is a “Cancel” button on the post compose screen for going back to where you were.

There are several other swipe gestures, such as two-finger swiping up/down to switch between light and dark mode, or two-finger left-to-right swipe to get back to the root Stream view.

And speaking of swipe gestures, one of the gestures included in the Pro feature is a 3-finger brightness control. While using the beta of Riposte 1.2, I showed this brightness control shortcut to my wife, and she asked why that wasn’t something you could do in every app. I agree (sort of).

In the iPhone’s Settings there are a handful of toggles buried too many taps deep, and I wish it’d be easier to get to them quickly. Brightness control is one of those, and while I don’t know that a universal iOS gesture of 3-finger swipe is the answer, I like that Riposte guys at least did something.

Typefaces

Preeminent among the Pro features in Riposte 1.2 is the option for different typefaces.

There are a total of 9 unique typefaces (a combination of iOS stock and free options, including Avenir, Exo, Gill, Signika, Source Sans Pro, and others). Some faces have multiple weights, making a total of 14 different font options.

Of the options, Avenir and Signika are my two favorites — I’ve been using Avenir at the Extra Small size.

I asked the Riposte guys why they were charging for a Pro update that didn’t include licensed typefaces such as Proxima Nova, Whitney, or Chaparral Pro. Their reply was that the typefaces they like are a little too expensive to license until they see what sales are like for the Pro update. Their intention with the Pro upgrade is for it to be the locus of future features, so it will only get better.

If I were in their shoes, I suspect I would make the same choice. Licensing a typeface for use in an iOS app is not cheap — costing in the thousands of dollars — and the ADN app market is still relatively small. Hopefully Riposte will be successful enough to both sustain its development and warrant the licensing of some elite faces like we’ve come accustomed to in the more mainstream apps like Instapaper and Twitterrific.

Post Drafts

Another Pro feature of Riposte is the auto-saving of any un-published post. You can view all your drafts by tapping the paper icon in the compose view.

Basically, when you cancel a post that has text in it (or if you quit the app), a draft is automatically created for you. It means no lost posts and not having to tap an “are you sure you want to cancel” button every time.

But it also means you end up with a lot of draft posts that should just go in the trash. After 2 weeks using the beta I had about 12 draft posts I didn’t want. A swipe and delete on each of them cleared them out before I wrote a few better drafts in order to stage the screenshot you see above.

Conclusion

ADN has become far more than just an ad-free Twitter replacement. And eventually the service will reach a point where any one single client cannot (or at least should not) handle all the functionality of ADN. But at the moment, for the core functionality of ADN as a social network, Riposte handles everything I am most commonly using with flying colors. It has become one of my favorite and most-used Home screen apps.

It’s impressive to me just how far and how fast this app has come in the short amount of time since its release. I am, as usual, looking forward to what’s in store for Riposte and for ADN in the days to come.

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Free App.net Invitations

And, of course, no ADN-related article would be complete without some free invites, courtesy of the Riposte developers and the App.net team. If you want to join ADN, click here to sign up for free (while invites last).

Note, when you join ADN your new account will automatically be following me (@shawnblanc). Free accounts can only follow up to 40 people, so feel free to unfollow me if you want.