My essential iOS apps — Part 3

January 8, 2014
by Riccardo Mori
Software

Part 3 — Special mentions

I originally had not planned a Third Part in my ‘Essential iOS apps’ series, but while writing the first two I couldn’t help but notice a few applications which — while I don’t consider them strictly indispensable — are important enough to warrant a mention. 

Sparrow — This promising email client enjoyed a brief moment where it was my primary email client both on the Mac and on my iPhone. Then Google came, acquired the company (or acqui-hired its developers, whatever), and ruined everything. Development of the Mac app has basically stopped, and on iOS it receives the occasional maintenance update to keep the app working. However, something curious has happened with this app and my setup: it is now the primary email client on my secondary devices. It has replaced the built-in Mail app on my iPhone 3GS, and it has replaced Mail.app both on my 12-inch and 17-inch PowerBook G4s (Yes, I was quick enough to download Sparrow at the beginning, when it was still a Universal Binary). In other words, it’s not an essential app, but I still love it very much.

x2y — This is a great aspect ratio calculator, developed by Joe Cieplinski, who is also one of my favourite tech writers (you should add his blog to your feeds). As the official app description goes, “x2y is a beautifully simple aspect ratio calculator for the iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch. Built for designers and web developers who need to resize images and videos in code, x2y calculates dimensions for you automatically. Just choose the original aspect ratio or size, enter one of the new desired dimensions, and the missing dimension will be calculated instantly.” I’m not a designer or Web developer, so this app is not part of my essential tools, strictly speaking, but whenever I need to resize an image I want to include in an article on one of my blogs, I always reach for x2y. It’s really a well-designed and thought-out application which I strongly recommend despite what some people may think about its ‘expensive’ price tag. 

Twitter — Why a special mention for Twitter’s official iOS client? For a very particular, obscure reason: to my knowledge, it’s the only Twitter client that will work on your old iPhone 3G with iOS 4.2.1. I didn’t believe it myself, but I tried this and it worked: on your iPhone 3G, enter the App Store app and look for Twitter. You’ll get the Download an older version of this app? dialog box, tap Download and install the app. Log in to Twitter and… it’ll work. (I mentioned it previously, by the way.)

Dragon Dictation — This app is worth a special mention because it still works with older iOS devices, having iOS 4.0 as minimum requirement (at the time of writing). It works great on my iPhone 3G.

Groove — Music player & Smart playlist — The app description says that “Groove learns your listening habits and organises your music into great playlists.” At first I didn’t think I would use such an app, since I’m not on the move enough to spend much time listening to music on my iPhone or iPad. Yet I recently tried Groove and was impressed by its (revamped) interface and, more importantly, by the great mixes it generated by choosing songs from my library. Again, I wouldn’t call Groove an ‘essential’, but its importance and frequency of use are rapidly increasing on my iDevices.

Mactracker — Mactracker is a compact encyclopaedia on everything Apple produced: computers, peripherals, devices, accessories, operating systems. It’s the best tool for quickly looking up some information on an Apple product, no matter the vintage. When I set up a new iOS device, this is usually the first non-strictly-essential app to be installed right after all the already-mentioned essentials.

Coast by Opera — This is a really interesting browser, which sits on my iPad dock together with Safari and has made me use Chrome less and less frequently. I love Opera’s modern take on how to browse the Web and the ‘websites as apps’ paradigm. I love how gestures are implemented and the browser’s UI in general. I’ll probably write more about it in a separate post.

Jasmine — I don’t watch a lot of YouTube videos, but when I do I fire up Jasmine and not the official YouTube iOS client. I simply love Jasmine’s minimal, elegant UI. It all feels so much less cluttered. 

VLC — The only occasion when I watch videos on my iPad is when I travel, which doesn’t happen all that frequently (and that’s why there were no video apps in my essentials collection for the iPad). There are many good third-party iOS apps for playing videos out there — Flex Player and Infuse are the first coming to mind — but for my needs, VLC is a complete-enough package. 

Status Board — When I was talking about Screens in Part Two of this series of articles, I wrote: “Over time I’ve purchased a few apps with an ‘expensive’ price tag, and at first glance it’s easy to dismiss them with the typical Oh, App X does just that? It’s not worth the price objection.” The same can be said about Status Board by Panic. Why should I pay $10 for an app that just displays information in a pretty way, most of which information (time, weather, email, Twitter and RSS feeds…) can be retrieved from other sources for free? Again, it’s a well-designed app and with little extra work it allows you to configure custom data sources to display the information you need. You can have it display statistics, with graphs and tables, in real time. And you can see all this information together at a glance. Again, once you begin to recognise and take advantage of its versatility, it’s not hard to see that it’s worth the $10.

 

And that’s really a wrap! Thanks for reading, and if you have questions or suggestions, you know how to reach me. 

Link to Part 1

Link to Part 2

My essential iOS apps — Part 2

January 8, 2014
by Riccardo Mori
Software

Part 2 — on the iPad

The following apps are as essential to me on the iPad as they are on the iPhone, and have already been discussed in Part 1: Dropbox, Simplenote, Google Maps, Snapseed, Scotty, iMDB, Wikipanion, Spotify, Pushpin for Pinboard, Twitterrific, Netbot and Felix.

All my iPad essentials (except Paper) are universal apps, or have a separate iPhone/iPad version available, but I find these in particular to be most enjoyable, useful, practical on the iPad. 

Flipboard — The first app I open in the morning, while having breakfast. The feature I love most is how easily you can add favourite articles and feeds to create a magazine of curated content. If you visit Flipboard’s website, you’ll also find a ‘Flip It’ bookmarklet to add to the browser, so that you can add things even when browsing from your computer. (By the way, I have a little magazine like that on Flipboard, called Morrick’s Flipcrumbs.)

Daedalus Touch — I’ve been writing more on my iPad in recent times, especially since I started using it with an Apple Wireless Keyboard. I’m also a happy user of Phraseology (I love its linguistic analysis tools) and iA Writer (I love its strong focus on the text and the airiness of the interface), but I’ve come to favour The Soulmen’s Daedalus Touch, especially since the last major update which has brought, among other nice improvements, the amazing option of letting you install your own fonts. Another useful feature in Daedalus is the integrated Web browser, particularly when I translate because I can quickly look up words in online dictionaries without having to switch to Safari and back. 

Paper — I like sketching and painting on the iPad when I have some time or when I need to clear my mind and relax. I have purchased a fair amount of apps for that, but since I’m talking about essentials here, if I had to choose just one to install on my hypothetical ‘minimal iPad’, I would pick Paper due to its versatility. You can use it to just make doodles or very refined drawings and paintings. (I have all the In-app purchases, of course.)

Documents by Readdle and GoodReader — To handle documents, these two apps are both great and rich in features. I like Documents’ user interface better, but I also like GoodReader extended syncing capabilities. So it’s really a draw between these two.

Posts — Time ago I had my eyes on Poster by Tom Witkin and put the app in my wishlist. But since 99.9% of the time I’m publishing articles from my Mac on my WordPress blogs, purchasing an iOS app for that purpose wasn’t a priority. When I finally decided to give Poster a try, Automattic acquired it, so I had to look for an alternative. After a bit of research, I tried Posts and found it to be very good for the job. (By the way, I had hoped that after Automattic acquired Poster, the official WordPress iOS app would get better, but I still find it barely usable.)

Just Type — This app is to the built-in Notes app what Google Maps is to the built-in Maps app. The feature I probably love most? Full Dropbox integration. And iCloud syncing. And a great selection of fonts to choose from for your notes. And… only $0.99/€0.89.

WordWeb Dictionary — On the iPhone, I like the Merriam-Webster Dictionary app better. On the iPad, I prefer WordWeb. I really like its search features: you can use wildcard characters like ‘*’ or ‘?’ to search patterns (e.g. if you type req*ed in the search field, you’ll get all the words beginning with ‘req’ and ending in ‘ed’.), and you can filter search results by noun, verb, adjective, adverbs. And did I mention it’s free?

Feedly — I still haven’t returned to my old favourite Reeder. For now I’m staying with the Feedly official iOS app because it’s good enough for my needs and because I actually like its Flipboard-ish interface (though I liked the previous default fonts better.) 

Screens — Over time I’ve purchased a few apps with an ‘expensive’ price tag, and at first glance it’s easy to dismiss them with the typical Oh, App X does just that? It’s not worth the price objection. Is Screens by Edovia worth the $20? It’s just a VNC client, after all. There are other, less expensive alternatives. I can use a Mac to control another Mac, and Screen Sharing is built in Mac OS X. Sure, but then you realise how well designed and well implemented the app is. You realise how fast and reliable it is. You realise how a well-designed UI makes monitoring and controlling a Mac via an iPad (or iPhone) a breeze. You realise how often you end up using it because (at least in my case) it’s faster and more responsive than a Mac-to-Mac remote desktop session. After a while, you realise that yes, Screens is worth its $20 price tag.

Readmill — The iPad is my main ebook reader (I don’t have a Kindle), and I read a lot in Apple’s iBooks app, which I find decent enough. But I also love Readmill’s iOS app, which has a really nice, elegant interface. Plus, I can upload a book or PDF from my Mac via the browser and have my Readmill library synced across iOS devices. Readmill (both the app and the service) is getting better and better with every update. 

Digits — I’ve never understood why certain iOS apps that are built-in on the iPhone are absent from the iPad. Digits is a great calculator app. I love the interface (big numbers and buttons on the iPad in landscape orientation), the ability to check your calculations on virtual paper tapes and even to email them, which comes very handy when calculating my expenses, etc.

Camera+ — I haven’t mentioned Camera+ among my essential iPhone camera apps because I actually started liking it more on the iPad. I don’t take many photos with the iPad, and for my very limited needs Apple’s Camera app should be enough, but I really like Camera+‘s interface, which feels a bit less cramped than on the iPhone 4. I also use it a lot to import and edit images from the camera roll. Another recent favourite (hat tip to Nick Heer for mentioning it in his great article on the best photo editing apps for the iPhone) is Afterlight.

AppShopper — AppShopper is an essential tool to keep an eye on the App Store. I use it to search for apps (it’s faster and better than the official App Store app), to manage a wishlist of apps I’m interested in and want to monitor, and so on. Note that I’ve linked to the current AppShopper Social app, but I’m still using (and referring to) the original AppShopper, which I downloaded before it was removed from the App Store in December 2012.

My essential iOS apps — Part 1

January 7, 2014
by Riccardo Mori
Software

First things first

This article may disappoint some people. It doesn’t want to be an in-depth guide to “The 30 best iOS apps you must have on your iPhone or iPad”. It’s not going to be another piece along the lines of “The best iOS apps introduced in 2013” or “iOS apps that everybody must have”.

Instead I wanted to focus on a selection of apps that have proven to be indispensable to me over the years, making this article more akin to a retrospective of sorts rather than a review of ‘what’s hot in the App Store now’. Perhaps you’ll find something useful among my ramblings.

Part 1 — On the iPhone

The impact of the iPhone on my digital life has been enormous. It revolutionised my personal computing for the third time, after the Macintosh Duo system and the Newton. When Steve Jobs announced it in January 2007, I knew I wanted one. At that time, although I was generally satisfied with my SonyEricsson K700i (mostly by its long-lasting battery and overall reliability), I also felt that mobile phones could do better than that. At the same time I wasn’t attracted by those high-end smartphones of the pre-iPhone era, because they looked too much ‘feature-stuffed’, so to speak. Their interfaces looked too unnecessarily complicated and cramped. They lacked intuitiveness (when trying a few of them I always had the feeling I would have needed to study the instruction manual to make the most out of them). Some of them had ridiculously small buttons to navigate their interface, or ridiculously small styluses. I was looking at the beauty and simplicity of the Newton’s UI, and wishing that something of that kind could make its way into a smartphone. When Jobs demoed the iPhone at the January Macworld San Francisco 2007 keynote, I immediately felt that all my mobile-phone-related wishes had come true. 

As you may remember, we in Europe had to wait 2008 and the iPhone 3G to have a first-hand experience with an iPhone (unless of course you obtained a first-generation iPhone and jailbroke it). I spent 2007 in excruciating wait to have an iPhone, and I was one of the first adopters when the iPhone 3G was available here in Spain. Given my limited budget, my iPhone 3G lasted as my primary phone from July 2008 to April 2011, when I upgraded to an iPhone 4 — which is still my current iPhone.

My use of the iPhone subtly changed over time. When the iPhone 3G got its final iOS update (4.2.1), I used to have a lot of apps on it, and I was using the iPhone for practically everything when I was on the move. When I upgraded to an iPhone 4, I really started focusing more on iPhone photography, given the abysmal difference between the 2MP camera of the iPhone 3G and the 5MP camera of the iPhone 4. I still had a lot of apps on my iPhone 4, and it still was my computer in a pocket, but I was especially enjoying it as my ‘everywhere camera’. When I purchased an iPad 3 on June 2012, many apps I typically used on the iPhone (news apps, feed readers, photo editors, writing apps, etc.) were definitely more enjoyable and useful on the iPad. So I started using fewer apps on the iPhone, and even the need of upgrading to a better model (such as the 4S before and the 5 later) was somehow attenuated by the iPad. The iPad had become my ‘productivity device’, and the iPhone’s usage became more focused on selected tasks: light browsing, email, photography & video, music/radio, social networks, occasional ebook reader and weather checker, and little else.

This verbose preamble should explain why my selection of essential iOS apps on the iPhone is limited to a few, tried-and-trusted apps. As I said in the excerpt, these are the apps I would pick if I were to set up an iPhone as a new device with a minimal selection of apps.

Dropbox and Simplenote — My basic syncing needs are fulfilled by these two apps. I’m currently looking into more powerful and versatile apps to handle my Dropbox, but for now the official client does a decent-enough job for me. Simplenote got better at every update and I never experienced any data loss when syncing with the Simplenote app for Mac or with Notational Velocity.

Google Maps — Apple’s Maps app is still not accurate or reliable enough where I live. Google Maps is, and it has happily taken a spot on the iPhone’s home screen, while the built-in Maps app lies hidden in a folder far away.

Photo apps — As I said, I’ve used my iPhone a lot as a dependable ‘everywhere camera’, that’s why there are quite a few essentials in this category: 

  1. VSCO Cam is probably the app I would put in my dock if I had one more slot (and it is in the dock of my iPhone 3GS). On my iPhone 4 running iOS 7 it’s the snappiest third-party photo app after the built-in Camera app. I like the clean interface, the filters (which feel like true photographic filters, not just gimmicks to give all iPhone photos a vintage look) and the powerful yet simple-to-use editing tools. And I really love the VSCO Grid, the place where you can show off your best shots taken with the app. My VSCO Grid is here. If you want to read a nice, detailed review of VSCO Cam, I suggest this article by Nick Heer.
  2. KitCam [No longer in the App Store] is probably the most complete photo app I’ve used. For shooting, it follows a Hipstamatic-like paradigm where you use a combination of virtual lenses, films and frames. It has three focus modes (Auto, Spot, Manual); lockable, touch focus & exposure points; video stabilisation; face detection; live exposure histogram; low light boost; four flash modes; an auto white balance toggle, and much more. Then it has a wealth of editing tools (White Balance compensation control, cropping & straightening, Auto adjust & Clarify, Exposure & White Balance, Colour Balance, Levels, etc.). Yes, its interface can become a bit crowded and some of the (many) filters it offers feel a bit unnecessary; it’s also a bit slow to launch on the iPhone 4. Yet to me it’s an essential app because of a few particular features, which I absolutely love: 
    • [a] Its black & white Film Noir pack, with three virtual films that imitate three Ilford black & white films (HP5 plus, Delta and XP2 Super 400 if I’m not mistaken) and do a great job at that, so much that now I use KitCam to shoot black & white photos almost exclusively.
    • [b] It can be configured to upload photos automatically to a FTP server, which is a sharing feature I haven’t seen much in other photo apps. It can be quite handy to have a series of photos automatically backed up on your server.
    • [c] Best of all, the beauty of KitCam is that editing is not destructive. You can take a photo with a 16:9 aspect ratio, a black & white filter and a black frame, but you can change everything later and have it become a square photo with popping colours and a white frame if you like. I still haven’t found another (good) iOS photo app that gives me this level of freedom after taking a photo.

    3.  

  3. Hipstamatic was probably the third-party photo app I used most on my iPhone 3G. When Hipstamatic debuted in late 2009, I thought it was one of those photo apps whose appeal would quickly wane after the initial ‘cool’ moment of discovery. Instead, I kept using it and kept purchasing film/lenses add-ons (‘paks’). I believe Hipstamatic developers have managed to keep things interesting over time, and with all the paks I’ve bought so far I can create a lot of different film/lens combinations which, if chosen carefully, can produce fantastic results.
  4. Hueless is another great photo app. You use it to shoot exclusively in black & white, and the results are really nice. I like “VictorianDavidJ” review on the App Store, which very well sums up what I love about this app: If you want a solid black-and-white photo app that is first-and-foremost a camera, this is the one. I love the colour filters, and the way you can adjust the percent of filter applied. These are proper colour filters in a black-and-white environment, too, affecting tone but not applying tint. Contrast adjustment is slick and easy, and there are preset slots for common shooting modes. Overall a very nice, true camera app.
  5. Mattebox by Ben Syverson has been a great, serendipitous discovery. It’s one of the rare apps I have really found by chance, browsing the App Store aimlessly one day, probably looking for something else. You should really check the Mattebox revamped website to get an idea of the look & feel of this app. When I started using the first version of Mattebox, I immediately loved its clean, intuitive interface and the presence of very few selected filters which, as in VSCO Cam’s case, all gave my photos a very natural, ‘film’ look. After a long wait, now Mattebox 2 is out and it’s even better. I really love what Syverson did with the filters: now they’re live, you can easily create them and share them, and I’m truly amazed by the general quality of the filters offered by the community. Again, take a good tour of the website if you’re not convinced, but if you ask me, Mattebox is really worth the $4.99/€4.49. (Fair warning, the app’s performance on the iPhone 4 is good enough, but not stellar in my experience.)
  6. Snapseed — Although you could use Snapseed as an app to take photos and then edit them, I use it as a separate photo and image editor. Powerful tools (Selective Adjust above all, in my opinion), ease of use, fast performance (even on my humble iPhone 4), and it’s free. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

 

Scotty — This app transfers photos and videos between iOS devices or from an iOS device to a Mac, over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. There are probably a lot of similar apps out there. I find Scotty to be a no-nonsense, fast, reliable app and so I don’t see why I should look for alternatives.

iMDB — The iOS app of the Internet Movie Database is a must-have to check information about movies, TV series, actors. Of course it’s part of my essentials.

Episodes — It’s an app for keeping track of the TV series you’re watching or interested in. I’ve been using it since its early days when it was just a Web app. I like it for its simplicity and clean UI. Those who want a more iOS 7‑looking app may want to check another recent favourite of mine, TeeVee.

Eucalyptus — I remember scoffing at the idea of reading anything longer than a news article or blog post on the screen of my iPhone 3G (when it was my primary phone). Eucalyptus made me change my mind and made me actually read more books. Eucalyptus is not the kind of ebook reader like Stanza or iBooks, you can’t feed ePubs or PDFs to it. Instead, it’s a great tool to read English-language, out of copyright books stored in the huge Project Gutenberg archive. Yes, it’s expensive. No, it hasn’t been updated to sport the look of iOS 7. And yes, it doesn’t matter at all, because you use the app to read books, and when you’re reading you only see the book’s pages, and when you flip the pages, you really feel you’re flipping the pages of a real book.

Wikipanion — My favourite app to read the Wikipedia. Its new iOS 7 UI makes it look like a built-in app. Enough said.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary — Being a translator, I have a few dictionary apps on my iOS devices. Of the monolingual dictionaries, Merriam-Webster is the one I look up more frequently, and that’s why I picked it for my ‘essentials’ collection. I also like the fact that it supports voice search (powered by Dragon): as a non-native English speaker, I often use it to improve my English pronunciation. 

Radium — A recent, very pleasant discovery which has quickly become a must-have for me. Radium is (you guessed it) an Internet radio player. I already was a user of Radium for Mac, but in recent times I basically stopped listening to the radio. Since installing Radium on my iPhone, though, I picked up the habit again and listen to the beloved BBC in the mornings. Its iOS 7‑ready UI is just beautiful. 

Spotify — The only music streaming service I’m subscribed to, so of course its app is part of my iPhone essentials.

Pushpin for Pinboard — As you may have guessed, it’s a Pinboard client. Is it the best? It’s not my place to say. I like it a lot. It’s simple, fast, and easy to use. I’ve been beta testing it for a while since I was asked to provide the Italian localisation for it. The main developer is a great guy and I know he cares about the app. And that’s enough for me.

Vert — I often need a unit converter when translating documents and books containing measurements in imperial units that need to be converted to their metric equivalents. Vert is a very complete app with a great iOS 7 user interface that’s a pleasure to use. (On my iPhone 3G I still use Converter by Architechies, which is another nice unit converter that has been on the App Store since the beginning, and probably one of the first third-party apps I bought for my then-new iPhone.)

[Update, Feb. 5, 2014 — I have to add Unread to my list of essentials. Unread is a great RSS reader for the iPhone. Read my brief review about it.] 

Social apps — I don’t have a Facebook account, and I’ve stopped using Instagram actively since it was acquired by Facebook. Therefore, the only social places you can find me are Twitter and App.net. For Twitter, I’ve been a Twitterrific user since day one. The app has always been perfect for my needs, so I’ve never looked elsewhere. For App.net, things aren’t as clear-cut, and at present I have more than one favourite. I like Netbot and Felix, because they’re both rich in features and they both make crossposting to Twitter very easy. But I’m also enjoying Riposte more and more lately, especially because it has an Interactions section where I can see at a glance if one of my posts has been favourited or reposted, and I also love how thoughtfully gestures are implemented (I don’t like apps whose UI relies on gestures too much because, if not done well, things can get confusing. Riposte has it right, in my opinion. Gestures are simple, easily discoverable, memorable, predictable.) 

Finally, I needed an app to exchange messages with my wife without resorting to SMS texts (expensive). We cannot use iMessages because I’m on an iPhone and she uses an Android phone. And frankly I also wanted to avoid apps like WhatsApp or Line because I don’t like their interfaces much and I’m not sure how secure they are. In the end I (we) chose Telegram Messenger because the developer seems to really care about privacy and security: among the many features of this app, I especially like the ‘secret chat’, which uses end-to-end encryption so that the message I exchange with the other person are really private (at least one hopes so nowadays.) For more information, read the security FAQ on the app’s website.

 

I guess that’s it for Part 1. In Part 2 you’ll find an overview of my essential iOS apps on the iPad. Thanks for reading.

A selection of favourite Mac apps

December 31, 2013
by Riccardo Mori
Software

Looking back at my 2013 with regard to Mac applications, one thing that has struck me is how stagnant it has been. If we put aside the Games category, my purchases have been scarce overall, and there hasn’t been any particular ‘whoa’ moment or remarkable new application to enter my workflow. One possible exception could have been Everpix, but we all know how it ended. (If you don’t know what Everpix was, check this brief review I wrote not long before the company shut down.)

So I thought I’ll take the chance to mention a few essentials I’ve been relying upon for a while, the majority of which are tried-and-trusted applications you’ve certainly heard of, but there are also a couple of little unsung heroes.

I’ve talked about this batch of utilities in detail two years ago in What I use: the essentials. I still use and greatly enjoy these applications and I really couldn’t work without any of them. TextExpander, Dropbox, f.lux and Hazel in particular are what I consider ‘mission critical’ apps.

Other long-time favourites

What would I do without Bare Bones software? I’ve been a happy user of BBEdit since version 3.0 and it has been my text editor of choice ever since. When I go back to my vintage Macs, it’s often to write in BBEdit. On my main machine I find I use TextWrangler more, but I turn to BBEdit for more complex projects and when I need to handle very big text files. When it comes to powerful search & replace tools and multi-file searching, BBEdit’s prowess is unparalleled.

It started as a Bare Bones product, then Rich Siegel gave it a home of its own: Mailsmith is a versatile email client I use on a daily basis together with Mac OS X’s Mail app to handle a bunch of secondary email accounts. I love Mailsmith because it deals with thousands of messages without a problem, and because I can perform very fine-grained searches, a really useful feature when you’re subscribed to a few interesting mailing lists and you need to find a particular email buried in your archives.

My image handling and editing needs are fulfilled by Graphic Converter (€34.95 / $39.95), another essential I’ve been using since version 3.0; and Acorn ($49.99 or $29.99 if you upgrade from a previous version). With these two powerful-enough tools, I really don’t need Photoshop. Recently I even discovered that Graphic Converter can handle vector files (I rarely deal with them, that’s why it took me so long to figure it out). Both these app are worth every penny.

To watch videos I still rely on an old version (0.6.8) of Movist which, despite being more than three years old, still works fine under OS X Mavericks. When Movist fails to handle a certain video file, I turn to VLC, of course. To convert video files, instead, Handbrake is a must-have tool.

The only social networks I’m active in are Twitter and App.net. For Twitter, I was a Tweetie user since the beginning, and used it until it no longer worked. But another long-time favourite client has been Twitterrific, which I use both on my Macs and iOS devices. It serves me quite well — though I think it’s time for an update of the Mac client — and I see no reason to change. (For App.net I happily use Wedge. Others prefer Kiwi, which is more feature-rich and polished, but for my needs Wedge is just fine.)

Another long-time favourite, which I’ve been using since the Mac OS 9 era, is of course Transmit. On Panic’s site you can read: “You need to transfer files. Maybe to an FTP or SFTP server, or the cloud via Amazon S3, or using WebDAV. You maintain a website, do backups, or upload photos. You need Transmit, the #1 Mac OS X FTP client.” It’s all true. Transmit is the most reliable and delightful FTP client I’ve ever used, and another of my ‘mission critical’ apps.

Speaking of mission critical apps, I simply cannot function without MarsEdit. If you write a blog, you need MarsEdit, period. And its developer, Daniel Jalkut, is a gentleman. Friendly, kind and helpful. A pleasant interlocutor. 

To handle PDF documents, I’ve been using Skim for longer than I can remember, and I think it replaced Adobe Reader in my workflow somewhere between version 7 and 8 of Adobe Reader. I also use Mac OS X’s Preview more often since it started to get better (from Mountain Lion onwards). I still rely on an old version of Adobe Acrobat Professional on my Power Mac G4 Cube when dealing with difficult PDFs that give me a hard time with text selection and whatnot.

Another great, dependable little utility I use frequently is Thomas Tempelmann’s Find Any File. As I wrote in this old article, When I need to perform searches that dig deeper into the system, or I need a more readable & customisable search results window, I resort to Find Any File, which I love because its UI is based on the Find File application in the Classic Mac OS, and also because it lets me search for files even inside application packages and in places of the System where Spotlight is not allowed to snoop. I’ve used it since it was in early beta, and has a permanent spot in my Dock.

I can’t emphasise enough how amazing Icon Factory’s Xscope app is. Even though I’m not a Web designer or developer, in so many circumstances Xscope has proven useful to measure on-screen elements to perfect the look of my humble website, or to extract the colour values of an element I needed to replicate elsewhere for consistency.

To remove apps I no longer use, or demo/trial versions of software I download and don’t find useful, I still rely on AppZapper. I also use it as a search tool, especially when I need to know where an application keeps all the usual related luggage that gets disseminated in various folders during installation or after the first launch. (Read this old article for more information.)

Recent entries

As I said, 2013 hasn’t been a year of great Mac software discoveries for me. But a few nifty apps worth mentioning are:

  • Glui — A simple, lightweight, and very useful app to capture and annotate the frequent screenshots I take, whether I need to feature them on my blog or send them to a developer for feedback (and even interface localisations). Before that, I used to rely on LittleSnapper by Realmac Software (now Ember), but Glui is really fast and well-designed, the perfect tool when you quickly need to take a screen capture and add a note on the fly.
  • ReadKit — After Google discontinued Google Reader, I could no longer use my beloved Reeder, so I started looking for alternatives. ReadKit is a capable replacement. If you come from Reeder, ReadKit has a familiar interface, and it connects to a lot of services (Instapaper, Pocket, Readability, Pinboard, Delicious, Feedly, Fever, NewsBlur, Feed Wrangler and Feedbin), so that you can have “everything in one place” as the website says. I particularly love using ReadKit to read and navigate my increasingly huge Pinboard archive.
  • Mou — For a specific project I’m working on (which I hope to announce very soon), I needed to have a text editor with Markdown capabilities — side-by-side preview, most importantly — and I found Mou to fit my needs quite well. I’ve also heard great things about MarkDrop if you’re looking for this kind of software. MarkDrop features, among other things, full Droplr integration.
  • DaisyDisk — An amazing tool to scan and explore my Mac’s internal and connected disks, it has proven to be essential to discover a lot of junk that was taking up precious gigabytes. Thanks to DaisyDisk, I’ve successfully reclaimed more than 35 GB on an external drive in a specific occasion where I had to salvage some files on a failing hard drive and I didn’t know where to copy them. I can’t recommend it enough.

Special mentions

  • Raskin — Raskin is the only application I use to navigate the filesystem on my Mac other than the Finder. Read my brief review for more information.
  • Disco — If you still handle optical discs and need a reliable tool to burn CDs and DVDs, I suggest Disco. Works with both PowerPC and Intel Macs. It’s not developed anymore, but it still works great and I never encountered any problem with it. Read my review for more information.

And that’s it, I think. I may have forgotten something, but these are really the key third-party apps I use, most of them on a daily basis. For questions and/or suggestions, you can reach me on Twitter and App.net (I’m @morrick on both), or send me an email. Happy 2014 to you all, dear readers!

That Writer Pro affair

December 28, 2013
by Riccardo Mori
Software

It’s been a rocky launch for Writer Pro by Information Architects. The application is presented as an austere (I won’t use the term minimalist) writing environment for writers. It has a clean interface, and implements four ‘modes’ that represent a typical writing workflow: 

Writer Pro’s simple workflow is built around how you work: Start with your ideas in Note, flesh them out in Write, progress to Edit for refining, then move to Read when you’re done. Rather than a limiting modal interface, these Workflow states act as environments to focus you on the task at hand. A document’s state syncs via iCloud across connected devices, and each state has a task-specific font and color.

The most notable feature in Writer Pro is Syntax Control: working in a similar way as iA Writer’s Focus Mode, Syntax Control “dims everything but the chosen syntax, helping you to control your writing style.” [I’m quoting again from Writer Pro’s website]. By way of a slider, you can highlight sentences, adjectives, nouns, verbs, prepositions, conjunctions, to check your writing style (if you’re using too many adjectives too often, if you’ve made repetitions, and so on). It’s a neat idea, and when Writer Pro was announced a few days ago, it made a great impression on me.

As you may have read (among other things, I’ve read this article by Jonathan Poritsky, this article at The Verge, and all the links in this post by John Gruber, who links to what’s probably the best summary of the whole situation), iA took a very protective attitude towards Syntax Control, a feature whose implementation the company considered original enough to submit a patent application for it. I don’t know if what prompted this protective attitude has been a suggestion from an overzealous lawyer in iA’s legal department, but what quickly developed over these few days has definitely been a series of public relations’ faux pas, raising criticism among developers and tech bloggers. Finally iA has decided to backtrack, publicly stating that they will drop their patents pending regarding Syntax Control. 

Back to Writer Pro now. Yesterday my friend Donovan Bond asked me over Twitter if I had purchased the app, and my reply was: I was interested, but all the fuss that ensued has left me a bit put off. I mostly use Daedalus and the old iA Writer. I believe that other people in my position — prospective buyers of Writer Pro who followed the recent brouhaha over the ‘Syntax Control situation’ — are probably feeling the same way. I think it’s understandable. 

While I may have lost a bit of enthusiasm towards Writer Pro, at least for now, I still believe it’s a solid app worth considering, that its value may become apparent over time, not after trying it casually for a few days. Instead, I also happened to read some other type of criticism towards Writer Pro from people who, expressing their disagreement about iA’s behaviour, have decided that they won’t buy their products, that they don’t intend to support iA in any way… and that Writer Pro isn’t worth the $20 anyway.

I’ve been wondering whether this attitude is fair or not. I don’t think it is.

Is the app expensive? By iOS App Store’s standards, yes it is. There is also a companion Writer Pro for Mac, which also costs $20. That is not particularly expensive for a Mac software. Of course it makes sense to want to purchase both apps (to take advantage of iCloud syncing, for example), and in that case $40 may feel too much for some. And I’m not arguing that. But what doesn’t feel right to me is dismissing an app, its value and its potential because its developer has acted in ways we don’t like or agree with. 

What does the developer’s attitude have to do with how well an app is designed and built? In a rush to protect its work, iA has undoubtedly made a few mistakes and attracted criticism, and some of that criticism was valid and constructive, there’s no denying that. But how iA acted shouldn’t negatively affect how we consider a piece of software. 

Sure, iOS complicates matters because you can’t try an app before you buy it. And when an app costs $20, you have to rely on how well the developer presents it. You have to take a leap of faith, so the process that leads to a final decision (you purchase the app, or you decide not to) is not entirely a cold, rational one. It’s understandable that some people choose not to purchase an app on principle[1], their message being something along the lines of: I dislike the developer’s attitude, so I won’t support them by giving them my money. In many cases, and speaking in general, I’m all for acting on principle — there are services and social networks I don’t subscribe to exactly because I don’t like certain policies or behaviours of the companies behind them.

But disparaging an app or a product because of something the developer said or did, well, ultimately doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. The whole Writer Pro affair was a bit sad to follow. Again, iA’s attitude deserved criticism, but I also noticed how quickly many have jumped on the iA-bashing bandwagon. I’m glad iA reversed its decision regarding the Syntax Control patent in the end, and that iA did so after considering the most constructive and informed criticism. What iA doesn’t deserve, however, is people trashing Writer Pro in the light of what happened around it. I may be okay with saying I won’t buy Writer Pro because I think iA are a bunch of morons and I don’t like their attitude, but I think it’s unfair to say I won’t buy Writer Pro because I think iA are a bunch of morons, I don’t like their attitude and the app is not worth $20 anyway. In the end, who knows, perhaps Writer Pro is really not worth $20, but I wish people weren’t so always ready to pass judgement. 

 

 

  • 1. Or rage-deleting one, like some did with Camera+ after its developer attacked other developers in the release notes accompanying a recent app update. ↩