Over on The Sweet Setup, Steve Owens picks the best app for sharing tasks with others.
Category: Apps
Audio Hijack 3 released ⇢
Sometimes, a tool is announced that seems like magic. Audio Hijack 3 lands squarely in this category.
The best RSS client for OS X ⇢
I waded through a bunch of weird, not-so-good RSS apps for the Mac to pick the best one. TL;DR: it’s Reeder.
The best Pinboard app for iOS ⇢
The hardest part of working on The Sweet Setup is keeping older reviews updated. The vast majority of the apps we look at receive updates on a regular basis, and sometimes, that march of progress means we need to revisit the whole thing.
iOS Pinboard apps have seen an incredible year, and as of today, we’ve chosen a new favorite: Pinner.
An update to the YouTube to Huffduffer workflow
This is follow-up to Friday’s post on ripping audio from YouTube and sending it to Huffduffer with Workflow for iOS.
As I wrote on Friday, Dropbox’s handling of shared links doesn’t play nice with Huffduffer, so I was sending my audio out to a remote server via Transmit for hosting.
Turns out, there is a way to do this with Dropbox and Workflow. It does require Clean Links from the iOS App Store.
From YouTube to Huffduffer with Workflow
Workflow has already become an incredibly useful iOS tool. It’s letting me do things on my iPhone and iPad that I previously could only do on my Mac.
For years, I’ve stripped the audio from talks uploaded to YouTube and listened to them in my podcast client via Huffduffer.
In the past, seeing a link to something while on the go means having to send the URL to Instapaper and having to remember to rip the audio and upload the file to Dropbox or S3 when I return to my Mac.
Our favorite third-party email app for OS X ⇢
Jason Snell, at The Sweet Setup:
Because Apple makes it, Mail is for everybody. But it’s not for everybody. Apple designed it to serve the masses, and if you want more–or less–from your email client, Apple Mail may not suit you. Maybe its old-school approach to mail, lifted from classic mail clients like Eudora and NeXTMail, just doesn’t fit the modern emailer. Maybe you want deep links to productivity apps on your Mac that Mail just won’t provide. Or maybe you’re just tired of being in a dysfunctional relationship with Mail.
The state of Apple’s Mac software: December 2014
Back in May of 2013, I took a look at all of Apple’s software in the Mac App Store and walked away with the conclusion that a lot of Apple’s first-party Mac apps were in pretty sorry shape.
Let’s revisit that, and see how things shape up here at the end of 2014.
Please note that all prices listed below don’t take into account that many of these apps are free for with new Macs. Ratings pulled from the Mac App Store on December 14, 2014.
Twitter clients in 2014 ⇢
Federico Viticci:
I started using the official Twitter client as my main Twitter app on my iPhone and iPad.
For the past six months, I’ve been reevaluating my entire Twitter experience based on the apps I use to read tweets and interact with people. The idea made a lot more sense once I stepped out of my preconceptions: I wanted to understand what 2014 Twitter was like and if that meant sacrificing my nerd cred and use a Muggle’s Twitter app, so be it. But at the same time, I’ve gone back and forth between Twitter and third-party clients, primarily out of habit, but also because they still offer powerful features and design details that I appreciate.
Evernote posts FAQ about Context ⇢
The business model isn’t what I thought it was:
Is this advertising?
No. Evernote does not get paid based on the number of views or clicks. We have no financial incentive to show any articles or other content. We only show things that we think are useful to our users. We don’t share user account information with our partners and we allow users to determine which Context sources they want to see, or to turn the feature off completely.
Buttongate
Earlier today, Greg Pierce, the developer of Drafts tweeted:
Welp. Enjoy the Drafts Today widget while it lasts. Apple has required me to re-submit w/o the buttons to create drafts or open the app…
— Greg Pierce (@agiletortoise) December 2, 2014
@johnvoorhees No buttons. I was told the Today view is for information presentation only, essentially.
— Greg Pierce (@agiletortoise) December 2, 2014
If this is true, it would mean Today widgets from apps like Evernote and the just-re-blessed PCalc are in trouble.
Our favorite way to share files, images and links ⇢
Bradley Chambers over on The Sweet Setup:
The Apple ecosystem has no shortage of ways to share files. There are countless apps and services that aim to make this as easy as possible. With a lot of the articles we write here at The Sweet Setup, we are comparing apps and services that are virtually identical outside of user interface. With this category, that is not the case. These apps, while appearing similar, all have a different focus.