Category: Apps

The new Health app in iOS 8 allows users to track their activity, calories and more. With HealthKit, third-party apps can share data with each other, letting users see a more complete picture of their health.

Past all of this, Health brings something long-needed to iOS: Medical ID.

For the uninitiated, a Medical ID is a tag, bracelet or some other item that contains vital information if the owner is in an accident or unable to respond or communicate. I wear a waterproof one when cycling, and my son wears one sharing critical facts about his situation that an EMT or other medical professional may need to know if no one can communicate to them.

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Tapbots:

Since iOS8 was released this week, we wanted to give you a quick update on where we are with things. Tweetbot 3 for the iPhone will be submitted soon. We are finishing up our work fixing bugs and optimizing features for iOS8 and also want to test on the new devices before submitting. This will be a free update for Tweetbot 3 customers.

Next, we wanted to state that Tweetbot 3 for the iPad is in development.

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The makers of Castro have purchased Unread, my favorite RSS app for iOS:

Unread makes an excellent companion to our podcast app, Castro. Both apps are news/entertainment focused, share similar design goals and even rely on the same underlying feed technology. We are grateful to Jared for trusting us with the future of Unread and look forward to developing and refining both of these apps for years to come.

We’ll be moving Unread to Supertop’s App Store account over the next few weeks — there are technical limitations that prevent a direct transfer, but when the transition happens we will ensure that all customers are moved to the new app free of charge.

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Brendan Wilhide, over on The Sweet Setup:

There are plenty of budgeting apps available to Mac users, and it can be difficult to find the right app for you. We spent six months testing and using the top contenders for features and usability, and we think iBank is the app which will best serve people’s budgeting and finance management needs.

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Quote keeping is a problem with a thousand possible solutions.

Quotes can be stored in apps like Vesper, Simplenote, Evernote or even Google Docs. But the data entry sucks, and there’s no relationships built across pieces of data. There’s no structure to the data, leading to messy storage.

Take Evernote for example. I rely on it daily as my Anything Bucket. It does a good job at doing lots of things. It’s a generalist.

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Maia Olson at Smile Software:

We’ve been hard at work since Apple announced the new and exciting extensions and custom keyboards available in iOS 8.

TextExpander touch 3, coming on the heels of iOS 8 this fall, includes a TextExpander keyboard which can expand snippets in any app on the iPhone or iPad, including built-in apps such as Mail and Safari.

Hot damn, my iOS devices are about to get a lot more useful at work.

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This morning, Dropbox announced a revamped approach to the company’s Pro offering.

Instead of the tiered structure in place before, all Dropbox Pro users will now have 1 TB of space on the service for $9.99/month or $99/year.

The new monthly price matches Google Drive’s monthly cost for the same amount of storage. Paid annually, Dropbox is actually cheaper.

In addition to the increased space, Pro users can set passwords and expiration dates for shared links and view-only permissions for shared folders. Lastly, Dropbox Pro customers can remotely unlink and remove a Dropbox folder from a lost computer.

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Bradley Chambers over on The Sweet Setup:

Public Wi-Fi is great way to download podcasts, movies, and music when on the go without burning through your data cap. Even checking Twitter and sending emails can start to add up if you’re away from home a lot. Public Wi-Fi isn’t always secure, though.

The solution? A VPN service, and Bradley has some great advice on which one to use.

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Robert McGinley Myers, over on The Sweet Setup:

RSS arguably had its perfect device when the iPad was introduced in 2010. Suddenly, you could read the entire Internet comfortably on the couch. You could use RSS to bring the web to you. That’s why our pick for the best RSS reader on the iPad is the $5 Unread, an app designed to help you slow down, lean back, and enjoy good writing.

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When I hopped on Skype earlier today to record a podcast and was greeted with a surprise:

Turns out:

We want everyone to experience the best Skype has to offer – from enhanced quality to better reliability to improved security – and the newest version of Skype is the way to do that. So everyone can benefit from the latest improvements, from time to time we retire older versions of Skype across all platforms, including mobile devices. It’s easy to update Skype; once you do, you’ll have access to the latest features our team has worked hard to deliver.

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This is the sort of thing I envisioned when Apple announced Extensions in June. Color me excited.

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Jared Sinclair, in an excellent article about the launch of his RSS application Unread:

If you want to make “real money” from a paid-up-front app, your launch week has to be be a box-office smash.

All of Jared’s piece is interesting, but that statement really hit me. I’ve heard it said before, but his data really backs it up.

It’s a shame Jared hasn’t made more on Unread. As he points out, the app was both featured on the App Store and garnered a fair bit of media attention. I can’t imagine how rough it is for developers of less popular paid apps. The whole thing really highlights how the free fall of App Store prices has affected developers.

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