This is the sort of thing that Microsoft needs to do to survive in the post-PC world: good, native apps on multiple platforms, powered by best-in-class cloud services.
Category: Apps
The Staff Favorites⇢
Shawn Blanc:
Here is a running list of our personal favorite apps on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. These are the apps we, The Sweet Setup staff, use day in and day out for work and play.
Why this list? We enjoy spending an inordinate amount of time to research, test, try, use and then pick the best apps. However, this is a slow process for us. And so, what to do in the meantime as we build out our catalog of app recommendations? Well, here are the apps that we use.
On Preview, Tags and iOS 8
There’s a rumor floating around that Apple will be bringing TextEdit and Preview to the iPhone and iPad with iOS 8.
For years on OS X, Preview has been the default applications for opening images and PDFs. Preview has had iCloud support on OS X for a couple of years ago — leading to confusion for some users — and it’s a no-brainer that Preview for iOS would tap into that iCloud container. Saving a PDF or an image in Preview on the Mac would sling it over to iOS over the air, which would be great.
Microsoft launches OneNote for Mac⇢
OneNote is pretty great on the PC, and the Mac version isn’t far behind it. I’m glad to see Evernote have some competition on OS X, and I find it very interesting that this on the Mac App Store. My guess is that the Office update rumored to be coming later this year will be in the App Store as well.
Day One Publish launched⇢
The best way to link to a new service like this is to actually use it.
Evernote for Pebble introduced⇢
The Pebble has come a long way since I reviewed it a year ago, and while a lot of the new enhancements are nice, this is pretty exciting.
Podcasting Wars: Skype Vs. FaceTime Audio
While FaceTime Audio was introduced with iOS 7, with OS X 10.9.2, Apple added audio-only calls to the desktop FaceTime application.
I — like many other podcasters — have thought about trying to harness Apple’s service to record shows, as opposed to the venerable solution, Skype.
FaceTime Audio only supports calls with two people, so it isn’t helpful for podcasts like mine, but it is possible to capture the incoming and outgoing audio fairly easily.
Plink⇢
Jeff Mueller:
Like a lot of nerds, I write in Markdown, and I use a combination of Byword and Editorial to draft my posts. Editorial can be made to upload images to a CDN, but it’s difficult to set up.
I wanted something simpler that could provide an easy-to-configure way to insert images into my posts directly from my iPad or iPhone. And I wanted it to be something anyone could set up.
Car, Plane or Boat?⇢
“You scored 80%. +K in ‘Try Harder.’”
Things that are cheaper than WhatsApp⇢
The $16 billion would fund St. Jude for 23 years or so.
Mactracker⇢
It seems that I’m always looking up details about Macs. If it’s minimal OS for a certain generation of Mac mini or the clock speed of the second generation PowerMac G3, I always end up opening Mactracker.
The newest version adds a ton of pre-Macintosh hardware, which is awesome. If you’re an Apple nerd and don’t have this app downloaded, shame on you.
The best iOS Pinboard app⇢
Chris Gonzales, over on The Sweet Setup:
After buying and testing far more Pinboard apps than any sane person should, I’ve concluded that Pushpin is by far the best of the bunch. At $10, Pushpin is also the most expensive, but it’s worth the cost.
Agreed.