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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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