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Iris: A Beautiful and Simple Instagram App for iPad

Instagram may have been acquired by Facebook, but this isn’t stopping third-party developers from coming up with clever solutions to use the Instagram API. If anything, if Facebook will live up to its promise of keeping Instagram alive while growing and improving its network, everyone’s favorite photo sharing service may see even bigger numbers and user adoption. And there’s no better way to use official APIs than building software the developers of the original app are ignoring, at least for now.

For the past few weeks, I have been trying a new Instagram app for the iPad called Iris. It’s available now on the App Store and it’s optimized for the Retina display. While Instagram has started experimenting with a new API to allow other developers to upload pictures to the service, Iris doesn’t let you upload photos using the iPad’s camera and the app’s custom interface. Instead, Iris is another app focused on providing a beautiful experience for browsing and liking Instagram photos, and, in my opinion, it is the most attractive solution that’s been brought to the market to date.

Iris puts great focus on large thumbnails for photos, a light background to make Instagram’s filters really pop, and a dark sidebar to switch between your feed, popular items, profile, and search. Iris allows you to browse either via large thumbnail previews or smaller ones; the layout change can be activated with a switch in the lower left corner. In the lower right corner, the developers have implemented a “pull to refresh” command, which literally requires you to pull a slider to refresh the main view. You can also hit the associated refresh button if you feel uncomfortable with pulling, but I found the gesture quite clever and fun. Unlike other apps, Iris doesn’t have standard pull to refresh at the top of the view.

To navigate, Iris uses a mix of tabs, “load more” buttons, and panels. For instance, the main feed gives you a vertical list of photos from people you follow, and once you reach the end of the list you can hit a “load more” button to fetch more items. I found the refresh times acceptable, and I like the custom popup dialog that shows up when you load sections or refresh pages. You can tap on a photo to bring it up at its original size; you can like with a double tap (like the original Instagram), or by hitting the heart icon below a photo. In the same area, you can find buttons to comment, and view a photo’s location. Comments are displayed in a panel that loads at the side of the screen and is reminiscent of Loren Brichter’s Twitter for iPad. If you tap on a user’s avatar while viewing a photo, the user’s profile will slide up from the bottom of the screen, and, if I had to point out a minor UI annoyance I noticed, you’ll have to hit a “back” button to make the profile view slide down again. I find the action confusing as back buttons are typically associated with the content area moving to the right.

The Popular section is pretty self-explanatory; I did find some nice touches in the profile view. You can view the people you follow and your followers in dedicated panels; you can follow/unfollow in-app, and of course check out another user’s complete set of photos. In your Profile, you can also hit a globe icon to have a history of your Instagram shots displayed as Iris pins on a Google map – it’s a neat summarization of the places you “visited” with Instagram.

The search function of the app is very basic as well: you can search for people and “tags”. While people results will open in the aforementioned side panel, tags will simply return associated photo results in a regular grid view.

If Instagram were to release an official iPad app, I think it’d be extremely similar to Iris’ approach. A minimal, beautiful interface for the Instagram community that takes advantage of the iPad’s display to lay out large thumbnails and photos. Instagram would obviously want to implement a camera in a (possible) official app – right now, Iris doesn’t let you upload anything, and has to display photos at low resolution on the iPad’s Retina display. The effect, however, is nice (especially thanks to filters, which help hiding some pixellation here and there), and I bet it gets a lot better on older iPad models.

Iris offers a simple, good-looking and enjoyable Instagram experience on the iPad, so if you’ve been looking for a great iPad app to browse your favorite photos, $1.99 should be a no-brainer.

Produce Morse Ringtones With iToneMaker

Some of you who are interested in electronic music may know Moog analog synthesizers and guitar effects. With their big stainless steel knobs, LEDs and very elaborate technology behind them, they create enormously noisy, grungy and disturbing sounds. The company also managed to create a very polished music production app for the iPad, animoog. The UI designer of today’s pick, iToneMaker Morse Code, was definitely inspired by this company’s product design, but nevertheless the app is a very unique and lovely compiled ringtone maker for your iPhone.

As the name might already suggest, the app’s sound production is based on the morse code principle. Hence you have to type in a word or a random letter/digit combination as the basis of your new ringtone into a message panel within the main window. The slightly different sounds of the single characters are played consecutively and result in the final ringtone.

Within this main window you can also change the basic elements of your ringtone: like “normal” analog synths, iToneMaker is based on (in this case obviously digital) oscillatory sound production. You can choose between triangular, saw and square oscillators and adjust their pitch, speed and break length between the morse sounds via custom sliding controls. Just push the central play button and your ringtone is played back, over and over… it can get pretty annoying, I warrant you.

If you are not satisfied with the output of these few controls - which happened to me literally every time I tried to produce an agreeable sound - you can additionally superimpose more editing features via the option button. You’ll find reverb and low-pass filter regulators plus some different effector types and the ability to change pitch while a morse tone is played. Besides that, developers Eiji and Tom kindly created some presets to choose from so that you never have to start from scratch completely and possibly never get to a passable ringtone result.

But let’s go back to the Moog-inspired UI. The knobs marking the advanced features are designed threedimensionally with a reflecting silver tone and are definitely dominating the individual style of the app. Everything else has got a monochromic look to it and the selector buttons feature a very nice custom indicating orange LED-design when their function is active. iToneMaker is coherent in every little detail and works really smooth with iOS 5 on my 3rd generation iPod touch. Even the implementation of the address book in order to use a friend’s name as a morse code pattern and entering longer character lines works as fast as the rest does.

There is just one small problem to the UX which I consider as relatively disadvantageous: if you superimpose the options panel it overlaps the (actually pretty big) play button and you can not stop the playback from there, if your ringtone is still running. But for an app which features such a cool and elaborated interface and is still available for free, this seems like a quite acceptable problem to me.

Shazam Player Now Available for iPad

Shazam Player, the app from the creators of popular music recognition utility Shazam, has today reached version 1.5, adding support for the iPad, Retina graphics, and better display of lyrics on screen. Shazam Player, as I outlined in my original review of the iPhone version, provides an alternative view to Apple’s Music app, enhancing your music library with a plethora of sharing and discovery functionalities for artists and albums.

Like its iPhone counterpart, Shazam Player for iPad offers users the ability to create separate playlists from Apple’s Music app and organize songs in “good” and “bad” lists for easy retrieval later. The whole interface has been revised to take advantage of the iPad’s real screen estate, adding a “Player” box on the left side to visualize the songs playing in your queue. These songs can be rearranged for a particular order, and lists can be saved for later or cleared with one tap. You can send single songs or entire albums to the player with a tap or swipe. Tapping on the triangle button next to a song gives you access to a separate popover window containing the same sharing options of the iPhone app: you can share on Facebook and Twitter, check out related YouTube videos, artist information, and activate LyricPlay.

Shazam Player’s standout feature, in fact, is its support for song lyrics visualized on screen through a system Shazam calls LyricPlay. This functionality is only available for tracks that have been “scanned” and matched with Shazam’s servers, and unfortunately I found this new 1.5 version to be mostly hit or miss when it came to, say, matching popular songs from Drake, Oasis, or even The Eagles – all of them available on iTunes and well-known to Shazam (the standard app can fetch song info through the device’s mic). On the iPad, when the feature works, lyrics have been updated for the Retina display and they follow a song’s progression with an animation on screen. Lyrics can now be sent to the Apple TV via AirPlay, and songs that aren’t matched for LyricsPlay usage have also received a new UI for full-screen cover art and music visualizer.

Overall, I still find Shazam Player a solid alternative to the iOS Music app if you’re looking for on-device playlist creation, sharing and queue options, and online lyrics support all in the same package. Keeping in mind that LyricsPlay won’t probably find all your lyrics, you can check out the app for free on the App Store.

Keep An Eye On Your Twitter Followers With Detective

When it comes to research for new subjects to write about, I’m constantly confronted with ones that are at heart too marginal to discuss, but I’m doing it nevertheless, because they have some interesting touch to them. In Apple news, editors know that kind of problem and the question connected to it always sounds like: “Should I post about it or not? Will it be interesting enough?” When it comes to apps and good design, it’s much easier most of the time. Most of the time I can divide UI/UX design in two parts. Either the app works, looks fine and is easy to use or it does not. When I started to test Detective by Notion, I immediately recognized: Oh god, that’s a hard decision; it has got a very nice look but I am not sure about its feature. Is it that good? To go even further, I’m still asking myself if the app has a feature at all. But let’s dive in a bit deeper and you’ll hopefully get my point.

What Detective basically does is list your new Twitter followers and unfollowers in a top-down window from a menu bar icon. That’s it. Yeah, that’s it, really. You’re probably thinking that you could check that by yourself or that perhaps you don’t care at all about who and how many followers you have as long as you can tweet and follow what or whom you want. That’s all understandable, but I thought about it more and came to the conclusion that Detective — and especially its UI design — has got some advantages that may make the use of it legible to some people.

First of all, Twitter doesn’t notify you when people unfollow you at all. Psychologically speaking, that’s a good move, since everyone is more likely to enjoy seeing how he gets more and more famous over time without spending a thought on those who may dislike him (or her). But there are still some serious Twitter users out there, who do still care about their followership, they’re rare but they exist, trust me. They may even like to ask some of them why they stopped following them and what they could do better. For them, Detective could be nice to have. It just serves the need of showing up these people and does that with a polished, gloomy monochrome design only interrupted by the green pluses for new or red minuses for ex-followers, respectively. Apart from the very poorly designed preferences panel — which is in fact offending the rest of the app’s design and looks like it doesn’t belong to the app at all, Detective is minimalist, functional and performs very well.

Which brings us the the second, even more pleasant feature of Detective, at least to me: it’s totally unobtrusive. And I consider that as the main reason for granting this app such a long post. I assume that most of you who are twittering already deactivated the notification mails Twitter sends out if you have a new follower, direct message and so on. Detective on the other hand is faster than those notification mails and its basic approach of notifying you is different. It’s just there, you can check the changes by yourself when you want or you can choose Growl notifications if you’re too lazy to click on the menu bar icon, but even that is still better than those annoying mails which constantly interrupt your workflow and clutter your mail inbox. The rest of the time, when you don’t want to get distracted, Detective is completely invisible (yes, I know, there’s still that icon in the menu bar, but let’s be honest, no one can get distracted by an icon that small).

To me, it is this unobtrusiveness that really makes the app valuable, despite its very limited feature set and purpose. It definitely is an indicator for a knowledge of good design, if a developer is not out to usurpingly bring his work to the foreground just for the sake of making the user aware of it. Unfortunately I consider its price of $2.99 still too high. Although it’s by and large a very decent app, Detective needs way more features (which are promised indeed, but obviously not included in the current version) to justify such an expenditure. Hopefully Notion will keep their promise of implementing stuff like multiple account support or retweet/favorite notifications — because then I could recommend it with no hesitation.

 

DragonDrop Simplifies OS X Drag & Drop

Ever since Lion’s release last year, I have been looking for ways to improve the system’s support for drag & drop. Lion is so focused on gestures, yet incredibly similar to older versions of OS X when it comes to file management, that I am still surprised the Finder didn’t get new functionalities aimed at increasing our efficiency with working with files on trackpads. A number of utilities have sprung from many users’ need to have a simpler drag & drop, such as Yoink.

DragonDrop, another take on simplified drag & drop for the OS X Finder, offers a solution that’s somewhat in between the aforementioned Yoink and Quick Look previews. DragonDrop lets you “pause” the drag & drop action by temporarily placing a file – being it an image, text document, webclip, or just about anything OS X can drag & drop (even colors) – in a floating shelf. When you’re ready to “resume”, you can pick up the file and drop it on your destination as it came from the original source.

While this concept is nothing new, DragonDrop provides a unique implementation – a feature that caused the app to take some time to be approved by Apple for sale on the App Store. DragonDrop can be activated by dropping files onto its menubar icon, or by performing a “shake” gesture with your finger while dragging. Apple didn’t like this feature – which is optional in the app’s Preferences – but eventually decided to approve DragonDrop as other Mac App Store apps already modify system functionalities.

Not everyone’s going to like the possibility of bringing up DragonDrop’s shelf with a shake gesture, but I’ve been using it extensively over the past weeks to quickly copy text from webpages and emails (without having to perform a long, precise drag & drop) and folders from the Finder. I like how the shake gesture makes the floating shelf appear next to the mouse cursor, rather than up in the menubar.

At $4.99, DragonDrop is a very focused utility (it also supports cut/copy/paste in the menubar) aimed at enhancing one core functionality of OS X. I recommend it, but if you’re not sure you might need it, there’s a free trial available on the developers’ website.

Read It Later Reborn: Pocket Saves Everything “For Later”

In the past five years, reading on the web has fundamentally changed. Read It Later, the first popular service to pioneer a certain kind of “bookmarking” for web articles, is reborn today as Pocket, and it promises to change the way users think of web content to “save for later”. Most importantly, Pocket wants to address what has become the scarcest resource of web citizens: time.

Read Later

People never had time to check out all the cool stuff that happens on the Internet every day. As blogging platforms started taking off in the past decade, sometime during 2006 some people began to realize they didn’t have time to read every article that was posted online. The digital publishing revolution had already happened, but the explosion of blogging was just starting to produce high-quality, journalistic and well-informed pieces that, due to a simple scarcity of time and intuitive tools, people didn’t have time to read in their entirety. Whilst the act of “bookmarking” something on the Internet goes back to several years ago, the more focused, practical act of “saving an article for later” can actually be traced back in the form of popular consumer software to somewhere in between late 2006 and 2007.

Nate Weiner was one of the first developers (and avid web readers) to understand that the bookmarking systems in place at the time (Delicious, magnolia, or simple browser bookmarks) weren’t cutting it, from a technical and psychological perspective, for those users that just wanted to put off an article for later.

The difference between “bookmarking” and “saving for later” is both practical and conceptual: a regular bookmark is usually archived for good, as bookmarking services place great emphasis on letting users store bookmarks – links to webpages – forever in their accounts. There are some exceptions today, but the underlying philosophy has pretty much stayed the same. The action of “saving an article for later”, on the other hand, takes a more pragmatical approach: an article a user wants to read today or tomorrow isn’t necessarily representative of a webpage he wants to store and archive for eternity. The terminology itself – “for later” – indicates that something is going to happen “later”. Once an article is read, most users tend to go on with their lives and forget about it. Like I said, it’s different today, and there are some specific use cases in which someone might want to archive articles – but the original concept lives on. People don’t have time to read every web article ever published.

Back in 2007, Nate Weiner set out to create a simple Firefox extension that would allow him to keep articles he found at work (and wanted to “read later”) in a different place than its browser bookmarks. On August 6, 2007, he launched the aptly-named Read It Later, a Firefox extension that did one thing well: it kept articles in a cozy little extension, saved for later. Users could hit a button to quickly save an article, and they could even save multiple browser tabs at once. As the extension started taking off, Nate began adding more features to Read It Later, such as offline support in December 2007.

Meanwhile, Marco Arment, developer at Tumblr, was facing a similar problem himself in 2007. He was constantly coming across news or blog articles he didn’t have time to read at the moment, and he needed something to read while on the bus or waiting in line. Arment discovered that there was no easy way to save links from a computer and access them later from the iPhone – we’re talking mid-2007 here, when the iPhone was getting in the hands of the first millions of customers, and when there was no SDK for developers to build native apps. So Arment decided, as he would later explain, to build just the service for that: Instapaper, a webpage that collected links saved from a bookmarklet, was launched publicly in January 2008. Like Read It Later, Instapaper solved a twofold issue: it allowed users to quickly save articles, and retrieve them later. Unlike Weiner’s app, though, Instapaper saved links in a webpage that could be easily accessed from the iPhone – mobile reading, in fact, seemed to be one of Instapaper’s primary features from the get-go. As Arment’s service became popular, he also went back to the drawing board – or in his case, programming tools – to implement new functionalities for Instapaper. The service’s hallmark feature, a text mode that strips unnecessary content out of web articles, was released in April 2008.

The rest is history. As Apple kept improving its mobile ecosystem with new devices, OS upgrades, and the App Store, Read It Later and Instapaper evolved, and iteratively became two fantastic services that serve millions of users every month. Over the years, we have followed both Instapaper and Read It Later closely at MacStories. Read more

Gemini Lovingly Finds Duplicates Of Your Files

Spring-cleaning is not much fun to do. Especially when talking about cluttered hard drives like mine. We all know with big hard drives comes big responsibility, but let’s be honest, just a few of us are constantly paying heed to delete useless duplicates. This problem can’t be tackled with apps which just provide good functionality — the task of decluttering your computer is that boring, you need great pixels as well to keep up the user’s interest and motivation.

Gemini is the first app I ever saw solving this necessary combination of design and usefulness with ease and bravour. The guys at MacPaw did a great job with it. When firing it up, Gemini is just a input screen on which you can simply drop folders or whole drives to let the app analyze and scan them. Unfortunately, this process takes some time but at least it’s subtitled with entertaining words (e.g.; “I, Gemini, am actually a duplicated file magician”). Afterwards the found duplicates are presented in a Finder-like, slightly modified window. Besides a list with the file names and paths it contains a pie chart showing up the media types of the useless files. The app comes with Quick Look support as well. Browsing your files is very intuitive, and I literally laughed when I saw the animation after finally deleting all my futile used data - it rushes through a virtual paper shredder falling down as shred.

The rest of Gemini’s look has got the same intuitive, almost magical touch to it. The rounded edges, warm colours and simple UI structure immediately appealed to me. It’s modern, minimalist, functional and — most important — it works. The design concept ends exactly where functionality begins, something I like very much. I could not find any unpolished detail in it, maybe the path information shown with the Quick Look preview is implemented a bit improperly, but I am sure that if there’s something you can not polish in order to make it beautiful, then it’s path information, as I think you’ll agree.

Apart from that, Gemini is a pretty good example of how good design can be both intuitive and functional. It really simplifies the process of cleaning up your computer, making it accessible for everyone from laymen to expert. And besides that, the price of $7.99 is more than just inexpensive when it comes to free hard drive space, it’s an excellent value for the money, so purchasing Gemini should be a no-brainer.

The iPad As A GPS Speedometer with Speed

Developed by High Caffeine Content, Speed is one of those apps that wouldn’t have been possible – or at least, nearly as enjoyable – ten years ago. Built for simplicity, elegance, and extreme practicality, Speed is a GPS speedometer that uses the iPad’s location data to tell you how fast you’re traveling. It works with iPads that have GPS available, and it has been designed to take full advantage of the Retina display. With a combination of Google Maps and beautifully represented compass, speedometer, and tripmeter laid out against a lusty black leather texture, Speed won’t replace all the functions of your car’s dashboard, but it also offers a glimpse into the future of car interfaces.

I have always believed that, in the future, car manufacturers and designers would opt for more driver-friendly touch interfaces and displays. Whilst not fully there yet, Speed is a great example of what the basics of this concept may look like a few years from now. A large display, a good-looking interface and menus, touch controls, built-in GPS and data polled directly from Google Maps. More importantly, all packaged into a consumer product that also happens to run an app that looks like a minimal car dashboard. Several car makers have already experimented with modular setups to allow for iOS devices to become a central part of the automobile experience; Speed shows that, with modern technologies, even third-party developers can produce something functional and pleasant.

I actually gave Speed a try in my Polo, driving around Viterbo and up to San Martino al Cimino. Once I switched from mph to kmh (just touch the speedometer), the app started updating my location on the map as I was driving, and it started tracking my speed and trip length. The app is surprisingly fast at detecting changes in speed: I have noticed it takes less than 2 seconds to detect sudden braking or stop. The developers say Speed offers a “a near-accurate representation”, and I can attest that’s absolutely the case here. Even better, because of this slight delay, if you’re keeping a constant speed it’ll seem as if the app really knows how fast you’re driving. The technology and implementation are quite impressive.

Some may deem Speed as a nice demo, but useless. While that’s certainly the case if you’re only looking for a full-time replacement for your car’s dashboard – and honestly, how can you expect an iPad to be 100% ready for that yet? – I think the app is worth checking out for its elegance and solid feature set alone. There are even some settings to adjust to magnetic north, use analog/digital speedometers, and use a speed limiter. On a more practical level, these features and settings make for, say, a pretty sweet solution to monitor trip lengths or check just how fast the local bus driver is traveling. It’d be nice to see the app gaining richer data representations (average speed, mileage history, speed patterns) in a future update.

The opportunity for Post-PC devices to improve existing technologies and appliances is huge. Speed is one of the many examples, and a very well-built one. Get the app here, and check out a video below. Read more

Scanner Pro Combines “Post-PC” and “Paperless” In A Single App

Scanner Pro, a camera-based scanning application for iOS devices by Readdle, has been updated to version 4.0, which adds a number of engine optimizations and new features, as well as support for the iPad. I was able to test the latest update to Scanner Pro, and I’m thoroughly impressed by the degree of independence and reliability Readdle achieved with Scanner Pro 4.0.

Let me explain. Until today, I have exclusively relied on a large, heavy wireless printer/scanner or my portable Doxie Go to scan, manage, and organize documents. In order to achieve a seamless paperless setup that required zero, or at least very minimal effort to be maintained and consistently used, I thought that the Doxie Go would be the solution for all my needs, as it offers a portable and lightweight device that outputs images at great quality in PDF. More often than not, however, the new devices and apps we have available nowadays bring new questions for issues we thought we had already figured out; as I began using the iPad as my primary computer, I realized how the Doxie, albeit well-designed and extremely usable, would still require me to use a computer to import scans, organize them, delete the ones I didn’t like, and upload the rest to Evernote.

I asked myself whether the iPad could even become a scanner. After all, the new iPad got a solid camera update in its latest version, and whilst not on par with the iPhone 4S’ camera, an iPhone 4-like lens – I assumed – could probably be a decent alternative to physical scanners, even the portable ones. The difference was mainly in the software: I wasn’t looking for an iPad accessory to turn the device into a scanner, I was scouting around for great scanner apps that would a) work reliably on the new iPad and Retina display, and b) support various online services, have basic document management features, and an “Open In” menu. Fortunately, Scanner Pro 4.0 by Readdle fits all these requisites, and it does so in a way that allows me to say this is the scanner app to try if you own a new iPad, and plan on going paperless using it. Read more