Jordan Merrick wrote some excellent pieces for AppStorm before it was killed off a month ago. His latest project, The Instructional looks like something to pay attention to.
My aim for The Instructional is to provide in-depth guides and workflows for Mac and iOS, picking up where most app reviews finish by exploring the various features and functions of apps for, and features of, both iOS and OS X.
Want to have a general announcement system in your house? Own a bunch of expensive Sonos speakers? Have I got the app for you.
SonosVoice let’s you broadcast your own voice with a very slight delay across your entire Sonos speaker system. The app is $1 and a huge amount of fun (with an occasional practical use).
My kid squealed like crazy hearing her voice broadcast around the house and I’ve used it to call my wife from another room with tremendous enthusiasm.
Thanks to this week’s sponsor, Tap Forms. I guess I have several reasons to thank them.
They make a terrific personal database application for Mac and iOS that I use They made it easy to migrate from, the now defunct, Bento They’re sponsoring Macdrifter this week As a former Bento user, I was disappointed regularly. The updates were mostly paid bug fixes and while the form designer was intuitive, the syncing was miserable.
As a fan and friend of Day One, this upcoming feature looks interesting.
Day One is rapidly becoming the greatest and most personal publishing system on any platform.
Simbol is a new iPhone app for getting at the HTML code for a character. It’s very simple but also practical. If you are looking to create simple math equations, there’s also a text entry box with search and insert. It’s also very attractive.
There’s no favorites and a couple symbols are missing, but it’s also free. I can imagine using this quite often.
Simbol | iPhone | Free
Pastebot was a terrific app for getting something from an iPhone to a Mac. Put some text or an image in Pastebot and it would be available on my Mac. But Pastebot appears to be abandoned and extremely dated. Even brand new replacements, like Command-C still require Bonjour for sharing data rather than syncing through a central server.
I toyed with other online clipboard managers like CloudApp and Droplr. They are great.
Hog Bay is discontinuing all work on iOS apps:
For the last 3 years Grey, Mutahhir, Young Hoo, and myself worked full-time at Hog Bay Software. Unfortunately our sales dropped this year forcing it back to just me again.
It’s sad to hear but I wish Jesse well. Go buy some of his stuff that’s awesome, like FoldingText.
Patrick Welker gives a tour of his elaborate methods for processing RSS feeds. It’s an impressive system and there’s a lot to learn. I think the most important take home point is that it’s worth taking the time to understand both the how and the why.
Patrick has too many buckets for my taste but everyone is different. Whatever you think, there’s value in see his organizational structure, which is laid out nicely in a context map.
My favorite iOS to Mac screen sharing application, AirServer just received an excellent update. This update adds built in screen recording.
With just a one click and no other application, I can do a screen recording from my iPad or iPhone on my Mac and save the entire session to an H.264 video file. There are also some modest effects to apply to the video session.
AirServer has always had solid performance for me.
In case you thought that it only takes a black mock turtleneck and an over-produced demo video to succeed, it apparently also takes not-so-subtle attacks on developers of pre-existing apps.
And in case you think their argument is valid, SyntaxCheck might change your mind1:
Small and dirty iOS demo showing NSLinguisticTagger live-detecting sentence structure in an UITextView.
But maybe it’s best to just let the market decide.
DisclaimerI don't like asshats.
