My favorite recipe app for the iPhone and iPad, Paprika, got a huge update the other day, bringing an iOS 7 design, autocomplete for when you are adding recipes, AirDrop support, and much more.
Best thing is Paprika is on sale for the rest of November. I have it for iPhone, iPad, & Mac, and their custom sync engine is top notch. If you have any interest in having a digital recipe box, Paprika is hands-down the app to get.
Whenever I need to know what the best in a certain class of hardware is, I turn to The Wirecutter and if I need some household goods I turn to their sister site, The Sweethome.
Now I have a place for where to find the best apps out there for Mac & iOS. The talented Shawn Blanc has essentially taken the concept of The Wirecutter and The Sweethome and applied it to software.
Today he launched The Sweet Setup. The goal is not to cover the newest apps, but the best apps.
Seeing picks like 1Password (yeah, yeah, I work for them), Byword, Check the Weather, and Dark Sky reassure me that I have good taste in apps, as all of those have resided on my devices for quite some time.
I really cannot wait to see how The Sweet Setup grows over time, and which amazing apps I should be using that I would never have known about otherwise.
When I was younger, it was very hard to pull me away from my colored pencil set and a good sketch pad. Then college came around and my time was consumed with writing papers all the time, and sketching fell a bit by the wayside.
Now, my five-year-old son loves to draw and sketch and I am reminded of my youth. While pencil and paper is still the best way to sketch, in my opinion, the day & age of being able to do so digitally on an iPad is also so much fun.
While I still do not sketch often (I can keep blaming time constraints, right?), I do enjoy seeing what is possible on my iPad. Naturally, I reach for Paper, by FiftyThree.
I also use a Cosmonaut stylus on occasion, and I love it, it does have some inflexibilities. I love the weight, the feel, and just generally how it handles. The tip is a bit broad, though.
Today, FiftyThree announced the Pencil, a perfect complement to Paper. It looks superb, and looks to be very versatil, as it has a bluetooth connection instead of being a passive hunk of rubber-coated aluminum. The only thing that is a bit of a downer for me is it looks like it only works great with Paper, and not other apps. I may be wrong there.
However, I adore their video to introduce it. Some friends of mine did not enjoy the motion in it, but I think it is a clever, fun, and delightful amount of whimsy.
When I launched techese, I had been yearning to get away from the likes of WordPress. I had settled on Squarespace back then and have been with it ever since. I still wholeheartedly recommend Squarespace to folks who ask me what they should use to create a site.
One thing I have always had issue with was their iOS app. It wasn't all that good back on Squarespace 5, and since Squarespace 6, it has been a bag of hurt.
Thankfully, Squarespace has released two new apps to handle the crowded functions of the previous app.
Blog handles the writing and posting part while Metrics handles all your stats. Both apps are gorgeous and work really well. These were worth the wait. I'm really happy that Markdown is a first-class citizen in the Blog app.
I have two issues which will hopefully be taken care of in updates. The first is that the Blog app is missing the social sharing toggles of the web interface. If it had those, I could truly do everything I wanted with posting from iOS, which would rock.
The second issue is that Metrics doesn't have an iPad UI, so it scales up in the ugly 2x mode.
Beyond those two omissions, the apps work great, are fast, and chock full of the feature set you would expect. I hope Squarespace treats these apps as first class, iterating often, instead of letting them languish as the previous app did for so long.
"Underscore" David Smith reflects on the fifth anniversary of his first release on the App Store:
The road I’ve traveled has been long. I’ve had countless late nights, disappointments and trials balanced almost exactly with elations, successes and growth. I’ve met some of my best friends during this process. I don’t know what the next 5 years will hold for me but if it is anything like that last I can’t wait.
It's a fantastic read, and I greatly appreciate David's candidness about his journey. If you are at all involved with app development and are not subscribed to his weekly 15-minute podcast, you should change that.
Marc Edwards tracked his step counts with both his iPhone 5s (using the M7 motion coprocessor) and his Fitbit Zip. I have to say, those results are pretty close.
I wear a Fitbit One every day to track my activity. I wonder if I will even need it with the iPhone whatever-they-call-it-next. (I'm not up for a new one until next fall). Presumably the M8(?) will be even better, and my iPhone is almost always with me.
I can see the one area I'd lose stats in is the Fitbit One tracks my sleep activity. I could go without it, but I have been able to determine when I am in a more active state of sleep in the morning by studying my sleep habits, and adjusting my alarm accordingly has resulted in a better me.
Shawn Blanc on the iPad Air:
…I think the iPad Air is “finally” a full-sized iPad without compromises. It has a gorgeous display, excellent battery life, it’s powerful, and, of course, it’s very lightweight and easy to hold.
The iPad Air (and Retina iPad mini) mark the end of one chapter and the beginning of the next for the iPad line. And so, now that we’re here, where does the iPad lineup go next?
I think Shawn is dead on when he draws the comparison to the comprises the iPhone made until the iPhone 4. I remember the startling difference between my iPhone 3G and my iPhone 4. The 3G felt like it was chock full of tradeoffs. The 4 felt like a truly luxurious piece of art.
And the iPhone has continued to just get even better with fewer compromises. I kind of thought that the iPhone 5c would be similar to the iPhone 3G, compromising luxury for a plastic back. But when I held one at the Apple Store, it was clear to me the quality of the plastic didn't even make it feel plastic. It felt as rock solid as my iPhone 5.
So the question really is where the iPad goes next? My guess is that it is going to aggressively eat the lunch of traditional "truck" computers.
John Carey is one of my favorite photographers. It is not unusual for you to see my Mac, iPhone, or iPad graced with one of his wallpaper photos.
He just released his long-awaited (by me, at the very least) iOS 7 Parallax Pack. I know from conversing with him on twitter that he meticulously sought out the optimal resolution to give enough margin to keep the images crisp and clear while playing to the fun of the parallax effect.
In the past John has given these away for free. You can get 30 of the images for free for either iPhone or iPad. But he also has 70 more available for a humble price. You can get either an iPhone only or iPad only pack for $7 each, or a combined iPhone/iPad pack for $10.
Well, I have to say this is $10 well spent for such great art that will delight me daily.
This piece by Michael Lopp Rands is one of the best articles I have read recently.
Dan Moren at Macworld has a little overview of a little something that my colleagues and I have been working on for a while.
I'm really proud of how 1Password 4 for Mac is turning out, and I can't wait until we get it into the hands of the people.
As they say, Fall is Coming.
Addendum: 9to5Mac has more pictures.
Disclosure: I work for AgileBits and 1Password's success pays my bills.
