If you ever wanted to try your hand at making / cooking tapas, then you really should get yourself a copy of The Photo Cookbook – Tapas. It’s full of simple, easy to follow, directions for a myriad of tapas dishes for both carnivores and vegetarians alike. It’s available on both the iPhone and iPad, for just $4.99.
Mmmm I’m getting hungry just looking at the photos!
How to Enable Two-Step Verification for Your Apple ID
Cody Fink from Mac Stories provided a walk through showing how to setup the two factor / step verification for your Apple ID.
You should really consider doing this if you use an Apple ID for anything, like buying Apps on your iPhone, buying movies on iTunes, etc.
I’ve been having a few issues with Gmail of late, the iOS app in particular, where it’s not showing my new emails despite sending me notifications that I have new email. It’ll load on say the iPhone, but not the iPad, and vice versa….so right now I’m gagging for a new email client that works well with Google Apps.
Mailbox looks like it might be a solution. Can’t wait to check it out.
My master plan for revolutionizing the future of publishing and saving tablet-native journalism
A publication’s app should be designed and built with purpose and consideration. The Magazine works because I based decisions not on what everyone else was doing, but on what would be best for this magazine. Every publication has its own unique needs, audience, economics, and style, so their apps should reflect that.
Marco’s response to all the assertions that he’s got the secret sauce to save the publishing industry from itself. Great read if you’ve been keeping up with all the subcompact publishing talk of the last week.
Seeing a lot of articles saying that Google has released Chrome for iOS today… I wonder if it will actually be released today, as I write this it’s still not in the Australian App Store and there’s not that many hours left ‘today’ in the US.
Update: It’s available now in the Australian App Store…but only if you go through iTunes, it doesn’t seem to be available via the App Store on the iPad.
The Mac App Store: Falling In Love Again
Andy Ihnatko on why the Mac App Store makes a lot of sense going forward.
Generating this image was a needlessly long and complicated process. Oh, the app is easy as pie. It was only complicated because I hadn’t really used the app in ages. I downloaded a fresh copy from HDRSoft and looked in my Mail archive for the license code, but I couldn’t find it. I used their website’s automated thingy to have it re-sent to me, but they didn’t have the code on file and it was a holiday weekend.
From the retro desktop-style interface through to the clunky name — Documents Unlimited PDF & Office Editor Apps for iPad — not a single aspect of this experience has been left untouched by the clunky hand of open-source UI design committees.
It’s pretty damn ugly, and expensive too…even at it’s sale price of $5.
(Via The Brooks Review.)
Drafting this one for 2014, because we like to write our blog posts a couple years early at Impending. Let’s hope I’ll never have to dig it up again.
[…]
After having weathered a couple of years and hundreds of scams, fraud apps, hoaxes, and clones that have hit the top of the charts, the atmosphere in 2014 among both App Store customers and app developers can only be described as cynical.
[…]
Customers have also in turn begun to rely more and more heavily on existing giant brands, and are avoiding less trustworthy upstarts, independent developers and studios, and apps that stray from the familiar. As a result innovation in the App Store is in a slow death spiral.
Great read from the team at Impending, they were involved with the development of Clear with Realmac Software, and of course the scammy rip off app that I wrote about last week.
One iPhone application that has been getting some great press of late is Launch Center. In it’s simplest form Launch Center is an app that allows you to trigger certain actions within other applications with a single tap, it also allows you to schedule actions as well.
For a bunch of it’s users, myself included, Launch Center has replaced numerous Homescreen apps, as well as saved many many taps. However it also has it’s detractors. Take a look at these screen caps from the App Store, how do you go from a glowing 5 star review to a call for minus stars?
I’ll admit that typically most 5 star reviews have little to no value, especially when it’s a review like “omg awesome app 5 starz” as it tells us nothing about why the app is so awesome. On the other end of the spectrum a 1 star, or in this case a “minus star” is next to worthless as well.
Continuing to use Launch Center as an example; the developer, App Cubby, clearly states in the description that notifications do not stay in Notification Center permanently, Apple does not allow apps that do this, they also state that users can ask for help or submit feedback on their support website. With developers not being able to interact with their Apple’s customers via responding to issues disguised as reviews, and when they clearly state that they can / will support via their own website, I think Apple is doing the developers a huge disservice by approving these comments.
I’d love to be able to have a filter set so that I don’t see any 5 or 1 star reviews, only give me 2,3, and 4 star reviews where people have actually submitted a considered opinion on the app in question. There’s an infinite amount more value in those reviews.
I’d love to see Apple start to actually moderate comments that are so very obviously user based issues, or even open a feedback channel so that developers can respond to critical reviews.
Or maybe it’s all too difficult for a $1.99 app.
And it’s damn good, but don’t take my word for it;
