Macgasm

It’s hard enough living up to expectations when you call yourself Simplenote. Figuring out what you can add to your application while maintaining your original philosophy has to be a difficult task for the Simplenote team as functionality and simplicity often butt heads.

Is tags, versions, sharing, and pins a little bit too much for a barebones text editor? We don’t think so, and Simplenote has done such a good job discerning between what’s a must have feature and what’s overkill that we’ll continue to recommend their app as a light-weight text editor.  Heck, it’s free.  How can we not recommend something that’s free and this awesome?

Here’s a quick look at some of the new features and what we think about them.

Tags and PushPins

Tags

The first thing I noticed when opening up the updated version of Simplenote was the ability to tag my “notes.” This comes in super handy for anyone who spends a great deal of time writing, and in particular bloggers. I use Simplenote to write blog posts, so being able to easily get to articles i’m working on based on a tagging system is pretty important for me. It’s a huge plus for the application. A quick downside of the tagging system is that you have to enter your tags one at a time. Separating them with commas or spaces creates a string, not a new tag.

Pushpins

The push pin feature is similar to the “sticky” feature on many blogging platforms. Essentially it lets you pin a particular note to the top of a note entry for quick retrieval. I’ll be using it to pin articles that need a lot more attention to the top of my workflow so they don’t get lost in the daily shuffle of article writing. Another excellent addition to the application.

Back in Time: Restoration

Think of it as Time Machine for your notes. You can go back and get previous versions of a document that you’re working on, which will obviously let you track edits and other omissions that happen from note to note, or in my case, article to article.  All you have to do is click on the clock and start to slide the slider backwards through time. Revisions are a must have in today’s world, and having them in Simplenote is another major step forward for the application. It just gained a lot of credit in my books.

Trash

No longer does deleting a note mean losing it forever. The trash can now acts as a catch all, but seemed a little bit wonky to me. Some articles went directly to the trash while others kind of disappeared. It’s a little bit scary, and I wouldn’t recommend using it fully yet. It could be a lingering bug, so be careful if you’re planning on deleting something.

Quick Wrap Up

There you have it, a quick look at the Simplenote update. The additions make sense, and they don’t come at the consequence of simplicity. It’s as simple and lightweight as ever and it’s even more useful than it was yesterday.  We’re pretty happy with it.

Late last week there was quite a hubub about Apple being the sole reason for iAds taking so long, as it was claimed that they were getting too involved in the creation process. Well, it seems like either someone was listening, or a couple more iAds were on the brink of being released, because AT&T and “The Switch” have both started to roll out their advertisements on the iPhone.

I haven’t been able to get any to pop up for me, so we’re going to repost here what Business Insider has to say about the AT&T ad. Trust me, we’re not in the habit of blockquoting large quotes, but this is an obvious exception.

The AT&T ad shows up in the BuzzFeed app. It wants to show us how much mobile Internet access we can get for $15 per month. We tap on it.

In the background, a bunch of clips from web pages. (This sort of reminds us of a recent Sprint ad.) Presumably, all this Internet combined would eat up AT&T’s 200 MB, $15/month mobile data plan.

You can slide your finger around the iPhone to pan around this big background image. It’s a little jerky, and unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like you can zoom in and read the stories closer. But we get it, that’s a lot of Internet!

If you tap on the AT&T logo in the cloud, you get a menu with various options.

I’m still not entirely sold on immersive advertisements being more valuable for consumers, but they do provide a few perks — they’re interactive, they get your attention, and consumers are more likely to engage with them than a traditional advertisement, which makes them more valuable for companies involved in the iAds program, and the returns should be higher.

I think the key thing to the iAds program that no one is talking about is that at some point they’re going to become the norm, and we’re going to start ignoring them again. I’m sure the first roadside advertisement got a lot of press when it went up, but now, I can’t remember the last time I registered what one was saying.  Could that happen to iAds?  Are we enamoured with them because they’re new?  We’re going to have to wait and see.

Article and Image Via Macstories

Why’s iTunes so damn successful? And what’s different between the iBooks store and the iTunes music store? Availability. Typing an obscure band into iTunes will likely reveal results, but typing some blockbuster books into iBooks and often enough you’re met with nothing. Zip. Zero. No results.

Take for instance Stieg Larsson’s popular Millennium trilogy — iBooks doesn’t have one result. That’s problematic. And, while iBooks is relatively new, others in the industry have had quite the head start in the eBooks realm, so the results don’t really come as much of a surprise. Apple wasn’t first to the table with a device, so it’s understandable that they’re still negotiating with publishers to get access to entire libraries of books. It sucks as a consumer, especially if you’re met with one empty search after another the first time you try to buy a book off the iBooks store. But, it’s no surprise that Amazon is outselling Apple 60 to 1 in the eBook stores. I can find almost anything on Amazon, and if I can’t find a similar iBook, guess where I’m going to be going for my purchase: Amazon. While the article on Boy Genius Report clearly demonstrates that the book in question was available on both book stores, there has to be a spill over effect happening to some degree.

Come find a book; stay and buy another book. If I can’t find a particular book in the iBook store, what is there to make me think that I might find my next book there — not too much. Apple’s got an opportunity to close the gap in the eBook world, but they’ll need more eBooks before they even have a fighting chance. Until then it’s hard to rely solely on iBooks for digital books.

Article Via Boy Genius Report

If you’re an iPad dev that just can’t wait for iAds, and you want to get ads on your free application as soon as possible, you may be interested in Google’s new ad format for iPad. They were just recently launched for iPad devs in Canada and USA.

In a recent blog post by Google Mobile Ads, they said:

“The new iOS SDK supports ad serving in iPad apps using three of the most common online ad formats, instantly making it easier for developers to grow their businesses and for advertisers to expand their presence to the iPad.

Advertisers whose campaigns run on the Google Display Network and include text or image ads in the above sizes can now show ads within iPad applications – provided their campaigns are targeting mobile devices or specifically the iPad.”

If you’ve used Google Adsense before, you probably know that Google doesn’t have the prettiest ads, so if you want to make sure your app is as sexy as it can be, you might just want to wait until iAds is available for iPad.

However, if you’re just interested in making a couple bucks off your free app, and you’re not that concerned with its appearance, you may want to check out the new ad formats.

Article via Mac Stories.

Image via vuemme.

If you’re a power user, I’m sure your Dock gets cluttered sometimes. I’m constantly testing out different browsers, so my Dock will overflow with little round icons. Well, no more. Thanks to Stacks, we can now easily have access to our favorite applications without having them take up room in the dock when they’re not being used.

First of all, right-click on your desired apps in the finder, and select “Make Alias.” Now, create a new folder for these aliases to live. Drag all of the aliases into the new folder, and then drag the folder into the right-hand side of your dock. It’s as easy as that.

You can now right-click on the stack to choose how you want it to be displayed. You can choose between Grid, Fan, and List. It’s completely up to you, but I’m a big fan of the Grid layout.

Now you’re only a click away from your favorite apps, but without all the annoying visual clutter. Pretty great, huh? This is a feature I just can’t remember living without in the 10.4 days.

Do you have any interesting Dock tips? Let us know by sounding off in the comment section of this post. Alternately, you can hit me up on Twitter if you’d like.

Growth, the number one statistic overlooked by people trying to lay the smack down on Apple for their market share. Apple doesn’t have the largest slice of the pie when it comes to market share of PCs, but they’ve been outpacing the industry when it comes to market growth over the last couple of years.

According to IDC and Needham’s Charlie Wolf, in June of this year (2010), Apple’s shipments were 14.1 percent higher than the industries growth rate of 20.9 percent, bringing them to a growth rate of 35 percent. That’s pretty impressive, but it’s not the most interesting number for the month. Apple’s Mac shipments to governments grew 200 percent in the month, and is 16 times higher than the markets average 12.1 percent growth. That’s huge, and considering it along side the other statistics both at the consumer level and business levels (3x higher than the market), it becomes quite evident that Apple’s growing their market share quite handsomely.

Wolf suggests that the growth has a lot to do with the iPhone “Halo” effect still, but I’d argue that he’s probably a device too late. While the iPhone 4 has enough buzz of it’s own these days, the iPad is clearly getting noticed by everyone, and it’s likely the driving force for Mac sales in the business sector.  Having both the iPhone and iPad in your arsenal can’t hurt though, and clearly Apple’s reaping the reward of purchases from consumers.

Article Via CNN Fortune

Photo Credit: Colleen AF Venable

If you spend a lot of time reading PDFs on your iPad, you know that iBooks leaves something to be desired. Heck, it’s an outright pain to get them onto your device. Unless I’m missing something, iBooks just doesn’t cut it for me (If I am, let me know in the comments).

I want an application that can go out and grab my PDFs from Dropbox, iDisk, or even the Web. This is where Folio comes in handy, you can access all three of those sources without having to plug your iPad or iPhone into iTunes. Apple’s rumoured to be working on over the air syncing, and when that day comes I might change my mind, but until then, Folio’s become my primary PDF reader on my iPad.  The application is 4.99 on the App Store and worth every single penny, especially if you spend a lot of time reading PDFs

What’s Macgasmic

To start it’s a universal app. That means that you buy the application once, and you can use it on both your iPhone and iPad. You don’t have to buy an application for both medium, which is great.

The UI is gorgeous, and lets you scroll from left to right through your entire PDF library. You click on the PDF cover and you’re immediately taken into the PDF in either a one page view or two page view depending on if you’re in landscape or portrait mode on your iPad. it’s really handy, and the extra screen real-estate of the iPad shines in Folio.

PDFs are interactive, you can obviously swipe from page to page, but you can also click on links to jump to other pages in the documents, or on weblinks which will open up an internal web browser so you can check out a link, then jump back into your PDF. It’s huge if you’re into PDF magazines like BeatWeek.

You can also bookmark your pages, change the brightness of your device, and toy with a display mode that includes different default colour schemes for your PDFs.

The really great thing about this app is the Dropbox support. I house all of the Macgasm files that I share with our writing team in Dropbox, so being able to access those PDFs directly from within Folio really set this application apart for me. I was immediately able to input my Dropbox info, download my PDFs, and run out the door to a meeting with potential advertisers, no sync required.

The Folio team is working on including syncing features between the iPhone and iPad app in the upcoming version, so keep your eyes peeled for that.

What needs work

The UI, while looking good, could be more functional by letting you switch to a view that lets you see more PDFs at once, permanently. This view is present on the iPhone, but it’s missing in the iPad version. The iPad version does let you click on a magnifying glass to see a listing of all your PDFs temporarily, so the functionality isn’t missing entirely, but being able to adopt the view permanently would be a nice little touch.

Importing from Dropbox literally takes a copy of the PDF on the server and downloads it to your device. If there’s a change to the file on Dropbox’s servers, it won’t automatically get pushed to your device. Instead, you have to delete your current version, and then re-download the new one. It’d be nice if Folio would keep synced with the changes automatically.  They’ve apparently received a lot of requests for this feature, and I’ve been assured that they’re working on it, and that it’ll make an appearance in a future version.

The Giveaway

With this review we’re also doing a giveaway. If you want a chance to win a promocode for Folio for iPad (US only) just follow these three steps:
1. Follow @macgasm on Twitter
2. Tweet this message “Win a copy of Folio for iPad and iPhone. Details and review here: http://su.pr/22HdWa”.
3. Post a comment here with a link to your tweet.
That’s it! I’ll randomly pick a winner Friday, August 27rd.

The Winner

Congrats to @dapperright on twitter for winning! we’ll be in contact over email with him to provide him with his coupon code.

I really, really, really need to put in my resume for some of these CEO positions. It seems like everywhere I look they get paid to toss out unsubstantiated claims based on personal bias. Much like the LG executive last week, Acer chairman JT Wang predicts that Apple’s market share in the iPad market will drop to between 20 and 30 percent.  The reason I say iPad market is becuase they pretty much currently own the entire landscape.

Let’s stop for a moment and put aside the fact that Wang has a vested interest in making that bold claim, and let’s think about just how likely it is that this is going to happen any time soon. Done thinking about it? Yeah, so are we.  The reason he thinks the iPad is going to fall substantially in market share is because of the closed garden that Apple has on the device. The new song is the same as the old song, and the argument continues to get older by the moment.  Consumers don’t care about the garden, geeks do, and I hate to say it, but consumers make up a lot more market share than the geeks.

The more these executives spout off about the iPad, the more I wonder just how much Google’s influencing what’s coming out of their mouths. To save myself some time here, I’m just going to say ditto to Acer. Putting down the competition without having a product of your own to show off is down right hilarious.

Article Via Engadget

Image Credit: Yutaka Tsutano