Macgasm

This morning a major update to Vemedio’s podcatcher Instacast has gone live on the App Store.

Instacast, a Macgasm favourite (check out our interview with Martin Hering, Instacast’s creator), is probably the single best iOS application to discover, download, organize, and most importantly, enjoy the podcasts you love. The developers have been hard at work and made many changes, not the least of which are a completely revamped user interface and a pro version, available via an in-app-purchase.

The nice people of Vemedio have also lowered the price from $ 2.99 to $ 0.99. The application was a steal before, but this new price is almost shamefully low. If you haven’t downloaded it so far, now’s the best time and don’t forget to subscribe to Macgasm TV once you’ve bought it.

Below you’ll find the list of changes straight from the horse’s mouth:

NEW IN VERSION 2.0
+ Revamped and improved user interface
+ Episode archiving
+ Improved Podcast Player with:
+ Sleep Timer
+ Continuous Playback backward and forward
+ List of episode links
+ Sharing of playback position via email and Twitter
+ Chapter Navigation
+ Improved podcast Auto-Download management
+ Download Manager with:
+ Pause and cancel downloads
+ Reorder downloads to set priority
+ Improved podcast feed parser with:
+ Support for Atom feeds
+ Support for MP3 chapter markers
+ Support for Multi-Format Podcasts
+ Support for Episode Deep Linking
+ VoiceOver support
+ Data Export

WITH INSTACAST PRO as In-app Purchase:
+ Playlists and Smart Playlists
+ Bookmarks with Import/Export
+ Settings for individual Podcasts
+ Push Notification for new episodes

Source: Vemedio blog

A few weeks ago I wrote a review of Remarks, a PDF-based note taking and markup application for the iPad. In the review I wrote that the software becomes really useful when using a stylus, because it allows for natural handwriting and that it’s also very useful when editing and marking up PDFs.

The stylus I’m using is the Cosmonaut by Studio Neat. This pen for capacitive touchscreens started as a Kickstarter project and received tremendous support, mostly — and rightfully — because of the great success the two inventors had with their first Kickstarter project, the Glif. In December 2011, the first styluses were shipped out to customers. I bought mine about two months ago and these are my impressions. [...]

Last week my colleague Nic Lake wrote an article about the way he uses his Apple hardware and what tasks he delegates to certain devices.

Like him, I’ve received similar questions about why and how I use the devices I own (pictured above), so with a courtesy nod to my colleague, here goes.

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If you’re a gamer, or just somebody who likes to play the occasional game on your iPhone, you’ve seen them; game splash screens. They tell you that, yes, your are indeed playing the game that you selected a few seconds ago on your iPhone home screen, and they tell you who made the game, and if you’re unlucky, they’ll also tell you who the person was who fetched coffee for the developers, who paid them and who walked their doggies.

I’m exaggerating of course, but in my opinion game splash screens need to die!

The reason why they exist is a pretty simple one: brand awareness. Companies want you to remember who made that great game you love playing in every spare minute you have. They want you to remember the fun you have with it and associate it with their name; so when you see another game by the same company on the App Store, you’ll be more inclined to buy it.

One of the ways to produce brand awareness is by repetition, which every person who has seen one feature film on TV will know: During every commercial break you see ads for the same products. While commercials are generally annoying when you just want to sit down and watch a movie, it makes sense for the advertisers, because you have to sit through them — well, you really don’t, since you can always get up and grab a new drink in order to miss the ads. People basically accept that they are there, because on some level they realise that these commercials pay for the shows and movies they watch.

But with games it’s a different matter. Showing splash screens when a game starts keeps a person from the thing she or he wants to do: playing the goddamn game. When the ad becomes a hindrance and one you cannot ignore, one you have to wait through, it’ll make you angry over time. This is even worse when you’ve already given the company money for the game (I’m deliberately ignoring “free”, ad-supported and freemium games in this article and focusing on paid games).

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A few weeks ago Readdle, the company behind apps like PDF Expert for iPad, released an app called Remarks, a highly flexible note taking app that stores your notes as PDF files.

One feature that didn’t make it into version 1.0 of the application was the ability to synchronise folders from Dropbox or WebDAV servers with the app. Last week Readdle notified us that an update was available, adding this functionality and a few other tweaks. So let’s take a look at this app.

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Over the last few months I started receiving an increasing amount of spam mails through my iCloud addresses (*@me.com). Being very careful with those, determining the reasons for the increase was easy:

• Firstly the Gawker data breach. I was notified that my data had been compromised and ever since then, spam started being sent to the email address I used with them.
• The second reason were hacked Facebook accounts of a few friends. To that data I had my profile show one of my email addresses, should friend like to contact me that way.
• The third and last reason was a recently compromised email account of an acquaintance in university, resulting in my private address becoming available to spammers.

Unfortunately now that I get spam, I have to deal with it. Apple’s automatic filtering seems to be pretty good, given that only a few spam mails get through every now and then, but like every automated solution, it has its weaknesses, resulting in false positives (wanted emails being treated as spam) and spam email getting through.

What particularly annoyed me about this situation, is that there’re no apparent mechanisms in iCloud or OS X Mail and on iOS to properly deal with spam and false positives.

iOS offers no way of marking an email as spam, and manually moving a spam email to the appropriate folder in the mail app — as some sites suggest — has no effect whatsoever. Then there’s the disconnect between the Mail app in OS X and iCloud: The spam filters and rules in the desktop application are entirely disconnected from iCloud’s spam filtering mechanisms, which means that any spam filters you set up on your Mac aren’t propagated to iCloud. On the other hand, email that iCloud sorts into the spam folder often aren’t recognised as such by the Mail app and — depending on the email sorting rules you may have set up — are sorted into other folders. iCloud itself (the web interface) has no spam settings, no way to set up rules, no way to correct mistakes the spam filter might’ve made, leaving the user with very few options.

There are a ways of dealing with unwanted emails in iCloud, though, as Apple’s website revealed after some searching:

1. You can manually forward spam emails to spam@me.com: Only few people know of this, but it’s especially important if you’re using an email client other than Apple’s own Mail app on the Mac. From the Message menu, select Forward as Attachment and send the mail to spam@me.com.
2. An even easier way is to click the Mark as SPAM button in OS X Mail. Doing this will not only move the email to the spam folder (unless you altered the default behaviour), but it’ll also forward the email to Apple.

Unfortunately, none of these options are present in iOS, which is something Apple should deal with sooner rather than later, especially because it sees iOS devices as almost independent from a host Mac at this point.

What’s even worse is the way iCloud deals with false positives. iCloud doesn’t offer a white list mechanism, allowing a user to add certain senders (bugsbunny@nospammail.com) or certain sender domains (*@disqus.com) to a list, so they won’t be marked as spam.

There is only one surefire way to deal with this:

Select an email that was falsely sorted into the spam folder in OS X Mail or any other email client. Make the app show the entire header information of the email. In OS X Mail you can do this by pressing CMD+SHIFT+H. Check the value “spamscore” or “X-spamscore”. If it’s anything other than “0”, the server has had some reason to think that the email in question might be spam.

In my case I didn’t receive emails from the commenting system disqus.com, which frankly drove me nuts. Notification emails from disqus always had spamscores between 11 and 81, meaning that all of them were sorted into my spam folder.

To solve this I had to contact iCloud support through this link. After the initial contact I was asked to send an email with the complete header information to the support person, who forwarded the email to the engineering staff. The engineering staff then added the domain to my individual white list, solving the problem.

There’s an interim solution for people who can’t wait for Apple to fix their issue: Set up a mail sorting rule in the iCloud web interface to sort mail from @domaininquestion.org to a folder in iCloud. This will override the spam sorting mechanism. The major drawback of this method is that Mail on iOS doesn’t show unread message counts or notifications for emails that don’t go into your regular inbox, and neither does Mail on OS X unless the user has changed the default behaviour.

As iCloud becomes more popular, which it certainly will, seeing that Apple urges every new iOS user to sign-up for an account, the amount of spam users have to deal with will increase. Better ways of handling this annoyance are needed on the server side, as well as on the user’s side.

Image Credit: Adapted from arnold | inuyaki

Last week, my Editor-in-Chief Joshua Schnell wrote an article about the hubbub made regarding Apple’s decision to name the new iPad, just iPad, not attaching a number to it.

He correctly observed that consumers don’t care what the iPad is called, as long as it does what it is supposed to do and as long as each iteration is noticeably better than the last:

Just before the keynote, John C. Welch put up an article nicely summarising what’s important for Apple in a product, writing:

The name doesn’t matter. What matters is the seamless and as-perfect-as-possible user experience. Apple does this through making the cutting-edge technology invisible and having a platform that provides choice and seamless integration.

I wholeheartedly agree with what both have said, but nonetheless this whole situation got me thinking. I followed the keynote through several live blogs and watched it once the stream became available and I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was more to this name simplification. As Joshua and many others have pointed out correctly, Apple doesn’t use numbers to differentiate each new generation of MacBook Pro or Macbook Air or even iPod touch from one another. Only iPhones and the second iPad were privy to a number after the name.

I have a feeling that Apple has named the new iPad the way it did because they finally made the iPad they wanted to build when they first introduced the device. What I mean by this is that the latest iPad, with its living-room-console graphics capabilities, the long battery life, the incredible degree of connectivity and most importantly the Retina display, is what Apple would’ve built two years ago, had it had the technology.

If you’re cynical, you could say this implies that the first two generations of the iPad were public beta tests, leading up to what Apple considers to be the iPad, but that would disregards Apple’s modus operandi. They iterate and with each iteration their products become distinctly better. You’d also ignore that there’s still no real tablet market; there’s still an iPad market and Apple keeps upping the game. Many tablet makers are still trying to catch up with the first generation of the device, creating gimmicky devices with ever growing feature lists in an effort to differentiate themselves from their almost identical competitors, none of which is Apple with its iPad.

Tim Cook said it in during the keynote — and it showed heavily in Apple’s quarterly results — post-PC devices are of great importance to Apple, both financially and culturally. Post-PC devices are no longer less powerful or less useful than PCs. They will neither replace PCs in the years to come, nor need they. iPads are great for tasks for which a Mac would only give you a less than perfect experience, thus making said tasks — consumptive or creative — easier and more pleasant.

Apple doesn’t regard iPads as companions to regular PCs any longer and the new naming convention mirrors this conviction: The iPad has grown up. They don’t need the markings on the door frame anymore.

Two days ago Fishlabs released an update to its award winning game Galaxy on Fire 2 HD. The update added two in app purchases: The long-awaited ‘Valkyrie’ extension and the ‘Kaamo Club’. After already having completely reworked the basic Galaxy on Fire 2 to take advantage of the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S’s improved graphics capabilities, the developers have now performed their magic on the extension.

The Valkyrie extension has been available for the standard definition version of the game for a while, adding a new storyline, new star systems, new equipment and new ships to the already deep game.

The Kaamo Club, which had been introduced with the release of the Valkyrie extension in the SD version, is basically your own space station. There you can store ships, equipment and resources, giving you a handy place to build and finish all the nice blueprints for equipment that you can collect throughout the game.

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