MacStories Favorite  

Unread

Created by Jared Sinclair and later acquired by Supertop – makers of the excellent Castro for iPhone – Unread is an elegant RSS reader that works with a variety of services, including MacStories favorites NewsBlur and Feed Wrangler.

Unlike other RSS apps, Unread doesn’t overwhlelm you with complex menus or a cluttered interface. Instead, Unread is all about a clean and focused experience with beautiful typography and a minimal UI aimed at putting the spotlight on what truly matters: articles and text. Reading in Unread doesn’t feel like scrolling through a list of headlines like in other traditional RSS readers, but it’s an experience more akin to something like Instapaper.

Unread also excels at making navigation and one-handed operations fast and intuitive through gestures. With vertical and horizontal swipes that can be performed anywhere on screen, Unread allows you to move across articles, open links in a built-in browser, and even open the system share sheet just by swiping and tapping.

Unread is a beautiful, comfortable, and modern RSS reader like no other on iOS. A must-have for RSS purists who are looking for a different take on RSS clients with a focus on reading.

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 MACSTORIES WEEKLY SPONSOR 

SketchParty TV

SketchParty TV turns your iPad (or iPhone) and Apple TV into a high-tech drawing and guessing game. Like Pictionary via AirPlay, it's great for families, parties, and classrooms. With thousands of words in seven languages and a built-in custom word list creator, you can share the fun and togetherness of game night with SketchParty TV.

Regularly $9.99, available to MacStories Weekly readers for a limited time price of $4.99.

MacStories Collections

iPad Productivity Apps for Students

Word, Excel & PowerPoint

Microsoft's Office apps are some of the most impressive apps available for the iPad. Plus, let's face it, as a student you are bound to run into Microsoft Office documents and will probably need to create them at some point. Sure, there are alternatives to using Office, but none are as fully featured whilst also easy to use. Better yet, as a student, you may also be eligible to receive Office 365 for free, which entitles you to unlock all the features of Office on the iPad, plus a free version of the Mac and Windows apps.
 

Also Great

PDF Expert

Along with Microsoft Office documents, students are bound to run into many PDF documents. PDF Expert is a great app from Readdle that'll let you annotate PDFs right from your iPad. I've never really enjoyed reading long PDFs on a laptop, but don't want to be printing dozens of pages, so reading and annotating documents on my iPad is a great alternative that works great. But PDF Expert can also be used as a way to organize all your documents, acting as a kind of 'Finder' on your iPad, that's because it'll sync your documents from a wide range of cloud services (including Dropbox and OneDrive). 

Evernote

As a student, you'll be making lots of notes, and whilst there are a lot of ways you can do this, Evernote remains my favourite. There's an Evernote app for every platform under the sun, it's easy to use and has been very reliable for me (I've used it for over 7 years). The notes are rich text, but you can also attach any document to a note, as well as clip webpages using various browser extensions. One of my favorite features is that Evernote's search will also search for text in any images. And if you ever want to share a note with someone else, Evernote will host the note and you just need to send them a link to view it. 

Also Great:

OneNote - Free

PCalc

If you use an iPad, you're bound to run into a situation where you need to do a quick calculation, only to realise Apple's calculator app isn't installed on an iPad. Which is why we recommend PCalc, a great replacement calculator app and one that is powerful enough to be used by students studying engineering or computer science. Plus, students will enjoy procrastinating by endlessly customizing PCalc with the different themes and custom layouts. 

Also Great:

Calcbot - Free

Soulver

Soulver is a mix between a calculator, spreadsheet and a piece of paper. It's a great app that will let you step through mathematical problems by interspersing a calculation with words that explain the context. So for example, you could write in Soulver; "3 movies tickets at $14 each", and Soulver will provide the answer. That's an extremely simple example, but it becomes a powerful tool when you tackle a complex problem and split it up into multiple lines, which allows you to clearly show your working out. Soulver is a really powerful tool for learning and I've used it many times to create great notes on how to solve complex problems. 

MindNode

Creating mind maps is a great way to quickly jot down ideas about a topic, and I find that they're a great way to coalesce thoughts about an essay I need to write. Creating them on the iPad is super easy with MindNode, which comes with multiple themes, an infinite canvas and a 'smart layout' option which keeps your canvas neat and easy to read. Once you're done you can export it to a number of formats, including as a Markdown outline. 

Scanbot

Whether you want to grab a copy of a page in a textbook, notes off a whiteboard or your scribbles on a piece of paper, the camera on your iPad can be incredibly useful. Scanbot makes it easy to grab a picture of those things and upload it straight to an online service like Evernote or Dropbox. But it can also do some clever post-processing to transform your iPad photos into more legible scanned images. It also has smart edge detection so that your image is cropped to include only what you need. 

Also Great:

Scanner Pro by Readdle - $2.99
Evernote Scannable - Free
Prizmo - $9.99

WolframAlpha

My final suggestion is WolframAlpha, which is an incredibly clever website (that has an iPad app). It's kind of like a search engine, but for natural language queries that refers to some kind of numerical data. Siri relies on WolframAlpha to answer questions such as exchange rate conversions. It's just an incredibly useful tool (I often use it for date and time calculations, e.g. 45 days from 1 May 2015) and one that is actually very powerful if you dig into it. Try it out, and see for yourself.

Tips with Tj  

Interesting Links  

David Sparks reviews the new MacBook.

tizi is a fashionable calculator for Apple Watch. Interesting combination of personalization and utility.

ustwo (makers of Monument Valley) have launched a time management app for Apple Watch – Gero.

Pixelmator for Mac has been updated with support for Force Touch.

Force Click shortcuts unconverted by Rene Ritchie.

The Iconfactory’s xScope comes to Apple Watch with xScope Mirror. You can also preview files from your Mac on the Watch.

Fraser Speirs on presenting with Apple Watch.

Instagram has added three new filters and support for emoji hashtags.

Good technical explanation of Apple’s ResearchKit by John Timmer at Ars Technica.

Two conferences for the iOS and Mac community worth keeping an eye on: Release Notes and Layers.

Stuart Hall takes a look at the App Store screenshots of popular apps. Interesting discoveries.

Jason Snell on how he transcribes Tim Cook nearly in real time.

Greg Pierce has good advice for indie developers: use affiliate links for your apps.

Home Screens  

Oisín Prendiville

My second screen is filled with folders but I also keep two on the home screen, one is a collection of podcast apps that I’m constantly dipping in and out of while developing Castro, the other is a mix of apps I launch infrequently enough but want relatively quick access to. Anything that’s not on this screen I launch from Spotlight instead of looking for the icon.

My most used apps other than our own are probably Slack and Tweetbot. I’ve used Simplenote for years so it’s filled with scattered thoughts, diary entries, app ideas, recommendations from friends, blog drafts and so on.

The icons that are probably least recognizable to readers are for My Artists, the first iOS app I ever wrote which I use to this day for listening to my music library, and Castro 2, the next iteration of our podcast app.

Padraig Ó Cinnéide

Apple Watch’s activity tracking has really hooked me, even though I’ve never had a Fitbit or checked how many steps I took on my iPhone, and I really enjoy the accompanying iPhone app. It’s a bit hard to find a specific piece of data if you’re looking for it, but I like the dark style and enjoy swiping around to see what other info it’ll reveal.

Monument Valley — I have a 2 month old daughter named Ida. Sometimes when I’m awake in the middle of the night, feeding her pumped milk, I’ll play a level of this, so it’s on my home screen again.

Other times I’ll catch up on RSS in our app Unread. We just released 1.5 and Readability View along with a dark theme is the best thing ever. I use this to keep up with about 15–20 feeds, mostly from people who post rarely that I might miss on Twitter.

Castro 2 is the app that we really want to make a mark with. We had been rushing to get it done but recently decided to take more time to really get it right. We hope to be ready to talk about it more in a few months.

App Camp Quiz Compendium — Turns out, my Harry Potter house is Hufflepuff and my career when I grow up should be graphic designer. You should get this app, because I want App Camp to be a billion dollar charity by the time Ida is ready to attend.

Pivotal Tracker so I can file bugs quickly if I notice any with our apps. (Looking forward to a version that supports iPhone 6 screen sizes though)

Financial Times is a web app. I like their writing and have a subscription but half the time I just read their website in Safari because this app is pretty rough. I really miss their native app that died when Apple changed the rules about subscriptions.

Miranda is a timezones app so I can keep track of when Oisin should be asleep but probably isn’t. The UI is pretty cool, though I’ll probably just use the Apple Watch world clock feature on my watch face in future.

iCloud Photo Sharing is the greatest thing ever when you have a new baby. Invite anyone who cares to a private stream and give everyone else only occasional Facebook photos or Instagram.

Peter Wells

First thing you’ll notice is I get no mobile reception at my desk at work. Second thing is I’m still using an iPhone 5, I still prefer the smaller screen, and I’m hoping for an iPhone 6c with a smaller screen. Or better yet, for an iPhone model like the Sony Z3 Compact, which fits a 4.7“ screen into a similar sized case of an iPhone 5 - thanks to a smaller ”chin and forehead" on that hardware. I really love the Sony line-up in the sense that smaller does not mean less features, it just means smaller. I’d love it if Apple embraced this idea.

As for my home screen, I try my best to group icons based on type as well as colour. When an app changes it’s icon, or a new app like Google Calendar replaces Fantastical, I can spend a week re-arranging my homescreen until everything feels ‘right’.

On an Android phone I fill the hard-to-reach top area of my homescreen with a clock widget, but because this isn’t an option on iOS, the top row is for apps I rarely use. Phone and Messages are almost never launched these days, so they’re in the hardest to reach spots. I read Feedly every day, but typically on my iPad rather than my iPhone. And Google Maps is great for driving, but I rarely drive, so it’s just filling up space too.

The next row is for apps I actually use frequently. We’ve recently started using Slack at work, and I absolutely love it - it’s so flexible and polished. We’re using it for group announcements, and as an iMessage replacement for small teams, etc. Pocket Casts is my go to podcasting app. I’ve tried them all, but Pocket Casts has the best mix of simple design and power features for me. Plus, I carry an Android phone with me for work, so I need a cross-platform podcasting app.

Pocket is still my favourite ‘read later’ service. I really only use it to collect stories for the Reckoner Podcast, and Pocket is the best I’ve found for glancing and copying out saved links to a Google Doc.

Spotify is my current music streaming service, but that’s subject to change. I really dont like any streaming service yet - I’d love soemthing that combines the music locker of Google Music with the Smart Playlists of iTunes with the ease of sharing of Spotify with the Music Genome of Pandora. Oh well. Until then, Spotify seems to have the best mix.

Next row, Foursquare. I still use and love Foursquare - it’s got much more traction than Yelp in Australia. I still check-in to Swarm too, although that seems to be far less popular than it was when check-ins lived in Foursqaure. Next There is the best, fastest public trasnport app I’ve ever used. If Next There supports your city - purchase it now. This is the only app I miss on Android these days.

Do Camera is there to create a kind of roll-your-own Evernote, along with Simplenote on the bottom row. As much as I’ve tried to love Evernote, I find it far too busy for my needs, and the sync is far too slow. So instead I keep all notes in Simplenote, with Do Camera sending all photos and screen shots I need to Dropbox. I love that Do Camera does not save to the Camera Roll.

Next, my most hated icon that houses my favourite time waster. Goddamn it Instagram, your icon looks like a balloon beside the rest of my home screen. Look , I get it, I think Apple went to far with their icon redesigns in iOS 7 too, but it’s time to move on. Still, I love the service, so Insta gets to stay.

I’m suprised how often I need to jump into my settings app, but there we are. The built in Camera app still has the best HDR functionality, so it stays too. And Wunderlist remains my favourite to-do app, that works on Mac, Windows, iOS and Android. I’ve tried every to-do, but keep coming back to Wunderlist.

I keep my work and home email separated with the help of Outlook and Inbox, so that I don’t stress about work out of hours. Facebook is a necessary evil, and Paper (which has the worst type of “flat icon”) remains the cleanest way of experiencing it.

Tweetbot remains my favourite Twitter application on iOS - but not my favourite Twitter app. That honour goes to Fenix, an Android app that is as beautiful as Tweetbot, but adopts newer features (like the new quoted tweets feature) much faster than the iOS king.

Google Calendar has finally supplanted Fantastical as my favourite iOS Calendar. Fantastical fought off many fine apps, but Google Calendar is near perfect in Schedule view.

Safari. I hated that icon the day we saw those iOS 7 mockups on 9to5 Mac, and I continue to hate that icon. Goddamn it’s awful. Still, the best iOS browser.

And finally, Telegram - a service I wish was as popular as WhatsApp - I find it to be the best of the thousands of messenging services out there. It has great security, lightning fast sync, a fantastic web and native Mac app - but no one uses it. Oh well.

Previously, on MacStories  

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