My new favorite iOS game is Alto’s Adventure. My 7- and 4-year olds love it, too.
Here are a couple of developer screenshots:
The app has cool music, great sound effects, and a really relaxing vibe. It’s a good challenge, too.
The app is on sale right now at the App Store for $0.99 (down from $2.99). You can find it here.
I’ve reviewed enough software to know over-hyped copy writing when I see it, so I was initially skeptical at the Things app’s claim to be “a delightful and easy to use task manager” (my italics).
But its aesthetic and usability really are pleasing and enjoyable. The layout is very simple and clean. It has almost a cartoonish (in a comforting way) feel to it. It looks like this:
Readers of this blog (especially patient ones) know that I’m a user of OmniFocus, but I’ve also been putting Things through its paces these last few months.
First, straight from the nearly perfect Things getting started guide, here’s the basic structure of the app:
Today is the list for to-dos that you want to start before the day ends. They’re your priorities.
Next is home for all of the to-dos you could start at any time. It’s a good place to look when putting together your Today list, or when you’ve finished everything there and you need more to do.
Scheduled is for to-dos that you’d like to start on a later date, either because there’s nothing you can do to start them yet, or you’d just rather be reminded of them on a specific day.
Someday is the place for to-dos that you might like to get to, but you’re not sure when. Regularly review what you’ve added here to decide if it’s time to act.
It all starts with the Inbox, where you can put items until you’re ready to decide when to do them. Things also allows you to organize by multi-step Projects and Areas of Responsibility, as well as make extensive use of Tags.
Things syncs instantaneously via its own cloud service across multiple devices. This makes using it on both a phone and a computer, for example, really easy—you never have to worry about an outdated notification showing up on your device. This is one of the few drawbacks of OmniFocus—if you don’t keep OF open and make sure it’s synced on all your devices, you’ll get a reminder on your iPhone to complete a task you already checked off on your computer. This is not an issue with Things, and it takes away an extra step in the task management process, so you can direct that energy to actually working through your task list.
Things is head and shoulders above other task management apps in this regard.
Things has a really nice tagging system. No GTD-style “contexts,” per se, though you could certainly use your tags as contexts if you wanted to. You can even assign sub-tags to your tags, a feature I really like. So I can tag a task under the category “Blog,” but also assign sub-tags such as “Future post” and “Learn apps.” I used this tagging system to track thank-you notes last Christmas—writing down presents (and who they were from) as we opened them, and then sorting by tag (giver) so that I knew what all I was thanking someone for when I came to their note! Handy, indeed.
The desktop app is feature-rich. As you might expect, in addition to seamless sync with the mobile apps, the desktop version of Things (pictured above) is fuller-bodied than the iOS apps. There is the Quick Entry feature, where a keyboard shortcut (no matter what app you’re using in the foreground, so long as Things is open somewhere) will let you enter a task before you forget. There is a really smooth way of accessing, displaying, and adjusting all your tags (where Things really shines). Editing a task is fast. And it looks good.
The iOS apps have a useful Today widget. Some Today widgets are better than others, and this one is good. You can view items due today, check them off (both without ever opening the app), and tap on New To-Do to be taken to the Things app to make a new entry.
Siri and Things work together (quite nicely). You can set up Things so that reminders you voice dictate to Siri go right into that app as tasks. So that you can use Things safely while driving. As OmniFocus is my task management app of choice, a comparison again is inevitable: to get Siri-generated reminders to show in OF, you have to actually open OF and let it sync. Not so in Things: the reminder goes to your Things Inbox for processing immediately.
There are some things that Things can’t do, which I had hoped it could.
There is no way (whether in iOS or OSX) to attach photos or files to an item. I find this a noteworthy lack. In OmniFocus and Evernote you can take a photo of something and immediately set it up with a to-do reminder. Sometimes life’s “inputs” come as visuals, and taking a picture and setting a due date is easiest. That’s not doable in Things. (You can link to actual files on a desktop, but that’s not the same as attaching the file itself, and the file doesn’t show up on an iPad.) There is a “Notes” field that attaches to your to-do, which is essential, though that field just accepts text entry.
The cosmos (or just your co-workers and bosses) also like to give to-do items via email. There’s no way to automate moving from an email into a task in Things. In OmniFocus you can just forward an email to your special OmniFocus email address, and it automatically becomes a task in your inbox. Todoist, like Outlook, can let you turn an email into a task in just a click, without even having to forward it anywhere. Evernote even lets you send an email as a Note to a specific Notebook with Tags, if you phrase your subject line right. Things may add this email-in-to-Inbox feature in the future, but for now, you have to take the extra step of copy-pasting an email into a new task yourself. Not as automated as I’d have liked.
You can get to a new task via the + button on the bottom right screen on iOS—so entering a new task right away is easy—but there is not the “Save +” option that other apps offer… so you have to add an extra tap when doing a rapid-fire brain dump. (This is not as much an issue on the desktop version of the app.)
You can set up repeating tasks, but not easily. This process was not as immediately intuitive as the rest of the app is. Things’s support page (which is awesome) details how you can do it from iOS and OSX. But, wow, did I spend a lot of time figuring out the very specific way in which this must be done in Things—and a couple of methods that you’d think would get you there… don’t.
So many reviews of task management apps affirm that there’s a personal element to what app works best for you. One user’s “intuitive” is another user’s, “Huh?” I’ve bought into the OmniFocus methodology and layout (mostly), which is intuitive enough but not easy out of the box. Things, on the other hand, is easy to figure out how to use right away without using a manual. The “Today” part of the app functions as a sort of daily review, though I prefer OmniFocus’s Forecast and actual Review perspectives. But you might be totally different on that!
In terms of complexity and capability, I’d put Things somewhere between Reminders and OmniFocus. It’s far more robust than Reminders, but not quite the souped-up to-do app some users might need. (Although one could just use the robust tagging system to customize Things for higher levels of complexity.)
Things is well-designed, looks great, and the seamless sync is a huge plus. Try it for yourself here (download link) with a free trial.
Thanks to the fine folks at Cultured Code, the makers of Things, for giving me downloads for the Mac and iOS apps for this review. See my other AppTastic Tuesday reviews here.
While OfficeTime is my go-to iOS app for tracking where I spend my working hours, I often use the Hours app to track my time doing chores, writing projects, and other related tasks. (I most often access it through its really handy Today widget, and just swiped down to start a timer to see how long this blog post takes!)
Normally $6.99, now the app is free, to celebrate the release of the Apple Watch and the accompanying Hours app. (P.S. What do you call apps on the Apple Watch? Applets? Seeds?)
It’s got a beautiful interface, decent exporting features, and is really easy to use without thinking about–which is as a time-tracking app should be.
Check it out here, or read more about the app here. Also, those of you who use and enjoy it now–it’s coming to Mac soon.
I enjoy my writing medium more than ever before, now that I’m writing daily in Ulysses.
I started to review the app here; now I conclude my review of Ulysses for Mac.
You need to know a little bit about Markdown to fully utilize Ulysses. This is from their help manual, which takes the form of a series of interactive Sheets in the app:
“Ulysses uses so-called minimal markup to define, not format or style, text passages. The full list of available definitions is accessible via
⌘9, and it should have you covered left to right. From headlines to lists, to images and footnotes, you simply assign meaning to text passages by entering some easy to remember shortcuts.”
(P.S. I just used that keyboard shortcut and drop-down menu to make the above a block quote… or I could have just typed in “>” before the quotation.)
It’s taken me a little time to learn Markdown (though there’s really not that much to it), but once you have, you can take advantage of Ulysses’s export options.
Again, from the help files:
“Now for the fun part: Ulysses can output your writing to a host of standard formats, such as Plain Text, RTF, HTML, ePub and even PDF. It does so by translating your plain text input based on the definition of the minimal markup. If your brain starts to hurt, here’s a simple example…”
Here’s why I could write this two-part blog post series in Ulysses (using Markdown), export it to html in WordPress, and then have you read it now as if nothing ever happened: Ulysses “will translate the emphasized passage to semantically correct <em>, and the headline will be tagged with <h2>.”
The idea here is that once you know and use Markdown, you don’t really have to do much by way of thinking about formatting.
When you’re ready to export, you can click to bring up the window at right (or type the shortcut ⌘6):
From here you can preview, copy your text to clipboard, save it to a file, or open it with various apps. (I use Nisus Writer Pro to open my Ulysses sheet as a text file.) You can see your text as RTF, PDF, HTML, plain text, or even a nicely formatted ePub so you can publish your own ebook. Ulysses automatically converts your markup to its proper formatting in the finished product.
The Quick Export function is varied and rich enough, but it takes some fussing to get your text to look how you want it. (This fussing starts to defeat the purpose, in my opinion, of the supposed simplicity of using Markdown.) You can go to Preferences and add your own Styles, so can customize how your text exports, if you need more than just the default Styles Ulysses gives you.
But this is more effort than unaccustomed writers may appreciate having to make.
There is a Style Exchange where users post their own formatted style sheets, which you can download to your own Ulysses.
And if you do decide to go all in with Ulysses (I’m there), there is a reference guide you can work through to figure out how to make your own Styles to export just how you want.
(See also here for a succinct overview on Ulysses’s blog about exporting.)
I love writing in Ulysses. Required export efforts and occasional iCloud syncing frustrations notwithstanding, it is a beautiful app in which to put down and rearrange words. It’s smooth and visually appealing. And Ulysses really does accomplish the dual goal of the developers to be (a) distraction-free in its layout yet (b) still give you easy access to any feature a writer would need.
You can keep notes and goals aligned to a given Sheet (i.e., document), and view them from the Attachments pane, or detach them and see them as their own free-floating windows. This really enhances the experience of writing in Ulysses. You can also bookmark paragraphs and favorite Sheets, so navigating through stacks of writing is easier than you’d expect.
I’ve used Ulysses to help inspire me to finish a couple of mid-sized pieces of writing recently—pieces that I was interested in but lacking some motivation for at the time of having to produce them. I told myself I could use Ulysses to write, and the prospect of using that environment made a big difference!
I know this may be silly, but if you have some emails you need to compose that you have been putting off, writing them from Ulysses can be like a spoonful of sugar.
There are a few things I’d like to see Ulysses offer in future updates, the lack of which have detracted (even if slightly) from my experience of using the app:
I do hasten to add, however, that the Ulysses for iPad app is stellar, easily one of the best apps in the App Store and my current favorite app for iPad.
By the way, my love for Scrivener has not changed, and it’s still a fuller-featured environment for getting lots of research and snippets organized—and has its own really nice distraction-free writing mode.
But Ulysses is on iPad now, too (Scrivener: not yet, but close-ish), and it’s beautiful on the Mac, so when I’m doing long periods of writing, I primarily use Ulysses at as many points along the way as I can.
You can download a free demo trial of Ulysses for Mac here. More about the iPad app is here. Check it out, and play around with it for a bit. It’s helped me really rediscover my love of writing.
Thanks to The Soulmen Gbr, developers of Ulysses, for giving me a download for the review. See my other AppTastic Tuesday reviews (yes, this one is a few days early) here.
Looking for a good scientific calculator that your kids (or roommate) won’t make off with, because it’s downloaded as an app to your iOS device? (Which your kids or roommate might also abscond with, but still….)
PCalc is a beautifully-designed, dynamic calculator for iPhone and iPad, available in the App Store. Below I review the definitely-worth-its-$9.99 app. There is a free, “lite” version available here.
PCalc functions with zero lag, and has a really nice layout, which you can change to suit your preferences:
I liked that view so much I didn’t even think to look for different display options till weeks later. But then I found this:
And this:
And also this:
The developer describes the app thus:
PCalc is ideal for scientists, engineers, students, programmers, or indeed anybody looking for a feature-rich calculator for the iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch.
It includes an extensive set of unit conversions, a paper tape, an optional RPN mode, engineering and scientific notation, as well as support for hexadecimal, octal and binary calculations.
My favorite feature–that I’ve not seen in any of the other five or six calculator apps I had downloaded and promptly deleted from my phone–is that PCalc can run conversions for you: currency, in the kitchen (good for those of us who still can’t go fluid ounces to cups, which is ALL of us), energy units and more.
Listening to the new Kendrick Lamar, I might want to know how many square miles 40 acres is. With PCalc, I have my answer within a few taps:
It has a bunch of Constants stored, to which you can add your own:
There are also a ton of functions this app can perform that I probably would have loved in my high school Calculus class, but would have trouble with now. You can do more when you rotate to landscape mode:
Note the Ticker Tape underneath the number up top… that’s your computation history! You can even swipe back from the results screen to have PCalc re-perform your last operations.
This is a highly advanced calculator. I can’t say whether science and math students can put away their TI-80-whatevers, but they should at least download PCalc first.
Need to quickly figure a tip, or something else? Without even unlocking your device, swipe down to the Today view and find the best-looking, most functional widget you’ll probably see on iOS 8:
Even Apple’s own Calculator app does not have access from the swipe-down Today view.
PCalc is a fantastic app, and the last non-graphing, scientific calculator app you’ll ever put on your phone. See the full feature list here, and look at many more screenshots here.
Thanks to TLA Systems, the makers of PCalc for iOS, for giving me a download of the app for this review. See my other AppTastic Tuesday reviews here.
Right now you can find the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, English Edition (DBWE, 16 volumes) for just $99.99 in Olive Tree Bible software. A few more Bonhoeffer items are also listed at their sale here.
Olive Tree’s iOS and desktop apps are free, so if you like Bonhoeffer and have the cash, this is probably the best price for his complete works in English that one will ever find. (It does not yet include the just-released-in-print Volume 17.)
Bonhoeffer died 70 years ago today.
I can hardly believe the technology on a little iPhone exists to do this, but this is now how I am going to take and process meeting notes from here on out.
I have an app (Drafts 4) that has a downloadable action I found at their Web Action Directory.
Let me show you what it can do:
This means I simply open the Drafts app (which is quite aesthetically pleasing, and fast, too) and take meeting notes there…including marking action steps with the checkbox keyboard shortcut key (!).
Then I tap the action above, and all my meeting notes are saved as an Evernote note, with all the checkboxes I made automatically converting to OmniFocus tasks.
Many, many thanks to Agile Tortoise for the awesome app and to @rosscatrow for the action above to install into Drafts 4. A good step forward in my ongoing quest to stay organized.
Today OmniFocus is expected to release an update that makes their iOS apps universal. The iPhone app, for the first time, will carry with it the capability to view and create custom Perspectives.
There are several upgrade paths, depending on what you’ve already purchased from Omni in the past. (Before the universal update, the iPhone and iPad apps were paid, separate purchases, with only iPad carrying a Pro upgrade version.)
It’s not the easiest upgrade process to understand, but here are two charts from Ken Case (via the Twitter) that will help:
And check out this lovely screenshot from the updated help files. You can now re-arrange your Perspectives on the phone.
You can see everything that’s new in iOS 2.1 here. My overly eager and long-winded review of OmniFocus is here.
The best texting app in the iOS App Store is (for the moment) free.
I’m a big fan (and daily user) of Launch Center Pro, which is created by the same developers who make Group Text+.
Group Text+ makes sending texts to a pre-saved group (or individuals) really easy and fast… and it even comes with a bunch of hilarious gifs you can send! (I’ve gotten way more into this last feature than a man my age probably should….)
Check out the app here–free, for the time being.
The purpose of Drafts 4 is twofold:
This may sound like one of those apps that developers made just because they could, but I’ve been surprised to find myself increasingly reliant on Drafts 4.
Just the last two days I used it to (a) jot down some stand-up meeting notes (which I then exported to an OmniFocus task) and (b) send an email to someone when I didn’t want to have to be distracted by unread emails in my inbox.
Open the app, and you get a blank screen, into which you can quickly type (or dictate, via Siri) text. I recently was fortunate enough to have inspiration for a sermon outline strike me when I was doing some chores around the house. Not sure what to do with this newly found locus for creativity, I quickly reached for Drafts and jotted my thoughts down:
From here I could access a wealth of sharing options:
This particular draft went into Evernote, where I could easily get it later. I could have exported it some other ways:
Also amazingly cool is that when I exported it to Reminders, Drafts made each separate line into its own task:
This is sweet enough–an app that lets you quickly jot down text and export/share to just about anywhere. But Drafts is built with an eye to detail. You can make your text look nice, too:
You can even re-arrange your text from within Drafts, just by virtue of having started a new line when you were entering text:
You can edit the keyboard keys that are available to you:
There are quite a few settings you can adjust:
And Drafts can keep everything you enter, regardless of whether you’ve shared or exported it. (Drafts also keeps a record of where you’ve shared/exported your draft.)
Yes, you guessed it, there’s a Today widget, too:
Drafts 4 is just as awesome on iPad (not pictured here) as it is on iPhone. The only possible downside to this app is that $9.99 is more than most iOS users are used to paying for an app. But it’s easily one of the most carefully developed and detailed apps I’ve used, and robust in its features and capabilities.
It’s well worth checking out, and has found a home in my daily workflow.
Thanks to the fine folks at Agile Tortoise, the makers of Drafts 4, for giving me a download of the app for this review. See my other AppTastic Tuesday reviews here.
Words on the Word 