Indie developers for Mac and iPhone have joined forces to help raise money for Haiti recovery. They are selling their apps at Indie+Relief and donating all proceeds to Haiti relief funds via one of three charities:
- Red Cross
- Doctors Without Borders
- UNICEF
There are some amazing apps on this list. If you are a Mac or iPhone user whose been eyeing a popular app but just haven’t brought yourself to shell out the money, now may be the time. You can give to the Haiti recovery effort and get that app you’ve been wanting at the same time.
Here are the apps for iPhone I find most interesting:
- Birdfeed, a Twitter client
- Campfire, a 37Signals’ Campfire client
- Instapaper Pro, which is self-explanatory (I use this)
- Rowmote, a super-charged remote for your AppleTV, Mac and Mac apps (I use this)
- Things Touch, the iPhone version of the popular GTD app (I use this religiously)
- Tweetie, the best Twitter app around (I use this religiously)
If you are looking for Mac apps, check these out:
- Acorn, an easy-to-use but powerful image editor (I’ve tried this and finally bought it today)
- Billings, an app to track time and bill clients (I use this)
- Default Folder X, a valuable add-on to Save menus (I use this)
- Delicious Library 2, catalogues your music, DVDs, apps and other stuff (I use this)
- Fetch, a pretty good ftp client
- HoudahSpot, tags all your files on your Mac
- MarsEdit, a desktop blogging client (I use this religiously)
- Pukka, a Delicious Bookmarks client (I use this)
- Things, a GTD app (I use this religiously)
- Tweetie for Mac, a Twitter client (I use this but prefer iPhone version)
(Quick Note: I usually would link to the apps, but I want you to go to Indie+Relief and link to the apps from there.)
You’ll find more than 150 apps for sale here, ranging from productivity apps to games. Go check it out, and consider a purchase to help out Haiti relief. If you are not interested in purchasing an app, you can also find a link to the three above-mentioned charities from this site.
This sale is for Jan. 20 only, so please go see it today.
(Originally posted on my personal blog.)
by samrhall on September 23, 2009
in Links
I talked about Patrick Jordan of Just Another iPhone Blog and his dislike of NetNewsWire’s new interface in my review. This morning they posted a second look at the app, which offers a few nice items. The best one:
Another small thing I’ve found I quite like is that within individual feeds, there are clear section dividers showing which day and date item were published. I find this very helpful.
Newsgator has released NetNewsWire 2.0 for the iPhone, which now syncs with Google Reader, just like its desktop coounterpart. It also sports a new icon, itself an improvement over the 1.0 version.
In truth, I was not a fan of the first incarnation of NNW for the iPhone. It was slow to sync, which made it virtually unusable for me. Until now, I’v been using Google Reader’s iPhone interface, which is quite nice.
But no longer. NNW 2.0 for iPhone is just about perfect for what I need. It syncs and loads quickly. You can email an article or post it to Instapaper, as one would expect. However, with emailing, you never leave NNW, which means no delay in returning to your feeds once the email is sent. (Ditto for Instapaper.)
You can also post to Twitter without ever leaving NNW, which is a tremendous feature for those of us who like to share articles we’re reading with the Twitterverse.
The final nicety in NNW 2.0 for iPhone is the ability to choose which feeds are shown directly from the reader interface. This could be done in NNW 1.0 for iPhone, but you had to log into your Newsgator account and choose which feeds you wanted and didn’t want to sync. That was, at best, inconvenient, even more so if you were constantly adding and deleting feeds.
Now if you want to limit which feeds sync with your iPhone, then it is as easy as pressing a checkmark next to the feed name under the Show/Hide Feeds tab at the bottom of your feeds list. (Certainly some will argue that this would be better placed in a preference pane somewhere, but I like the choice of putting it where it is. It means one less button on a tool bar or saving users from having to go into the iPhone’s main Settings.)
The only complaint I have is a user preference with the UI. You can star any article by pressing the star icon on the bottom bar. However, at first I couldn’t tell that it was working because I was at the bottom of the article and the only visual cue to know that an article has been starred is that a star appears next to the headline at the top of the article.
I would much prefer the functionality of Tweetie when marking a tweet as a favorite. In Tweetie, the star icon is just an outline. When you press it to mark a tweet as a favorite, the star fills in. If you press it again to remove it as a favorite, the star returns to an outline. Under this scenario, regardless of where you are in the article you are reading, you will know if it has been starred.
In addition, a couple of other things could be added to make it more appealing to some users:
- An All Items view
- Clipped items from NNW (In fairness, there is no way yet to sync Clippings from NNW on your desktop to Google Reader)
- Shared items view
I’ve not read a lot about NNW 2.0, which appeared in the app store just yesterday. LifeHacker loves it, but Just Another iPhone Blog is unhappy with the new look and feel. For my taste, I love the clean, simple look it offers.
NNW 2.0 lives on my home screen, and it is now the iPhone RSS reader I’ve always hoped to have.
You can get a free version (iTunes link) that displays ads from The Deck. Or you can shell out $1.99 and get the premium version (iTunes link) sans ads. I’m usually a free app kind of guy, but I paid the $1.99 because this version finally delivers what I want.
by samrhall on September 15, 2009
in Links
by samrhall on September 14, 2009
in Links
by samrhall on September 14, 2009
in News
I love my AppleTV, so I’m rooting for Apple to upgrade the device with new options, such as access to Netflix and Hulu. Of course, these things are doubtful. That doesn’t mean they can’t offer some worthwhile upgrades.
Until then, I just hope they don’t discontinue it. So today’s news of price drops for 160GB models and elimination of the 40GB models has people reading the tea leaves:
A $100 price drop is pretty significant for a device that originally cost $329 and the move is no doubt geared at trying aggressively to move some units during the upcoming holiday season. A price cut at this point also makes it pretty likely that there will be no hardware changes to the device in 2009. It is Apple, however, so you can never be too sure.
For me, I hope it’s a sign that what they have planned requires larger memory and that they are trying to make them ore affordable to make them more appealing.
Otherwise, the tea leaves say they are moving all remaining stock, will do nothing new with them and eventually we will see them die.
Come on Apple, do something good with this media device. Those of us who love them really love them. Others can and will with a few adjustments.
