Justin Williams on iPad Magazines →

Justin Williams, developer of popular apps like Elements and Today, shares his experience of trying to read his favorite magazines on his iPad:

Remember, kids. The first rule of App Club is that no one gives a fuck about your brand. A splash screen with a giant logo is something that makes editors and marketing directors feel good, but to a user it just feels like a meaningless delay. You know that feeling of frustration you get each time there’s a 15-second preroll before a video on the web? That’s what a splash screen with logos and advertisements is.

A lot of magazines available on the App Store suffer with the same issues Justin outlines above. I have personally tried apps like India Today and GG — none of which impressed me.

CloudApp is my favorite service for sharing links, screenshots, text files and other stuff on the web. It has been more than a year since CloudApp went public but the iOS platform has received no love from the developers. The CloudApp API hasn’t seen mass adoption that one would have hoped for when the service launched to everyone’s delight. That probably can be attributed to developers restricting the native app support to just the Mac platform. The web app does not allow you to upload files from your mobile device to the cloud which further aggravates the problem. Cloud2go was the first third-party app that tried to set things right but found only a few adopters. Stratus aims to plug this gaping hole with its sheer elegance and finesse.

Stratus comes wrapped in a beautiful interface with pretty pixels spread across the entire app. I still can’t take my eyes off those gorgeous icons for different file types. The app UI isn’t the usual run of the mill interfaces found in Cloud2go and zillion other apps flooding the App Store. It’s classy, yet functional. The tasty app icon makes your mouth watery every time it catches your eye.

The app neatly categorizes the files uploaded to your CloudApp account according to their file type making access easier. Stratus makes uploading files its primary occupation by placing an app-wide ‘plus’ button at the top right corner. A tap on the button lets you upload clipboard content, media from library or instantly captured photo to your CloudApp account. Clipboard integration is pretty cool as it can detect text, URLs, images or video placed on iOS clipboard and upload the same. The app comes with infinite scrolling of files that are sorted by uploaded date. File links can be copied to the clipboard with a single tap when previewing a file. The app also maintains a cache of previewed files to reduce network activity for repeated viewing. There is this really cool info button that reveals additional information about a file such as its size, uploaded date, view count, resolution, word/character count, track name etc. depending on the file type. Link privacy setting and account password can be changed from within the app itself. As the app uses streaming API, view counts are updated in real-time and you can also watch files magically appear out of thin air in to the app, if they were uploaded from some other location such as the web or the Mac app. Swipe to delete and in-app browser are some of the other nifty little features.

Stratus manages to do almost everything perfectly but there are a few things it could add to its armory. The ability to rename files is missing for one. The 5 megapixel sensor on iPhone 4 produces large size images/videos and it can be a pain to upload them on slow cellular networks. It would be fantastic if Stratus in the future could scale them down before uploading, akin to what Mail.app does currently. The only major issue I have with the app is its current buggy state that makes it crash-prone. A quick glance at app’s twitter account reveals that the developers are working on all of the above mentioned things and the next few releases should bring some really interesting stuff to the app.

Stratus is the iOS app that CloudApp developers should have developed and released a long time ago. Cloudette, BlueNube and Cloud2go are some of the other iOS apps that provide access to CloudApp service but none of them are universal apps like Stratus. Stratus comes packed with features and coupled with a brilliant interface, it steals the crown for being the best CloudApp app out there for iOS. Surprisingly, the developers decided not a charge a dime for such a gorgeous ad-free useful app. I hope these guys have a solid business model in mind to sustain the solid app they have managed to deliver. Grab it here before the developers change their mind.

iPad surfing would be 10x better if only Safari could hold more than two pages in its cache. It really is terrible to see page caches lost, which is why I hope the next iPad comes with at least a gig of RAM (or iOS could man up and begin caching on flash storage). But Safari is a baseline browser, the lowest common denominator in the browsing experience that people need. And apart from the caching, I think it’s excellent. I know a lot of people swear by Atomic Browser, a $0.99 app with always visible tabs, skins, download manager, hooks into other apps like Dropbox, and fullscreen viewing. I didn’t like it though.

I tried Switch, the browser which allowed you to have password protected user accounts. It’s a nice concept, but it falls short of a lot of things, stability in particular, and offering something more than just privacy. Very recently I came across Cyberspace. Oddly enough it didn’t boast a hundred new things you could do with it, nor was its user interface vastly different from Safari.

Cyberspace isn’t so much about adding new features as it is about changing the way the user approaches the browser. For instance, it comes with a unified addressbar/search bar, with DuckDuckGo as its search engine. Regular users don’t even know what DuckDuckGo is; it’s better than Google even though it uses Google. You can enter a search term, and if you tap on a search suggestion, it will invoke a “I’m feeling lucky” search and take you to that page. At first I wasn’t comfortable with this approach rather than showing you history matches or bookmarks, but at the end of the day it works. It’s like the entire web is your history and bookmark manager.

The universal bar does have a downside to it though — requiring a keyboard switch. The iOS keyboard adapts to a particular text field, so when it’s entering urls you have ready access to slashes, colons and the .com. But no spacebar, which is required if you need to run a search. Cyberspace makes up for that with a “switch keyboard” button, but then why not just have two separate text fields? Doing a separate address bar would also bring back bookmark matches.

Speaking of bookmarks, it doesn’t have any local bookmark organisation except for a long list of items. This sucks, because I love having the bookmarks bar in Safari. It integrates with Pinboard/Delicious though, so you can access your web bookmarks right there in a pop-over.

Cyberspace also integrates with things like Instapaper, Twitter and a whole lot of other services. Contextual menus allow you to add to Instapaper, and you can tweet right from within the app (big deal). One thing that Cyberspace doesn’t come with, is tabs. Strange, right? I thought so too. Even if the browser can’t cache every page, tabs help you navigate pages much better. How else is one supposed to cruise through Reddit? Only later did I realise I could use Cyberspace’s “article queue” feature. Simply add links to the queue. Then tap-and-hold the queue button to quickly run through links without having to go back and forth, always wondering whether Safari has cached the original page or not. It’s a different workflow, but with these limitations works flawlessly. The queue is emptied as you go through articles, so there’s nothing to manage.

Two other features I’d like to point out (among others that I’m not going to spell out): one is the ready access to Instapaper mobilizer, which loads a stripped down version of a page which is not just easier to read (like Readability), but loads faster on a slow connection. Second, is the scratchpad. Nothing innovative, but a very useful when you want to keep a temporary store of information without worrying about page caches and saving data. It also integrates with Pastebot, so you can select any content and directly shoot it into Pastebot.

There are some things about this app and all third party browser apps that make them feel un-Safari-like. For one, scrolling feels different, and not as responsive as the Safari app. It’s not something you can demonstrate, but it feels like that. Second, and I suppose Apple is at fault here, any links opened in other apps automatically open in Safari, which creates discrepancies in browsing experiences (I like to keep things consistent).

Cyberspace has moved itself onto the first page of my homescreen. It spent some time in the dock as well, replacing Safari, but I’m still not decided on who’s the winner. I mostly miss my bookmarks. I do use Cyberspace a lot though, especially for Reddit browsing, researching, and… you know what, I think I’ll move it to the Dock. It does have a nice icon after all.

$1.99 for a universal iPad and iPhone app.

There hasn’t been a usable blogging app for the iPad. Most of them have taken the obvious route, of offering a list of entries, and an editor. But none of them have truly tried to understand the iPad as a platform, its weaknesses when compared with the desktop, and deliver a solution that actually streamlines the process of writing articles for the web.

dPad by Kohichi Aoki, a Japanese iOS developer, claims to be an HTML editor for advanced blog entry composition. It doesn’t do much, but it does the right things. It doesn’t sync with your blog, it doesn’t pull down entries; it’s mostly just a text editor with a web view.

Let’s start with the editor part. Almost all well formatted blog entries depend on some HTML formatting for headings, blockquotes, and links, while the more heavily designed blogs will go as far as embedding divs. dPad allows you to select blocks of text and quickly wrap them with HTML tags. You can even insert ids and classes, which come with quotation marks ready for editing. Through all this you’re seeing just unformatted plaintext, with all your tags intact, so it’s probably not the best tool for someone who doesn’t understand HTML. I always use the HTML view in WordPress, so I feel right at home.

dPad also features a stunning web view. As with most articles for the web, you need to include some links or images from the web. That’s where the other tools plainly lost out to the desktop. You had to constantly switch between Safari and that app, using clunky copy paste procedures that couldn’t stand a chance to the desktop. It was worse if you composed directly in the WordPress admin, because Safari has this habit of losing cache. dPad slides out a web view panel, that’s optimised for some of the popular websites like YouTube and Flickr. What’s the optimisation? Well, when you find the YouTube video you want to embed, simply tap a button, choose the video size, and dPad will insert the embed code in your document. You can of course visit any site using the address bar, and when you want to insert the page you’re currently at, just tap the insert button and a cleanly formatted link anchor will be placed in your document.

You can then preview the HTML, which is unstyled but clearly readable. When you’re done with your entry, tap the publish button, and it will copy everything to the clipboard, and spring out a web view for whatever compose url you’ve set. dPad won’t actually interface with your blog, which I don’t think is a big deal anyway.

Is this the blogging app we’ve been waiting for? I haven’t used it long enough to be the judge of that, but it’s certainly a giant step in the right direction, breaking free from the most obvious user interfaces. It’s lacking things like multiple blog support, inserting images from the local library, and a more definitive HTML preview. The web view is also something that could use some work, enabling tabs for wider research capabilities (iPad would require more RAM for that).

Perhaps WYSIWYG is the better approach for the vast majority, and maybe users do want fuller integration with their blog. But for me, this is by far the best iPad app for publishing articles to the web — blogging. $6.99 at the App Store.

You would think the act of writing on the iPad was as straightforward a process as can be. A simple list of documents, a simple sync mode, and a simple text editing window. But there’s a reason why we don’t use the default notes app (apart from the crappy sync workflow). Because there’s simple good, and then there’s simple better.

I’m sure most of you have settled on your favourite notes app. There’s Simplenote, with its fantastic cloud sync, in-app revisions, note sharing, everything. Then we have PlainText, which is a more barebones text editor, syncs via Dropbox, my personal favourite. And iA Writer, which is geared less towards managing notes, and more toward punching out words to make lengthy articles. You could use a combination of these, and still have all your notes when you need them.

Fact is, we’re never going to have the best writing app, because there’s always something better coming along, that will offer some more features you can’t live without. Writings, by Italian developers Ludovico Rossi and Vito Modena, probably won’t replace PlainText or Simplenote — it’s more of a writing app than a notes app — but it features the best writing mode I’ve come across.

And that conclusion is largely based on the way it can move the cursor around. I find that if I’ve entered the wrong word while typing on the iPad, and sort of overshoot by entering a few more, it’s far easier just to delete the newly entered words than to move the cursor back and forth. Yes, the text selection implementation is superb on the iPad, but it can be quite frustrating while placing a cursor in between words and such. Writings adds a new layer, where you can tap on the left or right margin, to move the cursor back and forth. You can tap and hold the margin to rapidly move it between characters. This little UI improvement is so radical, it changes everything. iA Writer can move the cursor that way, but you have to hit a button on the special characters panel above the keyboard.

Besides that, Writings is a very good writing app. When you start typing, the entire UI disappears, leaving you with just a textured page with text on it — very organic, without overdoing it with torn edges and whatnot. When you start interacting with your text, the word count fades in (which also updates according to a selection). Even the title of the document stays out of vision, and you have to tap at the top to bring it into view.

Writings also has some customisation options. First, it can show you either a textured page background, or switch to your customised background/text-colour combo at the tap of a button. You can also change things like font sizes and adjust the margins, but you don’t have to, because the defaults are just right.

The only thing I didn’t like about the app, was how it presents documents. It’s got this cartoony wooden UI, where each document takes up a whole screen. That probably emphasises that this an app for longer articles, but it’s kind of a slow UI. That said, it’s a way prettier UI than iA Writer’s plain jane pop-over drop down list of articles — I guess it just comes down to personal taste.

Writings of course syncs with Dropbox, though yet again, it reserves its own folder, which means you’re going to have to use some folder sync workflow (rsync in Terminal) on the desktop if these documents are going to be accessible in other Dropbox based writing apps. Recommended, if you like what you see, though not necessary if you’re happy with what you have. Available in the App Store on December 17th. Meanwhile you can check out the demo video on the Writings site.

Edovia has so far shown us their talent in creating simple user experiences for complex tasks. TouchPad is by far the simplest way to have your iOS device act as a keyboard or mouse. They’ve taken that one step further, with Screens.

The App Store is not by any means short on VNC clients. There are cheap ones, and there are expensive ones. Most had probably regarded iTeleport as the winner.

There are two ways to see a remote desktop: Over the local network, or over the internet. The former is generally quite easy on the user, as the client just as to look for a bonjour broadcast of any computer. I had been using SplashTop remote, which requires a server app running on every desktop. When you launch the app, it finds and shows you all the computers on the local network, tap on one and you’re in. SplashTop is primarily for Windows machines, though they recently released a beta of their Mac client. It’s a good client, especially for Windows, but not very Mac-like.

Luc Vandal is a Cocoa developer, developing for iOS from the early days, so you can be rest assured this will go hand in hand with a Mac. When you first launch Screens, you’re prompted to add computers or “screens” to it. To use VNC over the local network you don’t need any additional software running on a Mac. All you need is to enable remote management in your system preferences. Of course, it also works over the internet. For Mac clients, just download the Screens connect applet, enter a unique name, and you’re done. Screens will work its magic, and without much delay, you’re seeing your desktop over the internet. It requires that your router supports UPnP, which is the same protocol used by Back to my Mac, though this worked where BTTM wouldn’t. I haven’t tested Windows or Linux clients, but you can access them by entering the IP address and have your router configured so.

Once your screens are in, it’s a joyride. A fancy user interface, showing you a large thumbnail of a screen (which later shows you that screen’s last view as a placeholder), much like the iPad Keynote app does. This alone makes the app far more approachable than any of the others.

Screens is fluid, elegant, and fast. Even on mediocre wireless connectivity, the application is so responsive while maintaining crisp imagery, it’s unbelievable. In terms of performance, it’s on par with iTeleport. You see your full desktop as it is, with support for pinch to zoom and other gestures you would associate with Apple’s platform. You can tap on something, and it will invoke a click; you don’t have to worry about where the mouse pointer is. Tap two fingers for a right click, two finger drag over an area for scroll. The only thing you can’t do, is hovering. One of the things SplashTop does, is it automatically resizes your desktop to fit the iPad. It’s a smart idea, so you don’t have to zoom and pan to navigate. It works really nice on Windows (the beta Mac client is a bit buggy), returning your windows to the exact state they were in. But Screens’ navigation is so fluid, that I didn’t feel I was making any effort in getting to what I wanted.

But perhaps the best feature of Screens, is its Pull-to-Dock feature. Yep, this has to be the craziest implementation of the infamous pull-to-refresh, ever. Like most sensible users, I have my Dock hidden from view. This makes it very difficult to access in a touch based environment (one had to use the keyboard shortcut to temporarily disable hiding). With Screens you just pull on the screen on the side your dock is on, and it’ll just pop out.

While my review of the app is mainly based on my iPad experience, it works just fine on the iPhone too. With that small a screen though, I feel remote desktop is more of a proof of concept than something actually useful. But it’s great on the iPad to a point that it’s actually usable — in a limited sense. The fluidity of pinching into your desktop, tapping without bothering where the mouse pointer is, and typing with the virtual keyboard (albeit, without auto-correct), makes for a great way to perform emergency tasks. If you haven’t got a VNC client on your iPad yet, I’d highly recommend you check out Screens. It’s the best there is. It’s $15 right now, going on to $25 soon.