When Google Reader was shut down, the feed-reader market became a sort of gold rush for developers, resulting in the wide array of RSS services we have to choose from today. Now, I'm a Feed Wrangler guy myself, but MnmlRdr is also worth a look if you're wanting a more lightweight, minimalist reading experience. Once you've signed up, you get access to…
MarkDrop is a new text editor for Mac OS X (10.8 and above) that combines Markdown with Droplr for easy sharing and storage. The left pane, with its monospaced text and format-highlighting, is where you'll do your writing. The right hand pane provides a real-time preview of your Markdown output. Once you've composed something in MarkDrop, it can be saved directly to…
There are numerous Pinboard clients out there for the iPhone, but Pinswift is my new favorite. The iOS 7-only iPhone app features a clean design, but isn't void of personality. The app syncs and searches quickly, and ships with robust x-callback-url support. Pinswift is $4.99 in the iOS App Store.
My friend Patrick Rhone is known for many things, one of them being a to-do system called Dash/Plus that was designed for people who like to manage task lists with pen and paper. Think of it as a collection of various bullet points you can use to denote the status of items on your to-do list. Today, Patrick announced that the Dash/Plus…
Barley is a WordPress plugin that allows you to edit your content – such as blog posts and images – directly from your site's front-end rather than from the back-end admin panel. This means that while viewing your site, you can simply click the text area you'd like to edit and begin typing. Our editor Shawn Blanc wrote a mini-review of it,…
AppViz is a popular sales-tracking tool for iOS developers that I believe dates back to 2009. Yesterday, The Iconfactory announced AppViz 3, the latest and greatest iteration of the service yet. The Mac app has been completely redesigned, with easy-to-understand graphs and statistics about how your apps are doing on the App Store. You can monitor in-app purchases, read reviews of your…
Runtime is a new run-tracking app for iPhone, built specifically for iOS 7 and the iPhone 5s' M7 chip. It records the places, routes, and even altitudes where you do your running/hiking/jogging/etc. For each session tracked, it will show you where you ran (in orange), where you walked (in yellow), and how many steps you took. Each 'run' can also be shared…
TouchID bring easy unlocking to the iPhone, but what about the Mac? Why are we stuck using passwords like animals? Well, the cost of the future is just $4. Knock is a new app that allows you to unlock your Mac by taping your iPhone. Using the low-power Bluetooth chip found the iPhone 4S, 5, 5C and 5S, Knock pairs to your…
The boys at Studio Neat are back, and this time, with a new app. Slow Fast Slow brings slow-mo video capture to the iPod touch, iPhone 5 and 5c, but even on the 5s, enhances the experience with an awesome user interface. Beyond the slow motion, the app can speed up video as well. Here are some of the technical details: Records…
It's not been mentioned here before, but unless I'm mistaken, all of us here at Tools & Toys use Delivery Status Touch to track our various shipments. I certainly can't think of a better option, because you can add tracking numbers from just about any delivery service out there and it will work like magic. The app just got even better too,…
Today, Apple released the newest version of OS X, dubbed Mavericks. While I wrote up a whole giant review over on 512 Pixels, I did want to highlight a few of the features here: Better power management: Thanks to things with complicated names like "timer coalescing," OS X Mavericks should run longer than Mountain Lion on notebooks. iBooks: Apple's brought the iBookStore…
The T&T gang are all huge fans of Dropbox, but the company's iPhone app is beginning to feel a bit dated not only in look and feel, but in terms of functionality as well. Boxie is a new app that bring a much better — and better looking — Dropbox experience to the iPhone. The app makes it easy to navigate and move…
Spark Camera is a new iPhone app that makes it super easy to make great-looking video clips, up to 30 seconds in length each. If you've ever used Vine, the interface will feel a bit familiar, as your method of recording is merely holding your finger on the screen. Let off the screen and the recording pauses, allowing you to set up…
Terminology, the best iOS dictionary app on the market, turned 3 yesterday. The all-new version is a $2.99 universal app that sports an all-new iOS 7 UI, but so much more. In addition to a great offline dictionary and thesaurus, Terminology 3 can search Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Google and other common reference sites. With iCloud, the app can sync favorite terms and histories…
There are a lot of automation tools out there for the iPhone, but Launch Center Pro may be one of the easiest to set up and use. Not unlike Automator on the Mac, Launch Center Pro's interface uses easy-to-understand menus to link actions together. If you need more power, you can type or paste commands, but for many actions, it's not required.…
Reconnaissance for iPhone is a new RSS app that ties into your Feed Wrangler account. It's the first iOS app I've seen designed specifically for Feed Wrangler outside of the official app, and it looks very nice. Actually, it just pushed out a redesign yesterday, which is what you see in the screenshots above. Reconnaissance integrates a little more deeply with Feed…
Brett Terpstra's awesome Markdown-preview app for Mac, Marked, has been updated to version 2. For those who don't already know, Marked acts like a sort of extension for any Mac text editor, allowing you to preview your Markdown-formatted plain text in its rich-formatted state, every time you save your document. The preview can be customized to look however you like, even as…
Remember that Snake game that used to be on Nokia cellphones back in the day? Nimble Quest is an iPhone game that combines the mechanics of Snake with those of a 16-bit RPG. You choose a hero, hit Play, and it puts your character on an open field with enemies continually spawning across the map. Swipe in different directions to move your…
"Underscore" David Smith has just released Pod Wrangler, a new podcast app for iPhone. The UI is very focused, with only the essential features most podcast listeners will need. You can subscribe to shows (or import from an OPML file), download episodes for offline play, and toggle playback speed while listening. Since this is an iOS 7-only app, new episodes can also…
Velocity is a new iPhone app from Lickability that brings speed reading to the masses. After hooking the app up to a Pocket or Instapaper account, users can open their articles to have the words flash by at up to 1,000 words per minute. (I prefer mine set to about 340.) I didn't think this app would be for me at first,…