Recently Amazon rolled out Audible Channels as a new benefit to Prime subscribers. Channels similar to podcasts and to some degree compete for listeners. If you are an Amazon Prime member and an Audible customer then you can subscribe to topical feeds filled with interesting content like The Great Courses, McSweeney’s, and HBR.
The topics are interesting, such as a Great Course series on the realities of life in ancient Rome.
Well, well, well. This is just great. A very generous person just dropped me a note today to say that in iOS 10 it’s very easy to convert an email to a PDF. From the standard message print screen pinch out to open the message in a new window. Now use the share sheet to send the PDF to another app.
Apparently this has been available since iOS 9 in some form or another.
Here’s a couple of nice options that may not be well known. You can share a contact by visiting the contact card in iOS and using the share sheet to send it as a text message. The shared contact can then be added, in its entirety, by the recipient on their iOS device.1
Maybe even more obscure than sharing a contact card, is sharing a voice message from iOS. While the message is selected for playing, tap the share icon in the upper right corner of the message.
Every year there’s one or two iOS apps that really elevate the platform to a new level for me. In the early days it was Tweetbot and iThoughts. Then it was Evernote and Editorial, and Workflow. More recently, scanning applications like Scanner Pro or Scanbot have been tremendous new tools. This year I think there are two or three fundamentally new apps that really change how I use my mobile devices.
My favorite iOS browser has a good update out today. iCab 9.5 adds smart folders, bookmark coloring, download and bookmark searching. There’s a lot in this update as usual. Just take a look at the version history for an idea of how powerful this browser is.
The new version offers a couple of features for in app purchase and is pretty honest about needing the IAP to support development. But only a couple of non-critical features are held back for IAP.
A Droplr lifetime subscription is available from StackSocial this week for $22. I let my subscription expire a while ago but this is a no brainer in my book.
By way of @ttscoff
Ulysses for iOS just received a nice update with Dropbox syncing, background syncing, quick search, and several other features. There’s an arms race in the text editor market again and I couldn’t be happier.
Unfortunately, the Dropbox syncing completely failed for me. I accept that I am a walking edge case with around 2000 plain text files but Ulysses deleted several hundred text files while attempting to sync. I’ve spent most of the morning restoring from Dropbox, which, incredibly is still as awkward and tedious as it was in 2012.
From the OmniFocus blog:
But, with our latest updates today (OmniFocus 2.6 for Mac and OmniFocus 2.15 for iOS), your data will be completely encrypted before it leaves your device so that it’s encrypted on the server itself.
This is a major improvement for me. I’ve always given the OmniSync server a side-eye for tracking tasks with sensitive information in them. This was especially true of tracking work tasks.
Scrivener for iOS is now available on the App Store for $20. This is a good year for iOS software.
I think it’s fair to say I’m excited for the upcoming release of Scrivener for iOS. Between this and the new DEVONthink for iOS, 2016 is going to be a huge year for researchers and writers.
Literature and Latte now has a series of preview posts on their blog that describe some of the Scrivener for iOS functionality. I’m giddy.
It’s time to talk
Syncing
Outlines
I’m hopeful that there will be more syncing options beyond Dropbox in the future.
