Pythonista 2.0 is available as a free upgrade on Monday.
I haven’t participated in the beta this time around but it looks like a nice upgrade. Most exciting to me is that Pythonista is the basis for Editorial and I’m hopeful we’ll see the iOS 9 version soon.
Here’s a nice preview PR video shared by Ole on Twitter
Visor is billed as an assistive app for those times when you need to read but the font, lighting, and your age make it impossible. Let’s just pretend that we know other people with that problem. Or better yet, let’s pretend we actually read the “fine” print on credit card statements. Here’s a simple example of how effective Visor is at magnifying and inverting colors. Visor isn’t intended to be used as a camera (although it does have a camera button) so these images are screen grabs of the interface.
Safari for iOS is one of my favorite browsers, simply because it’s so fast. The content blockers in iOS 9 has only made me love it, and the web, more. Even with all of this Safari love, I’m still just as likely to send a page to iCab because it’s my utility belt for the Internet. I’ve already started this new year by giving more attention to the apps that are truly exceptional instead of looking for new apps.
I wrote about losing one of my favorite “news” apps and how that’s changed my habits. I used this as an opportunity to up-end my entire reading process as an experiment in knowledge acquisition. This has mostly been a success and a surprise.
The first surprise was Wikipedia and related community driven repositories. On iOS, there is no shortage of Wikipedia apps. As it turned out, I’ve owned one of the best for the past 5 years.
App Santa is back and there are a lot of great apps on sale.
By way of @pslobo
If you search the archives here, you’ll see that I’ve been a huge fan of the iOS news app Zite for years. If you follow me on Twitter you’ve probably seen my early morning and weekend reading-links filled with science, beer, politics, and technology. Most of that content was surfaced for me by Zite.
Zite was special because it drew from multiple sources. It had a few of their own sources, which were mostly click-bait or teen-dream content, but the real power came from my RSS sources, Twitter account and an amazingly specific preference engine to tune content.
I’m either a fortune teller or it was completely obvious that Dropbox has been meandering for the past two years. Today they announced an end to both Carousel and Mailbox. I never understood how Mailbox sold more Dropbox subscriptions. Carousel made more sense but I never got behind Dropbox as my photo service because it was just too expensive for what the value it provided to me. What a bummer for users of those products.
I’m sold. iOS 9 is the best OS Apple has ever made since OS 6. As usual, the documentation is the weakest part of the product. Every week I find some new reason to love my big phone. This week I discovered two revolutionary, if hidden, features.
Annotate And Mail I measure the success of iOS by how many times I don’t have to put down my phone. Last week I received a request to complete a contract and sign it.
In the beginning we had islands of data. What was on our computer stayed on our computer. What was on our Treo stayed on its chubby little atoll. Then we had SD cards and USB drives to float between islands. Eventually we got Dropbox syncing and it felt like the future. Every document I wanted was available to me on any computer with an Internet connection. Fast forward and it’s started to feel like we settled a little too soon.
The alternative keyboards in iOS 8 seemed like a nice idea but switching was painfully slow. That little globe icon was like a nuclear bomb to my productivity and it was far too easy to hit accidentally. But the performance of keyboard switching in iOS 9 is greatly improved.1
I like Uniconsole because it gives me access to Emoticons which I think are much more expressive when texting stupid crap to my wife.
