My favorite iOS code editor — Textastic — is now on the Mac, and it's really, really nice. For $2.99, you'll get a code editor that can rival the best code editors, at least for basic code editing, and that's impressive. Check the full review at the link below for more info.
Now, if it just gets integrated FTP uploading on the Mac like it has on iOS, I'll have a single-app solution for publishing to Techinch from my Mac and iPhone. Oh, and for the record: I'm using the Solarized Light theme with the Source Code Pro font in Textastic on both my iPhone and Mac right now.
I just reviewed the latest version of Microsoft's Office Web Apps, and found them to be quite the handy online tool — even perhaps the best alternate to desktop Office itself. Actually, they worked so good that I even used Excel Web App to embed a PivotTable in my Real Racing 3 review before I finished the Office Web Apps review.
Here's the funny thing: the Office Web Apps let you easily take your files out of and keep backed up as real files on your computer by default. That's a far cry from Google Docs' online only format that no other app can read.
Turns out, Microsoft's really doing something right on the web with SkyDrive and Office Web Apps.
If you keep up with news about mobile games at all, you've likely heard complaints about Real Racing 3. It's a free game, but one that reviewers have complained could cost you over $500 in real-world money. On the other hand, it's one of the most downloaded games on the App Store, with great ratings by users. So who should you believe?
I'm typically strongly against free games with in-app purchases for money and coins, since most essentially force you to pay to keep playing — often far more than you would have paid for a game you outright buy. Games that are free to download but let you pay to unlock the rest of the levels — and then let you restore your purchase in the future — seem fine to me, but ones that let you use real-world money for purchases that get used up in the game (such as speeding the game up or enhancing gameplay in some way for a limited time), though, are definitely not ok in my book.
After playing Real Racing 3 off-and-on for several weeks, I've found that it falls on the good side of my freemium game scale. Here's why: you really can play it 100% for free. It's good enough, I'd highly recommend you download it from the App Store or Google Play Store, depending on your device, if you enjoy racing games at all.
That's my short review: Real Racing 3 is great fun, and while there's in-app purchases at almost every turn, you can play as much as you want for free. The graphics are beautiful, the racing simulation is fun, it works perfectly even if you're offline, and I'm surprised it's received as many complaints as it has.
Racing on a Budget
Here's how Real Racing 3 works. The game, like most freemium games, has two types of in-game currency: money (called RS$), and gold. You'll get money for winning or completing races (ranging from, say, $800 for a short race to over $10,000 for a long, advanced race), and unlocking new events in the game ($2-3,000 each). You'll get gold — 3-5 coins at a time — for getting to a new driver level, or for completing parts of a series.
Repairs
You'll start off with RS$35,000, enough to buy one of the cheapest cars (I went with the Ford Focus) and get started. As you play, you'll end up damaging your car, leaving you needing to pay to, say, replace your windshield or rear-view mirrors (yes, you'll see that damage in-game while playing). You're almost guaranteed to make enough in a race to more than pay for your repairs, and you can repair instantly. Just a few taps at the end of a game, and you're fixed.
Want to keep from having to get so many repairs, and have a better shot at winning a race? Break ahead of the pack of cars (as many as 22 in some races) as soon as possible. Otherwise, you'll end up slamming into other cars throughout the race. Also, stay on the track: you'll go faster, and need less repairs (yes, driving on dirt seems to damage your car far faster than it would in real-life).
Servicing
What takes more time — and money — is getting your car serviced. Over time, you'll need to get your oil and tires changed, as well as get your engine, suspension, and brakes service. This will take RS$ as well as time, up to 15 minutes for some servicing. Your car's performance will be worse until you get it serviced when it's needed, so you'll want to go ahead and do it.
The game will offer to let you spend coins to get repairs done immediately, but I'd recommend just waiting since coins are far more scarce in the game. Since it's a mobile game, if you play it like most of us play casual games, you'll be able to pay for, say, 15 minutes, then get the servicing done to your car and go on with life. Next time you want to play, your car will be ready. You can also do get multiple things services at once, so waiting on, say, your oil until your engine needs serviced too lets you take less time.
Yet another tip: once you have 2 or more cars, you can just play with another car while the other one is being serviced. You'll likely never need to literally wait for servicing with that.
Upgrades
Now, each car you buy will need upgrades for the best performance, something you'll noticed the need for as you progress through a series. You'll find upgrades for everything from your engine to your exhaust (sadly, there's no Tesla cars in Real Racing 3), and each upgrade will boost your car's performance in some way. They get very expensive, though, especially for more expensive cars, and some top-level upgrades will be billed in coins rather than RS$.
Upgrades will take time to be delivered, but you can keep racing your car while waiting for upgrades to come, albeit without the extra performance. Yes, you can pay coins to get upgrades immediately, but I'd again recommend not using coins to speed things up. If you want an upgrade that costs coins, use them there, but don't use coins to speed things up unless you're ready to shell out real world dollars to buy more coins. There's also one more upgrade you can use coins for: changing your car's color. Yup, that's another coin use I'd strongly recommend against.
All upgrades aren't necessary, per-se, but I did fully upgrade my first car to get the most out of it. Cars I purchased later on, though, have only gotten some of the upgrades since I got a bit more frugal with my in-game money.
New Cars
So you've kept racing, gotten your first car upgraded and in perfect repair, and now you've got quite a savings of RS$. It's time to get a new car. Only thing is, which car should you get?
Each event in Real Racing 4 includes the option of 3-4 cars, but you only need one of those cars to get into that event. Each car stars in at least 2 events, and 6 of the cars are in 3 events. Thus, when you purchase your next cars, you'll want to purchase ones that are in events — and hopefully series — that the cars you already have aren't in yet. There's no reason to buy another car from the same event you're already in, since you'll just end up playing the exact same events over again with a new car.
Here's a table I put together that should help you — at least a little — in finding the car you should buy to get into the events and series you want:
If you've saved your coins throughout the game, and haven't used them to speed anything up, then you'll end up with a decent collection of them over time. There's then 2 cars that sell for coins rather than RS$ that end up being approachable: the McLaren MP4-12C for 65 coins, and the Porsche 918 RSR Concept for 150 coins. The latter is how I plan to use my coins when I've earned enough.
Yet another option is spending real-world money for a car pack. There's several car packs that include one or more cars and some gold for, say, a couple real-world dollars. That's not such a bad price if you want more racing fun without waiting for in-app winnings.
There's also the crazy spectrum here: there's supercars that over RS$2.2 million, as well as ones that cost 400 and 800 coins, respectively. Those would cost you $40-$80 in real-world money if you were to buy them with in-app purchases, and would take more time to earn with in-app winnings than most of us would ever play a mobile game. But, still, most of the cars are well within the approachable price range for purchasing them with a reasonable amount of in-app winnings.
One more final thing on cars: they, too, take time to get delivered, and the wait time seems to go up with the value of the car. You could pay coins to get your car immediately, but again, I'd advise just waiting. Perhaps buy a car at the end of your racing session, and the next time you're ready to race, you'll have a new car waiting for you to drive. Not bad.
Why I Still Love Real Racing 3
Now, the racing is not terribly realistic. AI cars have a tendency to slam into your car far more than I've ever seen in a racing game, almost seeming to want to damage your car. And no matter how fast your car is, it's almost impossible to overtake the best AI cars when you're going straight, though you're guaranteed to overtake them on turns.
But you know what? It's still fun as far as racing games go. If you loved the classic Need for Speed games back in the '90's, you'll find Real Racing 3 just as enjoyable, if not more so with the high res graphics. And it also works 100% fine offline, something that can't be said for every game these days (even EA's own SimCity requires an internet connection to play now).
If there's one thing I wish Real Racing 3 didn't have — or would remove in future updates — it'd be the wait times. Using in-game RS$ to buy upgrades, repairs, servicing, and new cars makes sense, and even adding your own real-world money to add on some fancy cars is reasonable enough. The wait times is, in my opinion, what has made people so frustrated by Real Racing 3 so far. As I explained above, the wait times don't have to kill the game, or even make it that frustrating, but not having them would make it feel much more like a straight-out traditional game rather than a mobile, in-app centric game.
But you know what? I think I'll still keep playing Real Racing 3, just like I must have played the basic Proving Grounds track in Need for Speed IISE dozens of times. It's fun, and sure worth the low price of free.
A brilliant set of tips on story writing from Emma Coats, a former story artist at Pixar. The tips are great for anyone who writes or tells stories at all, and #14 especially applies to how I feel about my own work as a writer:
#14: Why must you tell THIS story? What’s the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That’s the heart of it.
So good. If you can't live without writing or telling what you are, then don't do it.
Google's hit an odd new trend. After years of giving us new free services, one after the other, it's now releasing $1,500 glasses and $1,300 laptops that can only run a browser. And it's taking away some of the free services we've grown dependent on.
Like Google Reader. The free RSS service from Google practically pushed every other RSS sync app out of the market, and while it may have not been the most advanced RSS reading app, it became the de facto RSS app and sync engine. Most native RSS readers, like my favorite, Reeder, relied on Google Reader's backend to keep up with RSS subscriptions. It just worked, and was free, so it became the standard. Why make an RSS reader app when Google has a free one that everyone already uses?
Then last week, Google decided that Reader wasn't that important, and announced it was going away in July. Suddenly, the market for RSS readers is wide-open again, and most of us have had to quickly decide on alternatives. I wrote up tutorial for getting your data out of Google Reader, and rounded up some of the best alternate RSS reader apps online today for Web.AppStorm; be sure to check that article out if you haven't read it already.
For me, though, there was only one RSS reader app I wanted to switch to: Fever. Shaun Inman's self-hosted RSS reader had caught my eyes years back, and I'd always meant to try it out … but Google Reader was so simple to just stick with that I'd never given it the effort. Now, I had no excuse not to try it.
The Fever
Fever is to Google Reader what WordPress.org is to WordPress.com: a self-hosted app that does much of the same thing as the free, online version. It's an app you'll download and run on your own server (or shared hosting account), and then will need to maintain on your own, just like programs you install on your computer. Google Reader gave us a simple service we could all use online, just like WordPress.com lets people make blogs online for free. But with Google Reader getting shut down, Fever becomes an even more attractive option, one that you might be interested in moving to even if you didn't feel yourself itching for more control over your feed reader (the biggest reason you'd want, say, to upgrade from a WordPress.com blog to self-hosted WordPress.org).
Oh, and Fever gives you more than Google Reader did, too. In addition to letting you read each of your RSS feeds in the order they've been updated — and yes, share them with your networks or save them to Instapaper if you want — it also gives you a list of the top news articles detected automatically from your feeds. It's like your own Techmeme or Google News, built from the sites you actually care about. But we'll talk about that more later.
Sparking the Fire
The only thing is, installing an app on your own server is usually a tad tricker than just installing Microsoft Office on your computer. WordPress has a so-called "famous 5 minute install", but is actually fairly complex to get setup if you've never hosted your own site before.
Fever, though, isn't tricky at all to get setup. You'll just download the Fever Server Compatibility Suite, which contains just 3 files, then upload them to your server via FTP. This should be simple enough to do if you've ever self-hosted your own site. Then, you'll visit the boot.php file on your site that you just uploaded, add info for a new MySQL database (again, something that you should find simple if you've ever hosted your own site), and purchase a copy of Fever via PayPal (yes, it costs $30. If you use it for 2.5 years, that's less than $1/month).
You'll then need to add your activation key to your own Fever install, and create an account to login and check your feeds. And with that, you're done. Really, no more files to upload or anything else. It's really, really simple to setup, so much so that I was surprised.
Fanning the Flames
Once you've got a Fever account setup on your own Fever install, you'll never have to worry again about losing your RSS feeds. Now, all you need to do is subscribe to your favorite sites. Fever makes this easy, giving you a bookmarklet to quickly subscribe to sites you visit with a simple click (or keyboard shortcut — Safari lets you press CMD+number for the bookmarklet you want, which is how I use them by default). Or, you can import your OPML file from Google Reader, following the directions on my Web.AppStorm post, or import feeds from any other RSS app you use.
And with that, you're done. Fever will check each of your RSS feeds, which might take a minute or so, depending on how many feeds you have and how fast your server is. After that, though, you can read through your RSS feeds in newest or oldest first (choose your preference in settings), and can jump through them quickly using familiar Google Reader-style keyboard shortcuts. You can even share articles or save them to Instapaper using the built-in sharing options, which also lets you add your own services for sharing if you'd like to. There's also a built-in saved articles option, which lets you mark articles as favorite so they'll be kept forever, and a search tool to help you find older articles (and you can set how long you want old feed entries kept — a nice option if you want to save space and keep less, or if you want to built an exhaustive RSS feed history and could care less about space). That's everything you could want if you're wanting a service to replace Google Reader.
Then, though, there's the Hot feature that makes Fever Fever. It goes through all of your feeds and finds the most popular links, then surfaces them for you with temperatures to show how "hot" they are. You can even add new RSS feeds to your "Sparks" section to add more data points for finding hot articles; these RSS feeds won't show up in your unread list, since they're likely sites that publish way too much to keep up with everything they say (think CNN or Techcrunch), but they'll help Fever find the hottest things you need to know. So now, you've got your own customized Google News replacement along with your own, self-hosted Google Reader.
Keep the Fire Going
Fever doesn't have native apps of its own, but there's plenty of ways to run it anywhere you want since it's a web app. You can, of course, just visit it in the browser anytime, and it even has a mobile version (sadly, though, one that's not retina display optimized) built-in for reading on the go. On your Mac, you can also use Fever in Fluid for a more native feel, with an unread count on your Dock. In Windows, you could do the same — to a degree — by saving the webpage as an app in Chrome.
Then, on the iPhone, my favorite Google Reader app — Reeder — also works with Fever (and I hope the Mac version gets Fever support sometime soon). You'll just need to login with your account, and you'll get the same experience you're used to if you already used Reeder, with the addition of the Hot section. There's also another iPhone app, Sunstroke, that's gotten praise from others I know. If you're using Android, there's the free app Meltdown that syncs with Fever, and you can get it from the Play Store or Amazon.
Oh, and on your server? There's not much you'll need to do. There's the option to check for and install updates to Fever built-in to the preferences menu, and pretty much everything else should just work. At least it has for me so far.
Goodbye, Reader!
With that, I've fully switched away from Google Reader. I only wish I'd done it sooner. It's nice to run your own services, and when they end up as easy to use as Fever did, you only feel dumb for not switching sooner.
Whether you switch to Fever or something else, be sure to hurry and do it. You've only got until July 1st. Also, don't forget to subscribe to our Techinch RSS feed to keep up with everything published here!
…how to move paragraphs and outline entries with a simple keyboard shortcut.
Keyboard shortcuts are awesome, but only if you know them. The text editing keyboard shortcuts in OS X are one of the best things about it, and formatting shortcuts in Word saved me hours of trying to find the center text option over the years. But what's frustrating is when there's an option to do something that you would have love to have found sooner, only to discover that it'd been there all along years later.
I've been using Microsoft Word for well over a decade, going from typing up essays in high school in Office '97 (which was, admittedly, old at the time) to using Office 2007 and then 2010 in college daily. One of the things I used to fuss about the most was writing outlines in Word. OneNote made it simpler, as did moving to the Mac since Word for Mac has an outlining mode, and in both of those you can drag-and-drop outline entries into the place you want. But in Word, it was a frustration all that time.
This week, I found that there's a very, very simple way to move a paragraph — or outline entry — around in Word: just press alt+shift+up/down, and the line will move up or down. Press the left or right arrows while holding down alt+shift when editing an outline, and you can move an entry deeper into or further out of an outline's levels. I discovered it while trying out Word 2013, and thought it was a great new feature. Nope. It's been in there for quite some time. I found it works in Word 2007, 2010, and 2013 for Windows, and Word 2011 for Mac, and likely works in older versions, though I don't have any around these days to try out. It sadly doesn't work in the Word Web App, though.
It's simple, works very nicely, and is something I'd be sure to use often if I used Word more these days. If you happen to use Byword for Mac, there's a similar feature in it, using ctrl+cmd+up/down. And, there's a geekier move text option in Vim. Otherwise, you'll have to stick to cutting-and-pasting paragraphs and outline entries to the place you want.
Or, you know, fire up Word and move text around with alt+shift+up/down. Now if only Word handled plain text and HTML nicely… (hey, one can wish).
Note for Mac Users: Mission Control uses the ctrl+shift+up/down shortcuts in Lion/Mountain Lion, so you'll need to change those first before you'll be able to move text with this trick in Word for Mac.
Avatars — those little photo icons on every social network and comment form these days — can be rather difficult to pick out. You need a decent shot of yourself, one that's recognizable even when it's just a tiny thumbnail, but one that still conveys your personality. Not fun.
So why not get your picture turned into a cartoonish avatar? That's exactly what Jaume Estruch, a freelance designer I've met through App.net, is now offering for 5€. Just send him a picture of yourself — even one you've shot on your phone's front-facing camera — and he'll turn it into a custom drawn avatar. Here's some examples of his original work from App.net accounts, including my own demo avatar he drew for me.
You'll just send off your picture, including any color requests or extra things you want included (say, a hat), and within 7 days you'll get a 500x500png photo to use online as you like. It's a neat idea for a graphics design service, and since he drew my avatar for free as one of his original demos, I wanted to spread the word about his service.
In early January, I heard of a new startup - TypeEngine - on App.net, one that piqued my interest immediately. Daniel Genser and Jamie Smyth have set out to make a high quality system to let writers and publishers launch their own iOS Newsstand apps, without touching a line of code. As a writer and editor, I've found Newsstand to be an exciting potential for a new way to publish, but the need to make a full iOS app has made it far more challenging to consider actually making a Newsstand app. But, TypeEngine is setting out to level the playing field, so anyone could make their own Newsstand magazine as long as they can do the hard work of lining up quality content for their app.
TypeEngine is aiming to offer a platform to make simple, text-focused magazines, in a design similar to my theme here on Techinch.com as well as many newer blogs today. But then, it's also similar to Marco Arment's The Magazine, a new iOS Newsstand (and now web-based) magazine that's been the inspiration for many of us to try to make digital magazines. The Magazine is quite the awesome project, and I've been a subscriber for months and had planned to write about it this week since it launched web-based subscriptions. Marco and his team have done a great job putting together amazing content in a great app, and deserve the success they've achieved so far.
What's frustrating, though, is that TypeEngine is already getting criticism that its initial designs are too similar to The Magazine, enough that TypeEngine addressed them today in a newsletter. Marco then followed up on his blog with a mildly critical stance on TypeEngine.
But here's the thing: magazines aren't a new idea, just like newspapers aren't a new idea. Neither are blogs; they've been online for well over a decade now. Clean, single column designs with light backgrounds and sans serif fonts aren't unique either; they've been used in print in the past, are terribly popular on writing-focused blogs today, and are now being used in new iOS magazines, including The Magazine, upcoming magazines from TypeEngine, and undoubtedly many others. Even if we all blogged with the very same theme, it wouldn't mean we were all copying each other; after all, almost every newspaper worldwide looks very, very similar at first glance.
What must - and will - be unique is the content. TypeEngine is setting out to do for iOS publishing what WordPress did for web publishing. WordPress democratized publishing, making blogging accessible to anyone, no matter what their coding skills. You can fuss over it all you want, but it's a powerful piece of software that now powers sites from the smallest startup blog to Time Magazine's blogs. But that didn't take away anything from the early hand-coded blogs, and original bloggers such as Dave Winer have kept on blogging, even though the rest of us now can so easily star our own sites with WordPress or other blog engines without digging deep into code.
If TypeEngine does for mobile publishing what WordPress did - and is still doing - for web publishing, then that will be a huge success for everyone. I look forward to continuing subscribing to The Magazine and hopefully subscribing to more new magazines on different topics that can be launched, now that writers can focus on writing and still publish easily on Newsstand.
I find TypeEngine exciting in the same way I find blogging engines exciting, and as a writer, launching a magazine is an exciting new potential. That's why I got in touch almost immediately with TypeEngine about the potential of launching a magazine with them. Last month, Techinch was picked as one of TypeEngine's launch partners, and I'm currently planning on launching a digital magazine this year. So I'm not just a unaffiliated bystander, but then, neither is Marco.
I highly respect Marco's work on Instapaper and The Magazine, and that inspires me in my own work. But I don't feel like I'm ripping his work off by launching a magazine with a text-focused design with TypeEngine, any more than The Magazine is ripping off the Facebook iOS app which popularized left-to-right slide-out menus that The Magazine and countless other apps now use. Perhaps everything is a remix far more than we all want, but that doesn't mean we can't all be unique in our own work even while we get inspired by the work of others. That's what the Magazine's design is, and that's what most other app designs are, and yes, even my TypeEngine magazine will be inspired in some ways by The Magazine and other publishing efforts, including early 1700's newspapers.
Woe betides if I or anyone else copies the content in any other publication, or the precise design of another app or site. But no one has a monopoly on a clean, text focused design in an iOS app, any more than anyone has a monopoly on similar designs on the web.
I take an insane amount of screenshots from my work as a tech writer, and am so used to documenting almost everything with screenshots, I'll typically take screenshots of new apps when I install them even if I'm not planning on writing a review. I took the time to capture the CS6 splash screens just for fun. It's a tiny obsession of mine, one that - aside from writing reviews - I've never really done anything with.
A post on John Gruber's Daring Fireball today reminded me of the joys of Folklore.org's index of tales of the early days of Apple. I've read every article on the site years ago, but the article Gruber mentioned today - about how Mac OS Classic's calculator UI came to be - got me searching for more screenshots of the Mac Classic calculator, just to compare the image.
That led me to an amazing site, GUIdebook.org, which features very nice screenshot collections of UIs ranging from Mac OS System 1 through OS X Panther, Amiga OS Workbench 1.0, OPENSTEP, the original Symbian OS, and more. It also has a number of rather old articles about early operating systems, as well as classic tech ads, interviews, icons, and more. It's the most comprehensive UI - and OS history - site you can imagine, and it's nicely designed. The only sad thing is that the site hasn't been updated since 2006, apparently as the site's author started working as an user experience designer at Google around that time.
Screenshots of new apps today might not seem like anything important, but 20 years from now, someone will be looking back at screenshots of OS X Mountain Lion and Windows 8 with the same nostalgia and curiosity that we look at Mac 1 and Amiga screnshots. It makes me want to start preserving more screenshots from the latest stuff today … yet another project I'd like to take on sometime.
So, if you want to waste some time this weekend on tech nostalgia - or want to see what UIs looked like before your time - here's some great resources. Know of any more?
Folklore.org - tales of Apple's early days, along with some stories about Microsoft and more
GUIdebook.org - A detailed site filled with screenshots, splash screens, icons, sounds, ads, and more from older OSes and apps.
TostyTech GUIs - A similar site (with a more '90's looking site design) that has screenshots of everything from the Xerox Alto to OS/2 to Windows 8. Not as intricately organized as GUIdebook, but still an awesome resource for old screenshots.
I just got my Nifty MiniDrive (a microSD adaptor that fits perfectly in the MacBook's SD card reader) this week, after backing it on Kickstarter last July, around the same time I bought my MacBook Air. It was a long wait, but one that was rather interesting as the Nifty team kept all of us Kickstarter backers informed about every step of the production process.
Plus, it works great in my MacBook. I'm a tad sad I didn't end up getting one of their other colors, but hey, the silver one does look very inconspicuous. Also, can't wait until 128Gb microSD cards are released, but for now, the ~$30 32Gb microSD card I picked up yesterday is working great.
