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Agenda 4 for iPhone improves on a great calendar app
Agenda from savvy apps is a super calendaring app, and Agenda 4 ($1.99) offers great improvements. In fact, savvy apps considers it a whole new app. There's certainly a lot of good stuff here, such as new views, impressive sharing options, UI changes and a lot more. Here's my look at Agenda 4 for iPhone. New views There's so much that's new with this app that I've got to just pick a place to start and jump right in. Agenda 4 offers two new views, for a total of five. My favorite, pictured above, lets you see the date, month and current appointments all at once. To use it, simply grab the bumpy "handle" on the right and slide it up. I think it's very handsome and useful. I don't have to squint to see the day's date on that tiny calendar, and every color-coded event is clearly legible. I've been using this view a lot. The other new view is "event flyout." You'll find it by tapping any event. A detail screen "flies in" (get it?) from the right with all the pertinent info. From this one view, you can browse the details, edit the event, share it (more on that in a bit), jump to Maps or add some notes. Now, back to sharing. Sharing I can imagine Agenda's developers in an early brainstorming session for version 4, and someone says, "I know. We'll let people share the hell out of their events." Well mission accomplished. Let's start in event flyout view. From there you've got the option to share your event via text or email. Additionally, you can tap the share button to send the event to a variety of supported apps that you've got installed. For me, that's OmniFocus, Due and Drafts. Other options are Clear, Scratch, Things and ToDo. You can even determine the order with which those icons appear in the share sheet. See? I told you they went nuts with sharing. Event creation This is new, too, and it's another surprise. Actually, four surprises. Agenda 4 lets you change the style of the event creation screen. Choose from Agenda mini, Agenda, iOS and Fantastical. Yes, Fantastical. A third-party calendar app that references and works with another third-party calendar app. Agenda mini is my preference. It offers the title plus start and stop time (hit the clock icon on the left to turn "all day" on or off). Agenda's expanded view I find confusing. It's comprehensive and lets you determine start and stop time, add alarms (one or two), set the location, add notes and invitees and repeat. Changing an event from timed to all day is done by clicking a clock icon which slides in from the left and eliminates one alarm option. There's a lot happening on this screen, and I'm not sure about the presentation. The real cool trick is Fantastical integration. With this entry option selected, you get a clean compose field with a Fantastical icon in the corner. You can create your event using natural language ("Drive to PA tomorrow at 9:00 AM") and tap the when you're done. Agenda then launches Fantastical, creates the event and then takes you back to Agenda. Neat, but I'm not sure why you'd use one calendar app to update another. Maybe I'm missing something. There are more little tweaks here and there and I'll let you find those. As I said, this is a new app and savvy apps is charging US$1.99 for it. Overall I like the app a lot and have to recommend it. It's fast, looks great and the external app support is super. Go get Agenda 4 here.
Today Weather is a tidy weather app for iPhone
Savvy Apps has released Today Weather (US$1.99), a great-looking weather app for the iPhone. It lets you monitor conditions across several cities via four distinct views. Nice touches like weather alerts, NOAA scale-compliant colors and clever navigation make Today Weather quite pleasant to use. Looks Weather apps are interesting to me in that I don't spend much time looking at them, yet I really like it when the look good. I'll use a Twitter client, Apple's Mail or a calendaring app many times per day. By contrast I'll check the weather once, maybe twice at the most. But a great-looking app -- and, more importantly, a legible app with simple navigation -- can make those two occurrences very pleasant. In short, Today Weather looks great. There are four views: seven-day forecast, current conditions, hourly forecast (across three days) and the dashboard. There's also a simple preferences screen. Note that the photos in my gallery below show the darker night view. During the day, all screens have a white background. %Gallery-173163% The seven-day screen shows an icon representing the day's predicted weather, a percentage chance of precipitation (if any is expected) and a clever bar graph showing each day's highs and/or lows (more on that later). The current conditions screen shows the current temp in big, bold numbers that are so easy to read. White on grey, top of the screen and above additional information like high and low, icon representing the current condition, chance of precipitation, wind speed and direction plus three hourly highs. You can also tap a map icon to jump to that city's location on a map. The hourly forecast presents a list view of each day's hourly temperature predictions, including sunrise and setting times. Finally, the dashboard shows each city's name, current time, weather icon, current temp plus high and low. That's a lot of information and Today Weather manages to present it in an orderly manner. None of this feels cluttered. Use Start by adding a city (or several) whose weather you'd like to track. You'll find an upward-facing arrow in the lower right-hand corner of most screens. Tap it to enter the dashboard editor. From here you can add a new city, delete the defaults or re-order them. You can even insert a new city between two existing ones, so it appears in your preferred order right off the bat. Nice. Once that's all set, tap any city to return to the dashboard. You can scroll up and down or tap any city to jump to its hourly forecast. From there, you've got two navigational choices. Swipe up or down to move through the hourly forecasts for each monitored city. For example, if you're watching the weather in Paris, LA and Scranton (it could happen), swiping up and down will toggle through the reports for Paris, LA and Scranton, respectively. Your other option is to swipe left and right. Left and right moves you between screens. For example, tap Scranton on the dashboard to open its hourly forecast screen, then swipe left for its current conditions screen and left again for its seven-day forecast. Again, swipe up and down on any screen to toggle between cities. Got it? The seven-day screen has a neat trick. Tap on the bar graph to toggle between highs and lows vs. highs alone. Another trick lets you move between screens by pinching. Not the fastest way to navigate, but fun. When a weather app offers so much, it's easy to want more. An animated radar map would be nice, for instance. But really, this is what I'm most interested in. Today Weather is available in the App Store now.
Buzz Contacts for iPhone offers fast access to contacts
Buzz Contacts from Savvy Apps (US$0.99) is a fast way to reach contacts from your iPhone. Organize them into groups for one-tap access to phone calls, text messages, email or FaceTime sessions. The UI is about as clean and tidy as one can get and conveniences like pre-written text messages are quite helpful. Here's my look at Buzz Contacts for iPhone. UI The no-frills, utilitarian look of Buzz Contacts is appropriate for a handy utility. Once you've set up some groups (more on that later), they're laid out on a 4 x 4 grid. Each contact is listed by name and an icon depicts the action associated with each button (phone, text, email or FaceTime). If a group contains more than four members, a swipe to the right reveals the next grid of four while a swipe to the left produces a list view. A toolbar pops up from the bottom of the screen allowing for group actions, so you can send an email or a text, for example, to everyone at once. The large buttons are hard to miss, so the risk of unintended taps is nominal. Use It's easy to create a group. I made one called "Family" which includes my wife, mother, father and two sisters. To begin, swipe to the right and tap "New Group." Next, tap the title to customize it and then tap the icon in the upper right. A list of your contacts appears. Tap the one you'd like to add and chose the method of contact. Keep adding contacts in this fashion until "Page One" is filled, meaning you've added four contacts. You can re-arrage the order in this screen as well. Make as many groups as you like, swiping to the right to toggle between groups. From there, you simply launch the app and tap the appropriate block to initiate just the type of communication you want: FaceTime with your sister, iPhone call to your co-worker, text message to your son or daughter. It's speedy and a time-saver. Buzz Contacts also lets you call those not in a group from the dialer. To use the dialer, swipe to the right again and tap Dialer. A keypad appears. Start tapping a number and Buzz guesses which one you're after. Give it a tap and you're off. There are a few thoughtful niceties in the app. Tapping a contact set up as an email or FaceTime session asks you to confirm your intention before placing the call, so you won't place accidental phone calls. Also, there's a list of pre-written text messages to choose from, like "Running Late. See you soon." and "On my way." Combine that with a group text message to send a lengthy message to the whole gang with little effort. I love useful utilities and Buzz Contacts is one. Since I pretty much only call the people in my family group, I've replaced the phone app in my iPhone's Dock with Buzz Contacts. It's definitely worth a try at $0.99.
