BrentSimmons
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Vesper simply collects and organizes your thoughts
Vesper (US$4.99) is a new iPhone app designed for the sole purpose of collecting and organizing your thoughts in a logical manner, and if the all-star development team is any indication, it should be a cutting-edge app with a modern, intuitive UI. The developers, a company named Q Branch, were kind enough to provide TUAW with a copy of Vesper for testing, and here are my first impressions of the app. To begin, let's talk about Q Branch. It's made up of the stellar team of John Gruber (Daring Fireball, creator of Markdown), Dave Wiskus (former designer and creative officer at Black Pixel) and Brent Simmons (NetNewsWire, MarsEdit, Glassboard). The team formed after a chat at Çingleton Deux in Montréal, Quebec, last year, when the friends decided that they could work together on apps. Simmons would develop the apps, Wiskus would design and Gruber would orchestrate the work of the team. Vesper is the first fruit of Q Branch. As Gruber describes the app, "Think of it as a cross between a notes app and a to-do list, inspired by the simplicity and clarity of Twitter. What's the difference between a thought, an idea and something you want to do? I don't know exactly. That's why we made Vesper." We don't know if Apple's going to "flatten" the iOS 7 UI design in the future, but Wiskus may have anticipated the future (or just followed a current design meme) with Vesper. It's a very flat and simple UI. Launching the app brings you to a set of notes that -- surprise! -- are also the app tutorial. To add a note, you tap a plus sign. The first paragraph of a note is automatically bold-faced, following paragraphs are in a regular style. Type in a web address, and it automatically turns into a link. You can also add an image by taking a photo or selecting one from your photo library. Those images always appear at the top of the note, blog-style -- I personally wish that they'd let the user slide the image to any location in the note. It's also impossible to add more than one image to a note. %Gallery-190595% Notes can be viewed in a list of all notes, or by tags. Yes -- like blog posts, Vesper notes have tags. Items with the same tag are automatically grouped together. Tapping the "hamburger" icon on a tag list moves that list of notes to the right, revealing a simple drawer showing "All Notes" and the individual tags. Tap a tag, and you see all notes that have been tagged that way. There's also a place for archived notes -- to archive a note, you simply swipe it to the left. Want to delete a note forever? Tap the "share" icon to reveal a popup for sending a note via email or Messages, make a copy of a note, or delete it. Searching your thoughts is equally easy. Tap on any tag to get a list of notes, pull down the list to reveal a search field, and type in your search term. When it comes to adding tags, Vesper anticipates the tag you wish to apply by suggesting previous tags. It's one more way to simplify the thought-capturing process. If you want to sort your notes somehow to give them a priority, you just tap and hold one and drag it up or down. One thing I also thought was interesting was the built-in browser. Tap on a link in any of your notes, and the page opens up. There are forward and back buttons to navigate through your browser history, a share button (open in Safari, send as a Message, email it, or copy the URL), and a Done button to get you back to your note. The browser uses pull-to-refresh to reload a page or display the loading status of a page; it then gets out of the way so most of the iPhone screen is filled with the page. Considering the widespread use of Chrome, it would be nice if Vesper would detect that browser on your iPhone and display a popup showing Chrome or Safari when you choose to open a page in another browser. Vesper has no settings to worry about, which makes it a rarity among apps. There's no choice of typeface, no themes, and every action is plainly marked. Wiskus did a wonderful job of designing an app that just gets out of the way of taking notes. I found Vesper worked very well with Siri dictation -- open a new note, tap the keyboard microphone and speak to get a "title", tap the return key, and then tap the keyboard microphone again to dictate the body of the note. Another thing I'd like to see in a future version of Vesper is a way to sync the app with a Mac version and/or iPad version. Although I pretty much always have my iPhone with me, I don't like changing my personal focus to another device to create or check a note. And I'd kill for a way to assign a note a deadline date. Being able to do something like assign a date, then have the bold-face headline slowly turn another color as I got closer to that date. That would be an easy and subtle reminder of an approaching deadline without having to use another reminder app. All in all, I think Vesper does a pretty decent job of letting you collect and organize your thoughts without getting in the way. Since that's what the developers at Q Branch were intending, I'd say they were right on target with the 1.0 release. I look forward to seeing what they can add to the functionality of the app without messing up its simplicity and clarity.
A visual history of NetNewsWire
NetNewsWire is, as Second Gear's Justin Williams says, "the elder statesman of the Mac OS X platform." Brent Simmons' newsreader has appeared on countless "must-have" app lists, and it was one of the most treasured pieces of Mac software since even before anyone outside of Cupertino knew the iPhone was going to exist. On the third birthday of his app, Today, Williams takes a nice look at NetNewsWire, both how it has worked visually over the years, and how it has grown along with the platform and stayed relevant for so long. The app originally started as MacNewsWire -- there were only a few set Mac news feeds, and no Safari, WebKit or Core Data implementation (because those things, you know, didn't actually exist yet). Over the years, the app has both grown and become more tightly focused, aimed at both what users have requested and, of course, Simmons' own vision of what the app is supposed to be. We've talked with Simmons before about translating the app over to iOS, but this is an excellent look back at NetNewsWire's history, and it's a great guide for how to keep a Mac app strong and popular for a long time.
TapLynx media-based iPhone app builder from NewsGator released
The iPhone app platform TapLynx from NetNewsWire was released yesterday, after months of anticipation. TapLynx provides you with a way to build media-rich iPhone applications without having to write any code. It's basically NetNewsWire's way of leveraging their RSS expertise along with their iPhone development skills, in the form of Brent Simmons. Although TapLynx users don't need Cocoa knowledge, if you're a Cocoa developer you can use TapLynx to quickly add media management features to your app. In fact, NewsGator distributes TapLynx as a Software Development Kit, making its development roots fairly obvious. Beyond the ability to customize the user interface and choose the feeds you want your app to display, TapLynx offers the unique feature of being able to do remote updates to the app. This means that you can change a number of things in the app including the look-and-feel without requiring an update to be submitted to the frustratingly slow App Store. Brent Simmons, the developer behind TapLynx, is the guy behind the perennial Mac favorite RSS reader, NetNewsWire. What many people don't know is that before he did NetNewsWire he worked at UserLand, creating tools for developers. So in some ways this is Brent returning to his roots. [Update] As commenters have pointed out, the pricing for TapLynx is a little over the top: $3,499US for an Enterprise license, which is the only type of license they offer. That makes the news of TapLynx's release a little less interesting, in my opinion.
TapLynx - Create iPhone focused newsreader applications without programming
Users of NewsGator's NetNewsWire iPhone news reader have been waiting with bated breath for the next iteration of the application, with the promise of the ability to mark news items unread and send articles to InstaPaper Instapaper, amongst other enhancements. As time has gone on, it became clear that Brent Simmons was working on other projects that are related to (but most decidedly not) the next iteration of NetNewsWire for the iPhone. So what has been keeping him busy? As it turns out, NewsGator is rolling out an entire iPhone framework called TapLynx, which will allow its users to create content-rich topic-focused newsreader applications. The first such application, the All Things Digital iPhone app, was created by Simmons himself. The goal of TapLynx is to offer users a framework that allows them to simply choose some images, set URLs for content feeds, and generate a media application for the iPhone without requiring any programming. TapLynx is currently not even yet in beta, but you can sign up to get an alpha invitation on the TapLynx site. By the way, for the NetNewsWire iPhone fans out there, it turns out that the next iteration of the app will be based on TapLynx, so even though it doesn't seem like there has been much recent movement, things are still progressing. We may even see the ability for NetNewsWire (both the Mac and iPhone versions) to synchronize with Google Reader accounts.
Shawn Blanc interviews Brent Simmons
Brent Simmons, creator of the beloved NetNewsWire RSS app, is a talkative guy. We've chatted with him quite a few times about various Mac issues, and late last week he gave another interview to Shawn Blanc over at his website.The interview is mostly about NetNewsWire-- the inspiration for its various features, and the development process Simmons goes through (he writes way more code than he ever uses, and calls himself an "anti-packrat"). There's also a picture of Simmons' workspace (above)-- he works on a Cinema display hooked up to a 17" iMac, with a 17" PowerBook around for PPC testing. He also has a HappyLite Sunshine Simulator right there-- I would think shining a light in my face every morning would wear me out, but he says it helps his Seattle existence, and if it gave us NNW (3.1 is on the way, we're told), I won't argue.Always a good guy, that Simmons, except that he's a little indecisive-- he told us his favorite feature was the Attention Report, and now he says it's the spacebar. Make up your mind!
WWDC Video: TUAW interview with Brent Simmons
Brent Simmons has earned a spot in our docks for years now with NetNewsWire, perhaps the premiere RSS reader on the Mac. But Brent loves developing Mac apps, and he's a big fan of the platform in general. Funny how that works. Mr. Simmons was kind enough to sit and chat with Scott about the WWDC keynote, his competition and some cool new features in NNW3.
MacTech's 25 most influential, version 2007
MacTech has released their MacTech 25 for the second year in a row-- it's a list of the top 25 most influential people in the Mac community (as selected by the community itself), and it reads like a who's who of people doing great stuff : John Gruber, the suave-looking Aaron Hillegass and Brent Simmons all make return appearances. This year they chose everyone who's ever programmed for MarsEdit (as Daniel Jalkut is happy to say), not to mention both co-founders of Rogue Ameoba, Paul Kafasis and Alex Lagutin.Who's missing? Anyone from Apple-- MacTech specifically left them off the list to make sure they didn't hog the Spotlight, so to speak. They say that Apple employees are allowed to be put in the Honorable Mentions section, but as far as I can tell, while Leo Laporte, David Pogue and Merlin Mann all made it, no one from Apple actually did. Better get cracking on those influencing techniques for next year, guys.
MarsEdit 1.2 lands with Growl, Picasa and Vox support
Making good on his word after purchasing MarsEdit from Brent Simmons, Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software has quickly taken up development of the blogging client. Today Daniel released MarsEdit 1.2, a minor update that brings some great features like Growl support (when publishing, refreshing or uploading images and files) and Picasa upload support for Blogger.com images, as well as support for blogging to Vox, the community-focused blogging system from Six Aparts, makers of Live Journal and TypePad. For anyone who needs the power of Mac OS X while blogging, MarsEdit is a great great choice that offers a wealth of other features for a mere $24.95. A demo is of course also available from Red Sweater Software.
5 questions with Brent Simmons, creator of NetNewsWire
Hot on the heels of releasing NetNewsWire 3 Brent Simmons, developer and creator of said program, sat down with me in the virtual HQ of TUAW (a.k.a. the Internet) and answered my questions five. Read on to hear what Brent has to say about NNW's new UI, the feature he would have liked to have included, and what apps are most often in his Dock.
TUAW Interview series: Brent Simmons on the Leopard delay - does it change anything?
Apple's announcement that Leopard has been delayed until October was quite the shocker, especially since we apparently have the iPhone to thank. This of course elicited nearly every response you can think of from every walk of life, but we don't often hear from what I feel is one of the most important building blocks of the Mac OS X community: 3rd party developers. Sure, developers blog about stuff like this on their own, but not everyone is down for sifting through posts about the inner workings of Mac OS X for the insightful opinion pieces on what things like a Leopard delay mean to Apple and its users. And that isn't a bad thing, especially since it inspired me to bring the developers' thoughts to you in an interview series with some of Mac OS X's biggest hitters, including Wil Shipley (co-founder of Omni Group and Delicious Monster), Paul Kafasis (CEO of Rogue Amoeba), Gus Mueller (of Flying Meat software) and Allan Odgaard (of Macromates). I wanted to get their thoughts on Leopard, the iPhone and where Apple is headed as a company in light of Mac OS X delays and Apple's gadgets which would (or should) make great venues for their products. Thankfully, all the developers responded positively and offered some great insight on these issues. These guys have a unique perspective on the state of Apple and its products, and I'm thankful that they all took the time to lay it down as only a Mac OS X developer can.First up (only because he was the first to reply) is Brent Simmons of NewsGator fame. Read on for thoughts from the man who brought RSS and blogging to the Mac masses with NetNewsWire and MarsEdit (which was acquired recently by Red Sweater Software).
TUAW Podcast #18: Macworld interview with Brent Simmons and Paul Kafasis
On Friday of last week at Macworld 07, Brent Simmons (of NewsGator/ NetNewsWire/ MarsEdit fame) and Paul Kafasis (of Rogue Amoeba/Audio Hijack/Airfoil fame) were kind enough to unite their powers and sit down with me for an interview. For just over 20 minutes we discussed Macworld, the iPhone, the state of Mac OS X, being a developer, whether competition or web services are slowing them down and a whole lot more. The interview turned out great, but the audio needed a little cleanup. My XtremeMac MicroMemo usually does a good recording job with my iPod, but we did the interview in the large press room hall at Macworld so it picked up some background noise. It sounds pretty good now (thanks Mike!), and it should be a good listen for anyone interested in a perspective on the state of Apple and their products from two influential 3rd party developers.This TUAW Podcast #18 weighs in at just under 21MB, and can be had from this direct link, our iTunes Store Podcast directory or our own podcast RSS feed. Enjoy.P.S. - On a related note, our TUAW podcast is now listed in the digg podcast directory. Why not head over and show some love by digging our podcast and your favorite individual episodes?
