AppleVis Unlimited: What's New and Noteworthy for July 2022

By AppleVis, 1 August, 2022

Member of the AppleVis Editorial Team

Welcome to the July 2022 edition of AppleVis Unlimited, our monthly summary of what's new and noteworthy on the AppleVis website. Below, you'll find a selection of content posted to AppleVis by members of the community - from new app entries, to app updates, to the latest news and podcasts. For easier navigation, the major sections of this post are at heading level 3, and each individual item is at heading level 4.

New and Noteworthy App Entries

Accessible Sudoku (iOS/iPadOS, US$0.99)

Play huge grids on small devices.

In this version you can

  • Choose to play 4,9,16 or 25 grid sizes.
  • Choose the number of cells to fill in.
  • Choose the zoom level.

Features

  • The 4 grid size has over 280 patterns.
  • The 9,16 and 25 grid sizes have 20,000 patterns
  • Designed to be played offline.
  • No in-app purchases.
  • Built to be easy to play but hard to put down.
  • Simple clean interface.
  • 100% VoiceOver compatible.

Current Version: 1.0.3 (July 18, 2022)

Read Accessible Sudoku's AppleVis App Directory entry for more information 

Visit Accessible Sudoku's App Store page 

Apollo for Reddit (iOS/iPadOS, Free With In-App Purchases)

Apollo is a beautiful Reddit app built for fast navigation with an incredibly powerful set of features. Thanks to features like the Jump Bar, fully customizable gestures, and a super-charged Media Viewer, browsing Reddit has never been this amazing.

It's created specifically with iOS design guidelines in mind, so it fits right at home on your device, and with input from thousands of Redditors helping sculpt and perfect it over several years before launching:

  • Jump Bar, for super-fast hopping between subreddits
  • Super-charged Media Viewer for an amazing experience viewing images, GIFs, videos, albums , and more from a variety of sources.
  • Tabbed interface for easy navigating
  • Incredibly powerful Markdown composer for writing comments and posts
  • Full inline Imgur uploading, both images and albums
  • Large or compact posts depending on your preference
  • Dark mode (can be automatic)
  • Fully customizable gestures
  • Safari View Controller for browsing articles and links
  • Inline previews of media in comments
  • 3D Touch support
  • Beautifully organized Inbox
  • Filtering and blocking
  • Face ID / Touch ID / Passcode lock
  • Moderator features
  • Tons of settings to tweak
  • GIF scrubbing to go backward and forward in time
  • Multiple accounts
  • Powerful search
  • Full Markdown rendering
  • Unobtrusive Volume Indicator

As well as much, much more and it's constantly evolving. If you have anything you'd specifically like to see, come to the ApolloApp subreddit and we'd love to hear it!

Current Version: 1.13.1 (May 22, 2022)

Read Apollo for Reddit's AppleVis App Directory entry for more information 

Visit Apollo for Reddit's App Store page 

Spelling Queen Pangrams (iOS/iPadOS, Free With In-App Purchases)

A whole world of words, in just 7 letters!

  • Find the pangram; be the spelling queen
  • 4000+ unique 7-letter games
  • Word counts & hints
  • Customizable English dictionary

App version of the popular game, with many added features like the option to play together with friends & family on your Wi-Fi!

  • Each 7-letter game is generated on the fly by algorithm. There are over 4000 unique 7 letter games to play!
  • Work your way up from Novice, to Brilliant, to Mastermind, and on to win! There are only two rules to finding words and winning the game: words must be at least 4 letters long, and words must always use the center letter.
  • Some games have only 10 words to find, to win the spelling game... other ones have over 50 words! Use Help to get a word count that will tell you how big the challenge is, see how many you've found, and get hints. There's now also a Game of the Day which is the same for everyone, everywhere.
  • Each game has at least one pangram - a word that uses all 7 of the game's individual letters. Some games have more than one!
  • The game's word list is a partial English dictionary of the most frequently used words that have 7 or fewer unique letters. In your game, you can customize your own personal word list! Here's how it works: if you enter a word that is in the English dictionary but is not in the game's list, you can add that new word to your own list. That new word will be included in future games, no matter which of your iCloud devices you are playing on!

Current Version: 2.6 (May 25, 2022)

Read Spelling Queen Pangrams's AppleVis App Directory entry for more information 

Visit Spelling Queen Pangrams's App Store page 

UniChar — Unicode Keyboard (iOS/iPadOS, Free With In-App Purchases)

UniChar is a powerful yet beautiful Unicode character app and keyboard that allows you to quickly find, type, and work with special symbols.

UniChar features thousands of symbols organized neatly into categories as well as a complete Unicode table.* You can quickly search for the symbol you’re looking for by name or by drawing, type symbols in any app with the custom keyboard, and collect your favorite symbols to access them even quicker.

For developers, UniChar is an efficient tool to work with Unicode code points and HTML entities. Revamp your workflow with Universal Clipboard – copy on your iPhone, paste on your Mac. Or use UniChar alongside other apps with Multitasking support on iPad.

Current Version: 7.5 (May 31, 2022)

Read UniChar — Unicode Keyboard's AppleVis App Directory entry for more information 

Visit UniChar — Unicode Keyboard's App Store page 

Unmute - Phone call assistant (iOS/iPadOS, Free With In-App Purchases)

Unmute lets your phone talk for you, on the phone!

With Text-To-Speech you can program sentences you want your phone to speak out loud. Also over the phone!

This can be helpful for people who are mute (can’t / don’t talk) or if you have other speech impediments.

The user on the other side of the line will hear the sentences spoken out loud by your phone through the call.

Features:

  • Create your own custom sentences
  • Favorite sentences are grouped together for easy use
  • Change the gender of the voice
  • Works in lots of languages

Current Version: 1.9 (August 19, 2021)

Read Unmute - Phone call assistant's AppleVis App Directory entry for more information 

Visit Unmute - Phone call assistant's App Store page 

All recent app entries posted to AppleVis can be found at:

iOS/iPadOS
Mac
Apple Watch
Apple TV

Notable App Updates

Envision AI (iOS/iPadOS, Free)

Envision is the fastest, most reliable and award-winning OCR app that speaks out the visual world, helping blind and visually impaired users to lead more independent lives.

Envision is developed for and together with the visually impaired community. The app is simple, gets things done and brings the best assistive experience to blind and low vision users.

Simply use your phone camera to scan any piece of text, your surroundings, objects, people or products and everything will be read out to you thanks to Envision’s smart artificial intelligence (AI) and Optical Character Recognition (OCR).

Current Version: 3.0.1 (July 28, 2022)

Changes in Version 3.0.0

Envision 3.0 is out and if you update to this version you’ll be able to use Envision entirely free of cost. We’d like to thank all our subscribers over the years for their support of the app. It’s with your help that we’re now able to offer the app to everyone in the blind and visually impaired community across the world!

We also have some major changes with this update:

  • We’ve improved the speed of Scan Text greatly with this version. It’s still incredibly accurate with reading text but now it’s a lot more accurate as well.
  • We’ve also improved offline instant text with this update. Now it can read text in any orientation(even if the image is upside down).
  • We’ve also improved the overall stability of the app when you share images or files from outside using the Envision It extension.

Read Envision AI's AppleVis App Directory entry for more information 

Visit Envision AI's App Store page 

Fantastical Calendar (iOS/iPadOS, Free With In-App Purchases)

Fantastical is the multiple award-winning calendar app with powerful features including intuitive natural language text parsing, beautiful full calendar day, week, month, quarter and year views, tasks, time zone support, and much, much more.

Current Version: 3.6.7 (July 12, 2022)

Changes in Version 3.6.6-3.6.7
  • Improved navigation in the Month View when using VoiceOver
  • Fixed an issue where text couldn't be entered into the parser window for some users
  • Fixed an issue where proposals could incorrectly be created without a timezone
  • Fixed an issue where changes were allowed to the category or color of a read-only calendar item
  • Fixed an issue that prevented location-based Reminders from being created correctly
  • Fixed an issue where Openings would fail to add a Zoom meeting if logged in on more devices than allowed by Zoom
  • Fixed a crash that would happen in background while clearing delivered notifications
  • Fixed an issue that caused Fantastical to crash when configuring Zoom meeting options on iOS
  • Various fixes and improvements

Read Fantastical Calendar's AppleVis App Directory entry for more information 

Visit Fantastical Calendar's App Store page 

Twitterrific: Tweet Your Way (iOS/iPadOS, Free With In-App Purchases)

Twitterrific is the award-winning, elegant Twitter client that’s easy to understand and a delight to use. Tweeting has never been simpler or so much fun!

Browse Twitter free from the clutter of promoted tweets. Easily search for the perfect GIF or meme when composing tweets. Use Muffles to hide tweets containing words, phrases, people and hashtags from the timeline that you don't want to see. Customize fonts, appearances, image thumbnails and more via the theme panel. Quickly respond to tweets, change accounts or view conversation threads with a minimum of effort using gestures. Rich media support means GIFs and videos play right in the timeline.

Robust VoiceOver support means Twitterrific is fully accessible. Extensive keyboard shortcuts make Twitterrific a breeze to use with an external keyboard.

Current Version: 6.3.8 (July 20, 2022)

Changes in Version 6.3.8

Improved support for adding ALT text to media, the ability to view media ALT descriptions, new accessibility muffle rules, new app icons, a dark theme and more!

FEATURES

  • New alternate app icons:
    • Sunflower
    • Green Wave
    • Spockerrific
  • New dark theme:
    • Kestrel
  • New muffle rules for filtering the timeline:
    • Added two new keywords to the muffle rule syntax: "media" and "inaccessible"
    • Muffle tweets that have attached images, videos, or GIFs: media
    • Muffle tweets with media from a single user: @username media
    • Muffle tweets that have media but no alt text: inaccessible
    • Muffle inaccessible tweets from a single user: @username inaccessible
  • View alt text descriptions when available for images and GIFs:
    • Tweets with media that include alt text will now show an ALT badge on thumbnails in the timeline
    • Tap the ALT badge to open the media and display the image's description
    • Media with alt text displays an ALT button in the full screen view
    • Tap the media's ALT button to toggle the description on / off
    • Tap anywhere on the alt text panel to copy the description text
    • When tweets in Center Stage mode, the alt text panel will show/hide depending if descriptions are available

IMPROVEMENTS

  • Increased the size of attached media thumbnails in the compose view
  • Images and GIFs that are missing alt text will show a blue +ALT badge in compose to remind you to add alt text
  • The field for adding alt text to images/gifs was expanded to two lines to make it easier to add descriptions
  • Increased the preview size of GIFs in the GIPHY picker
  • Reduced load time of GIPHY preview thumbnails
  • GIPHY attachments automatically use the GIF's title as the default alt text
  • Twitter does not accept alt text for videos, so the attachment editor no longer shows the alt text input box for videos
  • The media viewer's controls no longer fade in/out when paging through tweets in Center Stage mode

BUG FIXES

  • Fixed a blurry play icon on video and GIF attachments in the compose view
  • Compose shows the right number of page dots when removing attachments
  • Fixed several bugs that caused the compose attachment editor to not respect the device safe area when using an external keyboard
  • Fixed problems that could cause the tweet timestamp label to stop updating
  • The media viewer's paging control now respects the device's safe area
  • Fixed a bug that caused videos to stay paused after using the rewind button in Center Stage mode
  • Fixed a glitch where the video player's bar could disappear when a video is loading and then never reappear

Read Twitterrific: Tweet Your Way's AppleVis App Directory entry for more information 

Visit Twitterrific: Tweet Your Way's App Store page 

Recent News and Views

This Month in Podcasts

AppleVis Extra 87: a Conversation with Sarah Herrlinger and Dean Hudson of Apple's Accessibility Team

In this edition of the AppleVis Extra, Dave Nason and Thomas Domville are joined by Sarah Herrlinger, Director of Global Accessibility Policy and Initiatives at Apple; and Dean Hudson, Accessibility Evangelist at Apple. Topics covered in this podcast include a look at some of the new accessibility features coming later this year to Apple's platforms, as well as a broader look at Apple's approach to making their products accessible to as many people as possible.

Listen to “AppleVis Extra 87: a Conversation with Sarah Herrlinger and Dean Hudson of Apple's Accessibility Team”

A full transcript of this podcast is also available.

Podcasts by Thomas Domville

Hot AppleVis Content

Here are some of our posts which have got people talking in the past month:

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