For the past week, the entire MacStories team and I have been focusing on finalizing our coverage of Mountain Lion, which, according to recent speculation, may be coming out next Wednesday, July 25th. As you may have noticed, we have been posting less frequently on the site, but we wanted to get our coverage just right, and I think we’ve managed to come up with a good plan. More details soon.

In the meantime, I’d like to share some links of apps and tools I have been using to research, write, and edit my review of Mountain Lion. As a general tip, make sure to check out our Reviews section, as several of the apps we have reviewed recently have a spot on my iPhone or iPad Springboard. But I’ve also discovered some new gems that, while working on the review, have helped me organize all my material more efficiently.

Scrivener. Per Dave Caolo’s recommendation, I decided to give Scrivener a try as a desktop app for writing and researching articles, and I’m glad I did. I’m still a novice — Scrivener is very complex and feature-rich — but here’s a few things that immediately enhanced my workflow: possibility to organize ideas and drafts as outlines, text, or visual notes; support for file attachments and OPML; document references for webpages; split-mode for comparing “snapshots” of document copies without creating duplicates of a file. I have been using Scrivener to compare various edits of my review, and I love it. An iPad app is coming, and I also got this book to learn my ropes around the app. Even better: Scrivener can sync to Dropbox, so I can make additions using the app I prefer. For iOS integration, I’ve been testing an app called Index Card, though I’m still not entirely sold on its implementation of the cork board.

Marked. To preview Scrivener’s contents (written in Markdown), I use Marked. Its exporting features are fantastic, and I have been using the outline navigator to get a better sense of my review’s structure. If you write on a Mac, you need Marked.

Keyboard Maestro Markdown Library. I only found out about this collection of macros this week, when I was looking for ways to automate link insertion in my article with Markdown. It turns out, the Keyboard Maestro Markdown Library contains macros for links, formatting, lists, and even images. I have tweaked them to better suit our site’s requirements (for instance, I have added captions to my image macro, and article titles to the link one using this tip), and, in total, I’m pretty sure they have already helped me save minutes I would have spent copying & pasting HTML instead. Amazingly useful. More on why I love Keyboard Maestro here.

OmniOutliner and CarbonFin Outliner. I have recommended these two apps in the past, but they’re worth a second mention. For my review, I created an outline on my iPhone months ago and started adding new ideas and notes from there. On iOS, I like Outliner because it supports Dropbox and has a simpler interface than OmniOutliner for adding notes and indenting elements. But on the Mac, I rely on The Omni Group’s app because it’s got the best support for keyboard shortcuts and notes — which are both essential to my workflow.

NoMoreiTunes. I had to look up several iTunes applications in the past week, and this Safari extension did the trick (read: it doesn’t launch iTunes when Safari opens an iTunes link).

Markdown Service Tools. Because sometimes I want to use my Mac’s contextual menu to quickly generate HTML off some Markdown.

Macdrifter’s Dictionary Macro. Mountain Lion features a new three-finger single-tap action for Dictionary lookups and file previews, but some apps don’t recognize this gesture. If you use Keyboard Maestro, this is a nice way to forward any selected word to Dictionary.

Evernote. While my writing happened in Scrivener, all other research material that didn’t strictly belong to the article went into Evernote. With it, I use a combination of other apps and hacks that make it easy to save URLs, images, and just about anything. I use EverWebClipper to quickly beam URLs into Evernote from Mobile Safari; lately, I’ve also been playing with EverClip, which doesn’t feature a bookmarklet but can run in the background (“listening” for every new copied file) for 10 minutes. It’s sort of like Pastebot, but for Evernote, which is nice. To automate the process of saving links while on my Mac, I use a couple of AppleScripts put together by our Don Southard, which are obviously configured to work with Keyboard Maestro.

Captio. Indispensable utility to quickly save new tasks into my OmniFocus database.

iFiles. Following GoodReader’s somewhat unexpected removal of its iCloud-based file storage, iFiles came out with a similar functionality, and it works pretty well. iFiles hasn’t received a major update in months — apparently, the developer is working on a 2.0 version — but this iCloud integration is interesting, and works as you’d expect from an iOS file manager.

Last, IFTTT. If I’m not writing, I’m typically distracted by Internet while I browse around looking for interesting stuff. To make sure I can focus on writing without missing out on cool links, I have set up IFTTT to backup favorite tweets and starred Google Reader items to my Evernote and as a text file in my Dropbox. This way, if these services go down or will someday cease to support these functionalities, I’ll still have a complete archive of everything I had saved.

I have a confession to make: I’m a nerd. Yes, and I’m proud of it, because I think being a nerd means two things: I’m constantly curious about details, and I don’t hesitate to try out new stuff. To satisfy my curiosity, I’ve always dived into Apple’s ecosystem and the latest hardware related to it. Fortunately, my passion for Apple correlates with my love for discovering new music. I’ve been playing guitar since I was eight years old, and I love electronic music from the bottom of my heart as well. I’ve always found myself interested in both the traditional (perhaps organic) hardware side of music, and the more modern, digital software production process.

When the iPhone came out, many blogging colleagues and people around me predicted that its new software system, combined with the mobility of the device itself, would change the way people produce music and think about audible art as a whole. Three years later Apple unveiled the iPad. iPhone music software was indeed present at the time, but people soon recognized that the device’s screen was too small to create usable professional software for it — playing on-screen keyboards was nearly impossible and attempts to build high-end software synths like ReBirth or drum machines ended up in cluttered, untidy screens.

This problem seemed to get solved with the large screen of the iPad. Professional software retailers like KORG immediately started coding software versions of their most successful hardware. For instance, the iElectribe was one of the first apps available after the device’s launch. Over the years, I constantly tried out music apps for the iPad, tested hardware accessories (made possible with the release of iPhone OS 3), and never stopped investigating advantages, problems, and future possibilities of all those apps. Now, five years after the launch of iOS and the iPhone, I think it’s time to look back at how Apple’s mobile devices, with the focus clearly on the iPad, have changed the world of music and how they’ll continue to affect the future.

To do this, I recently went through my app archive and analyzed which kind of music apps remained installed on my devices, and which ones I liked when I tested them, but didn’t gain a place in my personal workflow. I discovered that I had to clearly divide music apps in several areas when discussing them. I distinguished between eight types of available music apps: promotion, discovery, entry level playing apps, handy/learning tools, sketching apps, recording, and professional software.

Throughout this post, I will cover each of those areas separately and point out their current state by discussing the most elaborate app(s) in their respective areas. I will point out the advantages and problems iOS brings to them, and predict — as far ahead as possible — what the future might hold.

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Today’s news that Paper, a sketching app for iPad, has been downloaded over 1.5 million times in two weeks made me think about the size of the App Store platform and ecosystem of devices. Launched in 2008, the App Store now extends across the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and distributes over half a million apps to customers (588964 apps per AppShopper). Last month, Apple reached the impressive milestone of 25 billion apps downloaded from the App Store — an important number that tops a history of exponential growth and adoption.

Below, I have compiled a list of noteworthy milestones reached by App Store developers in order to put Paper’s numbers in better perspective. For more App Store-related numbers, check out Wikipedia’s milestones table and our Mac App Store: Year One overview.

On January 24th, 2012, Apple announced the company paid over $4 billion to developers since the App Store’s launch in 2008. Over 315 million iOS devices have been sold to date; with these numbers, an average of 79 apps has been downloaded for every iOS device.

App Downloads: A History of Numbers

2009

July: Dictionary.com reaches 2.3 million iPhone app downloads.

2010

March: Doodle Jump for iPhone sells 3 million copies since launch.

June: Skype announces 5 million iPhone app downloads in four days.

June: Angry Birds for iPhone has been downloaded over 5 million times since its launch on December 2009.

September: Gameloft announces 20 million paid app downloads of its iOS games since the App Store’s launch.

2011

January: Pixelmator grosses $1 million in under 20 days.

January: Autodesk announces Sketchbook Pro for the Mac App Store has sold twice as many copies as the regular app in a year.

February: Fruit Ninja for iPhone hits 6 million paid downloads in 10 months.

May: Talking Tom 2 hits 1 million downloads in a single day.

June: Game publisher Chillingo announces 140 million downloads for its iOS apps since the App Store’s launch in 2008.

June: Gameloft announces 200 million iOS app downloads in 3 years.

October: Autodesk announces 3 million downloads of AutoCAD WS for iOS and Android.

October: Discovr announces 1 million downloads.

December: Flipboard for iPhone gets 1 million downloads in its first week.

2012

January: World of Goo downloaded over 1 million times by App Store and Mac App Store customers in 13 months.

February: Scribblenaut Remix sells 1 million copies since its launch in October 2011.

March: Camera+ sells 7 million copies in 1.5 years on the App Store (previously: 6 million copies in January 2012; 3 million copies in June 2011)

March: Angry Birds Space reports 10 million downloads in 10 days (the app is available on multiple platforms and devices, including iPhone, iPad, and Mac).

March: iPhoto for iOS downloaded by over 1 million unique users in under 10 days.

April: Draw Something hits 50 million downloads in under 2 months.

April: Paper for iPad is downloaded 1.5 million times in two weeks.

April: MLB.com At Bat 12 reports 3 million downloads. The app was released at the end of February 2012 on multiple platforms (including Android) and its developers also reported over 800,000 live streams per day.

A number of iOS applications have been updated following the release of the new iPad. While most of the software updates quickly approved by Apple have focused on Retina graphics, others that have come out in the past few days have brought new important functionalities as well.

PDF Expert, our favorite app to read and manage PDFs on the iPad, adds Retina graphics and document thumbnails in its new 4.0 version. On the new iPad, graphics are shaper and more detailed, but more importantly text is crisper and more readable. The new thumbnail-based interface makes for a more visual presentation and intuitive file browsing, although support for drag & drop could be improved (I’d like to be able to create folders by dropping a file on top of another, like on the Home screen). PDF Expert 4.0 also supports PDF portfolios, attachments, and embedded media.

ReaderX has improved a lot since my original review. The app now comes with more fonts, more options, a revised preview popover, improved scrolling, and better sharing. The wallpaper concept makes a lot more sense on the iPad’s Retina display, as it makes it easy to set smaller fonts, while maintaining readability and detail. Give it a try again.

OneEdit is an app I use on my iPad to quickly resize multiple photos at once and save them back to the Camera Roll. The app doesn’t support Retina graphics yet on the new iPad, but the issue will likely go unnoticed (except for the icon) as the app uses a lot of native UI elements that Apple is already providing at Retina size. OneEdit 1.8 (the app is sold in separate versions for iPhone and iPad) enhances the batch-processing features of the app with support for individual photos from Dropbox, upload to WebDAV, and possibility to resize images based on scale. I particularly like OneEdit’s approach to image editing with separate sources/tasks/output processes that makes it easy and clear for me to select images, act on them, and save them somewhere else. OneEdit is also pretty powerful with tons of other options I don’t use, so make sure to check out the app’s full description on the App Store.

Watchlater keeps on being one of the best options to save videos from the web for later by adding a new design and more sharing options to version 2.5. Functionality-wise the app is mostly unchanged from my original review, but the UI is much better and collaborating with friends on playlists is a great idea.

Other minor updates have been released on the App Store as well: Note & Share added fixes and new iPad compatibility; LogMeIn Ignition added Retina graphics; Path started hashing user data with version 2.1.1; Alien Blue for iPad added a new gesture to load Reddit comments.

Make sure to check out the Great apps for the new iPad App Store section for a comprehensive list of software updates released in the past weeks.

Over the past three years, some people have told me they don’t like the way I write software reviews. That I should just tell them whether ”they should buy the damn thing or not”. While I understand their point, with MacStories’ third anniversary quickly approaching I thought it would be appropriate to explain why I don’t do that.

An app is never ”just an app”. There are people behind the bits and buttons we use and touch every day. I have written about this before. When I am reviewing an app, I have to be honest to my reader and provide a careful and insightful analysis of the various features while taking into considerations other factors such as price, usability, and appearance. But at the same time, my writer’s instinct tells me that there’s more than just a checklist of features to mention. I want to tell *that* story.

There are a lot of sites that decide to focus their software reviews on enumerating features. That’s fine. Sometimes I believe, too, that simply telling our readers ”what’s new” in a specific piece of software is the only way we can cover a subject — otherwise we’d have to provide a disservice to our readers, by not covering it. This is especially true with software updates. And flashlight apps like Flashbot.

At MacStories, we carefully pick the things we want to talk about. We have been guilty of stupid rumors and speculation in the past, and we have learned a precious and invaluable lesson from that behavior: trust is important. Guess what, it’s about people again. You can only put so much of your soul on the Internet, and it can easily get lost somewhere along the line of rumors and linkbait. You’ll spread yourself too thin. You won’t tell a story. Some people excel at news reporting — which is an art by itself. Others, unfortunately, do it because they have to do it.

When I review an app, I want to find the story that needs to be told. I don’t want to be different just for the sake of originality — I genuinely believe that we’re witnessing a revolution of our digital era, and I don’t want to live it writing lists and inflammatory blog posts to drive our page views.

I want to tell this revolution. Or at least find a sweet spot where I, and my team, can contribute to providing a perspective that can make people think. Not just click.

Sometimes you’ll find an app that I love, while you think it’s terrible. That is fine, too. There’s no such thing as objectivity when you are reviewing something and expressing your opinions. There’s only honesty. Honesty and personality conflate in a number of ways, and when I write a review, my goal is to make sure the result is a balanced mix of facts, taste, and opinion. I try to tell the *why* and the *how* that are the sinew of my appreciation for fine software. Hopefully disagreements and constructive criticism will lead to a richer, variegate archive of software reviews in the future.

I have wondered if it was easier when our audience was in the order of hundreds, not millions. I ended up concluding that good traffic, besides allowing us to run this site, makes it all more exciting. It means we get to pick what we want to talk about, write it the way we want, and enjoy an intelligent discussion with more people because of it. And it’s getting better every day.

Perhaps we should just tell you whether you have to buy the damn thing or not. But that would take all the fun out of it.

That’s why we write what we write: because innovation never ceases to amaze us — and that’s a story worth telling.

It is often said that Apple doesn’t offer a filesystem for iOS devices. Sure enough, it is indeed not possible to manage documents and folders on an iPhone or iPad as you can on OS X. Apple does, however, offer a very basic file management system that works with iOS apps, and you’ve haven’t probably used it too many times:

Introduced with iOS 3.2 and iTunes 9.1, iTunes File Sharing allows applications to import files copied from a Mac or PC using iTunes, and export to a computer. In iTunes, all you have to do is connect an iOS device, head over the Apps tab, and choose File Sharing below the Home screen app management interface. You can copy almost any kind of file into an app’s internal directory dedicated to file sharing, and several iOS apps use this method to import or backup files and documents such as bookmarks, videos, or spreadsheets. I’ve often used this feature to import .avi files to watch on my iPad.

iTunes File Sharing doesn’t seem to get the attention other iTunes functionalities do, and I believe there are a couple of reasons behind this. First off, it’s quite cumbersome: the interface for File Sharing is buried within an iOS device’s settings in iTunes, and there are no options to, say, automate the process of importing files or setting up favorite sources for documents. Second, iTunes File Sharing only solves a partial problem, in that the majority of iOS users don’t lament the lack of a proper Mac-to-iOS file management system as much as they’re asking for an iOS-to-iOS centralized file storage solution that would also happen to sync back to a Mac.

So, I had an idea. I think the same iTunes File Sharing feature would work a lot better as a dedicated, native iCloud app for iOS devices (and maybe the Mac too). After all, if Apple is providing an iTunes-based file management utility for Mac users, why couldn’t they build an app that enabled any third-party iOS app to save and import files from iCloud? This app would be built into the system and allow users to simply collect documents, like iTunes File Sharing. Developers could easily add options to their apps to import files from “iCloud File Sharing” and export files to it. Users would have the same feature set of the existing iTunes File Sharing, only with an interface they are already familiar with, because iCloud File Sharing would resemble the existing file management workflow of iWork for iOS or iCloud.com. The only difference is that it would be integrated on a system level, work with any iOS app, and basically be an extension of the “Open In” menu that already allows apps to communicate with each other through supported file types.

I wouldn’t call such an app “Dropbox from Apple”, as Dropbox is mainly developed as a solution to sync files between computers, running in the background all the time, whereas this would be more oriented towards giving apps a better file sharing system. In fact, I imagine Apple could go as far as indicating the apps that can receive an iCloud file as they currently do with iTunes File Sharing for better organization and to maintain the app-driven model. iCloud File Sharing would play well with this strategy, and it would offer a basic way for developers to integrate iCloud in their apps.

Apps like GoodReader have already implemented a similar system of iCloud-based file management, and some third-party developers are experimenting with providing standalone apps for file management purposes over iCloud. A default utility from Apple would have the obvious advantage of not requiring any additional download: it would be integrated as a system action in any app for iPhone, iPad (and even the Mac). Apps would still have their own iCloud libraries and synced data; the file sharing part would ditch iTunes and become iCloud-powered (iTunes File Sharing would be kept around as an option for transferring large files such as videos through USB).

You might argue that Apple is trying to eliminate the concept of the filesystem altogether by embracing the app model with data silos that are self-contained and user-friendly. As iTunes File Sharing seems to be suggest, though, I think that Apple knows the app model and iOS only solve so much when it comes to file management — Apple has to deal with the fact that many people still work with files and folders, export them, move them around, and manage them. I believe the real winning scenario for Apple would be to make the management process as lightweight and intuitive as simple by relying on iCloud. Thus, iCloud File Sharing would serve as a better solution than iTunes File Sharing, ans it would strengthen Apple’s offerings requiring no or little effort from developers, ultimately providing an accessible way to manage files atop of Apple’s existing free 5 GB of storage for every iCloud account.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like the upcoming iOS 5.1 will introduce such a feature, and I’m not holding my breath for a surprise announcement during the iPad 3 event. But for the next major version of iOS, if Apple doesn’t think a better way to let apps communicate with each other is needed, I believe an evolution of iTunes File Sharing towards iCloud would be a sweet stopgap solution in the PC-free era.

One of my favorite apps in a long time, App Cubby’s Launch Center (our previous coverage here and here), just got a lot better thanks to an update released on the App Store a few minutes ago, version 1.2. Whilst one wouldn’t normally expect an app to get significant improvements in a 1.2 update, Launch Center’s latest version is, I believe, quite possibly the greatest addition to the app since its release, making it extremely easier to discover new third-party apps that can be integrated with no further configuration in Launch Center.

For those who are not familiar with Launch Center already, as we detailed in our previous reviews this utility allows you to set up custom shortcuts on your iPhone to launch common actions or often-used applications with a single tap. Upon firing up Launch Center, you’ll be able to create and manage shortcuts for, say, calling your wife or texting a coworker; you can create a quick action to activate the iPhone’s flashlight, launch a website in Safari, tweet, email someone, or Google your clipboard. As I’ve written before, Launch Center has replaced a bunch of existing apps in my dock thanks to its super-simple approach to aggregating default apps and functionalities that can be triggered through the popular URL schemes you can find documented on websites such as HandleOpenURL. And it’s from this idea of hidden URLs that only a few people know about that App Cubby decided to make Launch Center 1.2 all about app detection and integration.

Launch Center 1.2 leverages your apps’ internal URL schemes to simplify the process of discovering new shortcuts and speeding up your workflow. Launch Center comes with a new section called “Supported Apps” inside the Launch App menu, which lists third-party apps that can work with Launch Center through a URL. Launch Center organizes this list in Installed Apps (the ones you already have on your device) and Featured Apps (which you don’t have installed, and you can get from the App Store). This list of support apps, it turns out, has been built directly by App Cubby and it is hosted on the developers’ servers alongside links to the icons that, as you can see from the screenshots, are served directly to the iPhone and look great on the Retina Display. The reason behind App Cubby’s decision to keep the list of supported apps on their servers is to encourage more developers to get in touch and ask for integration in Launch Center which, ultimately, has a chance of becoming the de-facto solution for quickly accessing apps’ settings/sections/menus using a technology Apple is (seemingly) okay with.

App Cubby writes:

We’d also appreciate help in spreading the word about URL schemes. It’s surprising how few apps support them, and those that do don’t always go very deep with supported actions. If you have an idea for an app and/or action that would make sense in Launch Center, please contact the developer of that app directly and point them to this page.

Launching an app is great, but the true power of Launch Center is in the ability to trigger specific actions deep within an app. For example, while using Tweetbot, you may leave the app buried deep within a search. To launch the app and tweet might take quite a few taps as you have to back out of the search, tap the compose button, select an account, paste text, etc. Launch Center can make that a reliable 2 taps. 1 to open Launch Center and 1 to trigger the action.

In my Launch Center, I was pleased to see many of my most-used apps were already supported. I have set up shortcuts for 1Password, Instagram’s camera and Facebook; I tweaked Tweetbot’s shortcut to jump directly to my Favorites, and created an OmniFocus launch to create a new task “using clipboard for note”. Other apps I see as supported (and installed on my device) include Agenda, Evernote, Consume, Flipboard, Delivery Status Touch, Camera+, Instapaper, Skype, and Reeder. Hopefully a lot more will be coming soon thanks to App Cubby’s decision to make their iOS App URLs page public.

As I said above, Launch Center has become one of my favorite new apps for iPhone. It speeds up my workflow and looks neat, and I look forward to seeing how many developers will get in touch with App Cubby to formally introduce support for Launch Center in their apps (I also would like to see App Cubby figure out a way to fetch icons for any app).

You can find Launch Center 1.2 in the App Store.

Justin Williams writes about the current state of Twitter clients for iOS:

What iOS needs is the Twitter equivalent to Adium: a well maintained, open source Twitter client that is targeted at the most hardcore and passionate users of both Twitter and the iOS platform.

That, of course, is easier typed than done. Many open source projects fail because of lack of vision or direction. Others fail because they are just badly engineered software that aims to shove every pet feature into a unified product. Projects like Adium succeed because there is an established hierarchy of managers, developers and contributors. Each release has a focus and direction much like a commercially produced project.

My first Twitter client was Twittelator Pro by Andrew Stone, which I installed soon after I got my first iPhone in 2008. After that, I switched to Twitterrific, which I kept until Tweetie came out. For a few months I bounced back and forth between Tweetie, Twitterrific and Birdfeed but, eventually, I settled with Tweetie 2. I loved Tweetie 2. It was the perfect Twitter client for my needs, it was fast and Loren was (is) a great guy. But then Twitter bought the app, started doing all kinds of crazy things to it, and the excitement wore off. I went back to Twitterrific, but it wasn’t the same — I had become very accustomed to Tweetie (now Twitter for iPhone) and the simplicity of Twitterrific was disorienting. Like Justin, I’ve always had a problem with inline DMs in Twitterrific.

Throughout 2010 and 2011 there’s also been a period when I went back to trying every Twitter client out there, including Twittelator Pro (again), but also Echofon, Tweetings, HootSuite, Osfoora, TweetList and TweetLogix. I was addicted to trying Twitter clients until Tweetbot came out and, as I wrote in my review, proved to be a Twitter app for iPhone I could once again fall in love with. I’ve been using Tweetbot for iPhone ever since, and the app keeps getting better on each release. Personally, I don’t agree with Justin’s point that Tweetbot is ”the best designed Android app available for iOS”, but this isn’t the main problem.

The real issue is that these days iOS Twitter nerds are left with Tweetbot and nothing else. Twitterrific clearly isn’t targeting power users — maybe a better expression would be “users that don’t just casually check on Twitter” — and Twitter for iPhone, well, let’s just say it’s not exactly focused on Twitter geeks anymore. How about the other clients? I see very few innovators around, and the only third-party app I’m excited about (again, except Tweetbot, which I use every day) is Twittelator Neue — Stone’s app has a good chance to reinvent a few things especially if it ever comes to the iPad. But looking at the whole Twitter software landscape today, it’s clear to me there isn’t the kind of verve and anticipation for new clients that we experienced three years ago, with developers constantly updating their clients, one-upping competitors in terms of features, and teasing new products that (sadly) never came to be.

In a scenario where the less popular Twitter clients are either a) maintained through bug fix releases or b) updated with minor features every once in a while, lacking major additions like iPad and Mac counterparts, I see a glimmer of hope in Tweetbot — Tapbots are always up to some great stuff — and services like Tweet Marker: available for free to developers to implement in their apps, Tweet Marker is the first step towards that kind of client-side unification whose lack made switching Twitter clients on a daily (or even hourly) basis so painful in 2009. Check out the apps that already support Tweet Marker, and note how they’re the same names that I’ve mentioned above.

Building an Adium-like model for the ultimate Twitter client might be a viable plan, albeit an elaborate one considering all the technical complexities and frequent changes behind the Twitter API. An ideal modern Twitter client for power users should have delightful and powerful iOS apps and an outstanding Mac client that makes it extremely easy to switch environments without user fatigue; you have to make sure the apps are always brought up to date with the latest Twitter features from Twitter itself and iOS 5 (I’m fairly sure the technologies and APIs behind AIM aren’t updated nearly as often as Apple releases new iOS betas), and when everything’s distributed for free you have to make sure you’ve got a dedicated, kick-ass team of contributors and leaders, or things start to get messy (and slow) because of updates, user support, feature request, and so forth.

So here’s another possible scenario. Let’s continue to diversify the offer of available Twitter clients, and settle with one app for power users. Justin doesn’t like Tweetbot, but perhaps one year from now Tweetbot will be available on more platforms with changes and tweaks that everyone will like and use on a daily basis, even Justin. Around that Twitter client for power users, I imagine a flourishing ecosystem of innovative Twitter apps that don’t simply focus on building an alternative to Tweetbot — a daunting task at this point — but provide a unique experience that can live alongside the main, full-featured client. I’m thinking Tweet Library, also by Tweet Marker’s Manton Reece: instead of just focusing on being the perfect regular client, Tweet Library’s built-in client is functional to the app’s real feature: curating tweets and archiving them. This is the path I believe developers should strongly consider for building Twitter-connected apps: focus on APIs, services and interactions with other software. Where’s the Twitter app that integrates with Evernote and lets you annotate tweets? Where is the app to run, manage and archive online polls exclusively via Twitter? Where’s the service that lets you use your custom vanity URL and get beautiful, real-time, reliable click analytics instead of the ugly mess that’s HootSuite?

You see where I’m getting at — I believe developers are (obviously) completely free of investing their time and resources into competing with Tweetbot, but on the other hand I don’t think focusing on other aspects of Twitter means admitting defeat. It’s easy to say “Tweetbot won” or “Twitterrific is the best” when, really, the story is much more complex than that and also goes back to a company that has shown a “peculiar” approach to guiding its own third-party developers.

Will we ever go back to the Birdfeed and Tweetie era? I don’t think so. Twitter is now integrated in iOS 5 and seeing massive growth because of it, thus justifying the prospect of creating an app “for power users” even less. Yet I can’t help but think about a time, not too distant from now, when the power users will finally settle on a single solution for their power-hungry needs, and let other developers innovate atop of the Twitter platform in disruptive new ways. The ideas, devices, APIs and users are waiting.

[Photo by Jorge Quinteros]