Marco Tabini has a good overview of how the App Store (both for iOS and OS X) could use some improvements now that the 1 million app milestone is in sight. I particularly agree with his points on curation:

Given the sheer volume of apps on the App Stores, Apple’s role in curating them is becoming more and more important. The company’s notoriously tight grip on its distribution channels is often the source of much controversy, but there’s no denying that, by and large, it promotes all apps on an even field: In any given week, the latest release from a giant like, say, Electronic Arts could share the “Editor’s Pick” spot with an app written by an equally talented—but much more wallet-impaired—team of independent developers.

App Store curation is a topic I have been covering on MacStories for the past year, so Marco's observations resonate with me. Looking back at my Four Years of App Store article from May 2012, it's clear that the App Store team has done a very good job in increasing “human curation” with custom sections and weekly features, but there's still lots of work to be done. So, with the one-million app mark approaching, I thought this could be a good time to offer some suggestions for improvements (you've probably already seen a lot of these as tweets in my Twitter timeline).

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In our story about the first four years of App Store, we noted how Apple had been collecting apps and games in custom “sections” that, unfortunately, are often rarely updated and hard to find in the App Store once they are removed from the homepage.

For years now, Apple has been refreshing the App Store on a weekly basis to include custom “sections” showcasing hand-picked apps and games. These sections typically come with rotating banners and smaller “mini-banners” on the App Store’s homepage, and are later grouped into an “App Store Essentials” macro-section that includes several of past sections and recommendations.

Custom sections provide a decent solution to browse titles Apple has previously “curated”; however, these sections aren’t usually updated as often as they are created — N.O.V.A. 3, a new shooter game by Gameloft, still isn’t listed under Benchmark Games: Stunning Graphics, whilst the majority of reviewers and publications have outlined the game’s remarkable graphic capabilities.

With today’s weekly refresh of the App Store’s homepage, it appears Apple has started taking some first steps into a new direction — grouping all previous game bundles into a bigger “collection”. Aptly named Game Collections and linked from the App Store’s homepage, the section offers a roundup of every selection Apple offered to date.

Game Collections includes:

• Games Starter Kit (App Store Essentials)
• Benchmark Games
• Big Name Games
• The Best Games You’ve Never Played
• Quick-Fix Games
• Hardcore Games (App Store Essentials)
• Turn-Based Games
• Game Center
• Zombies
• Racing Games
• Great Platformers
• Sports Games (App Store Essentials)
• Music Rhythm Games
• Retro Games
• Great Role-Playing Games
• Hollywood Hits
• Flight Games
• Galactic Games
• Games for Kids
• Dinosaurs

Previously only available through the App Store’s homepage or partially through the dedicated Games category page, the new Game Collections feature brings some much needed organization to the custom sections Apple has been “curating” over the years. They are now accessible from a single place, and Apple notes how they will be “updated on a regular basis”.

As of today, “regular” apps still aren’t being organized into a unified collection. Right now, the App Store Essentials page is the best way to browse previously featured selections, but it also still mixes games and apps, and doesn’t provide the same elegant and simple layout of Game Collections. Hopefully Apple will provide an “App Collections” page as well, bringing past handpicked app selections and features in a single page.

Apple has been making a series of improvements to the App Store’s navigation lately. Aside from the complete App Store revamp coming in iOS 6, Apple redesigned the App of the Week section and renamed it to Editor’s Choice, leaving the former “App of the Week” to free app promotions.

App Store navigation and curation has long been an issue for third-party developers, with Apple’s Phil Schiller recently weighing in, too, noting how ”you can still get discovered and get a hit overnight”.

Since its release in April 2010, the iPad has been widely regarded as a “consumption device” not really suited for “content creation”. Whilst we have already examined the issue with dismissing the iPad as a device that’s not capable of doing the same things a computer can — and my friend Shawn has a good take on why “content” generally is an awful marketing umbrella — the Storify iPad app, coming today for free on the App Store, is yet another example of how the iPad is changing the way we create through unique interfaces built around touch and the strengths of iOS.

Storify is an interesting service. Per se, Storify isn’t strictly focused on allowing you to create original content (images, text, or a combination of both) that you can share with your friends; rather, Storify is a curation tool that, among other services, leverages Twitter and the openness of the web to let you create “social stories” based off elements shared by people you follow, or just about anyone else on the Internet. Storify wants to tell stories by “curating social media”. I have covered the topic of curation — especially Twitter curation — several times on MacStories, and I recently mentioned Storify in my review of Tweet Library, an iOS app by Manton Reece that enables you to create collections of tweets for future reference. As I detailed in the article, Storify integration in Tweet Library means you can easily collect tweets from a variety of sources (people you follow, Twitter lists, favorite tweets — Tweet Library does a great job at breaking up Twitter sections in neatly organized “sources” panels) and publish them online as a bundle on Storify. The first official Storify iPad app, however, brings the full feature set of Storify (or at least the majority of its online functionalities) to the tablet, mirroring the web counterpart available at storify.com to allow you to create visually rich social stories that go beyond collecting data from Twitter.

I have been able to test Storify for iPad in the past weeks, using it to create and edit stories that I’ve embedded on MacStories such as this one, or this one. When I first talked to Storify CEO Xavier Damman about their upcoming iPad client, I wondered how well the team had managed to port the desktop user interface and experience of Storify, which is largely based on drag & drop, to the iPad. Furthermore, the Storify web app benefits from the desktop nature of the web browser, which makes it easy to switch between dozens of tabs, collect links, snippets of text, and images, or simply open links from other applications without having to worry about “switching back” using a multitasking tray, such as the one we have on iOS. These are all problems a native iPad app should somehow address, I thought, as it’s not just as easy and quick to switch between the browser and multiple sources on an iPad, and I wouldn’t want the Storify creation process to become slow or, worse, cumbersome. It turns out, the Storify team solved the problem with converting mouse interaction to multitouch, and quite beautifully. (more…)

The last time I wrote about Twitter clients, I noted how I’d rather settle with a single app for power users, and have other developers innovate on top of Twitter and the technologies offered by Apple to provide a unique take on the standard Twitter experience. Unfortunately, until today very few developers seem to have believed in the market potential for innovative Twitter clients that go beyond refreshing your timeline and catching DMs, with Riverfold Software’s Tweet Library being the best example of what’s possible to do by leveraging the Twitter API, focusing on another kind of experience.

I initially reviewed Tweet Library when it hit version 1.0 on iPad. I wrote:

Tweet Library is a searchable local archive of your Twitter activity, with promising online functionalities that show good room for improvement. At $9.99 in the App Store it might not be an app for everyone, but if Twitter curation is your thing, this is the best you can have on the iPad right now.

Released earlier today, Tweet Library 2.0 offers some fantastic improvements for those who began using the app on the iPad last year, adding a completely new iPhone interface as part of the free, universal update that will have Twitter curation nerds drooling in new functionalities. (more…)

I love Instapaper. Whether I’m finding cool links on Twitter or I simply mark items for later in Google Reader, Instapaper provides a unique and beautiful way to keep all my reading material together and synced across the web, iPhone and iPad. In fact, Instapaper has changed my reading habits, and especially on the iPad, it gives a whole new meaning to the tablet as a tool for text consumption. Yet sometimes, there are those days when you feel like you haven’t found anything new worth saving in the queue, and the more you keep looking because you’re hungry for new articles in your inbox, the more you keep hitting things you’ve already archived in Instapaper. With version 3.0, Instapaper developer Marco Arment added a new feature to find articles your friends are “liking”, thus making the app more social and better suited for discovery. In the past week, I’ve also been using a new iPad app called Palimpsest to find great material from sources like The New Yorker and The New York Times to send directly off to Instapaper.

Palimpsest aggregates articles from popular online magazines and presents them in a beautifully formatted view. The original webpage is preloaded in the background so you’ll be able to send it to Instapaper, or read it as the author intended. Articles are sourced from popular curators like Arts & Letters Daily, Longreads, LongForm, and many others, in addition to the developer’s own picks. This curation aspect gives the app a personal touch that I think is pretty cool considering we often stumble upon automatic link-tweeting bots online. But because the developer’s and curators’ tastes might be different than yours, Palimpsest also includes like / dislike buttons to tell the app articles you’ve found interesting, and others you won’t like to see the next time. The app fetches around 50 articles on first launch, with 5-10 new articles every day, and roughly 10 saved for offline usage in the app’s cache. In my tests, I was given articles about politics, the death of Osama bin Laden (quite obviously), technology, food, and economy. The articles came from top-notch sources, so basically if you’re a Longreads user you’ll feel right home using Palimpsest, only this app also aggregates content from other websites and curators.

At $1.99, Palimpsest is a neat way to find a fresh feed of great articles every day (and send them to Instapaper), although it could really use an iPhone counterpart. Get the app here.

Released yesterday on the App Store and the web, Squrl is a new service powered by an HTML5 interface that allows you to save videos from several supported services, collect them on the iOS and web apps, and watch them later at any time. The concept behind the service is very simple and attractive: much like an Instapaper for video, Squrl enables you to save videos from Youtube, Vimeo, Hulu, Netflix and many other providers with the click of a bookmarklet (which you have to install from the website). Unlike Watchlater, though, Squrl doesn’t stop at collecting videos in a single place, it also packs social functionalities and organization features to let you create galleries and collections of videos, share them, or even subscribe to collections shared by other users in your social graph. (more…)

In case you missed it, Flipboard received a huge update last week. The new version, which I guess you’ve been using extensively, adds support for more services than the initially implemented Facebook and Twitter. Those two got a facelift, too, but Flipboard 1.1 is all about making the app the ultimate social magazine that can fetch articles and media from Google Reader and Flickr — something that loyal Flipboard users have been asking since the first version was released in July. In case you missed Apple’s 2010 roundup of the best apps from the App Store as well, Flipboard is now featured as the iPad App of 2010. To me, it’s an absolutely deserved position and I would have been surprised if Apple had chosen another app.

Before focusing on the new features and the interactions implemented in this update, I want to make my point clear: I do think that Flipboard is the iPad app of 2010, but not because of popularity, success or media coverage. Not because of the Apple commercials or the rave reviews it got on blogs and the App Store. Flipboard is the iPad app of the year because, in my opinion, it perfectly sums up the essence of the iPad as a consumer electronic product: it’s an app everyone can use, it looks simple and straightforward on the surface but if you want — you can make it go deeper on many levels. Flipboard, like the iPad itself, can be seen as something simple, an app for non-geeks, for the non-tech savvy audience that wants an aggregator of social content. I’m sure thousands of users think of Flipboard that way, and use it that way. Just like I know millions of people see the iPad as a simple and enjoyable alternative to the most complicated notebook. But a question has arisen between me, my followers and co-workers lately: does simple mean casual?

Better: does simplicity represent a weak point of a certain product? (more…)

Tweet Library is an excellent app by Riverfold Software which allows you to “curate tweets”. You can create collection of tweets and publish them online, keep an offline cache of your tweets and favorites, filter your timeline and sort tweets by date. It’s a great companion to your default Twitter client. From my review:

Tweet Library is an app meant for letting you archive, collect and filter tweets. It’s great for conference tweeting, it’s a good tool for blogger when a new iOS beta comes out and they need to group tweets about new features, it’s a great app for users wondering “what happened to that tweet?”. Tweet Library is a searchable local archive of your Twitter activity.

The new 1.1 update brings full support for iOS 4.2, meaning multitasking and persistent state. It works perfectly. The app now also contains a bunch of additional filters for pictures shared on flic.kr, instagr.am, and plixi.com. The developer also introduced lots of performance improvements and fixes.

Tweet Library is available at $9.99. If you use Twitter on a daily basis and you care about keeping a personal record of your tweets, it’s well worth it. Check out the full changelog below. (more…)