I ride the train into Chicago every weekday. Most days, you can find me listening to one of my favorite podcasts, or getting some work done while I listen to music, but other times, I just want to enjoy a good game. For the past couple of weeks I’ve been playing a wonderful game called A Good Snowman is Hard to Build that is trivial to learn, but full of challenging puzzles, and tremendously charming.
Achieving Personal Goals with Streaks
Good habits are hard to form. Before something becomes a habit that you don’t have to think about, it’s just a task that must be repeated over and over. The trouble is, good intentions only get you so far, which at least for me, is not very far at all.
So how do you get from aspiration to execution? An app isn’t going to magically make you eat better or wake up early to work on your next big project, but through a system of reminders and tracking, Streaks creates a sense of personal accountability that I find helps a lot.
It is easy to see why Apple named Streaks one of the best apps of 2015. Streaks looks great, with a design language that is right at home with today’s iOS, and is a great example of an app with a narrow focus, but deep, singular attention to detail.
Quiver 3: A Notebook That Adapts to How You Work
Research is a big part of all my projects, but I’ve never found a research app that fits my needs. My ideal research app is more than just a text editor or other app that I get by with. I want a tailor-made app designed from the ground up with research in mind that is lightweight and fast, even if I stuff it full of hundreds of notes with all kinds of embedded media. Just as important though, the app should sort and search my notes in a manner suited to the way I work, not the way the app wants me to work. It’s a tall order and one that nobody has pulled off before to my satisfaction, which is why I was so excited to discover Quiver 3.
Quiver, by Yaogang Lian of HappenApps, bills itself as programmer’s notebook, but it has evolved into much more than that. At the highest level, Quiver uses an organizational metaphor like Evernote, with individual notes organized into notebooks. But it’s at the note level where things get interesting.
A Screenshot Is Worth a Thousand Words
The easiest way to make a point about an app is often with a screenshot. This is especially true on Twitter with its 140 character limit, but it is equally true in a wide variety of other contexts. Designers use screenshots to communicate with clients and developers, or create mood boards and Pinterest-style collections that convey a look and style visually. Developers create screenshots to market their apps and writers use them to illustrate ideas for readers.
Regardless of the context, every screenshot is fundamentally about communication. But sometimes, a quick screenshot isn’t enough – you want to call out a feature or perhaps you have so many screenshots you need a tool to manage them. That’s where screenshot apps come in.
Screenshot apps tend to fall into one of two categories: managers and editors. On iOS, screenshot management apps dominate, likely because until Apple added a ‘Screenshots’ album to the Photos app with iOS 9, there was no good way to separate screenshots from snapshots of family and friends. On the Mac there are fewer apps, but their feature sets tend to be deeper.
The screenshot app market intrigues me. Although most apps address one of a couple basic problems, execution varies widely and there are gaps in functionality, especially on iOS. As a result, the screenshot app category is somewhat fragmented, but in a good way, leaving room for interesting solutions from clever developers.
Screenshots serve an important role at MacStories as revealed by the number of Federico’s 2015 must-have apps sprinkled throughout this article.1 After all, any post about apps that you read here is likely to include at least a few screenshots. But what works for MacStories may not serve your needs. Therefore, this article casts a broad net to provide an overview of the top screenshot apps on iOS and Mac and help you find the apps that meet your specific needs.
A Comprehensive Guide to the iTunes Affiliate Program
Inexpensive software and other tools, coupled with ubiquitous Internet access, have made it easier than ever for creative people to reach a large audience. Whether you are a writer, a podcaster, a video producer, a software developer, or a maker of some other description, distribution has been reduced to a mere implementation detail.
Yet, with barriers to entry being lowered, this also means that it’s never been more difficult to make a living online. Right now, if you run a website, advertising rates are down while readers are blocking ads in ever-increasing numbers. Podcasters are doing better as sponsorship rates are superior to web ads, but it’s a relatively new medium dominated by a relatively small group of companies that sponsor the most popular shows. The resulting concentration makes many podcasts vulnerable to losing the majority of their income if a sponsor leaves. Meanwhile, app prices continue to race toward free on every platform.
One of the keys to succeeding in any online market where supply outstrips demand, or where risk is concentrated, is to remain nimble and distribute the risk. People have experimented with all sorts of revenue models as a hedge against this uncertainty. Memberships and patronage systems are options that let “super fans” support work that they value more than others. But, there’s another option you should consider that has a lower barrier to entry, the potential to reach a far wider audience, and once set up, works on autopilot, producing cash without any intervention by you and at no added cost to your audience – the iTunes Affiliate Program.
In March, I launched an iOS app called Blink that makes it easy to create links for the iTunes Affiliate Program. I know writers, developers, and podcasters who have used the program successfully for years, but each had their own unique, quirky, and often fiddly solutions for generating links. I set out to streamline that process so they could concentrate on their craft instead of links.
But, Blink is just a tool. It leverages Apple’s iTunes Affiliate Program to help creative people build a sustainable business, but outside of a savvy core of people who recognize that the affiliate program helps them keep doing what they love, the program is still largely unknown. The purpose of this article is to fix that – to lay it all out comprehensively.
There is a lot here on the program because who doesn’t like a nerdy “deep dive” into almost anything? Don’t let that intimidate you. At its core, the program is dead simple. There are tools, like mine, to make linking easier once you have signed up, but you don’t need them to get started.
Home Screen: John Voorhees
Like many others, I recently realized the wisdom of the Pied Piper of Plus and moved from an iPhone 5s to a 6s Plus. I love the added screen real estate and 3D Touch, but with an extra row of icons and a screen too big to reach everything, I had to rethink my...