Why Colin Donnell Is Using Evernote →

Colin Donnell:

Besides Finder, Evernote is the only app I know of that you can really just throw anything at — PDFs, images, text notes — everything. And it’s not just that you can put everything into it, it’s that it treats most of those things the same way (through OCR), so that doing a text search is going to bring up results from all of the above.

That is indeed one of my favorite aspects of Evernote (which, last month, was also updated to support search inside iWork and Office documents). The other, as Sean said, is saved searches.

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Generational 031 →

Linked By Federico Viticci

In episode 031 of the Generational podcast, I was invited by Gabe and Erik to talk about my life in the past year, writing for MacStories, and how we pick the topics we cover here.

I believe it turned out to be a good episode. Go listen now.

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Designing An x-callback-url Action With x-cancel Parameter →

Linked By Federico Viticci

When we design an x-callback-url action, we tend to focus on the x-success parameter because we want to get more things done. Yet, when we use these actions, especially the ones that involve two or more chained actions, sometimes we feel the need to cancel the first task and either return to the original app or continue with the second task. Either way, based on our most frequent use cases, we may need to revisit these chained actions and redesign them to include the x-cancel parameter.

Great point by Eric Pramono.

In my articles, I tend to omit x-cancel or only mention it in passing. But it’s essential if you want URL scheme-based workflows to fail gracefully.

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The Cost of Launching a Mobile Game →

Linked By Federico Viticci

Edge:

This is in no way atypical for some of the more successful game developers, and all of that is done in hopes that the new games get featured on a variety of app stores, causing that oh-so-important spike in early sales.

The post refers to Jessica Lessin’s article on The Wall Street Journal about the launch of ZeptoLab’s latest game:

Overall, ZeptoLab says it will spend around $1 million launching “Cut the Rope: Time Travel,” which traces the adventures of the green monster Om Nom as he meets versions of himself in time periods like the Renaissance and the Middle Ages. On top of that sum, which includes the costs of animation, the company is counting on some free help by promoting the game inside its other titles.

After nearly five years, the App Store is a huge market and game developers are throwing big money at it. In ZeptoLab’s case, add the fact that the game has also launched on Android – it doesn’t always happen, though – and you understand why large companies are capitalizing on the installed base of mobile devices.

There’s another side of the coin: indie developers with great ideas but limited budgets. Take this Polygon article about Ridiculous Fishing as an example:

We did everything…I literally didn’t sleep for three days before the launch, just working and making sure that every reviewer and every website and every person that I could send the game to had the game.

Different games, different needs. Vlambeer doesn’t have the same resources of ZeptoLab and they opted for a different pricing scheme.

Smaller indie developers aren’t “less important” than established, popular game companies: because of the freedom that generally comes with independent creation, indie games tend to explore concepts and game mechanics that larger studios are more skeptical about. With the rise and consolidation of app stores and digital delivery platforms, indie games have become a fundamental piece of any device’s catalogue. Ask Sony. Ask Nintendo. Take a look at Kickstarter, with well-funded game and hardware projects.

On our end of the spectrum, I’d say that Apple is doing a good job overall. The App Store’s front page is skewed towards free-to-play games from large studios and publishers, but, on the flip side, Apple has featured indie titles numerous times in the past, and it also differentiates between “big name publishers” and smaller titles in their curated sections.

And yet, for a successful Ridiculous Fishing, there are hundreds of indie games with solid, original ideas that don’t get the recognition they’d deserve, either for a lack on the developer’s side (poor marketing skills is a common culprit) or an obvious inability to get noticed on the App Store. Other times it’s because the market is simply saturated, but, again, indie games tend to innovate and explore new ideas.

There’s a variety of improvements Apple itself could consider to help indie game (and app) developers, many of which I elaborated upon last year. Let developers offer videos alongside screenshots for those game/experiences that are hard to grasp in a couple of images; give more prominence to human curation and weekly sections; protect game makers against scams and rip-offs that are still far too present on the App Store.

Launching mobile games is expensive, especially for large companies. I hope Apple will keep working on finding the right balance between “big name games” and indie gems on the App Store.

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The Market for Paid iOS Apps →

Linked By Federico Viticci

Marco Arment:

I haven’t always used these particular apps to solve these problems, but it takes a lot to change my mind on one. If you make another RSS reader or Twitter client, there are certainly a lot of people who could use it, but you’ll need to compete with very mature, established apps. Competing in these categories isn’t about price: it’s about relevance and attention. If you can’t find enough customers here, it’s probably not because you’re charging $2.99 instead of $1.99 or $0 — it’s because your app isn’t convincing enough people that it’s worth using over the alternatives.

This is also the same problem I run into every time I’m sent new apps to review: is this going to be better than Tweetbot, Fantastical, or Drafts for my workflow? Should my readers know about this app even if I won’t use it every day? How do I balance the expectations of my readers, who want to know about new apps, with my personal opinions and workflow preferences?

I’ve thought deeply about this, and I concluded that, ultimately, my readers prefer honesty over quantity of mediocre app discoveries. When a new app comes around and it improves substantially on my workflow, they deserve to know about it. From my perspective, I have chosen to remain curious while having high standards for the apps I’m interested in.

From a developer’s standpoint, I agree with Marco’s article. The 2013 app market is fine if you have the right idea, executed well at the right time. In four years of writing this site – it was launched 9 months after the App Store – I’ve learnt this: people like new apps, but they expect a certain degree of quality and functionality from modern iOS apps.

Again, like Marco says, the bar is higher today. But it doesn’t mean developers can’t still raise it.

Today, the App Store has other problems.

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iPad and MacBook Running Nintendo DS Game with OpenEmu →

Linked By Federico Viticci

Cool demonstration of the capabilities of OpenEmu for OS X using the iPad as a second monitor. (via)

I’m looking forward to OpenEmu, which is still in private beta (though you can compile the source). I haven’t played my old GameBoy and SNES games in years, but, in the light of recent Nintendo announcements, I’d like to play them on a computer today. OpenEmu is promising:

Open Emu is an open source project to bring game emulation to OS X as a first class citizen, leveraging modern OS X technologies such as Cocoa, Core Animation and Quartz, and 3rd party libraries like Sparkle for auto-updating. Open Emu is based on a modular architecture, allowing for game-engine plugins, this means Open Emu can support a host of different emulation engines and back-ends while retaining a familiar OS X native front-end.

From what I’ve seen so far, OpenEmu will support both hardware controllers (with lots of configuration options) and software solutions like Joypad (which we reviewed).

Matt Gemmell had an excellent article a while back on playing Nintendo games on a Mac, with lots of great photos as well.

Update: In case it wasn’t clear enough, we don’t condone piracy here at MacStories. Either for apps or games, don’t be greedy. Support developers and buy original games. As Matt also says, most second-hand consoles and games are cheap on eBay these days.

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Iconic Bites by Susan Kare →

Linked By Federico Viticci

Recognizable to almost anyone who has used a computer, Susan’s art helped make early computers user-friendly and fun and bridged the divide between humans and modern technology. Here she talks to us about how her rich experience as an illustrator has colored her designs for the Path Shop.

I don’t use Path, I don’t get the appeal of this recent “stickers” trend in social networking apps, but these show that Susan Kare’s still got it.

For more Susan Kare-related reading, I recommend this article from late 2011 and this page on Susan’s website. I’ve always liked this quote from a 1996 interview with The New York Times:

I tend to think of icons more like traffic signs than as illustrations. It’s much more successful if it is simple.

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The Floating-Over-Everything Button →

Linked By Federico Viticci

Dan Frommer:

And it feels a bit more futuristic than the old nav-bars-of-square-buttons, in a Minority Report/Google Glass sort of way. Eventually, there might be a bunch of buttons hovering over our field of vision, on our car windshields, eyeglasses, wherever. This simulates that heads-up display effect.

Design trends come and go: some of them stick around, others are popular for a while but then slowly disappear as designers figure out better solutions. Remember when, after Instagram 1.0, dozens of apps started using large buttons in the middle of a toolbar? Or when pull-to-refresh could be seen in all sorts of designs?

Trends subside with time: new ones come out and gain traction, old ones re-surface with refreshed implementations. In the past few months, there seems to be a comeback of fun, entertaining pull-to-refresh animations after Apple’s default take with iOS 6. Two examples: Twitterrific 5 and the just-released Twitter Music.

The iOS ecosystem is now mature enough that we can recognize specific design patterns evolving and changing with time. I agree with Dan’s conclusion.

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Slugline →

Linked By Federico Viticci

New screenwriting app for OS X by Stu Maschwitz. I like how Jonathan Poritsky briefly describes it:

Slugline allows you to write in Fountain while making your script look like a formatted screenplay. It’s like Final Draft without all the headaches. It’s magic. And since your documents are always in plain text, you can take them with you anywhere.

Fountain is, of course, the plain text syntax for writing screenplays inspired by John Gruber’s Markdown. I don’t write screenplays, but I’m aware of the alternatives that already exist on the market (namely, Final Draft). Slugline, from what I see, looks like a mix of FoldingText and traditional screenwriting software: it’s got automatic formatting of plain text for screenplay documents, deep OS X integrations, and a rich preview that, however, is still based on a plain text file. I also like the Outline view, which more Mac text editors should support. Plus, even John August seems to like this app.

Slugline is available for $39.99 on the Mac App Store. You can watch the promo video below.

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