This week, people are nose tapping, Dropbox is sunsetting and Myke is colo(u)ring.
Also on this week’s Connected, a discussion on Slack and how we’re using it at MacStories (where the title comes from). You can listen here.
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With a blog post published today, Evernote has announced they’ll end support for various versions of Skitch (including iOS), Clearly, and Evernote for Pebble. Skitch for Mac will continue to receive support.
Specifically this means that as of today, we will no longer be making updates to these apps and as of January 22, they’ll no longer be available for download.
If you currently use any of these apps, you’ll find that they may continue to work for some time beyond January. We are not turning these apps “off,” but external changes like updates to your operating system or browser may break features or functionality at any point in the future.
The discontinuation of Skitch for iOS doesn’t come as a surprise: Evernote has been discontinuing other apps to put more focus on the main product; many of the dedicated Skitch functionalities are also available in the Evernote app; and, Evernote had left Skitch for iOS languishing anyway. Evernote acquired Skitch in August 2011.
Fortunately, there are plenty of options for quick image annotations on iOS these days. Personally, I recommend Pinpoint and PointOut.
This morning, Apple announced some major changes to its executive team:
Apple today announced that Jeff Williams has been named chief operating officer and Johny Srouji is joining Apple’s executive team as senior vice president for Hardware Technologies. Phil Schiller, senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing, will expand his role to include leadership of the revolutionary App Store across all Apple platforms. Apple also announced that Tor Myhren will join Apple in the first calendar quarter of 2016 as vice president of Marketing Communications, reporting to CEO Tim Cook.
Jeff Williams has been with the company since 1998 and has overseen the entire supply chain since 2010. Johny Srouji joined Apple in 2008 to lead the development of the A4, the company’s first system on a chip.
Also of note, Phil Schiller is now taking additional responsibilities for the App Store:
Cook continued, “In addition, Phil is taking on new responsibilities for advancing our ecosystem, led by the App Store, which has grown from a single, groundbreaking iOS store into four powerful platforms and an increasingly important part of our business. And I’m incredibly happy to welcome Tor Myhren, who will bring his creative talents to our advertising and marcom functions.”
And:
With added responsibility for the App Store, Phil Schiller will focus on strategies to extend the ecosystem Apple customers have come to love when using their iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV. Phil now leads nearly all developer-related functions at Apple, in addition to his other marketing responsibilities including Worldwide Product Marketing, international marketing, education and business marketing. More than 11 million developers around the world create apps for Apple’s four software platforms — iOS, OS X, watchOS and tvOS — as well as compatible hardware and other accessories, and customers have downloaded more than 100 billion apps across those platforms.
The App Store has long been criticized by the developer community for lacking proper accountability and a public figure in charge of the platform. It’ll be interesting to see how the App Store platforms will evolve and adapt following Schiller’s extended role.
Riccardo Mori:
From Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard onwards, while the Spotlight menu and find-as-you-type list of results on the upper right corner of the desktop remained essentially unchanged, this neatly organised window disappeared, and the Show All option simply triggered a new Finder window with the search results amassed in an unorganised fashion. If you didn’t find what you were looking for in the first results Spotlight displayed from the Search menu on the top right, you’d have to perform more organised searches with various filters and criteria directly from a Finder window. But the overall approach was less clean and clear than under Mac OS X Tiger. On the other hand, Spotlight got better as an app launcher and new features were introduced, like the ability to do quick calculations from the Spotlight search field itself.
When the Spotlight interface was finally redesigned with the release of Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite, it was great to see that Apple was revisiting that kind of search interface, with a panel front and centre, and with the results organised in categories in a similar way as it was under Tiger. Since I upgraded from Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks to 10.11 El Capitan avoiding Yosemite completely, I only started using this new Spotlight interface in recent times. And I have mixed feelings about it.
This is a terrific analysis of the behavior and design choices of Spotlight for OS X Tiger and the latest El Capitan. I agree with Riccardo – the organization of results in the original interface still looks better.
In July 2014, Apple and IBM announced a partnership which would see the two companies collaborate to deliver specialized enterprise apps. Today, the two have announced that they have produced more than 100 iOS apps, as Ariel Bogle of Mashable reports:
Katharyn White, vice president of the Apple and IBM partnership at IBM Global Business Services, told Mashable the company was excited to hit the 100 app milestone, but said the number was secondary to the achievement of having an impact across 14 industries and 65 individual professions, from travel to telecommunications and healthcare.
“It’s even more powerful to see these are coming through amazing use cases,” she said. “Whether nurses or insurance agents, manufacturing managers or retail shop workers.”
Although they’re not revealing total customer numbers, some of these specialized enterprise apps have been deployed by companies including Coca-Cola Amatil, Japan Post and Scandinavian Airlines. As Gartner analyst Van Baker told TechCrunch, the appeal of this partnership to enterprise customers is that it “combines the dominant enterprise device vendor with a dominant enterprise software vendor”.
In 2016, the Apple and IBM partnership aims to add more apps to the suite as well as more users, she said, but also to add value to existing apps as their analytics improve. IBM is also developing products to take advantage of the iPad Pro’s larger screen size and multi-tasking capabilities.
Casey Newton from the Verge, reporting on the new Slack App Directory and investment fund:
Slack is wrapping up a breakout year with a set of announcements designed to press its advantage as a next-generation productivity app. The team-communication app, which now has 2 million daily users and 570,000 paying customers, has established an $80 million fund to invest in companies who build Slack apps and other products that rely on integration with the company. (The fund is backed by Slack along with venture capital firms Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, Spark Growth, and Social + Capital.) Slack has also set up an “app directory” where administrators can browse the 150 integrations that are now available — Twitter, Dropbox, Trello, and Google Drive among them — and install them on their team’s Slack instance.
We use Slack behind the scenes at MacStories and really enjoy using it – out of all the group messaging services we’ve used, it’s easily the best. Part of what makes Slack so great is the way you can integrate third party apps and services with Slack, and as you might imagine, Federico has a lot of fun with that. Which is why this latest announcement from Slack is exciting to us. Slack integrations are now easier than ever to find with the Slack App Directory, and there’s now another incentive for companies and developers to build Slack integrations with the introduction of the investment fund.
If you want to learn more, be sure to read The Verge’s report, or alternatively the announcement on Slack’s official blog.
This week Federico and Myke wrap up some recent announcements from Nintendo and PlayStation.
Last week was a busy one for PlayStation and Final Fantasy VII fans. You can listen to Myke and I discussing the announcements here.
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Curtis Herbert has some wisdom for indie developers running a business:
What happens when the developer, designer, and the “evil” business/marketing person are all one in the same? You get a blog post out of it! Welcome to my inner struggles with Slopes as I’ve tried to turn it into a serious business.
Over the last few months I’ve learned that there is a need to compromise on some of my ideals. Well, compromise might not be the right word. I think some of the things that we think compromise our ideals actually don’t, when done right. I think as a designer / developer I was too quick to dismiss things I needed to implement to help my business be healthy just because of some preconceived “Apple would never do this” notion.
I would say that this applies to a lot of creative endeavors online. Many of us are fixated on ideals of elegance and perfectionism that aren’t healthy for the business, which ultimately results in failure to monetize and survive. A great product doesn’t sell by itself.
A month after the launch of the new Apple TV and associated App Store, the folks at appFigures have released some numbers on the TV apps available to users:
The long awaited Apple TV App Store opened about a month ago, and since we happen to be into apps that got us pretty excited. We started tracking the new store when it had just opened in late October, and have been keeping a close watch on its progress for a little over a month now. Armed with a database full of apps we set out to share some of the things we’re seeing.
These are some fascinating stats – I wasn’t expecting Education apps to be high in the list and, given Apple’s promotion during the Apple TV introduction, I imagined we’d see more Shopping apps.
With over 60% apps available for free and 85% of them priced between $0.99 and $2.99, it’ll be interesting to see what happens when and if some console games come to the platform.
