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Photos for OS X and Pros→

Serenity Caldwell on Apple’s new Photos app for OS X:

See, true professionals know what they like, and can seek it out from Apple’s programs or elsewhere. But new users? They don’t know what they like, or what they need. They don’t know what the difference between an aperture and shutter speed is, or why that’s important. They just want to be able to take good pictures and make them look good for Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, cards, you name it. They want it to be easy.

Bingo. I may be an “advanced user” of some aspects of iOS, but when it comes to photography I don’t understand half of the terminology involved with prosumer photo apps.

I don’t know what kind of precise improvements my photos need. But I know what I want from my photo app – the simple ability to take a picture and have a single copy on all my devices. This is why I could never get into the idea of “processing” my photos: a picture is either good or bad for me, and the basic editing tools in the Photos app for iOS are enough for my needs.

As I wrote before, iCloud Photo Library is shaping up to be exactly what I want from iOS and OS X for photo management and lightweight editing.

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Agents of Change→

A fantastic point in an editorial by Jason Snell for iMore:

There are plenty of other examples of Apple’s corporate culture and accepting the inevitability of change. I admire the way the company introduced the iPad with no fear about the possibility that it would cannibalize Mac sales. This was a lesson I learned during the early days of the web, when I was working for media companies focused on print: If you resist change out of fear that you’ll cannibalize your existing business, all you’ll be doing is allowing someone else to cannibalize your business instead of doing it yourself.

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Photos for Mac Coming with OS X 10.10.3→

Apple announced today that Photos for Mac, first showcased last year, will be included in Yosemite’s 10.10.3 update set to be released later this Spring. As previously explained, Photos for Mac will sync with iCloud Photo Library and replace iPhoto as the single place where users will be able to browse, organize, edit, and share their photos.

A few months ago, I took all my photos and put them into iCloud Photo Library. I’m talking about almost 9 years of photos stored in iCloud. The service (which costs me €0.99/month as everything is under 20 GB) has been working extremely well for me. Photos are available on all my devices and I like that I can take pictures on my phone, come home, and find everything on my iPad when I sit down.

I’m curious to see how Photos for Mac will integrate with the rest of the ecosystem and if performance will keep up. In the meantime, you can read hands-on impressions at The Verge, Re/Code, and Wired.

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Connected: The Microsoft of Ourselves→

To celebrate the show’s silver anniversary, the boys talk about Stephen’s shownote museum, Myke’s Mac Pro and Federico’s iPad Air 2.

This week’s Connected includes a discussion about Microsoft’s Outlook app for iOS and an addendum to my iPad story from yesterday. You can listen to the episode here.

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Tweetbot 2.0 for Mac Coming As Free Update→

Tapbots announced today that Tweetbot 2.0 for Mac will be released on Yosemite and it’ll be a free update for existing customers.

My preference on iOS these days may go to Twitter’s official app, but, on the desktop, Twitter for Mac is in a very sad state, whereas Tweetbot is a great client with tons of handy features. I’m curious to see if Tapbots will manage to add support for modern Twitter features, but, overall, the visual refresh is already looking good. Considering that it’ll be a free update, you can buy the app today from the Mac App Store, get your Twitter token in, and wait for the new version to launch.

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Why Every Photo Storage Startup Dies Or Gets Acquired→

Casey Newton on Picturelife selling to StreamNation:

No wonder people keep building superior services: it’s impossible to store your photos with Apple, or Google, or Amazon, and not imagine you could do it better. And the need grows larger every day. Last year, trend forecaster Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins estimated that we upload 1.8 billion photos to the internet a day, up from 500 million the year before. But while services like Picturelife have attracted thousands of paying customers — I’m one of them — they haven’t found enough to build a sustainable business.

I liked Picturelife. For a while, I used it to browse photos, even though I still kept a copy in Dropbox for backup.

These days, I’m using iCloud Photo Library, with no other backups or workflows involved. I pay €0.99/month for iCloud storage and all my pictures are on my iPhone, iPad, and iCloud.com. I realize that this is an unpopular choice – primarily because of iCloud’s not-so-great reputation – but the service has been working flawlessly for me and I like how I don’t have to think about managing it. It’s built right there into the Camera and Photos app and it demolished the need for a third-party photo app for me.

I hope this post won’t jinx it.

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Watch Apps and Tap Distance→

David Smith writes about changes to WatchKit Apple launched yesterday with the fifth beta of iOS 8.2:

In all my design work for my WatchKit apps the question that I keep asking is: How will this make my app more convenient to use? If I don’t have a good answer for that then I’m likely heading down the wrong path.

Watch apps shouldn’t try and be full blown apps, replicating the full functionality of their big-brother iPhone apps. Instead they should be sleek, svelte companions that take advantage of their immediate availability to their user. This leads me to the problem I’m so glad Apple has addressed. The tap distance required for the user to perform any action.

This, I hope, is how developers of the iPhone apps I use every day are thinking about Apple Watch. Making Watch apps that emphasize quick interactions in a natural and direct way instead of cramming iPhone apps into a small display.

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Realmac Launches Crowdfunding Campaign for Typed Blogging Platform→

Realmac Software (makers of Ember, Typed for Mac, Clear, and RapidWeaver) have launched a crowdfunding campaign for Typed.com, a blogging platform they’ve been building for the past few months. The highlights: it’ll support Markdown, multiple users and blogs, custom domains, and responsive designs out of the box.

As they explain the campaign page:

Most blogging software is clunky, with bloated writing tools that get in the way. Typed is different. Typed.com uses Markdown syntax for writing content, combined with a beautifully focused interface. It’s a joy to use.

We know a thing or two about building apps that have great user experiences: Typed.com is built by the same team that made Clear, the award winning to-do app for iOS and Mac.

This is an interesting new venture for Realmac and I hope it succeeds. I welcome innovation in blogging services with this kind of features and sustainable business model. You can back the project here and watch the video below.

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