Posts in Linked

How Should Dropbox Respond To Google Drive’s Price Cut?→

Bradley Chambers writes about Dropbox and last week’s price cut for Google Drive:

Dropbox has been the king of the folder syncing hill for a few years now. Transporter is doing a end-run around on Dropbox by offering similar functionality with no monthly fees (and using onsite storage). Google is doing a full frontal assault with the price cut. Google is offering 100GB at 75% less than Dropbox at this time.

How does Dropbox respond? One thing they need is a great web presence. Dropbox’s web interface is for viewing, organizing, deleting, and viewing. With Google Drive, you can create and edit spreadsheets, presentations, and documents. Dropbox needs to add this feature, but they also need to provide more. What could they do without matching the price?

I think that Bradley’s proposed solutions make a lot of sense from a productivity standpoint, but I’ll add this: revamp the Photos product on the web and mobile apps. Last year, Dropbox launched a series of enhancements to make it easier to upload photos and share them, but the presentation options and management features still lack behind what dedicated solutions like Picturelife, Flickr, and even Google+ are providing (not to mention the defunct, beloved Everpix).

The Photos view on Dropbox is limited, and while it aggregrates photos from your account and organizes them chronologically, it doesn’t do much else. Dropbox is already storing user files and they’re way past the problem of scaling, so they shouldn’t run into the same issues of a startup like Everpix in terms of costs. If done right, photo backup and management with options to tag people, browse albums and locations, and easily share through Dropbox with family members could become an important part of the Dropbox product, if only because photos are personal, people care about them, and clearly no one has solved the photo problem yet – not Apple, not Flickr, and not Loom or Picturelife yet. Dropbox may not cut prices as much as Google, but a terrific Photos product could add a lot of value to the service.

Could Dropbox “fix” photo backup and management this year, or do they feel like Apple and Google will eventually get it just right (especially Apple, which is in an extremely sorry state of confusing Photo Stream affairs these days). Or does Dropbox prefer focusing on productivity features such as the ones Bradley imagines? Could they do both?

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iCloud Tabs In Google Chrome For Mac→

Two weeks ago, I covered CloudyTabs, a free Mac app to access Safari’s iCloud Tabs from the OS X menu bar. For those who wished to have a more integrated solution for Google Chrome on the Mac, Thundercloud is a simple extension that, like CloudyTabs, reads Safari’s iCloud Tabs and puts them in a popover. There are a couple of configuration steps to get the extension to work with Chrome, but they’re explained upon installation and they’re easy to follow.

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Wearing Apple→

First, let’s look at the market for quality timepieces; ones that you’d be proud to wear on your wrist. It’s dominated by companies with centuries of experience. It’s also a high-end market: spending a few thousand dollars on a nice watch is chump change. You’re buying a work of art.

Apple certainly has great designers, but they’re going to be competing against craftsmen who’ve been refining their craft since the 15th century.

Craig Hockenberry makes an interesting case for a wearable device by Apple that isn’t a watch.

We discussed the importance of the fashion aspect for wearables on The Prompt, and I believe that it’s often overlooked by the tech press. I don’t know if Apple’s focus will be on health and fitness tracking or using the wearable’s sensors for notifications and inter-device communication (maybe all of them?), but I think it’s obvious that it has to look good – and be “incredible”, as Cook said – to be considered by young customers.

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How Apple is Quelling Motion Sickness and Making iOS More Accessible with iOS 7.1→

For The Guardian, Craig Grannell writes about many of Apple’s new animations for iOS 7.1, and what that means for people who previously got motion sick. While iOS 7 had lots of nice visual touches, bouncy animations and parallax effects made some customers feel physically ill when using their iPhone. In addition to numerous visual changes that aim to reduce physical illness in iOS 7.1, Apple has also been hard at work making iOS even more accessible by reintroducing button hints.

Josh de Lioncourt at Macworld also runs through some new additions in accessibility that should help those with low-vision or motor impairments. For example, the camera button can be turned into a switch that turns on head tracking, reducing the need for a separate device.

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Keyboard Shortcuts For iOS 7 Apps→

In early January, after collecting keyboard shortcuts for Apple apps and system features in iOS 7, I created a dedicated page for keyboard shortcuts in third-party iOS 7 apps.

I’ve been tweaking and updating the page for the past three months, and it now includes 20 apps that have implemented keyboard shortcuts. The page has a custom sub-domain at ios-shortcuts.macstories.net, and it comes with an index of apps at the top to easily see supported apps and click to instantly jump to a specific one. Each app has links to iTunes, website, and additional documentation if available.

If you’ve developed an iOS app with external keyboard integration, let me know on Twitter or over email and I’ll add it to the list. Check out the page here.

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Edge On Apple’s iOS Gaming Revolution→

Much has changed in the two years since we called Apple “the hottest property in handheld gaming” and said that the company had “changed the videogame industry irrevocably”. Between E236 and today, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs has passed away, iPhone 5 has launched and bifurcated, Game Center’s poker-table felt has been torn off in favour of a spartan interface, and a wave of licensed iOS controllers has reached the market, drawing iPhones and iPads closer to the traditional world of videogame hardware. In other respects, though, nothing is different – Apple seems no closer to infiltrating the home console business through its set-top box, for example.

But crucially – at least for the people who have seen iOS platforms become integral parts of their gaming lives – it feels like the potential we saw in Apple’s devices to become a disruptive force has dissipated. Where we once saw a promising new marketplace of fresh ideas, unrestricted creativity, and daring new ways to play, the App Store of 2014 is swamped with cash-guzzling junk, shameless knockoffs and predictable sequels. Games worth discovering still exist, but they mostly dwell on the fringes and in the shadows, while endless horror stories suggest that paid-for games are simply no longer profitable and are dying out. What happened to the iOS gaming revolution?

Great story by Edge on the state of iOS gaming, free-to-play, App Store charts, and indie development in the age of freemium and Clash of Clans.

Time will tell whether the App Store can still accommodate developers who arguably make better games than the stuff that’s in the top charts or that Apple features. There’s hope, and I want to believe that somebody at Apple is reading Edge’s piece and wondering how they can make the App Store a better place for game creators who are not King or Supercell. Reducing the visibility of the Top Grossing chart and allowing games that cover political/religious/controversial themes would be a good start and an encouraging signal.

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Luggage Tracking With iBeacon→

Travel Radar is a new iPhone app that lets you track your luggage using iBeacons. By measuring approximate distance from the beacon to your iPhone, Travel Radar can fire off a notification when your luggage is nearby, allowing you to easily identify it and pick it up. The app can track up to two pieces of luggage within 20 meters, and it’s $1.99 on the App Store.

iBeacons seem perfect for this kind of short-range smart tracking, which has gotten better with iOS 7.1. The developers of Travel Radar have detailed a few options for consumer beacons in a blog post – they recommend the Estimote Beacons, which I’ve also been considering to tinker at home with a few ideas I have (see this).

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Next Angry Birds Game To Be Turn-Based RPG→

According to Kotaku, the next Angry Birds game is going to be a turn-based RPG called Angry Birds Epic. The game will soft-launch in Australia and Canada (so that Rovio will have time to gather feedback from a smaller audience and tweak the game before a general release) and it will have a crafting system.

Considering what Rovio did with another genre spin-off, Angry Birds Go, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a lot of In-App Purchases for casting spells, summons, or getting more powerful equipment and items for crafting. IAPs were overused in Go, so I’m a bit skeptical about Epic.

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