As someone who primarily works on iOS, I won’t lie – I considered buying an Android device to see how customizing some parts of the user experience would benefit my workflow. The Services-like menu and improved document management framework seem like features that Apple should be inspired from instead of relying on the clumsy Open In menu.
Richard’s article offers a good, honest perspective that includes many of the reasons why I don’t want to switch to an Android device.
This week, Myke, Federico and Stephen re-visit iWork and product screenshots, then discuss the iPad Air and Everpix.
Also: our new Tumblr website. Get the episode here.
Brought to you by two excellent sponsors:
Ramp Champ was one of the first iPhone games I bought in 2009 after I got my iPhone 3GS. I remember spending hours with Ramp Champ trying to beat my records and get the highest scores – we’re talking about the days when you couldn’t buy Smurfs with In-App Purchases and he called the shots.
The Iconfactory then sold Ramp Champ, which is back today with a version 1.2 that adds Retina graphics and support for the 4-inch screen. I’ve been playing Ramp Champ after three years and I can gladly confirm that it’s still fun and powered by great graphics and sounds. As reported by TouchArcade, Ramp Champ 2 is in the works under the new owner Seven Gun Games.
Ramp Champ is an App Store classic – and it’s a free update if you bought the original app in 2009. If you’re not familiar with the game, make sure to read Louie Mantia’s original design article.
Nathan Barry and Jeremy Olson have released the iOS 7 edition of The App Design Handbook, a fantastic guide for anyone who’s interested in iOS app development but doesn’t know where to look or how to start. I have read the book today – even if you’ve been working with iOS for a while, Nathan and Jeremy explain iOS 7 with practical examples and why the changes the OS brings aren’t just cosmetic (or “flat”). The style of the book is informative and concise and several aspects of app planning, design, development, and marketing are covered. I’ve known Jeremy for years, and he knows how to make good apps, pitch them, and turn them into financial and personal successes. These guys know what they’re talking about.
What I like is that you can choose between various options for purchase, starting from the standalone book to the $199 package that comes with 9 interviews with folks like Mark Kawano and Marc Edwards, 9 video tutorials, and 5 resources for app design and development.
With the holidays coming up, The App Design Handbook makes for a great gift to friends or relatives who think they have a potentially good idea but don’t know how to turn it into a successful app. Nathan and Jeremy did a great job and you can buy the book here.
Apple responds to iWork criticism:
The new iWork applications—Pages, Numbers, and Keynote—were released for Mac on October 22nd. These applications were rewritten from the ground up to be fully 64-bit and to support a unified file format between OS X and iOS 7 versions, as well as iWork for iCloud beta.
These apps feature an all-new design with an intelligent format panel and many new features such as easy ways to share documents, Apple-designed styles for objects, interactive charts, new templates, and new animations in Keynote.
In rewriting these applications, some features from iWork ’09 were not available for the initial release. We plan to reintroduce some of these features in the next few releases and will continue to add brand new features on an ongoing basis.
I’m glad I didn’t believe Apple was a company that didn’t care about advanced users anymore (as the narrative goes in some corners of the Internet these days). I still think that Apple should avoid this kind of software launches (no criticism is better than criticism, after all), but I’ll take promised features over nothing. If Apple can’t afford to ship more complete rewrites on day one (and it’s not like Apple didn’t think this would happen), being communicative about future changes is obviously better than silence (and we have plenty of precedents).
AppleScript “improvements” have been announced for Numbers and Keynote, but not for Pages (who’s going to tell Pierre Igot?). Seems like a curious omission.
From the Everpix blog:
It’s frustrating (to say the least) that we cannot continue to work on Everpix. We were unable to secure sufficient funding in order to properly scale the business, and our endeavors to find a new home for Everpix did not come to pass. At this point, we have no other options but to discontinue the service.
I’m sad that Everpix is going away. For a very long time, I debated whether Everpix was worth trying out: the service looked good, and I was only hearing great things from happy customers. So after the discussion we had with Bradley on The Prompt, I signed up, imported seven years of photos, and then paid the annual membership to support Everpix and unlock all features.
I’m not disappointed about the money (Everpix says that all paying customers will be refunded) – I’m just sad that an amazing service is going away because they couldn’t figure out a business model. Everpix was fantastic: photos were grouped by year and pulled from a variety of sources like Instagram and even Messages for OS X automatically. The Flashback feature showed me each morning photos that I took on the same day years ago. They weren’t always the most pleasant memories, but they were my memories, and as such they were cherished. That part – the magic of this software going away – is what saddens me as a user, not just as a customer. I genuinely loved what Everpix was doing.
If there’s a lesson to be taken away, it’s that building great products doesn’t equal building solid businesses. It’s a harsh reality and it’s applicable to any kind of entrepreneurial endeavor – the product that you love crafting for yourself (as Everpix did) doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve created a sustainable business. The Verge has a good story about Everpix, and I’d like to highlight this bit:
The founders acknowledge they made mistakes along the way. They spent too much time on the product and not enough time on growth and distribution. The first pitch deck they put together for investors was mediocre. They began marketing too late. They failed to effectively position themselves against giants like Apple and Google, who offer fairly robust — and mostly free — Everpix alternatives. And while the product wasn’t particularly difficult to use, it did have a learning curve and required a commitment to entrust an unknown startup with your life’s memories — a hard sell that Everpix never got around to making much easier.
Rimer put it a bit differently: “Having a great product is not the only thing that ultimately makes a company successful.”
I loved my three weeks of Everpix. It would be great to see an open-source version of its engine, or perhaps Apple taking everything that made Everpix great (including its team) and using it for the ridiculous mess that is iPhoto (and Photo Stream).
I don’t know if I’ll have the energy to fall in love with another third-party photo service any time soon. I’m just glad that I never stopped backing up my JPEGs.
Our thanks to Doxie for sponsoring MacStories this week.
Doxie Go is the tiny, rechargeable mobile paper scanner that scans anywhere with no computer required. Scan paper, receipts, and cards, then sync to Doxie’s elegant Mac software.
Doxie makes it easy to go paperless, create searchable PDFs with integrated ABBYY FineReader OCR, and send scans to your favorite Mac and cloud apps – Dropbox, Evernote, and more.
It’s time to finally go paperless. Get your new Doxie Go direct from Doxie, from Amazon.com in the USA, or from Amazon.co.uk in Europe.
Federico’s note: I have two Doxie scanners at home and my family and I have been using them for almost two years to scan important work/health-related documents and old photographs. I like the Doxie scanners because they produce higher-quality scans than what you’d normally get with an iPhone’s camera, but they’re portable and they don’t require much desk space.
I was really excited when Apple announced to add tag support to Finder with OS X 10.9 Mavericks. But after installing the OS update and playing with the new tag feature, I was a bit disappointed on how the feature was implemented. There was neither a command line utility to manage tags nor was there a way to do this with AppleScript. – At least, I did not find a proper solution. So, to add/remove tags to/from a file or folder one had to open the info dialog (⌘+I) and modify the tags in the new input field at the top.
Good work by Marko Kästner. Mavericks’ Finder can be slow at searching or adding tags for power users; Marko’s workflow is nicely integrated with Alfred and it can be activated with a keyboard shortcut.
On last week’s episode of The Prompt, Federico went off on a rant about ugly iOS screenshots. He wasn’t complaining about the apps themselves being ugly, he was chastising those of us who post screenshots with status bars showing inconsistent times, signal strengths, and battery levels. And Lord help you if your battery icon is in the red.
His recommendation was Status Magic, a Mac app that cleans up the status bars in your iOS screenshots and makes them uniform. It looks like a nice app, but my thoughts gravitated toward a script using the Python Imaging Library. Why would I write a script when an inexpensive app is available?
Fixing iOS status bars is one of the reasons I need to use my Mac with Status Magic because there is no similar app on iOS. I am playing around with Dr. Drang’s script, which can be easily adapted to Pythonista and integrated with the app’s photos module for Camera Roll integration. Putting together status bar replacement images that match Apple’s ones is a bit of work (it’s tricky to get the fonts right, but now I’m trying this) and they won’t produce good results with blurred status bars, but those are the same inconveniences that iOS 7 brought to Status Magic anyway.
I’m looking forward to seeing what tweaks and improvements the Doctor will make to his script. Once I have a good solution for Pythonista (which I already use to combine screenshots on iOS), my iOS writing and editing workflow for text and screenshots will be largely similar to the OS X one (I still need a good uploader for Cloud Files and an iOS version of this).
