Posts in Linked

Apple Restricting Special Characters In App Descriptions→

Mikey Campbell:

As seen in the image above, Apple is no longer allowing developers to submit app description edits with the unique character sets, which in this case includes a checkmark, explosion, “no symbol” and a speech bubble. It is thought that others are included in the new restrictions, but that has yet to be verified.

It appears that Apple has also started restricting usage of glyphs that aren’t necessarily emoji.

I would welcome a change to text-only release notes. While emoji and other characters can add a bit of fun and personality to otherwise boring release notes, some developers were overusing them.

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Twitterrific 5.2.1: Notification Badges, Favstar, Trends, and More→

Big update for Twitterrific today, including automatic theme changing based on local sunrise and sunset times, automatic timeline refreshing after posting a tweet or DM, and improved VoiceOver support. The list of updates is long, but the rest is comprised of bug fixes and various improvements.

By the way, if you’re looking for those Trends, they’re buried in Search under the Tweets tab. For Favstar, you’ll also have to turn on those links in the Settings under Other Services.

For more information on Twitterrific, be sure to read our earlier reviews.

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Dark Sky Launches Forecast Lines→

Another neat web app following the release of Forecast.io last month:

Forecast Lines shows you the forecast spread for each field (temperature, precipitation intensity, pressure, etc.), overlaid with our best guess of what will actually occur. It’s a simple idea, but a powerful one: at a glance, you can see what will happen over the course of the next week, and where we are most–and least–confident in our predictions.

Essentially, Lines looks like a consumer version of Forecast.io’s API raw data sources, which is also available here.

I’m a big fan of the Dark Sky team’s work with web apps and developer APIs for weather data. I can’t use the main Dark Sky app in Italy, but I am testing various third-party apps that are implementing Forecast.io and I’m impressed with their accuracy so far.

I like the idea of Lines’ statistically-aggregated graphs, and, unsurprisingly, the iOS web app is solid.

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Delicious Library 3 Announced→

MacRumors’ Arnold Kim published a preview of Delicious Monster’s upcoming Delicious Library 3, a major update to 2008’s Delicious Library 2. In version 3.0, the app will evolve from being a catalogue of the media you own to become a recommendation tool based on the products you own:

We’re centered on the idea of your books (movies, cds, whatever) being an aspect of your unique personality, and our app does neat things with your personal data—like give you cool graphic summaries, or really good composite recommendations.

I have been struggling in the past months to find a system to help me keep track of things I want  to buy. Initially, I set up a Pinterest board, but I ended up not liking the service’s focus on social and sharing; then, I started appending URLs to a text file in Dropbox, but I missed the richness of Pinterest’s image thumbnails. Right now, I’m  using Evernote with a mix of rich text and inline photos/screenshots, but the solution isn’t ideal (although I believe it’s better than what I was doing before).

I’m intrigued by Delicious Library’s new focus on recommendations. I look forward to trying the app’s engine and iOS version (with sync – I assume).

Make sure to read MacRumors’ post for more information and screenshots.

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

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→

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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