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Four Years of App Store: Developers Weigh In On Search, Discovery, and Curation

“The App Store is a grand slam, with a staggering 10 million applications downloaded in just three days”. That’s how Apple co-founder and late CEO Steve Jobs saluted the launch of the company’s new storefront for iOS (née iPhone OS) applications on July 14, 2008. Almost four years and over 25 billion downloads later, the App Store has evolved into a brand that spans two platforms (iOS and OS X), three different iOS devices (iPhone, iPod touch, iPad), a variety of Macs, and that hosts over 600,000 apps from more than 200,000 registered developers. Albeit minimal in terms of revenue for a company that makes billions off iPhones and iPads, the App Store created a new economy that nurtures an ecosystem ultimately aimed at selling more devices, as well as showing consumers that, nowadays, software is revolutionizing the way they approach work, entertainment, and other personal tasks. In spite of its tremendous growth, however, little has been done to improve a basic premise of the App Store: finding new apps.

“Discovery and search has been a huge concern of mine for a long time”, said Craig Hockenberry, Principal at design and development studio The Iconfactory. Hockenberry and his team were among the first developers to support the App Store in 2008 with Twitterrific, a Twitter client for iPhone that has expanded to the iPad and Mac, with different versions available on the App Store and Mac App Store. In 2009, a year after the App Store launched, Hockenberry offered a series of suggestions to Apple in order to improve certain aspects of the App Store – namely, following early discussions with developers that decided to sell software on the “iTunes App Store”, he noted how there was “still much room for improvement” to turn the App Store into a viable and reliable business platform for developers who weren’t simply interested in experimenting with it.

Hockenberry’s “Year two” post still rings true today, in spite of the functionalities that Apple fixed, improved, or brought to the App Store in the past four years. For instance, Apple created a “New and Noteworthy” section on the homepage of the App Store that is refreshed on a weekly basis to showcase apps Apple deems worthy of attention; promotional codes, which Hockenberry listed as one of the tools that had helped them sell more products, were made available internationally in late 2010; either on print, its website, or YouTube, Apple has kept pushing ad campaigns to educate iOS and Mac users on the importance and convenience of the App Store.

The very motto that started the app revolution, however, didn’t meet an equal amount of attention by Apple in terms of improvements for the infrastructure behind it. As Hockenberry wrote in 2009, “it’s incredibly hard to find the “that” in “there’s an app for that.” Between keyword spamming and the sheer volume of choices in each category, customers can’t find what they want”.

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Everyme Launches Web App for Group Messaging, Improves iPhone App

Released in April exclusively on the iPhone, Everyme offered a new take on private messaging with groups by combining a clean design with a featured called “Magic Stories”, which allowed the app to automatically fetch important updates from other social networks, and bring them into Everyme. From my review:

Everyme is a private “network” of people, organized in circles, connected to other services. The distinction between “communication” and “sharing” will also define Everyme as a private network, or a messaging service going forward. Unlike most messaging solutions, Everyme could improve its “magic” aggregation and cross-service data collection to simplify organization for its users; unlike most social networks, Everyme could, say, think of something like Xobni’s contact history to provide better, more informative stats about the people you care about. It is an interesting scenario, and I look forward to Everyme’s next steps; today, I don’t think Everyme can be compared to Path — as some are already doing — as the focus is clearly on group messaging, whereas Path has taken a more elegant, Facebook-like approach with its digital journal.

Today, Everyme begins its expansion onto other platforms and connected services by releasing an Android app, web access, and an improved iPhone app with support for Instagram, better communication within groups, and more. I have been able to test the new Everyme for iPhone, and while I am still looking forward to a native iPad version (most of my iMessages these days are sent from the iPad), I have enjoyed the changes brought to version 1.5.

The most visible change in Everyme 1.5 is support for photo uploads with Instagram-like filters. Similarly to how Path for iPhone lets you preview filtered photos as you take them, Everyme 1.5 puts a filter bar at the top of the screen, enabling you to see how a picture will look like with Vintage, Hipster, Pro, Adams, or Sepia effects applied. I didn’t find Everyme’s filters to be as attractive and fun to use as Instagram’s, but I do think they are better than Path’s somewhat curious choices. Photo uploads are generally faster in Everyme 1.5, and because not everyone will want to add yet another filter-based photo sharing tool to their workflows, the team added support for Instagram into the app. With an additional login option in the Settings, Everyme can now look for activity in your Instagram account, and populate your Circles with Magic Stories coming from Instagram as well.

Other minor, yet welcome improvements have found their way into Everyme 1.5. When you share links, for instance, the app now embeds summaries inline to give others an idea of what they are about to click on (Everyme features a built-in browser for webpages); users can now create and edit their own bios, and comments are displayed inline within the news feed. Comments can be deleted with a swipe, and, speaking of gestures, Everyme 1.5 also comes with pull-to-refresh to update circles and stories. Overall, Everyme 1.5 appeared to be faster than version 1.0 in my tests, and I was happy to see a new “export data” option to request an export of all your data you shared on Everyme, and get it delivered via email.

Today, Everyme is also launching a web app to communicate with your Circles. Sporting a clean design similar to the iPhone app, the web app features a sidebar on the left listing all your circles, with unobtrusive notification badges for unread stories and messages; you can manage your profile and your Circles, share stories and upload pictures from your computer, and, overall, enjoy the basic Everyme experience from any modern web browser, which should come in handy for those times when an iPhone isn’t available, or to sift through multiple conversations at once with the convenience of a larger display. I haven’t been able to test the web app on the iPad’s Mobile Safari yet, but I assume it makes for a decent temporary solution until the Everyme team comes out with a native tablet client.

Everyme 1.5 is available for free on the App Store.

Justnotes is Simplenote’s Desktop Companion and a Little More

I already know what you’re thinking: “Justnotes looks a lot like nvALT.” You wouldn’t be wrong in thinking that Justnotes is visually reminiscient of Notational Velocity and its poweruser fork, nvALT, but it wouldn’t be fair to judge without getting hands on. I’d posit Justnotes as an alternative to TextEdit on OS X — it’s a container for creating, sorting, and archiving text files. Otherwise, Justnotes is simply the desktop counterpart to Simplenote… With a twist.

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Apple To Reject Mac Apps With “Hotkey Functionality” Starting June 1? [Updated]

According to TUAW, Apple will start rejecting Mac apps with “hotkey functionality” starting June 1, when the deadline for Sandboxing will become active for Mac App Store developers.

Apparently, Apple will allow hotkey apps that are already in the Mac App Store before June to offer only bug fixes. New apps and any apps that add features (i.e. non-bugfix releases) will not be allowed to support hotkeys.

TUAW has been told that Apple will be rejecting all apps with hotkey functionality starting June 1, regardless of whether the new features are hotkey related or not. Basically, if you’re developing one of those apps, an app that assumes you can still add hotkeys, don’t bother submitting it to the Mac App Store.

While TUAW doesn’t specifically mention any Mac app that would be subject to this new restriction, it is safe to assume that by “hotkey functionality” they mean desktop applications that allow users to set up keyboard shortcuts to activate other apps or system locations (such as Apptivate), or an app’s specific functionality (such as Alfred’s hotkey to show a search box, or OmniFocus’ hotkey-based Quick Entry panel).

I spoke to various developers of Mac apps with system-wide hotkey functionality, and they were unaware of the changes that Apple may begin to enforce on June 1. Currently, there is no mention of such specific change in the Mac App Store Review Guidelines (or Sandboxing FAQs), and the APIs used by the developers I contacted aren’t deprecated in the latest Mountain Lion Developer Preview, updated yesterday. Some developers told me Apple may have rejected some apps that registered hotkeys without a user’s explicit consent, but according to TUAW the issue is different, and related to the kind of control and experience that Apple wants on the Mac App Store, rather than technical limitations or APIs.

Initially pushed back from November 2011 to March 2012, and then again to June 1, 2012, Sandboxing for Mac apps has found a considerable amount of skepticism in the Apple developer community, as it would pose a threat to existing Mac apps that would have to rework their functionalities around the limitations of sandboxing.

As I wrote in February:

Sandboxing is a new technology in OS X Lion that limits the functionalities of Mac App Store applications to a list of “entitlements” that cover various areas of the operating system an app can access, such as networking, printing, or a user’s files. A sandboxed application would be unable to harm the system outside of its operational scope (managed by the entitlements), and this has caused some concerns as apps would lose access to the Mac’s entire filesystem, which is required by some functionalities of certain applications that aren’t necessary malicious or “compromised”. Similarly, inter-app communication would be a technical issue with sandboxing, as apps like TextExpander, Keyboard Maestro and CoverSutra — utilities that perform actions in the background without asking for user’s interaction in some cases (user-initiated actions can override the sandbox) — couldn’t get past the sandboxing requirement for the Mac App Store.

In the past months, a number of notable Mac developers have voiced their concerns in regards to sandboxing: Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software wrote that “to increase adoption, Apple should expand the current list of entitlements until it covers every reasonable behavior that users expect from Mac apps”; following his decision to stop selling Clipstart on the Mac App Store, Riverfold’s Manton Reece noted how, rather than playing “catch-up” with Apple to work around the list of entitlements for sandboxed apps, he’d prefer to keep selling his apps on his own website – something that the upcoming Mountain Lion will keep supporting thanks to GateKeeper.

Over at TUAW, Erica Sadun says we should say goodbye to “hotkeys, macro programs, end-user customization”. While I can’t confirm the kind of apps and “hotkey functionalities” that Apple has apparently already rejected or will start rejecting in two weeks (I’ve only seen some discussions about clipboard managers and keyboard shortcuts on the Mac Dev Forums), it would surely be unfortunate to lose software like Alfred, Apptivate, or Keyboard Maestro (just to name a few) to an updated Mac App Store policy. Erica Sadun refers to these hotkey-enabled apps as “all those great little hotkey shortcuts that used to let us bring an app to the forefront and do something”.

That sandboxing would be a technical issue for apps based on AppleScript technologies is nothing new; however, Apple also specifically asked developers to get in touch with the company if technical issues were preventing them from sandboxing an app, suggesting that the company was actively working on getting developers of existing great Mac software on board with sandboxing, without limitations. This week, the Pixelmator team updated their application with support for sandboxing; other developers of “power-user” applications like Keyboard Maestro, however, still haven’t found a proper way to work around sandboxing entitlements, going as far as writing “Keyboard Maestro requires access to other applications to perform your macros and so is not, and cannot, be sandboxed” on the app’s Mac App Store page.

According to Apple’s notice from February, developers of existing apps on the Mac App Store that are not sandboxed may still submit bug fix updates without sandboxing their apps. In theory, this should mean that apps like Alfred or Shortcuts (with hotkey functionality) or Keyboard Maestro (for general incompatibility) should stay on the Mac App Store as long as their developers don’t include new features, but only bug fixes for existing customers. But what’s going to happen when developers of hotkey-enabled apps or already-approved macro programs like KM will decide to update their apps with new features?

Just like in February, the future of sandboxing and Mac App Store apps is uncertain, but it’s looking worse if Apple really has decided to ban hotkey functionality – a common trait of keyboard-based software, such as Mac apps – from the Mac App Store. With the WWDC ‘12 scheduled to kick off 10 days after the proposed sandboxing deadline, here’s to hoping Apple will, once again, be more flexible, and offer third-party developers new ways to work around sandboxing – the Mac App Store deserves all kinds of OS X software, from simple single-purpose utilities, to more complex, power user-oriented applications.

Update: Throughout the day, several developers I spoke to confirmed my earlier reports that the APIs to implement global hotkeys and keyboard shortcuts haven’t been deprecated (not even in Mountain Lion), and aren’t going away any time soon. Two developers I spoke to, in particular, confirmed that recent updates to their Mac apps with “hotkey functionality” were approved without issues by Apple.

Furthermore, developers confirmed they couldn’t find any new mention of hotkey-related entitlements in today’s updated documentation for Gatekeeper and Sandboxing. So while more “complex” utilities like Keyboard Maestro and TextExpander may still have to find a way to work around Sandboxing, other apps that incorporate hotkey functionality – like OmniFocus, Alfred, or just about any app that offers a systemwide shortcut – should still be fine for the Mac App Store.

Lex Friedman at Macworld confirmed with his own sources that a ban for general “hotkey functionality” isn’t coming to the Mac App Store, writing that “so long as developers use Apple’s officially supported APIs to register systemwide global hotkeys, their apps will remain eligible for inclusion in the Mac App Store”.

Sparrow 1.6 for Mac Now Available, Adds POP Support, “True Unified Inbox”

The Sparrow team has been busy rolling out updates for its iPhone app, but a new version of their popular Mac email client is available today on the Mac App Store, and it adds a series of long-requested features and fixes. If you’re still running a POP account, for instance, Sparrow 1.6 will finally let you configure it – this is a functionality “Sparrow switchers” have been asking since day one, but it took the team a while to properly implement it alongside support for Gmail and regular IMAP. If you’re still rocking a Hotmail account via POP and have been looking for ways to get those emails into Sparrow, now’s the time to update.

Version 1.6, however, comes with other improvements and fixes to enhance the performances and overall stability of the app, as well as usability in some areas. A minor yet welcome change in my Sparrow workflow, for instance, is the new “Empty Spam” button that allows me to flush undesired messages with a single click.

Another small change, but a new “Inbox Zero” message now greets you when nothing else is awaiting reply in your inbox. It’s the little things.

Also in Sparrow 1.6, there is a “true unified inbox” that lets you navigate all your drafts, starred messages, and sent emails directly from your unified account. Among the other changes, the tab key in the composer view now lets you toggle down from ‘To’, ‘Subject’ to ‘From’; hitting Esc on Quick Reply will save a draft; and a new Shift-cmd-option-M shortcut toggles the Extended Sidebar (so you can easily switch to a Twitter-like layout with profile pictures and icons instead of labels).

Make sure to check out the Sparrow blog for a full list of fixes and improvements in 1.6. Sparrow for Mac continues to be a staff favorite here at MacStories for its clever combination of social features, intuitive gestures, and customization options, and for this update, the Sparrow team kindly donated 20 promo codes to MacStories readers. You can get Sparrow for Mac at $9.99 on the Mac App Store, or you can enter our giveaway and try to win one of the 20 copies up for grabs. Details below.

Sparrow for Mac Giveaway

To enter the giveaway, tweet the following message before 11.59 AM PDT (May  18th, tomorrow):

Win a copy of Sparrow for Mac on MacStories: http://mcstr.net/Jktamq

We will search Twitter.com for tweets and retweets and randomly pick up the winners. Make sure to follow @macstoriesnet on Twitter so we can get in touch with you once the giveaway is over. If you want to increase your odds of winning, you can also leave a comment to this post.

Winners will be announced on Saturday (May 19th). Good luck!

Due, the Super-Fast Reminder App for iOS, Now Available for the Mac

I remember the first time I heard about Phocus’ Due - John Gruber linked to it. After buying it, Due has always stayed on my iPhone. I’ve tried many similar apps, but Due has always been my go-to application. Due isn’t trying to compete with the larger, more involved GTD apps, so anyone can use it and learn to love it.

One of the most important features of Due has always been the auto snooze feature, as Calendar events and Reminders will show you something once, then vanish back into the OS. Due will continually remind you about something until you get it done, and that’s what I love about this app. I also love that each alert is customizable - need to delay it an hour, a day, or a few minutes? No problem! The timers are also fun and much better than the iOS Clock functions. I use several timers when I’m cooking or grilling, whether it’s flipping burgers or making homemade eggrolls. Due for iOS is a very popular reminder and timer application for iOS, available as a universal application that looks great (and is retina-ready) on both the iPhone and the iPad. We have covered Due several times before, but now it’s available for the Mac!

I was priviledged to help test this app from its inception and it’s been exciting seeing it evolve into the 1.0 release in the Mac App Store. The UI is very similar to the iOS counterpart, so the learning curve is very fast. It has those wonderful pinstripes and the pop-up windows look very nice. The icon is very slick - one of the best I have seen for a reminder application. Due for Mac (along with the iOS version) uses iCloud or Dropbox syncing so that all of your data is available no matter where you are. Set a timer on the Mac app, launch the iOS version so that changes can sync, then go outside. When the timer is up, your iPhone will alert you that it has expired. I prefer iCloud syncing as it is hard wired into the OS; in all my 1.0 testing, sync was fast and flawless.

Like all other versions, Due has natural time parsing which makes it a breeze to enter reminders. Type, “Make dinner reservations with wife at 10am tomorrow” and your reminder is set for 10 AM tomorrow. “Cancel Spotify and renew Rdio subscription in 1 month” and you get a buzz a month later. There are no awkward date pickers, nor rigid date and time format to follow.

As with the iOS versions, assignable alert sounds are available for the Mac. You can use louder and longer alerts for very important reminders, and softer ones for regular reminders.

Power users will love all of Due for Mac’s shortcuts. Don’t worry about using your trackpad - show or hide Due, create reminders, reschedule them, mark them complete, delete them - it’s all a keyboard shortcut away. Due for Mac also supports Growl notifications. If I had to comment about something that I’d like to see it would be a global hotkey to bring up Due no matter what you are doing, and I’d also like to see an optional menu bar icon.

Due is a very fast reminder and timer application. I’d like to think it’s Reminders on steroids. Due is $9.99 and available via the Mac App Store. The iCloud (Dropbox) sync is worth $10 alone and if you already have the universal iOS app, iCloud and Dropbox sync make Due for Mac a must buy. If you’re looking for a great reminder app to add to your arsenal, you can’t go wrong with any of Due’s weaponry. $15 will cover every one of your devices.

Flipboard’s Move From “Social Magazine” To “Internet Magazine”

Last night, Flipboard released a 1.9 update for its iPhone and iPad app that, among various fixes and new features, introduces one important addition to the social magazine: audio. As the company writes on their blog:

Our Content Guide is now chock-full of some of the best sounds we could find. We’ve launched new partnerships with NPR and PRI and scoured SoundCloud’s massive community of sound creators to bring you some of our favorites—artists like Snoop Dogg and Diplo; music labels like Atlantic Records and Ninja Tune; podcasts from The New Yorker and Slate; and segments from shows like Radiolab and Science Friday.

Right now, support for audio content is mainly implemented through SoundCloud, which received a new login option in the app’s settings, and NPR and PRI, which have agreed on a partnership with Flipboard to make content available in the app’s content guide, properly reformatted to fit Flipboard’s unique style and interactions. In Flipboard 1.9, support for audio means you can start playing a podcast featured in the content guide (such as TWiT or TNW Daily Dose) or any content available in your SoundCloud account, and go back to browsing links and photos as Flipboard can keep playing audio while you’re reading something else. The app will show up as an audio source in the iOS multitasking tray, and you can control audio playback from within the app itself too with a “note” icon in the upper toolbar (on iPhone) that will display a folder-like animation for viewing and pausing audio.

Looking back at Flipboard’s evolution over the past months, I think support for audio in version 1.9 is yet another example of how the company has been gradually and relentlessly drifting away from a system that simply aggregates “your social links” to embrace a broader vision that’s turning Flipboard into “an Internet magazine”, whether it’s social or not.

Flipboard started off as a neat app to give a magazine-like layout to links shared on Twitter and Facebook. Then came Google Reader, Flickr, and Instagram with more content types and visual previews. The company started announcing partnerships with publishers to display their content beautifully inside Flipboard, and with more content came an explosive growth that led to a re-imagined version 1.5, focused on showcasing “popular stories” and making more great content available to users through a content guide that wasn’t necessarily social – rather, it was aimed at letting users know that more content was available on Flipboard beyond their existing social accounts. After that, Flipboard released the long-awaited iPhone app, unifying accounts with over-the-air sync and bringing Cover Stories – a dedicated view for interesting and popular stories – over to the iPad app.

While still prominently “social” in the way it puts the focus on accounts and supported services, Flipboard has become perfectly usable and enjoyable even without necessarily configuring a Twitter or Facebook account. The company has put great effort on building a content guide that spans different countries, themes, content types, and publishers. Flipboard aggregates top content shared by Pocket, it collects the best things found on the Internet under the “Cool Curators” section, and, alongside the usual Tech and Business news, displays popular videos from YouTube, Vimeo, and even Colbert Report in a Video category. With version 1.9, audio has been brought into the mix.

The social component of Flipboard is still strong (version 1.9 also brings “related sections” for social networks, such as “tweets mentioning you”), but it hasn’t been the only way to enjoy Flipboard for quite some time, and this is more visible than ever in the latest update. Flipboard doesn’t simply create a personalized magazine out of content “being shared with me” anymore – it still does that, but at the same time, it allows me to find other great content that I wouldn’t have discovered otherwise.

More than a “social magazine”, the “Internet magazine” aggregates and reformats content that is also social, but not strictly so. Curation and APIs are keys here. Flipboard was already rumored to be considering support for movies and TV shows last year. Would it be too absurd to think the app will someday gain compatibility with Rdio and Spotify to let you find the best music from your favorite streaming service? How about YouTube and Vimeo, to let users also find videos that are bring shared in those social accounts? According to TechCrunch, “Flipboard will look into other ways it can do more with video”.

With social accounts, APIs, search, and curation, Flipboard has become more than a social magazine: it is restructuring Internet content for the screens of mobile devices with the help of a strong social counterpart.

Preview iOS Designs Instantly With Skala

A while ago I wrote a quick review about Screenshot Journal, a utility to archive and investigate iPhone and iPad screenshots on the go. It features a zooming capability of up to 400% to inspect single pixels in order to easily find design flaws, but to transfer those screenshots back and forth, I personally use Pastebot. As I recently found out, developer Bjango offers a kind of a mixture of these two worlds: Skala.

Skala is a tool for designers to easily check iPhone or iPad UI designs (or other creations like wallpapers, etc.) they made on their computers on the screen of iOS devices. Skala comes in two apps: Skala Preview on the Mac — which ironically features a 3D version of the feared OS X beachball as its icon — and Skala View on iOS. The latter obviously works on both the iPad and iPhone, but because the design is the same in both cases, I’m going to focus only on the iPhone version here. Read more