Gmail 2.0: A Year Later

Despite Google’s persistence on adopting web views in an iOS frame, Gmail’s iOS app has been consistently improved since its inception. For the amount of ridicule Gmail for iOS has received, whether it be for its mobile web disguise or a lack of support for multiple accounts, it’d be a shame not to recognize some of the substantial improvements that have been made to the app. While I didn’t think Gmail was a great app, I didn’t think of it as a bad app, offering a native Gmail experience for account holders who want to take advantage of Google’s quick search capabilities, labels, and importance markers. On iOS, the main benefit is near instant notifications, something that Apple’s native Mail app can’t take advantage of unless Gmail is set up as an Exchange account. (And that notification sound? One of the best.)

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Evernote Business and Related Notes→

Related Notes

Related Notes


Today Evernote officially introduced Evernote Business, its new platform that comes with dedicated features for teams and organizations to get the most out of Evernote. Announced earlier this year, Evernote Business builds on the existing foundation of Evernote for regular customers, but it adds more storage, an admin console, Business Notebooks, and the Business Library, a way for members of a team to get direct access to a collection of notebooks.

The Business Library is a collection of selected Business Notebooks that are accessible to the entire organization. At Evernote, our Business Library includes everything from important HR documents to design assets to product schedules to media mentions. All employees have the ability to publish some of their Business Notebooks into the Business Library. Administrators have full control over the Business Library, and can further elevate notebooks into a Recommended set that they feel are particularly valuable to employees.

With Business, Evernote has updated its platform for the new type of accounts that, however, can still merge Personal Notebooks (which are private) with Business Notebooks, which are shared with members of an organization. There’s an admin FAQ and user FAQ available, and the Evernote native and web apps have been updated for compatibility with Evernote Business. The service starts at $10 per user per month, and for now it is available in seven countries. More details (including a video with CEO Phil Libin) are available on Evernote’s blog post.

As I tweeted this morning, however, a big change for me is the addition of Related Notes for both business and normal Premium accounts. As Evernote explains:

This is where things start getting magical. In the latest version of Evernote for Mac (coming soon to other platforms), as you type a new note or view an existing one, Related Notes will appear at the bottom of the note area. The more you type, the more contextually relevant the notes will become.

Essentially, Related Notes is a section that lives underneath the note panel showing up to three related notes. In my opinion, it is a great way to rediscover notes that you may have forgotten about. That has certainly been a problem with the way I use Evernote, because I tend to clip a lot of material from the web, and it often gets lost unless I access it on a regular basis. From what I’ve seen so far, Related Notes works surprisingly well in capturing existing notes about the same subject; I’d be interested in knowing what kind of algorithm Evernote is using here – whether they simply look at keywords or also consider location, tags, time stamps, and other metadata.

Related Notes are available in Evernote 5.0.2, released today for non-Mac App Store users.

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iTunes 11 Interface Innovations→

iTunes 11 Interface Innovations

I don’t use iTunes as my default media player on a daily basis. However, since the release of iTunes 11, mainly out of curiosity and to see my wish granted, I’ve forced myself to listen to some music and do some movie watching with it. I was considering a separate article, but Adam C. Engst perfectly summed up the issues I find myself having with iTunes 11:

In the end, it’s good to see Apple trying to extend interface concepts with all these new approaches in iTunes 11 and some, like the use of color and the new approach to application typography are welcome. But there’s a distinct lack of consistency and attention to discoverability that renders the single-window model and multifarious button menus less successful than they might be. I cringe at the thought of trying to help someone use iTunes 11 over the phone — it will be nearly impossible to describe the screen successfully and to walk someone through different actions if you can’t do so in person.

Overall, I believe iTunes 11 is an improvement. I like the expanded album view, the new Store’s consistency with iOS, the device popovers, and the MiniPlayer. But at the same time, as a non-power user of iTunes 11, I found it to be extremely complicated and confusing in other areas: the Done button to dismiss the device window, the separation of sections, views, devices, and Store buttons across the entire window, and the non-native sharing of the iTunes Store. And yes, even other inconsistencies such as the inability to go back to Apps view, the lack of visual hints for songs added to UpNext using the “+” button in the popovers, and the standalone Downloads window that should have probably worked like Safari’s.

It’s not that I don’t like iTunes 11: in fact, I do – overall. It’s that, even from my perspective, there’s a surprising lack of minutiae in the design of iTunes 11.

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Slogger and Day One Memories

Slogger is a fantastic script created by Brett Terpstra. With a bit of manual setup, Slogger can run on your Mac and, on a daily basis, pull entries from various Internet sources – such as Twitter and RSS – and put them into Day One automatically. It is a way to fill Day One with social updates for stuff that you write elsewhere. Brett is awesome, he’s working on new stuff for Slogger, and you should definitely check it out (and consider a donation) if you’re interested in its functionality.

I, however, have turned Slogger off a couple of weeks ago and removed the entries it created. This happened soon after the release of Day One with tags and search, which made me realize “automated logging” is not for me. Slogger was a placebo, not a medicine to let me write more. Somewhat intrigued by its scriptability and automation, I fell short of my own promise:

In twenty years, I’m not sure I’ll be able to remember the songs I like today, or the faces of people that I care about now. I don’t even know if I’ll be around in twenty years. But I do know that I want to do everything I can to make sure I can get there with my own memories. We are what we know. And I want to remember.

It took a while for me to realize I wasn’t fixing the right problem. Instead of making an effort to document memories I care about, I was passively watching another Internet pipe feeding a digital archive of my life with tweets, liked items, starred posts, and everything in between. Brett is awesome, but Slogger is not for me. At least not with the current version of Day One, because there’s no way to meaningfully separate “social entries” from “actually-written-by-me entries”. My wish is for Slogger to eventually mature into a standalone app for “social archiving”, separate from Day One.

I want my thoughts – not my stupid Twitter jokes – to be read by someone who, for some reason, will care about the life I had. There are several aspects of my digital life that I like to improve, but I won’t automate my memories.

Day One is a personal experience, and as such, I want it to be mine.

The Unarchiver AppleScript, iOS App, and Archive Browser

I have been using The Unarchiver for years now. It’s been listed in my Must-Have Mac Apps roundups, and I recommend it to every friend who, after switching from Windows to OS X, asks me about “WinRAR for Mac”. The Unarchiver is a powerful and simple extraction tool with support for multiple formats and a set of user preferences to configure in the Settings.

There have been some updates to The Unarchiver lately. The free Mac app, The Unarchiver, received initial AppleScript support with a dictionary that supports extraction and various options such as location of extracted files and originals. Whilst The Unarchiver is pretty straightforward in itself, AppleScript support means you’ll be able to put together automated workflows with loops, if conditions, and different settings than the app’s ones. More importantly, you’ll be able to extend The Unarchiver and make it communicate with other apps installed on your Mac (an example: automate downloads with Transmit and extract with The Unarchiver in AppleScript). Here’s a sample extraction script for the file currently selected in Finder:

tell application "Finder"
    set sel to the selection as text
    set the_file to POSIX path of sel
    
    tell application "The Unarchiver"
        if isRunningExtractions is false then
            unarchive the_file to Original with deleting Original
        end if
    end tell
end tell

Developer Dag Agren has also released a paid iOS app for The Unarchiver. Initially buggy, Dag has been busy improving it and making it more reliable on iOS 6. Called Archives, it is based on The Unarchiver, which means you’ll get support for a plethora of formats. The app lets you look inside archives and preview files before extracting them; you can open a file in other apps that support the format using Open In, you can save images to the Camera Roll, and check out advanced information for each file. I have found Archives to be particularly useful in previewing files from Mail or Safari. Archives is $1.99 on the App Store.

Last, inspired by Archives for iOS, Archive Browser for OS X is a paid version of The Unarchiver with support for browsing and previews before extraction. It supports Quick Look, and it’s $3.99 on the App Store.

The Daily Shuts Down→

The Daily Shuts Down

The Daily, one of the most discussed Apple-related rumors of late 2010 that turned out to be a poorly designed iPad-only magazine, is shutting down on December 15. AllThingsD reports, in fact, that parent company News Corp. will “cease standalone publication” of the app later this month. Technology and “assets” from The Daily will be folded into News Corp-owned The New York Post, a tabloid. News Corp.’s Murdoch was quoted in the press release:

From its launch, The Daily was a bold experiment in digital publishing and an amazing vehicle for innovation. Unfortunately, our experience was that we could not find a large enough audience quickly enough to convince us the business model was sustainable in the long-term. Therefore we will take the very best of what we have learned at The Daily and apply it to all our properties. Under the editorial leadership of Editor-in-Chief Col Allan and the business and digital leadership of Jesse, I know The New York Post will continue to grow and become stronger on the web, on mobile, and not least, the paper itself. I want to thank all of the journalists, digital and business professionals for the hard work they put into The Daily.

Quite a departure, unfortunately, from Murdoch’s original statements on the future of his venture:

The Daily is not a legacy brand moving from the print to the digital world. We have license to experiment. We believe The Daily will be the model for how stories are told.

Murdoch’s intent may have been noble enough to justify the effort, but The Daily – as an app – was flawed since the first issue. The interface was clunky and confusing; the app required large downloads, and, in just a matter of weeks, its readership substantially decreased, in spite of heavy promotions by News Corp, including a commercial that aired during the XLV Super Bowl.

The Daily was launched in early 2011 as part of Apple’s new subscription feature for App Store apps.

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Tips For Releasing and Marketing Your New App→

Tips For Releasing and Marketing Your New App

Good list of tips by Brett Terpstra that new developers should keep in mind for their app releases. I especially recommend the “What To Include” section:

Bloggers like links. It saves time when doing a quick mention and provides the material for deeper research if they decide it’s worth it. Include all of the most relevant links. Link to screenshots (don’t embed them) and your homepage or a press page.

A surprising amount of developers often forget to even mention their app’s name in emails we receive on a daily basis. Others mention it, but they don’t include a direct link to the App Store. Even worse, some developers send promo codes without mentioning their app’s name or direct link, so we can’t be sure what we’re being given, exactly.

From personal experience, I can say that having links to videos is also a huge plus. I’m not saying you should prepare dedicated videos for each blogger you’d like to try your app: I would suggest picking a few, and making screencasts with voiceover and picture-in-picture where you can explain the app, show how it works, and establish a different kind of indirect “eye contact” with the person on the other side of email. It takes time, but it’s worth the effort – especially if it’s the first time you’re promoting an app.

Read Brett’s excellent list of tips here.

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