This Week's Sponsor:

Direct Mail

Professional Email Marketing Built Just for Mac Users

Clear: An Interview With Impending’s Phill Ryu

When Phill Ryu (MacHeist team member) emailed me a few days ago to give me a preview of his upcoming iPhone app, Clear, I immediately said “yes” and eagerly started waiting for a TestFlight email to hit my inbox. I know Phill: he has good taste in design, knows that I like great apps, and he’s an overall nice guy that I had gotten to work with multiple times in the past for MacHeist. Phill hinted at the particular nature of the app; yet when the beta came, I felt the kind of surprise and delight in using Clear I hadn’t experienced, I believe, since the original Tweetbot beta. Clear is one of those apps that redefine interaction schemes and navigation patterns: like Tweetie’s “pull-to-refresh” and Tweetbot’s “swipe-to-load” before it, I’m sure Clear’s gestures to move between lists and add new tasks will change the way developers imagine todo list apps.

Clear is a simple todo list app. Without spoiling too much now – you can check out the app’s webpage here, and promo video below – let me just say that the way Clear handles task creation, completion and list management has been uniquely and cleverly built around the iPhone’s screen and the way we can interact with our devices. In fact, I don’t think Clear would be possible on any other platform – when Clear comes out in the next few weeks, you’ll understand why you often hear of things such as “iPhone features the smoothest animations” or “fastest scrolling”. Everything in Clear is delightfully tappable, scrollable, responsive to your fingers with visual cues and sound effects. Yet it’s so simple. I’ll leave my thoughts about the app for a proper review.

What’s also intriguing about Clear, interface aside, is the team behind it. Take a look at the studio’s page: those who have been around long enough in the Apple Community will instantly recognize names like David Lanham and Dan Counsell; Impending’s webpage also reveals Ted Bradley, Jay Meistrich, Raphael Mun, Jeremy Grosser and Josh Mobley worked on Impending’s debut. Clear itself was co-created by Phill Ryu, Dan Counsell and Milen Dzhumerov. That was enough to trigger my curiosity radar, and ask Phill to sit down for a (virtual) coffee to discuss Impending and Clear.

Check out my interview with Phill Ryu and Clear’s promo video after the break. Read more

2012, The Next iPhone, And LTE

The iPhone 4S, released in October, was supposed to feature LTE connectivity, at least according to some of the rumors that were floating around at the time. The device turned out to feature faster 3G downloads at 14.4 Mbps through HSPDA, which is an enhanced version of the 3G protocol that has been around for a while, but still isn’t as widely adopted as you would expect from a technology that Apple decided to use in a major iPhone upgrade. In Italy, for instance, few areas have access to HSDPA, not to mention HSPA+.

(Note: although commonly referred to as “4G” the current revision of LTE doesn’t meet the requirements for 4G connectivity yet. The LTE Advanced standard does conform to 4G requirements, but it’s likely that you’ll see the term “LTE” associated with 4G simply because it’s a major leap forward in terms of wireless connectivity)

Now, the debate as to whether Apple should have made the 4S an LTE iPhone or should have an LTE iPhone 5 this year is making the rounds again. Unlike previous debates, fortunately this time we have someone who’s trying to make some sense out of this and cut through the haze of rumors and theories to point out that, actually, it wouldn’t make much sense business-wise for Apple to implement LTE in the near term. Why? Because of all those 37 million iPhones Apple has sold in the quarter that ended on December 31, very few of them were sold in areas where LTE is available. Read: the United States, some parts of Denmark and Sweden, some cities in Canada, and Saudi Arabia. The “4G” rollout in countries other than the US is a slow process, and the ones mentioned above have a very small percentage of their spectrum covered by active LTE networks – they’re basically in the middle of initial testing right now. And even in the US, Chris Foreman assumes that whilst the major carriers have all implemented LTE or will start relatively soon, only half of subscribers would be covered in 2012, thus reducing the potential addressable market to 15% of iPhone customers worldwide. Why would Apple make an LTE iPhone for 15% of its entire customer base?

According to fourth quarter 2011 results, AT&T activated 4.1 million iPhones, while Verizon activated 4.2 million. Sprint would not disclose the number of iPhones it activated last quarter, but we feel safe in assuming that number is less than 4 million. Assuming Sprint was able to activate (perhaps a generous) 2 million or so iPhones, only a little over a quarter of iPhones were sold in the US. The other three-quarters, then, are sold in areas with practically no LTE coverage.

It goes deeper. You might argue that, yes, Apple could make an exception because they have made some in the past. But the WiFi-less 3GS and camera-less iPhone 4S were necessary modifications to get these devices on sale, otherwise they wouldn’t have gotten regulatory approval. It’s not like Apple is forced to implement LTE, especially considering the enhanced 3G still isn’t as widely adopted as the company hopes.

The LTE iPhone is primarily the result of months of speculation and countless rumors based on nothing. No evidence. Perhaps a few code strings here and there, but then again – go trust those code references these days. For all we know, the LTE iPhone doesn’t exist.

Or does it? A popular counterargument I often get is that Apple experiments with all kinds of new technologies in their labs; they take a look at new specifications and standards, and consider whether they should be worth investing more research and development resources for possible future implementations. I get it, and it’s entirely plausible that Apple engineers have at least looked at current LTE chips utilized by several Android handsets. But I don’t know how far they may have gotten into actually testing these chips, if only for verification purposes, at the light of Cook’s multiple remarks in the past about concerns regarding the effects these chips have on battery life. Those bigger screens Android makers tout in their commercials might be a requirement, rather than a feature. But I digress.

Another popular theory is that new LTE chips by Qualcomm, a component supplier Apple is already using, should become available in the first half of this year and, based on published specifications, allow device makers to considerably cut down on battery usage and required space. These new chips are smaller, consume less power and are made by a company Apple already buys components from. The next iPhone will have LTE! Not so fast. Read more

Launch Center 1.1 Adds Scheduled Launch Actions

We reviewed App Cubby’s Launch Center when the app was released back in December after Apple rejected an initial version based on Notification Center. Even without fancy Notification Center integration, Launch Center has become one of my new favorite apps, earning a spot in my iPhone’s dock because of its greatest achievement: allowing me to save an unlimited number of shortcuts for actions that I repeat every day (such as calling my mom or iMessaging my team) in a single place. I’d argue that I even prefer Launch Center without Notification Center support as it’s more focused.

And today with version 1.1 it gets even better. Launch Center 1.o, in fact, allowed you to create shortcuts through custom URLs and activate them with a single tap. But you still had to remember you had to do something – you’ve got your nice action to call your dad, but what if you forget to call him? The shortcut becomes useless. Similarly, your iOS device comes with alarms, but you can’t associate actions to them; it’s easy to set an alarm in three hours for something “important”, and forget what it was all about. Launch Center’s new scheduled launch actions are a fantastic mix of shortcuts and alarms: you can now assign a custom alarm to each of your shortcuts. When the time comes, Launch Center will fire off a local iOS notification that will show up in Notification Center, and take you to the configured action…which will activate and call your dad with one tap, to finish the example above. It’s genius.

I use Launch Center every day and I can already see scheduled launch actions becoming an integral part of my workflow – imagine setting up alarms for emails, messages or just about any app you know you’re going to use at a certain point in time. Launch Center 1.1 combines the speed of custom URLs with local notifications to create smart alarms that have both context and the appropriate speed to feel immediate and intuitive.

Launch Center 1.1 is available in the App Store at $0.99.

Apple’s Results and Developers→

Apple’s Results and Developers

David Smith looks at yesterday’s Q1 2012 numbers from an indie developer’s perspective:

If you add up the combined resolutions of all iOS devices sold in this quarter you get 40,747,941,888,000 pixels. It takes 17 viewings of entire Star Wars Saga on Blu Ray to see that many pixels. (805 minutes x 24 fps x 1080p).

On a more serious note:

Apple paid out $700M to developers during this quarter. That is equivalent to 125 $0.99 apps being sold every second.

Hardware brings in the real money for Apple. But I think it’s safe to say that, at this point, it’s the software ecosystem and the developers that are convincing people to switch to iOS. I’d like to know: how much of those $700 comes from games?

Permalink

The Apple Community

I read this great piece by Stephen Hackett today, and while I was reading it I figured I’m often asked why I (and to an extent our team) do what I do every day. So here’s a brief explanation.

It’s about technology and getting to make a living out of writing for this community, the Apple community. Communities are made of people; in this case, the Apple community is made of developers, readers, fans of Apple devices, journalists, designers, PR guys – everyone who has at least some interest in following technology and the stuff Apple comes up with.

I don’t work for myself. I mean, sure, technically I do work for myself, but that’s not what gets me out of bed in the morning. I work for my readers. I work for the developers who come up with amazing solutions and ideas every day. I work for my team. Ultimately, I don’t work because I have to, but because it feels good to write about and for the Apple community.

“I do what I do” because I can provide for myself and my family thanks to what I love writing about – technology and software.

Because with the iPhone I have a world of information and data in my pocket; data that travels from a server who-knows-where in North Carolina, through a series of cables and pipes from the U.S to Italy, from another server to a cell tower, from a cell tower wirelessly to my device, and it turns into pixels I can see on a screen that, however, shows no pixels. When I stop to think about it, I still look at my iPhone with the amusement of a three year old kid seeing the night sky for the first time.

“I do what I do” because software is helping me make my life a little better. I can take photos and show them to my friends and archive them online. When I’m at the hospital, I can send text messages to my friends for free, in real-time, and feel good about knowing that someone on the other part of the screen is reading my words. With Rdio, I can listen to any song I want whenever I want, from any device I own, and tell my girlfriend she should check out the latest hit from Noel Gallagher. With Dropbox, I can write my articles on one device, pick them up again on another one, take a break and finish them up on a mobile phone that magically got the latest versions of those files over the air. Software is disrupting every industry it touches. I get to write about it, and even choose which app to use.

I write for the Apple community because in the past three years I got to know some amazingly talented and honest and caring people that, however, I’ve never met in “real life”. But isn’t this real life? What about having a team of four people around the world that greet you with “good morning buddy” every morning isn’t real? How could you exclude from real-life the works of developers who pour their souls into making a little piece of software – often just to make something work better for their customers – and are kind enough to tell you about it, in advance, with honest words and ready for any feedback you might have? Just because we haven’t shaken hands yet it doesn’t mean this, all this, isn’t real. Actual businesses are built every day on top of our community, ideas flourish and turn into projects with deadlines, projects that I will likely write about and share with other people that have decided to listen to what I have to say. The things we write, the feedback we give, the links we share – they do matter. Right now I’m writing this post on my iPad, in my living room, with my dad trying to understand how Gmail works. In a few minutes, these digital words will travel through a network, and end up on a website on a server somewhere in the United States. What’s not real about this, exactly?

“I do what I do” because I don’t think I’m better than anyone, but my words can make life slightly better for someone else. Maybe a developer who would really like to see his dream come true and hours of coding turned into an app anyone can see and use. Maybe a reader who needs help with his computer. Maybe someone who was having a bad day, but suddenly felt inspired in reading about Steve again. I don’t think the Apple Community is better than other circles of people who share a common interest. But I do believe we are better human beings because of it, because of what we decide to do to make even the smallest dent in the universe.

It’s easy to lose motivation though. Because the Internet allows for these kinds of communications that don’t require a physical confrontation or debate face-to-face, it’s easy to lose track of a conversation, misinterpret someone else’s words, or think a reader is “hating you”. Not that “online fights” and controversies aren’t real. They are very much so. But even when I’m reading about the latest Gruber-Thurrot (or anyone, really) blogging face-off, I like to think if they ever met “in real life” they would grab a beer together, look back at their “Internet fights” and say “Oh, screw it – what do you think of the latest iPhone?” with the enthusiasm of two people who are genuinely excited and passionate about technology.

Because, ultimately, it’s about the people. Even when we write about Google or Apple or Twitter and we imagine these big, faceless corporations in glass buildings “somewhere in California”, we’re actually writing about big corporations in glass buildings “somewhere in California”. But made of people. Of ideas. Of passion and genius and willingness to run a business successfully, to spread innovation and collaboration, to provide services that weren’t possible before. To show up every day because “it’s worth it”. Are tech companies greedy? Sure they are. But you have to believe there’s still a genuine, intact spark of passion in their core values. Otherwise they wouldn’t be here. Greediness alone doesn’t get you anywhere.

Which brings me back to the Apple Community. It’s easier to see what I’m talking about with the “smaller guys”, the indie developers and the bloggers. It’s easier to get to know them, work with them, maybe grab a beer with them and show them pictures of my kids someday, too.

And that’s why I do what I do.

Crunch: Extract & Preview Resources of iOS Apps

Those who design and develop for iOS know how useful it can be to take a peek inside an application’s resources and see how other developers and designers chose to structure an app. This can be done by locating an app’s .ipa file in the OS X Finder, select the “Show Package Contents” menu, and start exploring the contents of what would otherwise be a normally synced app on your iPhone or iPad. Folks who do this on a regular basis also know that, by default, OS X doesn’t “normalize” iOS .png images – application images are optimized so iOS can load them faster, but their format isn’t entirely compatible with the Mac’s Finder, Preview, or QuickLook. Crunch, a new app by Pragmatic Code, aims at solving this issue with .png images by providing a beautifully streamlined interface to take a look inside an app when needed.

Obviously, the contents of an application are subject to copyright, and upon first launch Crunch will warn you that you shouldn’t share or copy images from someone else. Taking a look, however, is not a crime, and Crunch absolutely delivers on its promise to enhance the way you can explore an app’s resources on your Mac. I believe any developer or designer who tries Crunch will never go back to old Finder hacks and scripts to extract and preview iOS resources.

Crunch is capable of automatically detecting apps from your iTunes library and filtering them by platform – iPhone, iPad, or Universal. Crunch will also install a QuickLook plugin, so you’ll be able to see each app’s icon overlaying the standard .ipa file preview in the Finder and QuickLook windows. Once you’ve selected an app, you can hit Export, and Crunch will ask you where you’d like to save an app’s resources, and if you’d like to keep all files with their existing folder hierarchy, or only Retina-ready @2x image files. The latter option can be particularly useful to pinpoint images ready for the rumored iPad 3’s Retina Display found inside several Apple apps for iOS.

As I mentioned above, images will be normalized when exported – but you’ll need to have Xcode installed as Crunch uses a tool provided by Xcode to revert the optimization and make a .png Mac-ready.

Crunch does one thing very well, and I’m sure it can become an invaluable tool for anyone who designs and develops for iOS and wants to “know more” about apps and how they’re created, at least from a graphical standpoint. Crunch is only $9 via Pragmatic Code’s website.

Smile’s PDFpen for iPad Is A Powerful 1.0 Version

Released last night on the App Store at $9.99, PDFpen for iPad brings Smile’s popular PDF editing and annotating tool to iPad owners, sporting features that take advantage of the native functionalities offered by iOS 5, such as full iCloud integration.

I have played with PDFpen for a few hours, and I have to say I am impressed by the amount of polish and options that went into this first release. Whilst you obviously won’t find all the tools and menus from apps like Readdle’s PDF Expert in version 1.0 of PDFpen for iPad (PDF Expert reached version 3.2 yesterday), Smile’s latest app shows a promising future because of features it already comes with, such as iCloud storage across iOS and OS X or native Dropbox and Evernote integration via APIs.

I’ll start with the exporting options. Unlike several PDF management apps, PDFpen doesn’t stop at offering a standard “Open In…” menu that simply forwards a local document to other installed iOS apps; the app does that, too( and quite cleverly I might add, as upon exporting PDFpen asks you if you want to save a “document” with annotations editable by other apps, or a flattened copy), but it also directly integrates with Dropbox, Evernote, iDisk, Google Docs, webDAV and FTP. If you choose to export PDFs to Dropbox or Evernote, PDFpen will let you log in and pick a destination folder – personally, I’d recommend storing regular PDF docs in Dropbox, and those that you want to OCR in Evernote, as the service provides great search functionalities for this.

Sharing options can be accessed on a per-document basis from the upper toolbar’s sharing menu; alternatively, you can select multiple documents from the main screen and share them online (or locally, through WiFi Transfer and iTunes Copy). Overall, also considering PDFpen’s support for iCloud from day one, if you put strong emphasis on sharing options for your documents, I’d say you should strongly consider a PDFpen setup on your Mac and iOS devices.

When it comes to editing a PDF, as I said earlier PDFpen doesn’t sport all the options of a popular competitor such as PDF Expert yet, but credit where credit’s due – Smile has been supporting PDFpen for years and I’m sure features will come over time. Plus, it’s not like the app is underpowered in this first release – PDF Expert simply offers more because it’s been around longer. As with the Mac version, PDFpen lets you annotate documents with notes (which you can export separately), various shapes and arrows, images from the iPad’s Camera Roll and your own text. Images can be freely moved and resized on screen, whilst text can be entered with the keyboard, or through direct touch input. As you can see from the screenshots, the app supports different types of highlights and colors, with a toolbar allowing you to modify colors and font sizes, among other things. Personally, I’d like the developers to reconsider the organization of the toolbar menus, as I’ve sometimes struggled to find a particular option because it was too buried inside a popover menu with multiple choices. Perhaps contextual menus or a taller toolbar could help in this regard.

Text can be manipulated, too, either through boxes you can move on screen, or by dragging your scribbles around. What’s cool about PDFpen is that it lets you tweak the opacity/fill color/width parameters of any shape, as well as re-arrange any element in the back/front of other annotations on screen. And, obviously, if you need to digitally sign PDFs, PDFpen will let you do that as well by letting you save any annotation as a template you can reuse later.

PDF Expert’s editing toolbar and popup menu (above) Vs. PDFpen (below).

You may be wondering – how do PDFpen’s annotations compare to the competition? Pretty well, I’d say, except for some issues with compatibility across apps that, I assume, could also be due to different implementation techniques between developers. Highlights, notes and colors work fairly well, with colors and text styles accessible from a bottom toolbar or popover menus. What I’ve noticed is that PDF Expert is much more intuitive in editing annotations and highlights thanks to an enhanced iOS popup menu, whereas PDFpen can feel a little clunky in relying exclusively on the popover metaphor. Moreover, PDF Expert generally accepts any kind of PDF edited from other applications you throw at it, while I had PDFpen not properly recognizing highlights and shapes from some third-party PDF apps. Both solutions, however, exported PDFs (editable or flattened) to Preview and Acrobat just fine. I would say that PDFpen offers smoother animations and transitions (the sidebar with thumbnail previews is a personal favorite of mine) with an overall simpler approach to controls and annotations tools, whereas PDF Expert is obviously more mature because of its longer development cycle. I can’t comment on other apps, as PDF Expert is the only PDF editing app I’ve used regularly until today.

As far as my workflow is concerned, in spite of PDF Expert offering more features with an editing toolbar that I prefer, I think I’ll stick with PDFpen, for a couple of reasons. First is iCloud support, which I regard as a must-have these days for people serious about keeping the same set of documents always in sync between devices. Second, I like the idea of getting used to the same group of apps on my Mac and iOS devices – in case you don’t know, PDFpen is available on the Mac as well and it’s a really powerful app. PDF Expert doesn’t offer a Mac client, but it’s got an iPhone version; I, however, don’t read or edit PDFs on my iPhone. Last, PDFpen’s excellent export capabilities allow me to considerably streamline my iPad workflow when it comes to importing PDFs (from Dropbox, Papers, or PDF Converter), annotating them, and saving them for long-term storage either in Evernote or Dropbox. I’ve also recently bought a Doxie Go portable scanner from Amazon, and I can’t wait to test PDFpen with the Camera Connection Kit and direct Evernote uploads alongside Doxie’s software. This experiment will also prove how PDFpen can handle large libraries of files and how well the renaming/combining features can work when handling a lot of files.

At $9.99, PDFpen for iPad is a fantastic first version and I look forward to seeing what future updates will bring. Get the app here.

Evernote Working On Todo List App Following Egretlist Acquisition

During the past year, note taking/memory management service Evernote set out to build a platform around its services, which span the web, iOS devices, OS X and Windows through a set of cross-platform tools and native applications. The company launched Trunk, a unified showcase of third-party applications that integrate with the Evernote API, and updated its iOS and Mac offerings with richer user interfaces and new functionalities. Furthermore, Evernote acquired image annotating service Skitch and released an iPad version of it; they also launched four standalone Evernote-based apps: Food and Hello, for remembering meals and people, respectively; Clearly, to read web articles in an elegant format; Peek, to help students learn more through Evernote’s visual presentation.

Whilst it sounds fairly obvious for Evernote to be considering new platforms and opportunities to expand upon the concept of preserving human memory – a subject that offers itself to a broad range of implementations – Alexia Tsotsis over at TechCrunch shares some juicy details behind Evernote’s various acquisitions that led to the dedicated Evernote apps we see today.

As it turns out, Evernote CEO Phil Libin has confirmed the company purchased four startups in the past year alone: among those, Readable became Evernote Clearly, Notable Meals became Evernote Food and an another one, called Minds Momentum, was acquired in order to get the assets for an upcoming Evernote todo list application. TechCrunch doesn’t share any more details, however a quick Google search confirms that Minds Momentum was the company behind Egretlist, an iPhone app to manage todos based off Evernote that we reviewed here.

We wrote:

This isn’t an application meant to replace Evernote with a prettier interface, but rather complement it. Egretlist is strictly focused on managing to-do lists with your various notebooks. On the surface, that might pretty tame. But when you combine to-do lists with Evernote, suddenly the functionality becomes stellar. As you read in the real-estate example, being able to just sync not only with yourself, but others using Evernote’s service, makes for an always online, always updateable task-list not dissimilar to Basecamp to-dos and milestones.

Basically, Egretlist provided an effortless way to create todos and format them in a native interface that would, however, sync back to Evernote’s main client to make those todos readable, and possibly editable as well, from your desktop computers. Interestingly, Minds Momentum also developed another paid Evernote-based app, Egretlinks, which ran universally on the iPhone and iPad and allowed users to manage web clippings from their Evernote notebooks. Both Egretlist and Egretlinks haven’t been updated in months, the developers’ Twitter account is silent, and the website is still showing iPhone 3GS screenshots for the apps.

Evernote isn’t new to this kind of acquisitions. iOS text editor Essay, for instance, was bought by Evernote to power their iOS rich text editor and few people knew about it until the developer published a blog post.

From my perspective, it only makes sense for Evernote to look forward to revamping the todo management aspect of the service. Note taking and memory management often overlap with todo creation and completion these days, and Evernote’s built-in checklist/todo support is stripped down to minimal functionality without really offering a compelling way to add tasks and reminders. I’m first to admit I’ve used Evernote to remember things to do more than a couple of times in the past.

Minds Momentum’s acquisition, I believe, also plays well with Evernote’s plan in the long term. Rather than supercharging the main client with hundreds of features, Evernote has taken the ecosystem approach in choosing to offer a centralized service with a main general purpose client and several different standalone apps for more specific purposes. The Evernote app itself isn’t the proverbial Swiss army knife: the whole service is. Honestly, I don’t want the Evernote app to incorporate a text editor and a task management tool and food diaries, and it appears that the company seems to be thinking the same thing – nurturing an ecosystem can be much more profitable and rewarding (both for the company and its users) than feature creep.

I look forward to Evernote’s “upcoming” todo list application, just as I can’t wait to get my hands on a public version of the latest Mac beta (which adds some sweet improvements in the text editing UI) and refreshed iOS clients. Expect more Evernote news soon.

Adam Lashinsky’s Inside Apple Is Now Available For Purchase On The iBookstore

Adam Lashinsky’s new book Inside Apple is now available for purchase on the iBookstore and those who pre-ordered it can now download it. The book goes inside the secretive company, revealing a number of tactics, strategies and systems that has allowed Apple to “churn out hit after hit”.

Based on numerous interviews, the book offers exclusive new information about how Apple innovates, deals with its suppliers and is handling the transition into the Post Jobs Era. Lashinsky, a Senior Editor at Large for Fortune, knows the subject cold: In a 2008 cover story for the magazine entitled The Genius Behind Steve: Could Operations Whiz Tim Cook Run The Company Someday he predicted that Tim Cook, then an unknown, would eventually succeed Steve Jobs as CEO.

Inside Apple is available on the iBookstore for $12.99 and is also available on Amazon. We’ll be publishing a full review of Inside Apple sometime in the coming week, so stay tuned for that. A full description of the book is available below the break.

Read more