Day One 1.5 for iOS: Now With iCloud Sync

Earlier this year, I started using Day One. Not just another text editor with Mac and iOS versions and support for Markdown formatting, Day One is at the same time a flexible and focused solution to archive your thoughts, memories, experiences into a well-built interface that keeps everything in sync across Macs and iOS devices. A fresh take on the old paper journal, Day One takes advantage of modern technologies such as local reminders to tell you when it’s time to write your journal; on the iPhone and iPad, the app supports different font sizes and Markdown, so you’ll be able to write nicely formatted documents that you can easily export to HTML. On the Mac, Day One comes with a standalone menubar application that makes it incredibly fun and quick to jot down thoughts whenever you want.

Day One’s 1.5 update for iOS, released today on the App Store, brings a more powerful Dropbox sync for iPhones and iPads (Day One can store its database in Dropbox, and it allows you to export notes on the Mac via File>Export) and the long-awaited iCloud sync, which I’ve been able to test on my iPhone 4S and iPad 2 (Day One 1.5 for Mac isn’t live yet, but it’s been submitted to the Mac App Store).

I came from an old installation of Day One with a Dropbox database synced to my iPhone and iPad. As I upgraded to version 1.5 and launched the app on both devices, I was asked to disable Dropbox sync if I wanted to use iCloud. I disabled Dropbox, and waited a few minutes for the initial iCloud background sync to finish (it had to pull at least 50 entries to begin with).

Once iCloud is up and running in Day One, it is extremely reliable, fast, and invisible. Unlike Dropbox, it’s not manual sync you have to initiate or automatically perform upon launch and quit – it’s push technology that constantly sends changes back and forth between devices. As an example, I started writing a new entry on my iPhone and it showed up after a few seconds on my iPad, which was running Day One. The main list of notes on the left basically refreshes to accomodate a new note – no manual sync needed. For the same reason, notes are pushed with iCloud as you write them – typos included.

Day One 1.5 clearly fits in a much bigger picture with the Mac client constantly receiving changes from the cloud, but this doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy Day One 1.5 for iOS now. In fact, I often find myself writing my journal on iOS devices rather than the Mac, so iCloud support (with this kind of invisible push technology) is more than welcome.

Day One for iOS is $1.99 on the App Store.

Dom Leca On UI Conventions and Sparrow 2.0→

Dom Leca on UI Conventions and Sparrow 2.0

Sparrow’s Dom Leca on The Verge:

What’s the give and take between adhering to popular OS X UI conventions and going in your own direction?

I think there is a huge variety of design on OS X but the 2 main choices that a developer / designer really has are the orthodox way, sticking with the Apple HIG in a strict manner, or the Loren Brichter’s way.

I am not saying that there is no in-between. A lot of our inspiration in Sparrow comes from other developers who are not strictly following the HIG or Loren’s UI style. But like on the iPhone with the pull to refresh or the cell swipe, Loren created a new standard with its Tweetie core animation sidebar.

Jared Erondu has another interview with Leca today over at Macgasm today; in the article, Leca mentions some of the future plans for Sparrow 2.0, including a people-centric view for the desktop application:

The main idea we have for version two is that the concept of messages will be thrown in the background and people will take a central place. It will be a people centric app. You won’t look for the last message you received, but for the last people who talked with you. In terms of navigation, and the way you will treat your mail, the functioning of labels, folders and stuff like that – it changes the way it works a lot.

Sparrow may have borrowed a lot from Brichter’s Tweetie design, but in the past year the app has been constantly updated, adding innovative functionalities that you can’t find anywhere else (CloudApp and Dropbox integration for attachments is a personal favorite). Whilst Sparrow recognized Brichter’s UI approach as functional to what they were trying to achieve (switching accounts) and iterated on the concept blending that specific UI convention with new Lion elements, standard HIG stuff and their own vision, others have – unfortunately – blindly re-implemented Tweetie’s design adding little or no innovation to the mix.

This is what the first Sparrow beta looked like. With Sparrow for iPhone announced in August and now nearing the beta stage, I have big expectations for Sparrow in 2012.

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Calendr for iPhone: Fast and Elegant Event Creation

I’ve never been a dedicated user of calendar software on my Mac and iOS devices, but I’ve always been interested in checking out well-made applications capable of working with Google Calendar, MobileMe and, more recently, Apple’s iCloud. Whereas Apple’s Calendar app (iCal on the desktop) has taken quite the skeuomorphic turn with the latest iOS and Lion upgrades (in spite of the iPhone version still lacking the leather and stitches Apple seems to love so much), other utilities like the excellent Fantastical (our review), QuickCal, Week Calendar and Agenda have all offered their unique takes on event creation, quick reminders, access to multiple calendars, and more. I may not be entering events in my “Personal” iCloud calendar all day long, but I enjoy trusting a fine app when I need to schedule that Sony CES keynote or NBA game and don’t want to even look at iCal. To me, calendar has always been a system I’ve wanted to use more – perhaps the right app is key to this.

Chocomoko’s Calendr, which I discovered in the App Store last week, is yet another iPhone client that comes with built-in integration with iOS calendars; unlike other apps that focus on supercharging the iPhone’s native calendar experience with features (Week Calendar, QuickCal) or interface approaches (Agenda) different from Apple’s, Calendr caught my attention because it doesn’t come with hundreds of alternative functionalities, focusing instead on two key elements: navigation and touch-based event creation. Read more

Apple Releases iOS 5.1 Beta 3

As noted by MacRumors, Apple has released a few minutes ago the third beta of iOS 5.1 to developers. The new beta comes almost a month after iOS 5.1 beta 2, which was released on December 12. Currently, it appears beta 3 is only showing up as over-the-air update with the Developer Center still reporting beta 2 as the latest available.

The new beta carries build number 9B5141a. The first two betas of iOS 5.1 brought bug fixes and minor new features to the operating system, and it’s still unclear whether Apple may be planning to add more functionalities throughtout various betas seeded to developers.

We’ll update this post with relevant information in case it becomes available. iOS 5.1 beta 3 should become available on the iOS Dev Center shortly.

Vimeo for iPad Previewed, Coming “Later This Month”

Originally released on the iPhone back in March, today web video platform Vimeo confirmed a major update for the iPhone client, as well as a brand new app specifically designed for the iPad are in the works and should become available “later this month”. The Verge has posted an initial preview of the iPad version, which sports a completely new design, various sharing options, and the built-in video editor that was introduced with version 1.0 for iPhone and iPod touch users.

The Vimeo iPhone app, in fact, besides allowing you to access your Vimeo account and thus check on liked videos, “watch later” queue and items from Vimeo’s popular picks, packs a rather impressive video editor to adjust media on the go and upload directly to the service without using a computer.

Vimeo is also launching apps for Android smartphones and tablets and Windows Phone 7, and it looks like interface-wise, Android and iOS users are at least going to share the same “dashboard grid” paradigm made popular by Facebook and several other iPhone apps.

Judging from the screenshots posted by The Verge, it appears Vimeo for iPad will allow for both shooting and browsing within the same app; similarly to the iPhone app (whose update hasn’t been revealed just yet), iPad users will be able to browse featured videos, liked items, subscriptions, videos saved for later and personal uploads.

Vimeo for iPhone is currently free and available on the App Store.

Slippery slopes→

Slippery slopes

Good response by Marco Arment to my counterargument to his post about auto-renewal subscriptions and iOS technologies Apple doesn’t open up to developers (or at least the majority of them). I particularly like his proposed solution for Newsstand Kit’s push notification applied to other apps:

Newsstand Kit’s background-wakeup push notification can only fire once a day, and background NKAssetDownloads only work if the device is on Wi-Fi and has a healthy battery charge. So give all apps the ability to receive that background-wakeup push notification once a day, as long as the user has granted them permission to use push notifications. Then let them update or download whatever they can do in the 10 minutes that they’re allowed to run in the background. And if the system decides to terminate them during those 10 minutes for any reason, that’s fine, too.

Even without NKAssetDownloads, and even if Wi-Fi was required, this would be a huge benefit. Unlimited-time NKAssetDownloads are only required by magazines because so many of them are ridiculously bloated at hundreds of megabytes per issue, but a huge class of apps could download everything they need in a few hundred kilobytes over a few minutes, at most.

I still think auto-renewable subscriptions should be limited to a specific set of apps (and Apple must be clear about that – enough with the unwritten rules), but I have to say I’m intrigued by the idea of smaller lightweight downloads now.

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How Many iPhones Did Apple Sell In Q1 2012?

Philip Elmer-Dewitt reports on analysts’ expectations for iPhone sales in Apple’s first financial quarter of 2012 (which ended last week):

The numbers from the 22 Wall Street analysts who have responded so far to our call for estimates range from a high of 35 million iPhones from BTIG’s Walter Piecyk to a low of 25.2 million from Gabelli’s Hendi Susanto. The average among this group is 29.74 million, which would represent a year-over-year increase of 83%.

The average among our panel of 15 independents – an assortment of bloggers, enthusiasts and individual investors – is 33.42 million iPhones, or an annual increase of nearly 106%. Among this group, the estimates range from a high of 35.75 million from Posts at Eventide’s Robert Paul Leitao to a low of 30.17 million from Alexis Cabot of the MacObserver’s Apple Finance Board.

To put these predictions in context, here’s how Apple performed in its previous Q1s:

And here’s a graph showing every iPhone quarter to date:

Predictions for Q1 2012 (results will be announced on January 24) now range between 25.2 million and 35.75 million iPhones sold. Either way, it’s going to be a “blow-out quarter” for iPhone sales – even if we consider Apple’s Q3 2011, the biggest ever for iPhone sales to date with 20.34 million units sold.

It’ll be interesting to observe how Asia-Pacific will perform in relation to iPhone sales, too, as Apple reported overall sales more than doubled in Q4 2011. As for Q1 2012 itself, Apple CEO Tim Cook said they were confident to have enough 4S supply to go through the holiday season, and also confirmed the company was expecting record iPhone sales for the quarter with revenue guidance set at $37 billion (Asymco’s Horace Dediu, however, expects revenue to hit $44 billion).

Apple’s “Targeted Enhancements”

Marco Arment, writing about iOS’ Auto-Renewable subscriptions, which appear to be exclusive to apps that deliver “new content” during each renewal period:

Ultimately, I had to ship Instapaper 4.0 with non-renewing subscriptions, I was able to delete all of the clunky auto-renewing server code, nobody sees that terrible dialog in my app, and I need to ship an update soon that will annoy my best customers with manual-renewal notifications.

But this is a great example, like Newsstand Kit’s background downloads, of Apple adding a capability to iOS that’s potentially useful to thousands of developers, and then restricting it so that only a handful of players (usually big companies) can actually use it.

I hope that, in time, they unbundle some of these myopically targeted enhancements and make them potentially useful to all developers. But Apple’s record on this isn’t great so far.

Marco is right – auto-renewable subscriptions are easy to use (and understand) and more developers should get access to it. Imagine being able to subscribe to Instapaper through iTunes, or getting your Evernote Premium account billed automatically every year or month, instead of having to purchase it manually (as it happens now). But I could argue that, at the same time, new technologies like Newsstand Kit’s background downloads (described here) and auto-renewable subscriptions are more of a conceptual and technical issue for Apple rather than a “limitation” imposed to developers. Imagine if every app in the Store went free, and started billing users periodically for “usage”. That would create an unrealistic ecosystem of free apps with in-app subscriptions for all kinds of content. I’m not saying apps like Instapaper shouldn’t get access to auto-renewable subscriptions – it actually seems like a perfect fit to me – but I believe that instead of going on a case-by-case basis, Apple decided to roll out the feature for “publishers of new content” first. That’s easier to scale.

It gets murkier with the background downloads of Newsstand. Periodicals and newspapers get this neat implementation of automatic downloads of new issues. Would a third-party app like Instapaper benefit from it? Sure. Imagine being able to have your Instapaper queue delivered to you wirelessly, each morning, instead of having to download it manually (which takes seconds but it’s still a manual action). That’d be great. Or the aforementioned Evernote, which could, in theory, figure out a way to push changes from its remote database once per day without a user’s direct action (case in point: I add a lot of items to Evernote on my Mac overnight, I see all the changes automatically pushed to my iPad the next morning). Again, I believe some apps should get this functionality for increased usability and overall enjoyment of the user, but there are exceptions I’m fairly certain Apple considered. What if every developer of every app starts implementing background downloads for remote content? Even once per day, for every app, it can be  a lot of data. And when you add data caps to the mix and start imagining games that can download new levels remotely on 3G…not good.

Obviously, if we follow this argument – that every developer should get access to the latest technologies used by Apple, or that at least some developers should be able to – we could say that Apple did figure out solutions in the past to avoid problems with, say, data caps and 3G downloads. Granular controls, like “Use Cellular Data” in the Store’s Settings, or the common limit of 20 MB for App Store downloads on 3G. But again, imagine a scenario where every developer gets to implement subscriptions or background downloads. Is the user supposed to go through a list of 100+ apps and switch every single one of them to “off” for background downloads? And if the list is a bad idea, and we argue again that only some apps should get these features – why, say, just Instapaper or Evernote? Why not Infinity Blade II?

Last, it is true Apple doesn’t have a great record for bringing iOS’ enhancements to third-party developers in a short period of time – but keep in mind that the iPhone launched without multitasking and background applications and eventually got one of the best implementations of multitasking out there and background tasks (for some apps) up to 10 minutes. The other side of the coin, obviously, is that third-party apps can’t run in the background all the time like Apple’s Music app - but the same question rises again: can you imagine every single developer doing that? (Speaking of enhancements in Apple’s apps: I expect Mail’s rich text controls to be opened up next to developers for integration. And did anyone mention Siri?)

In the past four (almost five now) years, Apple has taught us (and the industry) that iOS isn’t about big press releases and revolutions as much as it’s about incremental progress, iterative improvements and refinements. Apple rolls in its very own way, and looking back at the differences between iPhone OS 1 and iOS 5, it’s clear that a lot of work went into all the updates and fixes and changes that got us this.

Developers rightfully want access to cool new features as soon as they’re available (especially when they seem such a good fit) and users are always eager to see the latest software functionalities implemented in delightful new ways, but the App Store’s ecosystem is so variegate and unique that sometimes waiting is the best option.