Affinity Designer Debuts on iPad as a Full-Featured Graphic Design Tool

Nearly one year ago, Serif released Affinity Photo for the iPad as a full-featured photo editing powerhouse. Unlike what companies such as Adobe do, where a Mac app like Photoshop is broken down into less powerful versions on iOS, Affinity Photo was brought to the iPad with no compromises whatsoever. Today, that same philosophy is bringing us Serif’s second major iPad app: Affinity Designer.

Where Affinity Photo focuses on photo editing, Affinity Designer is a vector-based illustration tool. And with full support for the Apple Pencil, iOS 11’s drag and drop, and system technologies like Metal, the app looks like the ultimate portable design studio.

For a limited time, Affinity Designer is available at a launch price of $13.99, 30% off the regular price of $19.99. If this kind of app in any way interests you, it looks like a steal at this price. One important note is that, similar to Affinity Photo, due to the power demanded by Affinity Designer, it’s only available on a select number of iPad models: all iPad Pros, plus the iPad Air 2, and the 5th and 6th generation iPad.

Developers’ Decade-Long Rollercoaster Ride: The Business of Selling Apps on the App Store

The case for native third-party apps on the iPhone was apparent immediately. By creating a device that blends into the background – with functionality entirely driven by software – Apple built a mobile computing platform that could become anything, so long as there was an app to drive the experience. The idea that the iPhone might be limited to a handful of stock Apple apps felt like a horrible waste to developers who were hungry to build their own apps.

When developers arrived in San Francisco for WWDC in 2007, they were eager for news of a native iPhone SDK. Instead, Scott Forstall took the stage and introduced iPhone web apps as Apple’s ‘sweet solution’. It didn’t go over well.

Fortunately, Apple’s flirtation with web apps was short-lived. By the fall of 2007, Steve Jobs confirmed that the company was working on an iPhone SDK for third-party developers, which was released in March 2008.

About four months later, the App Store launched on July 10, 2008, with around 500 apps. Ten years later, the Store offers over 2.1 million. Of course, a lot has happened in between too:

  • 2008: The App Store was launched with roughly 500 free and paid apps and games.
  • 2009: In-App Purchases were added for paid apps, followed by free apps a few months later.
  • 2010: Apple launched its iAd in-app advertising platform.
  • 2013: By its 5th anniversary, the App Store featured over 900,000 apps.
  • 2015: Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller took over responsibility for the App Store.
  • 2016: Apple expanded the categories of apps that can use auto-renewing subscriptions, discontinued iAd, and launched a search ads program. Free, time-limited In-App Purchases were also used for the first time to approximate free trials of apps.
  • 2017: Apple redesigned the App Store with daily editorial content.
  • 2018: As of WWDC, the App Store offered over 2.1 million apps and had paid developers over $100 billion in 10 years.

It’s hard to overstate the meteoric growth of the App Store as a marketplace. Over the course of a decade, the App Store’s history has been dominated by rapid growth and constant change that’s been highlighted by spectacular successes, failures, and controversies. Nowhere has that change been more pronounced than the economics of the App Store. It’s a story that has had a profound effect on the way software is sold and how users relate to the apps they use.

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John Giannandrea, Former Google Executive, Is Apple’s Chief of Machine Learning and AI Strategy

Earlier this year The New York Times reported that Apple had made a big new hire: John Giannandrea, at the time Google’s Chief of Search and Artificial Intelligence. Today Giannandrea officially joined the ranks of Apple’s leadership page on Apple.com.

As part of Giannandrea’s employee profile, we learn his official title with Apple: ‘Chief of Machine Learning and AI Strategy.’ He reports directly to Tim Cook and oversees technologies related to Siri and machine learning.

Breaking the news of Giannandrea’s new role, Matthew Panzarino wrote for TechCrunch:

Apple is creating a new AI/ML team that brings together its Core ML and Siri teams under one leader in John Giannandrea.
[…]
The internal structures of the Siri and Core ML teams will remain the same, but they will now answer to Giannandrea. Apple’s internal structure means that the teams will likely remain integrated across the org as they’re wedded to various projects including developer tools, mapping, Core OS and more. ML is everywhere, basically.

The last two years especially, AI and machine learning have been heavy focuses of Apple, particularly on iOS. Giannandrea is a major hire for the company, and while it may take some time for his impact to be seen in user-facing products, bringing together Siri and machine learning teams under this new leader is a key step toward realizing future potential in an area that’s bound to grow more important as time passes.

10 Years of App Store: A Timeline of Changes

It’s hard to remember using an iPhone before the App Store. However, for the first year, the iPhone could only run the handful of apps that Apple created for it. Anything else required using mobile web apps in Safari.1

On March 6, 2008, just nine months after the original iPhone went on sale, Steve Jobs and Scott Forstall announced that Apple would ship an SDK for third-party developers to write applications that could run natively on the iPhone, without the clumsiness inherent in web apps.

After Forstall took some time going through the details of the SDK, Steve Jobs came back on stage to answer a question that had no doubt been circulating the room:

How do you distribute software on a device like the iPhone?

The answer was an App Store.

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A Decade on the App Store: From Day One Through Today

“There’s an app for that” may have been coined as a marketing term in 2009, but in 2018 the phrase is indisputable. With over 2 million apps on the App Store, there is seldom a niche unexplored, and few obvious utilities not rapaciously overindulged. The App Store is a worldwide phenomenon, an enormous entity providing instant access to a treasure trove of software for hundreds of millions of people. Things have come a long way in a decade.

Ten years ago today, the App Store launched with 552 apps, available only on the original iPhone, iPod Touch, and the iPhone 3G (which shipped the day after). The developers of those apps overcame a fascinating set of challenges to secure front row seats in one of the greatest software advents in history. Many of these apps were built into sustainable businesses, and continue in active development today. Even those that didn’t make it are still testaments to their time, effortlessly invoking nostalgia in users who participated in that era.

The early days of the App Store were a journey into the unknown for Apple, third-party developers, and users alike. The economics of the store were entirely unrealized – nobody knew which app ideas would work or how much they could charge for an app. Apple’s processes for approving apps were primitive, their developer documentation was fallow, and they still thought it a good idea to make developers sign a non-disclosure agreement in order to access the SDK (software development kit). For iPhone users, every new app could completely revolutionize their mobile experience, or it could be another icon they never tapped on again.

Despite this uncertainty, developers pushed forward with their ideas, Apple hustled as many apps through approval as it could, and on July 10, 2008, users exploded enthusiastically onto the scene. Within the first year of the App Store, iPhone and iPod Touch owners had already downloaded over 1.5 billion apps. From the beginning it was clear that the App Store would be an unmitigated success.

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App Store 10th Anniversary: The AppStories Interview Series

As Federico explained yesterday, we knew from the earliest planning stages of our coverage of the App Store’s 10th anniversary that we wanted to include interviews with the developers and designers of apps and games we love. We do interviews periodically on AppStories and knew it would be the perfect way to let the people whose lives have been affected by the App Store tell their stories in their own words. Over the course of this week, we will post one episode of AppStories each day featuring interviews on a wide variety of topics that complement the in-depth stories you can read here on MacStories.

If you haven’t subscribed to AppStories yet, you can do so with the links at the bottom of this post or listen here in your browser using the embedded players below. As new episodes are published this week, we will update this post with the latest interviews.

I hope you enjoy these conversations as much as we did recording them.

Sponsored by:

Episode 69 - An Interview with Ryan Cash and Harry Nesbitt of Team Alto

Federico and John are joined by Team Alto members Ryan Cash and Harry Nesbitt.

Episode 68 - Interviews with Michael Flarup and Marc Edwards

Federico and John interview Michael Flarup and Marc Edwards about iOS app design.

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New Videos Highlight the iPad’s Power and Flexibility in Common Situations

Today Apple launched four new 15-second ads, each of which highlights the iPad’s capabilities in common domains – travel, notes, paperwork, and portability – compared to common tools in those same settings.

Two of the ads showcase the iPad’s usefulness as a paperless solution in the workplace and at school. While other employees and students wrangle with messy desks full of disorganized papers, the iPad users in the ads access all their documents and books from the compact tablet. Another ad takes place on an airplane, where flyers have tray tables that are over-crowded with their meal and laptops – the iPad Pro user, however, simply collapses the Smart Keyboard and uses the iPad in tablet mode to free up more space. Finally, the last ad shows users packing overstuffed bags with items like books, while the iPad user easily throws their sleek device into a backpack.

Apple clearly wants to convey how the iPad can make people’s lives easier and more organized – a fitting message during a season packed with travel and back-to-school plans.

Before the App Store: the “Sweet Solution” of Web Apps and Developers’ Relentless Passion

Apple has a history of shipping 1.0 products that are amazingly great in some ways, and shockingly undeveloped in others. The iPhone, juggernaut of Apple products, was no exception. When it launched, the iPhone was a smartphone like no other, setting a new standard for what pocket computers could do. But in spite of its astounding achievements, one black eye on the product’s otherwise-stellar launch is that it offered no access to third-party apps.

The App Store as we know it today didn’t exist on the iPhone’s day one. On the path of creating a device that would change the world, Steve Jobs and his team neglected one important point: the developer story. Perhaps this was a problem of Apple’s own making – if the iPhone hadn’t been such an impressive product, there wouldn’t have been much demand for native third-party apps. But it was an impressive product, so the demand was substantial, leaving Apple with a big problem on its hands.

Developers, understandably, were excited about the potential of what they could do with the first product that lived up to its name as a true _smart_phone. Yet between the iPhone’s unveiling in January 2007 and its release nearly six months later, there was nary a hint of an iPhone SDK (software development kit). Instead, Apple shared what it infamously called a “sweet solution” for third-party apps on iPhone: web apps.

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Celebrating the App Store’s 10th Anniversary with a Week of Special Coverage

When the App Store opened for business on July 10, 2008, I was working at a physical eBay store after dropping out of university. I’m pretty sure I don’t even actually remember the exact day the App Store launched; I do remember that, at some point during the summer after finally buying my first iPhone, the App Store opened my eyes to a world that captured my interest like nothing had ever done before. I had no idea that, just a few months later, I would start writing a blog about Apple and apps that, nearly a decade later, is my full-time job. Something was immediately clear though: I wanted to learn everything I could about apps and the people who made them, and I wanted to try all the best ones I could find. I was hooked.

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