The Apple Editor’s Choice Award App for Tracking Your Money. Start Your Free Trial Today
This week, Stephen, Myke and Federico tackle a mountain of listener questions and are cast in “Connected: The Motion Picture”.
Lots of questions from our listeners on this week’s Connected. Don’t miss the movie discussion at the end. You can get the episode here.
Sponsored by:
Joe Cieplinski writes about the importance of having a good website for your app:
Look, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t do your due diligence with ASO, and that you shouldn’t care at all about getting people to rate your app. If you take a few hours doing some basic research, you can certainly make some improvements to your keywords that could boost your ranking considerably. But how many developers are throwing together what amounts to barely more than a skeleton web page, and then spending little to no time at all trying to drive people to it? I think there’s a lot to be gained by spending some time on this.
More than six years after the launch of the App Store, I find it curious every time I come across an app on the Store and either there’s no link to a website or the “website” consists of screenshots from iTunes and an icon. This sounds obvious – having a good app website is important (sometimes absolutely necessary) and I completely agree with Joe’s motivations.
There’s a mountain of data inside your car waiting to be unleashed, and all you have to do is plug in a quick little connector and download a mobile application.
Automatic is a smart driving assistant that plugs into your car’s data port and lets you connect your smartphone (either iPhone or Android) with your car. By talking to your car’s onboard computer and using your smartphone’s GPS and data plan to upgrade your car’s capabilities, Automatic will allow you to easily diagnose your engine light, never forget where you parked your car, and save hundreds of dollars on gas.
Automatic learns your driving habits and gives you suggestions through subtle audio cues to drive smarter and stop wasting gas. Thanks to a map view available on your phone, Automatic can display a trip timeline after every driving session, showing you how you’re doing with a Drive Score; the app can even track local gas prices and tell you how much you’re spending.
In case of engine problems, Automatic can decipher what the “check engine” light means and show you a description of the issue with a possible solution. And thanks to a feature called Crash Alert, Automatic can detect many types of serious crashes and automatically alert local authorities as well as your loved ones when you can’t.
Automatic is currently available in the US for iPhone and Android devices, with a 45-day return policy and free shipping in 2 business days.
MacStories readers can go to automatic.com/macstories to get $20 off and buy Automatic at just $79.99. For more information, check out Automatic’s website.
Our thanks to Automatic for sponsoring MacStories this week.
I noticed some users tweeting about mobile tweet analytics over the past couple of weeks, and today Twitter has officialized the rollout:
On mobile (currently available on Twitter for iPhone), click on one of your Tweets to get to the Tweet detail page, then tap “View Tweet activity.” Make sure you have installed the latest version of Twitter for iPhone.
%F0%9F%93%88%F0%9F%93%8A%F0%9F%93%B2 Happy holidays! We just launched mobile Tweet analytics for iOS! Congrats to the team! https://t.co/hxuC43tgLr pic.twitter.com/HZc63rh3jf
— Ian Chan (@chanian) December 22, 2014
It’s nice that I can look at analytics directly from the Twitter app for iPhone, although most of those stats don’t take into account third-party clients, which I suspect the majority of my followers use.
As someone who uses Twitter for work, this is another reason to keep using the official client over third-party apps, and yet more proof that Twitter for iPad never gets cool new features first.
The holidays are upon us once again! #MacStoriesDeals is the best place to find great deals for iOS apps and games, Mac software, and more.
Every year, thousands of iOS and OS X software deals are launched for the holidays. We handpick the best ones and collect them in a single post with links to buy or share discounted products directly. You don’t need to be overwhelmed by holiday deals because we take care of finding the best stuff for you.
Bookmark this post and come back to find updated deals starting today through Christmas. Updates will be listed as new entries at the top of each category.
You can find us as @MacStoriesDeals on Twitter.
This is a proof of concept that I put together out of curiosity today, and it’ll likely break for some documents or Microsoft Excel, but it’s been working well for me, and I thought I’d share it.
I created a workflow that converts colums/rows copied from spreadsheets in Numbers and Google Sheets to a MultiMarkdown table.
If you do any sort of note-taking or writing on iOS, you probably find yourself wishing you’d be able to copy separate bits of text in the clipboard simultaneously. While that’s still not possible because the iOS clipboard only supports one entry at a time, the process can be sped up with Workflow.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about how I was looking for an extension to append links to an existing note through the system share sheet. I eventually downloaded NoteBox, which has an iOS 8 extension that can quickly capture any string of text and that has a merge feature to collect separate notes into a single one. That wasn’t perfect, but it allowed me to collect dozens of tweets and prepare them for a blog post on MacStories in just a couple of minutes.
With Workflow, I came up with a better system that uses extensions and the ability to append text to the iOS clipboard. This is the workflow I use, which does three simple things:
In practice, this means that, using any app capable of showing the share sheet, you can add some text to your clipboard as a new line without convoluted steps of manual copy & paste. Want to add some tweets to a link you copied? In Twitterrific, run the workflow on those tweets and they will be added to the clipboard. Multiple links in Safari or RSS? Copy the first one as you’d normally do, then add more through the workflow. You won’t have to manually merge the contents of the clipboard as long as you use the Workflow action extension to append text.
I’m using this workflow every day to end up with a clipboard that contains multiple links, email addresses, or generic strings of text, and it’s been a great timesaver. You can download the workflow here.
Charles Perry has a great response to David Smith’s concerns about the App Store being “full” (which I also pondered here):
We need to compete in niches, where there isn’t enough opportunity to justify the attention of large corporate developers. Don’t try to create a new bookkeeping app – Intuit will eat you alive. Instead build a bookkeeping app that’s tailored specifically for veterinarians or, even more narrowly, for large animal veterinarians. Don’t build a general purpose word processor – Microsoft has that space all locked up. Instead, build a word processor that’s specialized for a particular field like academics or screenwriting. Each of these niches offer plenty of revenue opportunities for a single developer. The big players won’t be interested, though. After all, a niche with potential annual revenue of $250,000 might be an amazing opportunity for an indie, but for the big players, $250,000 won’t even cover their engineering costs.
As I often argue, small niches can actually be pretty big on the Internet. Or, at least, big enough to turn a profit.
This week Federico and Myke start off talking about coffee habits, before discussing the newly announced Final Fantasy mobile game, customisable 3DS Home screens, Nintendo’s YouTube press tour and how games like Minecraft and No Man’s Sky could be shaping the future of gaming.
This happened after we recorded Virtual today (look for some thoughts soon). You can get the episode here.
Sponsored by:
