Nintendo’s Second Mobile Game to Feature “Familiar” Character→

Nintendo didn’t only announce details for Miitomo and My Nintendo this week. Here’s Takashi Mochizuki, reporting for The Wall Street Journal:

Videogame giant on Tuesday posted a sharp drop in quarterly net profit, but it stoked the hopes of fans by promising that its second smartphone game would feature one of the company’s best-known characters.

And:

“The second game won’t be another communication app, and we plan to adopt one of our characters that fans are very familiar with,” Nintendo CEO Tatsumi Kimishima said.

Mario is the obvious choice (as is Pikachu, also given this year’s 20th anniversary of the Pokémon franchise), but I’ve long argued that WarioWare mini-games would be great candidates for multitouch gameplay and, possibly, In-App Purchases. Still, Nintendo has plenty of options to choose from.

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Nintendo Outlines Launch Plans for ‘My Nintendo’ Service and Miitomo iOS App

Following a first announcement in October last year, Nintendo has revealed its launch plans for their first iOS app, Miitomo:

Starting Feb. 17, people will be able to pre-register for Miitomo by signing up for the new Nintendo Account service using their existing email, social media accounts or current Nintendo Network IDs. People who pre-register will be among the first to be notified about the availability of Miitomo when it launches in March. Nintendo will offer a special Miitomo bonus to anyone who signs up for a Nintendo Account between Feb. 17 and launch.

Previously teased as a communication service inspired by the company’s Mii avatars and 3DS game Tomodachi Life, here’s how the company describes Miitomo today:

Miitomo is a social experience that uses Nintendo’s Mii characters, which first debuted on the Wii console, to engage friends in a lighthearted and welcoming environment.

Miitomo will be available on both the iPhone and iPad, and it’ll be based on the new Nintendo Account service announced last year. Miitomo will first be released in Japan in mid-March and in 15 other countries by the end of March.

In addition, Miitomo users with a Nintendo Account will be able to take advantage of the new My Nintendo service, which promises to be more than the old Club Nintendo rewards program with a deeper integration with “Nintendo products and services”. As detailed in an investor call earlier this week, My Nintendo will enable users to earn platinum points by interacting with Nintendo mobile apps and opening the eShop on a Nintendo console, while gold points will be collected by purchasing downloadable software for 3DS and Wii U. Points can be exchanged for digital content (platinum) or discount codes for eShop titles (gold).

Nintendo has offered further details on how the point system will work in an English version of their investor slides:

In the case of the previous Club Nintendo, we offered points, or “coins,” as a result of our members’ purchasing and registering our products. For My Nintendo, the points are gained by members not only as the result of their digital purchases but also as the result of their activities, such as playing games and apps, and interacting with information from Nintendo.

The company notes that, after opening Nintendo Account registrations last December, they have already started providing Japanese users with access to some My Nintendo services. These include personalized game recommendations, which “are crafted for each of them based on their profile, purchase records and play records”.

Details on Miitomo are still scarce despite today’s announcements – it sounds like users will be able to chat and ask questions, but I’m curious to know if Nintendo is planning to add any gameplay/collectible elements to the app as well. According to Nintendo, more information about Nintendo Account, My Nintendo, and Miitomo will be released “in the coming weeks”.

Microsoft Acquires SwiftKey→

No productivity app seems to be safe with Microsoft. Following a Financial Times report from yesterday, the company has confirmed they have acquired SwiftKey, makers of the popular keyboard and predictive text engine for iOS and Android:

This acquisition is a great example of Microsoft’s commitment to bringing its software and services to all platforms. We’ll continue to develop SwiftKey’s market-leading keyboard apps for Android and iOS as well as explore scenarios for the integration of the core technology across the breadth of our product and services portfolio. Moreover, SwiftKey’s predictive technology aligns with Microsoft’s investments and ambition to develop intelligent systems that can work more on the user’s behalf and under their control.

In the coming months, we’ll have more to share about how we’ll integrate SwiftKey technology with our Guinness World Record Word Flow technology for Windows. In the interim, I’m extremely excited about the technology, talent and market position SwiftKey brings to us with this acquisition, and about how this further demonstrates Microsoft’s desire to bring key apps and technologies to platforms from Windows to Android to iOS.

SwiftKey is one of the most popular third-party keyboards on both mobile OSes; on iOS, it’s often relied upon by users who want a multilingual typing experience in a single keyboard. I’m interested to see how SwiftKey as a keyboard will continue on iOS – custom keyboards haven’t received much attention in the past two years, and they’re severely limited in how much they can integrate with the rest of the system.

Above all, SwiftKey is good tech for Microsoft. The acquisition gives them access to a large database of typing habits and patterns spanning 100 languages, and it’ll likely help them build text features on desktop and mobile. Long term, it’s hard to predict how Microsoft’s string of mobile app acquisitions will play out, but, right now, it’s clear that Microsoft is buying the best apps around.

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Activist Engineering→

Matthew Bischoff:

You’ve been there. You’re sitting in a meeting and your boss, a product manager, or an executive is talking about Q2 goals. They’re laying out a roadmap of the features that are going to be “coming down the pike”. All of a sudden you see it. An innocuous bullet that makes your blood boil: “Auto-invite friends”, “Re-engagement notifications”, or “Disable ATS”.

The particular feature isn’t important. What matters is that you’re the engineer that’s noticed this capital-B Bad Idea. You know why it’s a problem. This time it’s not just the technical debt or the time it’d take to implement. This idea is bad because it trades a worse product for a better “business”: revenue, eyeballs, impressions, you know the drill.

You have a choice in this moment.

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The Futility of Pleasing All Users→

Khoi Vinh made an interesting point in his consideration of a recent update to 1Password:

At this stage, having gone through at least six major revisions, the utility must accommodate many different usage styles—people who want strict separation among their vaults, people who want to see across all their vaults, and more. As with any software, as the number of use cases grows, it becomes harder and harder to reconcile them with a single coherent interface. That’s the unfortunate truth of creating great experiences; not all of your users are going to be happy all of the time.

I think there’s a middle ground here, though it isn’t often appreciated: settings.

As time goes on, I realize that apps that let me configure their behavior exactly like I want – 2Do, Fiery Feeds, and even the just-released Airmail – are what I prefer. An abundance of settings isn’t necessarily the best way to build an app (in some instances, it could be seen as a cop out from a developer who doesn’t know how to pick which features to ship, or as a case of feature creep), but after transitioning from OS X to iOS as my main computing platform, I tend to choose productivity apps that can scale, accomodating the needs of many users as possible.

Some people don’t like that, and there’s certainly a place for “opinionated” software that doesn’t overwhelm the user with dozens of settings, but it’s a trend I’ve noticed in the apps I’ve ended up using the most on iOS.

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Daylite: The Productivity App for Individuals and Teams, Exclusively for Mac and iOS [Sponsor]

Marketcircle helps individuals, teams, and small businesses on the Mac, iPhone and iPad be more productive with their two apps, Daylite and Billings Pro.

For those of you who don’t know about Daylite, it has been around for almost 15 years. Daylite helps you manage clients, schedules, tasks, projects, emails and new business opportunities, all in one app where they’re interconnected. From a single client you can see who referred them, emails to and from, booked or upcoming appointments, pending business deals and even future followups. Or from a single Project you can see each person and their role, the tasks and who’s responsible, meetings about the project, and notes, all in chronological order. Daylite helps you remember everything so you don’t have to worry about anything falling through the cracks. And when you invite team members, you can share this information, assign tasks or check each others calendars before scheduling meetings.

And with the recent release of Daylite 6, Marketcircle has made it even easier to get started. Create an account and login from your Mac, iPhone or iPad, then works with or without an Internet connection. Daylite will sync changes between devices and teammates when a connection is available. Marketcircle includes a 30 day trial for Daylite, with monthly and yearly plans.

You can even read about other companies using Daylite here.

Our thanks to Marketcircle for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Twitterrific Adds Redesigned Today View, watchOS 2 App, Refined Profile Pages→

Solid update to the Twitter client by The Iconfactory: version 5.14 of Twitterrific brings a redesigned and customizable Today screen to view an activity summary for the selected account (with a counter for quoted tweets, too), better support for 3D Touch to peek at events in the timeline, a watchOS 2 app, and the ability to preview recently shared media in profile pages.

I don’t use Twitterrific as my main client – I prefer Tweetbot – but choosing between the two is largely a matter of minor preferences at this point (one of mine: Tweetbot lets me see people who retweeted and faved one of my tweets from the tweet detail view). It’s great to see that The Iconfactory is getting rid of many of the old annoyances of Twitterrific: DMs are now excluded from the unified timeline (I criticized this here), the tab bar supports 5 buttons on iPad, where you can also choose to show it at the bottom in portrait (previously, the feature was iPhone-only). Great changes.

Twitterrific 5.14 is available on the App Store.

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Zapier Launches Multi-Step Zaps for Richer Web Automation

The new multi-step editor in Zapier.

The new multi-step editor in Zapier.

I’ve long been interested in web automation as a complement to my iOS apps and workflows. While I expressed my fair share of skepticism about the practical benefits of web automation in the past – primarily due to a lack of native apps to trigger recipes on IFTTT and Zapier – with time I’ve learned to appreciate the ability to automate web services and let them perform tedious tasks for me. The fact that I’m increasingly relying on web services with iOS apps that are simple front-ends to data that lives in the cloud might be related, too.1 My use of web automation isn’t dramatically creative: I have a couple of Do Button recipes to send automated emails with one tap; I forward YouTube updates and some RSS items to Slack; and, I let a couple of Twitter accounts tweet on my behalf with automated recipes because I’d forget otherwise. Nothing too revolutionary.

Today, Zapier – the power-user (and paid) alternative to IFTTT – is launching multi-step zaps (the equivalent of recipes in IFTTT), which I was able to test for the past week. I’ve long preferred Zapier to IFTTT for the additional controls that it offers when building complex web automations. Zapier lets you assign filters to actions, you can parse data from email messages with a dedicated Zapier Parser service, and, generally speaking, everything is built with an eye for people who, like me, want to tweak as much as possible. Multi-step zaps fit squarely into this strategy and they’re, by far, the most powerful solution I’ve tried to chain multiple web services together and save time.

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Airmail for iPhone Review: Power User Email

If you want to drive an average tech nerd crazy, try to talk about email clients.

Over the course of (almost) seven years of writing for MacStories, I’ve seen email pronounced dead (multiple times), reinvented, redesigned, and, most recently, made smarter with machine learning and cloud services. Email has been deemed unfixable, unmanageable, and unhealthy. And yet, for better or worse, we keep using it.

Despite its archaic nature and stale protocols, email works – it’s the closest thing to a common standard for digital communication we have. Messaging services may rise and grow and fall and shut down, but email will always be there, humbly humming along, hoarding thousands of unread messages in your inbox. You have to believe that, if this planet were to end tomorrow, cockroaches and IMAP would survive it.

I have written my fair share of email client reviews since 2009, and I’ve made my stance on what I’m looking for abundantly clear. I like my email client to bear the speed and polish of Microsoft’s Outlook, the clever touches and integrations of Dispatch, and, if possible, the smart options of Inbox and Spark. The fact that, eight years into the App Store, I’m still cherry-picking my ideal set of features for an email client says a lot about the landscape. Every time a new email client is released, you will find users who are perfectly content with it, others who prefer the built-in app on their devices, and some who are intrigued, but still unhappily waiting for the email client of their dreams to be made.

In case you’re wondering, I’m that guy in the last group, assembling yet another email client review, making a list of ideal email features for an iOS app.

And I actually love it, because the past 12 months have brought a ton of interesting changes in the email market for iPhone and iPad. Perhaps most notably, Microsoft surprised iOS users with a solid client, evolved from an acquisition and quickly improved to accommodate fast search and notifications, calendar integration, and full iOS 9 support. Outlook – a runner-up to my App of the Year in 2015 – is the email app I recommend to anyone who wants to try something different than Mail. Spark, launched by Readdle last year, has received a series of improvements with the promise of future Mac and iPad versions. The power-user oriented Dispatch has also continued to grow, with an eye for iPad users adopting iOS 9. And, reinvigorated by the demise of Mailbox, dozens of other developers have tried (or have kept trying) their hand at improving email on iOS. There was a time when Apple didn’t even accept third-party email clients on the App Store; today, you can find hundreds of similar and drastically different takes on email on the Store.

Developed by Italian indie studio Bloop, Airmail was first released on OS X in early 2013, capitalizing on the shutdown of Sparrow with a design reminiscent of that popular client acquired by Google (which, in turn, borrowed heavily from Loren Brichter’s Tweetie, the grandfather of those kinds of interfaces). Through the years, Airmail has become one of the most powerful email apps for the Mac, with support for multiple accounts, keyboard shortcuts, and a long list of preferences to tweak the app to your needs. Airmail is up there with MailMate in the club of desktop email clients that allow you to configure and fiddle with settings to make email as welcoming as it could possibly be.

Bloop is hoping to replicate its desktop success with Airmail for iPhone, launching today on the App Store at $4.99. I’ve been trying Airmail for the past couple of months, and it brings some unique features and options to the table, but, as usual, the road ahead is going to be long.

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