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Rdio For iOS Gets Station Tuning, New Collection Options

rdio

rdio

Following the introduction of improved, personalized radio stations in early August, Rdio has today rolled out an update to its iOS app that brings a wider range of controls for stations and Collection views to iPhones and iPads.

In stations, it’s now possible to alter the selection of tracks that the service will automatically pick choosing between “Familiar” and “Adventurous” settings with three additional levels of fine-tuning in the middle. Like Rdio for desktop computers, these settings are displayed as dots in the radio playing view.

Other additions in this update are more subtle, but still noteworthy. In search results, filters allow you to easily view results for artists, albums, songs, playlists, people, or labels – a handy change to simplify the process of finding exactly what you’re looking for. In the Collection view on the iPad, you can browse with a new (and admittedly visually more appealing) album view, and both the iPhone and iPad apps get the ability to sort Collection by Recently Added – useful to get a quick overview of the artists, albums, or songs you’ve been adding to your account lately.1 In the Stations area, Rdio for iOS can now start artist-only stations, just like the Mac app.

rdio

rdio

I’m a big fan of Rdio’s recent work on UI design and stations. Rdio has been looking like an iOS 7-ready app for quite a few months now, thanks to a great use of blurs and music artworks as backgrounds – a design choice that is in line with iOS 7’s focus on deference and user content. In Stations, I’m impressed by the accuracy of the “Your FM” algorithm and the way it manages to regularly bring up songs that it knows I’ll like. I can’t wait to see what Rdio will do with the actual iOS 7, and I’m curious to see if they will (finally) bring back standard Recommendations, which briefly showed up for me, but then disappeared.

You can get the latest Rdio for iOS here.

  1. I personally peruse the History section on a daily basis to quickly re-listen to songs I’m currently addicted to over and over. ↩︎

Simplenote is Relaunching With Improved Syncing for Mac, iOS 7, and Android→

From the guys who make sharing notes between iOS, Android, and your desktop computer simple:

We’ve been beta testing new versions of Simplenote for Mac, Android, and iOS 7. They look a lot different: cleaner, simpler, and more lightweight. Our approach was to return to first principles and build anew.

A side effect is that some less frequently used features won’t be available, at least at first. Some people will cheer. Others, like those who adore sorting notes by reverse chronological creation date, may mourn. More details are coming soon.

Also of note are improvements to Simperium, which should make syncing between your devices faster and more seamless.

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Mirimage’s Editorial Workflows for Pocket and App.net→

Great demonstration of Editorial’s scripting capabilities. First, a workflow to fetch a random article from Pocket:

I’ve made 3 workflows; two for the authentication (Pocket Auth 1 & 2), and one that fetches a random article from the user’s unread queue and opens it in the Editorial browser. The Pocket authentication only needs to run once.

And then one to post on App.net (which could be nicely chained to my Post To WordPress workflow):

If you’re an App.net Developer, you can post to App.net directly from Editorial. I integrated this workflow into Federico Viticci’s Post to WordPress workflow, to post new articles to App.net in addition to Twitter.

Side note: I’m keeping track of Editorial workflows I find over at this Pinboard tag.

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ReadKit 2.3→

ReadKit, my favorite RSS/read later client for OS X, has been updated today to version 2.3, which brings a new icon, several bug fixes, and some new welcome features.

For me, the two most important additions are the improved sharing system and a global preference to group items by date or feed. The latter is available in Preferences > General, but there’s also a smart folder-specific setting that can override the general preference (so if you like to group a smart folder by feed instead of date, you can do that). Sharing is reminiscent of Reeder in that it supports services like Evernote, Twitter, Facebook, and Pinboard and it lets you assign custom keyboard shortcuts to each sharing service.

I’m a fan of the new sharing options, as they are faster to activate than drag & drop between sources (which was already supported). As the developers write:

ReadKit started out as a read later application for Instapaper, Pocket and Readability and it wasn’t so important to share articles between these services, despite the fact that it has worked with a simple drag-and-drop. Then RSS abilities has been added to the application, but the way of sharing remained unchanged. It’s time to improve this functionality, so this version introduces the new sharing menu, customizable sharing shortcuts and the ability to send articles into non-premium Instapaper accounts as well. Additional improvements and services are coming soon.

I’ve been using ReadKit every day since version 2.0 and I highly recommend it. The 2.3 update is available on the Mac App Store.

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A Very Mild Defense of In-App Purchases→

In this part of his post on In-App Purchases, John Moltz sums up my feelings quite well:

What we should be asking is simply whether or not we’re spending what the app is worth. We’ve spent a lot of time decrying the race to the bottom in app pricing. Now we’re complaining because app developers have found a way to make more money.

Not surprisingly, the study cited above says the freemium model works out well for developers. Almost exclusively, of course, it’s all the wrong developers. Because the good ones, the ones we like and go drinking with at WWDC, would rather drag a nail across a Retina MacBook Pro than go freemium.

Exactly. I am complaining because the wrong developers are leveraging In-App Purchases to create “games” that nickel and dime players and keep asking for more money. Funnily, just as we thought the arcade was dead, it’s back and it’s more expensive than ever with mobile games.

My problem is with games designed not for fun, but for profit. Games that are optimized for shady IAP tactics, rather than great gameplay. But I don’t want to repeat myself – here’s what I’ve written about my bias for quality games, Apple and its culture for gaming, and the value of In-App Purchases.

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The Prompt: X→

On the 10th episode of the The Prompt, Federico, Myke and Stephen discuss their awesome fans, Apple and gaming and gold-colored iPhones. They close with Federico’s review of Editorial for iPad, a discussion about creating things on the Internet and Stephen’s super power.

I can’t believe it’s been 10 episodes since we started The Prompt. Support from listeners has been amazing, and I’m excited about the future of The Prompt.

As an aside, if you’re reading this now, make sure to check out the #1 Prompt-related Twitter account, @timerkoalasing. He/she is live-tweeting the X episode as he/she listens to it. I’ll let you guess what his/her comments are like.

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Stuart Hall’s App Store Experiment→

This is an excellent series by Stuart Hall: he developed a 7 minute workout app, and he’s been posting details, numbers, and comments on what it’s like to enter the App Store market today.

Particularly interesting is the switch to a free model with In-App Purchase, detailed in part two:

How does In App Purchase (IAP) stack up against a paid download? For this app it’s been an increase of over 3x from around $22 per day to around $65 per day. The IAP converts at approximate 2-3% of the downloads per day.

[…]

IAP increases revenues - For better or worse for the ecosystem as a whole, it’s been proven over and over again it makes more money.

While Stuart’s story won’t apply to every kind of app category and pricing scheme, there are several data points and charts worth considering. Make sure to check out part one and part two – I hope there will be a part three as well.

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Shared Accounts In Google’s iOS Apps

Alex Chitu, reporting on a feature that I also noticed after YouTube’s 2.0 update:

If you enter the credentials of a Google account in the YouTube app and then open the AdSense app, you’ll find the new account and you can sign in without entering the password. If you remove an account, it will be removed from the other Google apps that support this feature. I assume that most Google apps for iOS will be updated to use this brilliant feature.

Once I logged into YouTube with my account (on an iOS 7 device), I then fired up the AdSense app (that I had just downloaded from the App Store) and my account was already listed in the screen with available accounts. It does seem like the YouTube and AdSense apps are capable of sharing accounts so users won’t have to log into their account every time in each Google app. AdSense didn’t bring up an authorization screen in YouTube – it just recognized the account that I had set up in YouTube.

Google’s documentation for YouTube confirms this, but doesn’t specify which iOS apps support shared accounts:

If you’ve signed in with another Google app on your iOS device, you may see this account listed.

Google’s explanation isn’t clear; the shared account option isn’t mentioned in the documentation for Gmail and Chrome. Upon signing out from the YouTube app, an alert dialog reads:

To sign in again, just select one of your Google accounts saved on this device. You will not be required to enter your password. To remove a saved account, tap “Sign In” > “Manage” > “Remove”.

It’ll be interesting to see if and when shared accounts will be integrated with Google’s other iOS apps. In the past few months, Google enhanced the inter-app communication capabilities of Gmail, Maps, Drive, and Chrome with the ability to open links in other apps, completely foregoing the need to launch Apple apps like Safari, Maps, or Mail.

Furthermore, Google is also providing an SDK for developers to add this functionality to their apps (for web links), showcasing examples of third-party apps that support Chrome. While Google apps won’t have the same kind of system integration that they have on Android, the combination of URL callbacks and shared accounts could help the creation of a “Google app ecosystem” on iOS.