Nice work (and great name) by Jeff Mueller: starting from my idea for an action menu for Safari in Launch Center Pro, he made a web app to simplify the process of assembling the bookmarklet. You can choose from a set of emojis for icons, select one of the built-in actions (so you don’t have to write URL schemes), and hit Create Menu to generate a menu. It’s very simple and much better than writing code manually.
I hope that Jeff will add more app actions and emojis soon. Check it out here.
Mac Power Users is one of my favorite tech podcasts, so when Katie and David asked me if I wanted to do a second episode with them, I immediately accepted.
We talked about iPad workflows, iOS automation, the future of iOS, photo management, and more. There are lots of links to apps and tools I use on a daily basis in the show notes, and I’m glad that the episode turned out well. You can listen here.
With an update released today, Evernote is bringing descriptive, natural language-based search to its Mac client. The feature, which can be activated from Evernote’s search bar, aims at making it easier to find specific notes using a natural input system for note names and content, as well as more advanced filters for date, location, device, and attachments.
Descriptive search is, essentially, a refined interface for Evernote’s existing search system, which has long enabled users to find notes by combining tokens in the search menu. Instead of clicking to choose search options and combine them, you can now type commands such as “notes created this month” or “notes with images and created this year” and Evernote will display a suggestion based on matching search results for your account. Read more
Jared Sinclair:
Comfortable also means physical comfort, which is an aspect of mobile app design that designers often forget. Anyone with a new baby knows how convenient it is to be able to use an app with one hand. Some areas of the screen are hard to reach, especially on an iPhone 5 or later. Grip your phone in one hand observe the sweep of your thumb. It’s easy to reach objects in the center, but the navigation bar is too far away to reach without adjusting your grip. Although it’s tempting to jump to the conclusion that closer is always better, positioning an item too close to your hand can cause discomfort because of the way your thumb has to flex to reach it.
One of my favorite aspects of Unread. Check out Jared’s post for more details on his design process, as well as concepts he didn’t end up using.
Each step feels more perilous than the last. As you dash over a pool of lava, you lunge to slay a demon archer, cornered and unprepared for the daring attack. Looking ahead it seems all but impossible to make the last jump, as demon footmen move to block the exit. Throwing your spear, you impale the dark beast, only to be greeted by a bomb that lands behind your feet. You bash away the bomb with your shield, taking out another demon as it explodes at a distance. Leaping across the last chasm, a lapse in judgement leaves you directly in the crosshairs of a second archer, who fires an arrow directly into your exposed side as you land.
And thus ends the quest for the Fleece.
This is Hoplite, where a pair of sandals, a trusty spear, sturdy shield, and three hearts are all that protect you from hordes of demons in the Underworld. Your quest is to recover the Fleece and make it out alive, but the journey is treacherous.
Last week, I was looking at the way I use Safari and save links to other apps and services, and I realized that I wanted a unified action menu to group some of my most used bookmarklets together. While this can be done by creating a bookmark folder in Safari, folders require too many taps on the iPhone and I’d like to have better visual differentiation between actions with unique icons for each one of them. That seemed like a good opportunity to test the capabilities of Launch Center Pro (now on the iPad as well) when it comes to lists and JavaScript, so I got to work.
A fair warning: Though my solution works, the code isn’t pretty. Until Apple improves the way apps can share information with each other, we’re stuck with hacks like URL schemes, JavaScript, and manual encoding. If you want to customize what I came up with, you’ll have to manually edit URL schemes and test everything on your own. If you’re not concerned about a bookmarklet’s prettiness, go ahead – I’m fairly satisfied with the results. Read more
Unread, developed by Jared Sinclair, is my new favorite RSS reader for iPhone. Unread is on my Home screen, on the same spot that Reeder held since late 2009 when I first reviewed it. Unread provides a fantastic mix of elegant typography, intuitive gesture-based, one-handed navigation, iOS 7 features, and modern sharing tools that, in my opinion, make it the best RSS reader for iPhone today.
I’ve been using Reeder for over four years, and the app hasn’t changed much. It received interface refinements through the years and support for more RSS services was added after Google Reader’s demise in 2013, but it’s no secret that, for months, Reeder stagnated, with no updates to reassure users that Silvio Rizzi still had big plans for the app. Not that the lack of updates was a problem per se: Reeder was a great app and it always kept working, but seven months without updates on the iPhone and the removal of the iPad and Mac versions from the App Store didn’t suggest that Reeder was on track for major changes.
In September 2013, just a week before iOS 7, Rizzi released Reeder 2, a new app for iPhone and iPad. Reeder 2 brought a completely new UI for the iPad and an evolution of the iPhone’s one, leveraging new animations and transitions for navigation inside feeds and articles. My review wasn’t completely positive: while I lauded the app’s speed, elegance, and familiarity, I also stressed that, in the age of Mr. Reader, Reeder for iPad was too little, too late for my workflow. I concluded by saying that Reeder was a “beautiful and familiar app that could have taken bigger risks”. In spite of the fresh(ish) coat of paint, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Reeder 2 wasn’t exactly new or advancing the basics of the app in meaningful ways.
Especially if you’ve been waiting for an update to Reeder for iPad, maybe a redesigned Reeder that doesn’t go crazy with new features but that instead brings a cleaner reading and syncing experience is exactly what you wanted from Rizzi. Reeder 2 is a fine piece of software – it certainly looks and works better than the majority of RSS clients on the App Store – but my hope was that Rizzi would include new functionalities in the sharing and browsing departments. I guess that, with Reeder 2, I was expecting the same impact that Reeder 1 had in 2009, whereas what I found was a beautiful, solid, but familiar (and trite, in some areas) take on the same app.
I was hopeful that the new foundation would give Rizzi time to regroup and evaluate how Reeder could add new iOS 7 features without losing its nature in the process, but, four months and a 2.1 update later, things haven’t changed much. That’s not necessarily a bad thing – good software takes time, especially when you’re an indie developer – but, as a user, I was curious to see whether other RSS readers could satisfy my news-reading needs better.
Hence, Unread. Read more
I read two articles over the weekend about the impact of In-App Purchases on the games industry. Thomas Baekdal argues that consumable IAPs, mastered by companies like Electronic Arts, are destroying the industry. He uses the latest Dungeon Keeper game for iOS as an example.
We have reached a point in which mobile games couldn’t even be said to be a game anymore. Playing a game means that you have fun. It doesn’t mean that you sit around and wait for the game to annoy you for so long that you decide to pay credits to speed it up. And for an old geezer like me who remember the glory days of gaming back in the 1990s, it’s just unbearable to watch.
With the help of NerdCubed (great guy), let me illustrate just how bad in-app purchases in games have become. Let’s compare a game from the 1990s with the same game on the iPad today.
On the other hand, Drew Crawford makes the case for In-App Purchases as the best revenue model for the modern App Store games market, noting that they can be considered the evolution of the arcade:
See, in the in-app purchase model actually predates phones. It predates video game consoles. It goes all the way back to the arcade, where millions of consumers were happy to pay a whole quarter ($0.89 in 2013 dollars) to pay for just a few minutes. The entire video games industry comes from this model. Kids these days.
But in fact, the model predates computers. I can trace it at least as far back as the Periscope mechanical arcade game from Sega in 1966 that offers to sell you ten lives for 25 cents ($1.80 in 2013 dollars).
I understand Crawford’s position, and I think that In-App Purchase isn’t strictly a bad model for monetization. My problem is with the user-hostile consumable approach to IAP as illustrated by Baekdal and perfected by EA. It may make sense financially, it may even turn out to make millions of dollars for EA, but, as a gamer, I just think it’s sad.
Speaking of 1984, Forbes’ Allen St. John published a look behind the scenes of Apple’s iconic Super Bowl commercial. If you can bear with the paginated format and initial ad, there are some interesting details.
On the 30th anniversary of the ad that changed the world, I talked to Steve Hayden, the Chiat/Day advertising VP who wrote that spot. He talked about how Apple founder Steve Jobs commissioned the ad, Blade Runner auteur Ridley Scott brought it to life, and how that 60 second spot which ran just once in January of 1984, changed his life.
