iOS 7.0.4 is currently propagating and should be available for download soon through Software Update. It includes bug fixes, various improvements, and fixes an issue with FaceTime calls.
The new update comes nearly a month after iOS 7.0.3, which was released on October 22nd and included iCloud Keychain, improvements to Spotlight, and changes to the Reduce Motion setting in Accessibility. iOS 7.0.4 is the third public update to iOS 7, which launched for all iOS devices on September 18.
This is part ten, the final in a series detailing the process of making a product marketing video for my app, Fin. I hope to inspire others to try and make these kinds of videos for their own products, as I think they are pretty essential for selling apps to customers. We may not all have the budget to hire a pro team to make super-awesome videos for us, but we can make something worthwhile if we put in some time and effort, and a little bit of cash.
Joe Cieplinski has published a series on creating a professional-looking promo videos for apps. Today, he concluded the series with Part 10, which includes all links to previous entries.
Joe’s articles contain a lot of useful tips to create a videos using Apple tools like Motion and Final Cut Pro X. You can watch the video he made for his new app, Fin, here.
David Sparks has published his fourth Field Guide:
There are over 300 pages and nearly 1.5 hours of video screencasts and 200 screenshots as I walk you through. I’ve also included several audio interviews with friends including Serenity Caldwell, Rob Corddry, Merlin Mann, Fraser Speirs, Jeff Taekman, Aisha Tyler, David Wain, and Gabe Weatherhead, that provide even more perspective on the best ways to tackle email.
The book features a new craftsman-style design and is illustrated by Mike Rohde. In a lot of ways, this book feels like the culmination of everything I’ve learned along the way. I’m really proud of this book and I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed creating it. It is available in the iBooks Store and PDF for $9.99.
I own every Field Guide, and David’s work has been a huge inspiraton for my Editorial book. I’m downloading the (1.1 GB) Email Field Guide as soon as I get my Internet back.
Joined by Matthew Alexander, Stephen and Myke wade through a mountain of follow-up, discuss the iPad mini with Retina display, Netflix, fitness trackers and the means of payment used in Tennessee, Hawaii and parts of Europe.
I couldn’t join Myke and Stephen this week due to ongoing issues with my ISP. Get the episode here.
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When I write on my iPad mini, I often need to look up and reference price of apps that I already own. That’s a surprisingly hard thing to do on an iOS device, so I decided to remove the annoyance caused by this problem with an Editorial workflow. I call it “Get App Price”.
If you own an app, searching for it in the iOS 7 App Store won’t show you the price information alongside the app’s icon and description – you’ll only get an Open or Install button. Unlike the Mac App Store, there is no separate pricing field in the app information at the bottom of the screen, which usually forces me to go to a developer’s website to find out what the price of an app is.1 There wouldn’t be any problem if Apple allowed Safari to open iTunes web previews without redirecting them straight to the App Store, which is what they do on OS X. I have tried to force Safari to open web previews, and I even downloaded browsers that can set a modified user agent string to trick iOS into thinking they’re desktop web browsers worthy of a web preview – eventually, the App Store app always opened, displaying no price.
I set out to create a simple workflow to fetch an app’s title and price directly from iTunes with no clipboard import or other middleman. I later found out that you can tap on the “Related” tab in the App Store or gift an app to view its price, but I had already created a workflow that’s faster than opening the App Store and tapping a bunch of buttons just to get a price. I’m a free man, and I deserve my own App Store lookup solution.2
Day One, my favorite journaling app for iOS and OS X, has received an update today that brings a visual refresh for iOS 7, support for background fetch via Dropbox, and new data tracking sources.
Since its inception, Day One has been about adding context to your diary by using features of iOS and OS X that augment the classic journal in ways that paper never could. It was only last year, however, that Bloom Built’s vision could come to fruition with support for photos, weather data, and location information available right into your daily journal. Since then, Paul Mayne and his team have been hard at work to ensure that Day One could have feature consistency across platforms as well as take advantage of online data and Apple’s latest OSes and technologies.
Today’s new version for iOS is, again, all about data, sensors, and additional context for your journal entries, which are no longer limited to text and pictures but now span a bevy of tracking points such as date and time, tags, weather, location, activity tracking, and steps taken. Read more
We’ve seen great apps come and go. There are wonderful ideas that just are not financially viable without a bit of random luck. I don’t think $3 email clients are the way to move forward. MailMate is unapologetically $50. The developer is considerate enough to lay it all out. Unless there’s enough money to allow him to work on the project, it simply will not happen.
Gabe Weatherhead writes about some of the nerdy features of MailMate. While I don’t organize my email messages in a folder structure like Gabe does, I’m fascinated by his setup with smart folders (based on MailMate’s superior criteria). The crowdfunding campaign (which actually gives you an app license key) that was launched the other day is halfway there.
New app created by Daniel Nordh aimed at letting you organize notes visually. iPad-first, I’ve been trying Curator for the past week and it’s a nice version 1.0: sort of like Pinterest, but without social features and focused on collecting photos, text notes, and live websites that you can pin on your boards. Everything happens through drag & drop and the app looks good on iOS 7 and the Retina display.
If you want more, you can import images from Dropbox, Flickr, iOS photos, and more services using a built-in media picker based on Filepicker.io. Curator has essentially no learning curve, and I see it as the Vesper of Pinterest-like apps: it’s fast, easy to use, but it has no sync or advanced features for now. I’d recommend Curator to people who use an iPad as their primary computer and just need a simple app to organize the things they like without signing up for a web service or learning to use Evernote.
The business model is also interesting: the app is free, but there’s a $6.99 In-App Purchase if you want to create more than five boards.
Reminders.app on OS X is somewhat limited and inconsistent, but for its simplicity offers a lot of possibilities. For many this is all they need to keep control of their tasks and reminders.
Sven Fechner has a nice list of tips, tricks, and links for the OS X Reminders app. I use Reminders every day through Fantastical 2 on my iPhone, but I have to rely on Apple’s apps on my iPad and MacBook Air. I would love to see better consistency between all platforms (just one example: clickable URLs in notes).
