Federico Viticci

10804 posts on MacStories since April 2009

Federico is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of MacStories, where he writes about Apple with a focus on apps, developers, iPad, and iOS productivity. He founded MacStories in April 2009 and has been writing about Apple since. Federico is also the co-host of AppStories, a weekly podcast exploring the world of apps, Unwind, a fun exploration of media and more, and NPC: Next Portable Console, a show about portable gaming and the handheld revolution.
@viticci@macstories.net
@viticci.macstories.net
viticci@macstories.net

Panic’s iOS Apps in 2015→

Cabel Sasser, writing for the Panic blog on their iOS apps and how they did on the App Store in 2015:

iOS Revenue. I brought this up last year and we still haven’t licked it. We had a change of heart — well, an experimental change of heart — and reduced the price of our iOS apps in 2015 to normalize them at $9.99 or less, thinking that was the upper limit and/or sweet spot for iOS app pricing. But it didn’t have a meaningful impact on sales.

More and more I’m beginning to think we simply made the wrong type of apps for iOS — we made professional tools that aren’t really “in demand” on that platform — and that price isn’t our problem, but interest is.

So, once again, we will investigate raising our iOS app prices in 2016, with two hopes: that the awesome customers that love and need these apps understand the incredible amount of work that goes into them and that these people are also willing to pay more for a quality professional app (whereas, say, the casual gamer would not).

You have to wonder if Apple should come up with new ways to incentivize the creation of these types of pro apps, or if Panic shouldn’t have lowered prices in the first place. Maybe it’s a bit of both.

I don’t think Panic made the wrong type of apps for iOS. Panic’s apps are fantastic pieces of software, and Apple should be proud of having them on the App Store. Panic’s commitment to their iOS apps is laudable, and their taste, unsurprisingly, impeccable. Coda 2 and Transmit are some of the finest productivity software you’ll find on the App Store.

As usual, I’m going to say that a possible solution lies somewhere in the middle. I’d like to see Apple improve the App Store with tools and developer relations that help companies like Panic, and I’d urge more developers to place the correct value on their apps. The Omni Group is a good example to follow here. It may sound old fashioned, but I think quality software deserves an appropriate price.

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Apple Q1 2016 Results: $75.9 Billion Revenue, 74.8 Million iPhones, 16.1 Million iPads Sold

Apple has just published their financial results for Q1 2016 for the quarter that ended in December 2015. The company posted revenue of $75.9 billion. The company sold 16.1 million iPads, 74.8 million iPhones, and 5.3 million Macs, earning a quarterly net profit of $18.4 billion.

“Our team delivered Apple’s biggest quarter ever, thanks to the world’s most innovative products and all-time record sales of iPhone, Apple Watch and Apple TV,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “The growth of our Services business accelerated during the quarter to produce record results, and our installed base recently crossed a major milestone of one billion active devices.”

“Our record sales and strong margins drove all-time records for net income and EPS in spite of a very difficult macroeconomic environment,” said Luca Maestri, Apple’s CFO. “We generated operating cash flow of $27.5 billion during the quarter, and returned over $9 billion to investors through share repurchases and dividends. We have now completed $153 billion of our $200 billion capital return program.”

For the first time, Apple has included supplemental material alongside its financial results, noting that “in constant currency, Q1’16 revenue would have been $5 billion higher”. “$100 of Apple’s non-U.S. dollar revenue in Q4’14 translates into only $85 U.S. dollars today”, the company noted in a document available here.

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MindNode 4.2 with Reminders Integration→

Nice update to MindNode, a great mind-mapping app for iOS and OS X, which can now attach tasks to items and (optionally) sync with iCloud Reminders:

Mind Maps are a great way to kick off a new project and Tasks are often a major part of this workflow. MindNode now offers native Tasks support. You can turn any child node into a task and check off completed tasks directly on the canvas. To help you stay on top of your tasks, MindNode will also show a task progress indicator on parent nodes that have children with tasks.

If you prefer Apple Reminders to manage your tasks, you can also export your Tasks to Reminders and MindNode will keep the completion state in sync with Reminders. For example when you mark a task as completed in Reminders, it will also be marked as completed in MindNode. This feature works across iOS and OS X.

Even better, if you use Reminders with 2Do, you’ll be able to work on a project with a tree structure in MindNode, then share to Reminders and complete tasks either from 2Do or MindNode. Clever integration – though it would also be useful to import lists from Reminders and visualize them as mind maps in MindNode.

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Improving the iOS Emoji Keyboard→

Steven Aquino, writing at The App Factor:

What I’d like to see Apple do is not necessarily make the emojis themselves bigger — the keyboard only fits a finite space, after all — but rather change how they’re presented to the user.

Here’s my suggestion: Apple should take the magnification animation it already employs on the text keyboard and apply it to the emojis. Every time I press on, say, a smiley face, the face would “pop up” in the same manner a letter does when you press its corresponding key. Taking this a step further, it would also be helpful if you could use the magnification loupe (for moving the insertion point) to scrub through emoji. The only caveat here is that Apple would need to make the loupe larger, which is something I wrote about in my aforementioned article. As it is now, the current magnification level wouldn’t do much good to compensate for the small size of the emoji.

Looking at the emoji keyboard from an accessibility perspective, Steven’s suggestions make a lot of sense. Existing features such as Dynamic Type and Character Preview could also be used for emoji, but I like Steven’s loupe idea better.

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Ben Brooks on Moving to 2Do→

Ben Brooks has a spot-on comment on task managers after his move to 2Do:

That is: if you are using every part of the task management system when things are light, then problems will arise when things get busy. It’s not that OmniFocus was overkill for me, it’s that it was too rigid. That rigidity is great when I am suffering decision fatigue from the amount of work I have, but it is a burden when I am not suffering that fatigue.

Further: when you aren’t busy your task management system should be easy. The system should scale, not permanently be operating as if you are the busiest person in the world all the time.

At its core, this is what I love about 2Do: its flexibility makes it either extremely simple or incredibly advanced – or both at the same time if you just switch views in the app. Unlike other task managers, 2Do adapts to your needs.

(Side note: after Email to 2Do, I wouldn’t mind paying for all sorts of optional add-ons in the app.)

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Canvas, Episode 2: Document Providers→

Federico and Fraser go in-depth on the Document Picker and Document Provider system in iOS 9.

In the second episode of Canvas, Fraser and I discussed what is perhaps one of the most underestimated features of iOS 8 and iOS 9 – Document Providers. The document picker is often overlooked, but knowing how (and when) to use it can enhance your iOS workflow to make you save time and better integrate apps with each other.

You can listen to the episode here.

Featured workflows:

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