Posts in Linked

Why Every Photo Storage Startup Dies Or Gets Acquired→

Casey Newton on Picturelife selling to StreamNation:

No wonder people keep building superior services: it’s impossible to store your photos with Apple, or Google, or Amazon, and not imagine you could do it better. And the need grows larger every day. Last year, trend forecaster Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins estimated that we upload 1.8 billion photos to the internet a day, up from 500 million the year before. But while services like Picturelife have attracted thousands of paying customers — I’m one of them — they haven’t found enough to build a sustainable business.

I liked Picturelife. For a while, I used it to browse photos, even though I still kept a copy in Dropbox for backup.

These days, I’m using iCloud Photo Library, with no other backups or workflows involved. I pay €0.99/month for iCloud storage and all my pictures are on my iPhone, iPad, and iCloud.com. I realize that this is an unpopular choice – primarily because of iCloud’s not-so-great reputation – but the service has been working flawlessly for me and I like how I don’t have to think about managing it. It’s built right there into the Camera and Photos app and it demolished the need for a third-party photo app for me.

I hope this post won’t jinx it.

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Watch Apps and Tap Distance→

David Smith writes about changes to WatchKit Apple launched yesterday with the fifth beta of iOS 8.2:

In all my design work for my WatchKit apps the question that I keep asking is: How will this make my app more convenient to use? If I don’t have a good answer for that then I’m likely heading down the wrong path.

Watch apps shouldn’t try and be full blown apps, replicating the full functionality of their big-brother iPhone apps. Instead they should be sleek, svelte companions that take advantage of their immediate availability to their user. This leads me to the problem I’m so glad Apple has addressed. The tap distance required for the user to perform any action.

This, I hope, is how developers of the iPhone apps I use every day are thinking about Apple Watch. Making Watch apps that emphasize quick interactions in a natural and direct way instead of cramming iPhone apps into a small display.

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Realmac Launches Crowdfunding Campaign for Typed Blogging Platform→

Realmac Software (makers of Ember, Typed for Mac, Clear, and RapidWeaver) have launched a crowdfunding campaign for Typed.com, a blogging platform they’ve been building for the past few months. The highlights: it’ll support Markdown, multiple users and blogs, custom domains, and responsive designs out of the box.

As they explain the campaign page:

Most blogging software is clunky, with bloated writing tools that get in the way. Typed is different. Typed.com uses Markdown syntax for writing content, combined with a beautifully focused interface. It’s a joy to use.

We know a thing or two about building apps that have great user experiences: Typed.com is built by the same team that made Clear, the award winning to-do app for iOS and Mac.

This is an interesting new venture for Realmac and I hope it succeeds. I welcome innovation in blogging services with this kind of features and sustainable business model. You can back the project here and watch the video below.

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Desk App’s 2014→

A great overview of Desk’s 2014 by its developer, John Saddington:

The bottom-line, though, is that it means that it is quite possible to “make it” as an indie developer and eek out an income that is substantive and worthwhile. I hope this report, if anything, gives some encouragement to all of those that are interested in seriously (or semi-seriously) pursuing an independent app that creates great value for users and customers.

Desk is a new text editor and publishing app for OS X, and John has clearly put years of thought and passion into it. What struck me in his blog post is how he reinvested the app’s revenue into advertising instead of settling on what he had achieved, going after a very committed audience that produced interesting results.

Fascinating story, and good business sense. See also: Joe Cieplinski’s thoughts.

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Todoist App Coming to Apple Watch→

This morning, Todoist announced an Apple Watch version of their app. Joe Rossignol writes:

Todoist aims to bring its popular to-do app for iPhone and iPad to the wrist with a simplistic Apple Watch app that will provide task management at a glance. When paired with an iPhone, the app will enable users to view their upcoming tasks and categories, reply to comments, and schedule or mark complete tasks. Todoist tells us that the video below is missing the task filter view, but plans to add the feature soon.

The past few weeks in the tech news cycle have been full of intriguing, but ultimately useless, examples of Apple Watch “concepts”. This is an actual WatchKit app coming soon to Apple Watch.

I’m excited because Todoist is my task management service of choice, and the ability to quickly mark a task as completed or defer it from my wrist could be interesting. The app looks standard – as I suspect most initial Apple Watch apps will be like – but make sure to hit the source link for a short demo video.

Also: considering Todoist’s integration with IFTTT and Zapier, how cool would it be to trigger automated workflows from an Apple Watch?

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Twitter Instant Timeline→

Vindu Goel writes about Twitter’s new “instant timeline” feature, which will allow users to sign up and start reading tweets without curating a following list manually:

Over all, however, the quality of the instant timeline was so good that I was almost tempted to dump my regular Twitter account, where I follow more than 700 other accounts, probably one-third of which are no longer important to me.

But:

The first part of the sign-up process is unchanged. After you pick a user name and password, Twitter asks for access to your smartphone’s contact list. Once you grant that access, the service scans it for people with Twitter accounts and suggests them as people to follow.

The feature has currently rolled out to a small percentage of users on Android. On multiple occasions, Twitter stated that getting people to sign up and enjoy the service without the burden of choosing accounts to follow is a priority for the company, and the results reported by The New York Times sound encouraging.

Still, I wonder how scanning contacts to find accounts based on common interest would work for people who have heard of Twitter but don’t have friends who use it (example: my parents). Keeping this instant timeline in addition to the traditional way of creating an account and picking people to follow sounds good though, and I’m curious to see when it’ll roll out to iPhone users.

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Virtual: My Friends Thought I Was a Genius→

This week Federico and Myke talk about their experiences with Grim Fandango Remastered and the Code Name S.T.E.A.M demo.

A great game and a promising demo featured in this week’s Virtual. You can listen to the episode here.

For more Grim Fandango reads, I recommend this story by Polygon on how Grim Fandango came to life again, Laura Hudson’s article on playing the game today, and Kotaku’s guide to why so many people love Grim Fandango.

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The iPad Introduction, Five Years Later→

Five years later, Federico, Myke and Stephen re-visit Steve Jobs’ announcement of the original iPad.

On January 27, 2010, Steve Jobs introduced the iPad. Five years later, the iPad has sold over 200 million units and it has become my main computer. So, obviously, we’d have a special episode of Connected to revisit the keynote and its message after five years.

I’m very happy about how this turned out. We put a lot of work into it – don’t miss the rumor section before the actual keynote – and it’s been fun to look back at the origin of the device I now use every day. You can listen to the episode here.

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Microsoft Releases Outlook for iOS→

Microsoft today released an iPhone and iPad version of Outlook, their well-known email app from the Office suite of productivity apps. The app is free and does not require a subscription to Office 365.

Outlook for iOS supports email accounts from Microsoft Exchange, Office 365, Outlook.com, iCloud, Gmail, and Yahoo Mail - but does not yet support custom IMAP accounts. Interestingly, the app also directly connects to online storage services such as OneDrive, Dropbox and Google Drive so you can easily attach and send files.

Outlook makes it simple to share files stored in the cloud. With just a few taps, you can insert a link to any file from OneDrive, Dropbox and other popular accounts in your email message. Recipients are automatically granted permission to view these files, with no extra steps.

Need to find a file quickly? No problem. Outlook provides a view of your recently received email attachments, so you don’t have to go searching through email to find that document you need. Outlook also lets you search across both your cloud storage and your email attachments at once, with Quick Filters to let you quickly sort by file type.

Be sure to read the full announcement blog post from the Microsoft Office team, they highlight a number of neat features that might convince you to try the app out. And if you’re ready to try the app out, here’s the direct link to Outlook on the App Store.
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