This week, the 5by5 delegates to the UN from England, Italy and Tennessee gather to discuss some follow up, Windows and the Apple cult.
I also got to talk about Nintendo and Steve Ballmer. You can get the episode here, or subscribe via iTunes.
Posts in Linked
The Prompt, Episode 2: “Explode Into a Pile of Stars”→
Responding To iOS 7→
Winning apps won’t merely take Apple’s default look and mimic it. Think about how boring it would be if all of our apps looked like iOS 7 Calendar or Settings. It would get old really fast. But that’s nothing new. Think about if all the apps on iOS 6 looked like iOS 6 Calendar and settings… Yep, it would be really boring.
Jeremy Olson has some great thoughts on how designers and developers should respond to iOS 7 in the coming months. From what I’ve seen so far, this summer will be an interesting one.
Apple Details iOS 7 Business and Education Improvements→
Last night, Apple updated its iOS 7 mini-site to include links to two webpages that detail improvements coming for Business and Education users.
For Business, the biggest additions are Per app VPN, more controls on “Open In”, third-party app data protection, and more options coming to MDM with streamlined enrollment. New MDM options are also coming for Education users, alongside single sign-on for an institution’s apps, App Store license management, and more.
Macworld has a good overview of the changes coming in iOS 7 for Business and Education. As noted by Bradley Chambers, the new Apple ID features for students under age 13 are a notable addition.
Dropbox for iOS Gets Easier Sharing→
The Dropbox app for iOS received a nice update last night. It’s now possible to swipe across any file to bring up a bar containing icons to share, mark as starred, move, or delete; you can also easily share any folder or multiple photos at once with other users.
I’m particularly happy about improved photo sharing, as it fits well with my photo archiving workflow.
‘Creativity as an effortless fantasy’→
John Pavlus of Co.Design on Instagram’s Cinema mode:
Stabilization is the “filters” of mobile video: the one-touch (or in Instagram’s case, no-touch) killer feature that makes your mundane “moments”–your life, really–look and feel like art, and you the artist. Instagram’s video feature is usually compared to Vine, but it really has more in common with Paper–another fantasy-driven art-making app that transforms your homely scrawls into graceful sketches.
[via Ellis Hamburger]
‘Trust me. There are thousands of apps that haven’t been written yet.’→
Kevin Hoctor of No Thirst Software, commenting on the idea that all marketable software has already been written:
I wrote some advice in an interview with App Camp For Girls recently, “Find something in your life that is broken and write software to fix it.” The best software is personal. It’s something you need. It heals a wound in your life and makes you happy.
Thinking About The New Mac Pro→
Guy English of kickingbear writes:
I don’t think Geekbench scores for this machine will be terribly meaningful. Benchmarks have the curse of trying to capture how a machine will perform under typical, or extreme, conditions. What they don’t do is give a broad perspective of the actual capabilities of the machine. They’re informed by history. If you do something new history will be less relevant.
Keep reading for the geeky bits.
Markdown for the Blind→
Steven Aquino, writing for TidBITS:
Markdown has changed my life for the better. Not only is it easier to work with than graphical interfaces given the limitations of my vision, but it has caused me to embrace plain text for nearly all of my documents. No longer do I have to work in bloated word processors with toolbars galore, or worry about rich-text formatting. Discovering Markdown has been liberating in the truest sense of the word.
It’s amazing how the same markup we use to simply make our lives easier when writing for the web can be used to empower a writer who is legally blind.
On App Pricing and Sustainability→
Ben Thompson, writing about Paper’s sustainability vs. success on the App Store:
By every visible measure, FiftyThree, the makers of Paper, are the definition of an app store success story, and this week they closed a Series A round of financing led by Andreessen Horowitz.
It’s easy to see this as a big endorsement of the App Store: startup creates a breakthrough product, gets noticed, gets funding, changes the world. And perhaps that’s the path FiftyThree is on.
But there’s another scenario that may be in play, and if I were Apple, this round of funding and FiftyThree’s plans going forward should be a yellow flag that the App Store may not be as strong as it could be.
Erica Ogg of GigaOm conversed with Impending’s Phill Ryu and FiftyThree’s CEO Georg Petschnigg earlier this week to talk about how developers are coping with App Store economics. The conversation takes us through Ryu’s thought process on deciding what’s fair to the customer while ensuring his company is able to continue developing Hatch, the soon-to-be-launched app his team has been working on for the past months. Petschnigg’s opinion on the matter is that one-time paid apps are limiting.
“In-app purchase is a tremendous opportunity to offer something (like how a) chef only puts what people want to eat on a menu, we see in-app purchase as a mechanism for paring down the feature set and offering up what people want to buy,” he told me. “It keeps the software footprint small and efficient. And from a design perspective it’s incredibly liberating.”
FiftyThree has been one of the most transparent high profile developers in the industry, often sharing what goes into the development of each of their new features on their blog. FiftyThree, starting with just five employees, has grown into a team of twenty two, becoming “a workshop for re-imagining common digital tools.” The company has made money by charging for tools through in-app purchases, but Ben points out that alone doesn’t appear to be sustainable given their quick growth. What Paper is now working on aren’t just new tools for Paper, but hardware and services that have the potential to bring in more revenue outside of the App Store.
Ben also highlights some of the core problems facing the App Store today, given customer’s expectations of value and price from a previous article on Adobe’s subscription model.
There is so much more Apple (and the other platform owners) could be doing to improve this situation; paid updates and app-store supported subscriptions (beyond Newsstand) would be great places to start.