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“Mac Developers Are Laughing at the Mac App Store Guidelines”→

“Mac Developers Are Laughing at the Mac App Store Guidelines”

Jonathan Rentzsch:

Studying the details of Apple’s current implementation, it becomes clear Apple crafted the Mac App Store policies primarily with its own interests in mind, not of its customers and certainly not its developers.

My fellow Mac developers are laughing at the Mac App Store guidelines. They’re reporting that apps they’ve been shipping for years — a number of them Apple Design Award-winning — would be rejected from the Mac App Store. These are proven apps, beloved by their users. The current guidelines are clearly out-of-touch.

Maybe not just its own interests in mind, but there’s no doubt Apple has something to fix here. Does the 90-day timeframe sound like a “let’s gather feedback before the thing goes live” strategy to anyone else? How long before revised guidelines?

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The History of Trainyard→

The History of Trainyard

I tried a variety of mini-marketing escapades, including spending $50 on AdMob, $50 on Project Wonderful (Axe Cop, specifically), and $50 on Google Adwords. None of that worked. $50 is almost too tiny an amount to spend, but it became immediately obvious that any ad campaign within my budget would have no effect on sales whatsoever.

I should add that I definitely wasn’t disheartened. I knew it would take time, and that I had a great game that would eventually be successful. I just really wasn’t sure how to get there, but that was part of the adventure.

Great story, and congrats.

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iPad: Scroll or Card?→

iPad: Scroll or Card?

You often hear the argument that the iPad is all new and the Internet is all shit (too cold, too technical, not pretty enough), so the nerds should be ignored. After all, the iPad is closer to printed magazine than that damned Internet, right? No, it’s not. It’s a touch screen device. Touch SCREEN device. The fact that you touch it doesn’t mean that it’s like print. As a matter of fact it’s lightyears away from print.

Amen.

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Mac App Store Review Guidelines Breakdown→

Mac App Store Review Guidelines Breakdown

Nilay Patel at Engadget takes a look at Apple’s review guidelines for the Mac App Store. This caught my attention:

6.2 Apps that look similar to Apple Products or apps bundled on the Mac, including the Finder, iChat, iTunes, and Dashboard, will be rejected. This one’s quite odd, as there are lots and lots of Mac apps that look like Apple’s own apps – DoubleTwist looks like iTunes, for example, and almost every FTP app looks like the Finder in some way. And what about an app like Delicious Library, which actually inspired Apple apps like iBooks and iPhoto 11’s new books interface? This one’s going to be hard to enforce in a reasonable way.

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David Pogue: “Office for Mac Isn’t an Improvement”→

David Pogue: “Office for Mac Isn’t an Improvement”

The new Office suite has gotten rave reviews from my counterparts at other publications. Clearly, something must be wrong with me; I think that, in day-to-day usability, Office 2011 is a big step backward.

The Mac suite now includes the Ribbon, a horizontal toolbar that’s built into Office for Windows. What I don’t get is this: Last time I checked, computer screens were all wider than they are tall. The last thing you’d want to do is to eat up *vertical* screen space with interface clutter like the Ribbon. Don’t we really want those controls off to the side, like the Formatting Palette in the previous Mac Office?

Walt Mossberg loved the new Outlook. Pogues hates it.

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An Open App Store On The Mac→

An Open App Store On The Mac

A number of prominent app developers would have to commit to supporting an open Mac app store, by making their apps available on that store. These announcements would pretty much have to happen this week in order to have enough impact to sway the course of discussion. There’s no reason these would have to be exclusive, or say anything negative about Apple’s app store, but could just be expressions of these developers pursuing every distribution option available.

Interesting ideas based on Sparkle and Growl, but not going to happen. The Mac App Store will likely become most people’s way to discover and install Mac apps; developers’ websites will be there for demos and trials. And for apps that can’t go through Apple’s approval process.

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The Air’s Place In An iPad World→

The Air’s Place In An iPad World

In fact, the MacBook Air’s biggest competition is the iPad. Both can be used as a standalone product, but really shine when used as a secondary device. Both have great battery life and are thin and light. The smaller Air is even close to the size of the iPad.

The difference of course is all about software. For some people, iOS just doesn’t meet their needs. The new 11.6″ MacBook Air offers all of the features of Mac OS X in the smallest package ever. For people who need a full-blown computer that can go just about anywhere, the Air is an obvious choice. For everyone else, though, the iPad is really, really hard to ignore.

The iPad is similar in size to the new Air, and it’s cheaper. But don’t forget and don’t underestimate the importance of a small device running OS X at an acceptable form factor. For some people working in certain conditions with very few space available and frequent travelers, the 11.6-inch Air is a God-send.

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Marco Arment On The New MacBook Air→

Marco Arment On The New MacBook Air

Insightful analysis by Arment:

The 11” looks impressively tiny, but realistically, most people are unlikely to see significant benefits in portability or practicality from the 11” over the 13”. There are very few situations in which you’d be able to comfortably carry or use the 11” but not the 13”.

The 11” screen resolution of 1366x768 is great for its size, but it’s going to bevery cramped, especially vertically. Screen size is very important and noticeable in everyday use, and it’s often the limiting factor for how much work advanced users can comfortably get done on a laptop.

The 11” is also significantly slower and with less battery life, although these are less important factors.

The whole post is a must-read. Although in my opinion, that 11-inch model is damn tempting.

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Apple in Business Land→

Apple in Business Land

Rex Hammock:

I’ve watched closely (as both a customer and writer) as Apple has made attempts to better serve small business and corporate customers.

But I have a hard time believing Steve Jobs has ever obsessed over the B2B marketplace the way he’s obsessed over the materials that go into the glass staircases of major Apple Stores.

Perhaps because he has (in my opinion, brilliantly) focused the company’s products so much on great design that delights consumers, Apple’s varsity squad of product designers may have lacked the bandwidth to apply such attention to designing products that display such a deep understanding of how businesses use technology.

I just wonder if Jonathan Ive has ever sat in on a meeting where a discussion was taking place on how small business managers want to share contacts and calendars among their employees, for instance?

It’d be nice to see an update to this tomorrow, but I think the whole event will be focused on “OS X Lion Sneak Peek”.  Just for the sake of comparison, this is how Apple promotes the upcoming enterprise features in iOS 4.2 for iPad, business apps, iPhone in business and profiles.

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