Cody Fink

1547 posts on MacStories since January 2010

Former MacStories contributor.

[email protected]

This Week's Sponsor:

PowerPhotos

The Ultimate Toolbox for Photos on the Mac

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.

Permalink

Quantifying the iTunes Video Store→

Horace Dediu of Asymco writes,

Apple states that the movie download rate is 350k/day. My estimate  was only about 126k/day.

As a result, my new estimate for the rate of spending on iTunes video is about $1.75 billion/yr. This is much more substantial than prior estimates mainly because movies are much more valuable. A tripling of the download rate shows up as a significant rise in the profile of video vis-à-vis the other media types.

Apps, music, and software are still king, but video on demand is still a growing source of revenue for Apple.

Permalink

HBO GO, WatchESPN, Sky News, Crunchyroll, and Qello Come to Apple TV

Apple is rolling out new programming with its latest software update, version 5.3, for 2nd and 3rd generation Apple TVs. HBO GO and WatchESPN are now directly available on Apple TV, in addition to Sky News (for US, UK, and Ireland), Crunchyroll, and Qello.

HBO GO and WatchESPN require a cable subscription:

HBO GO users get unlimited access to their favorite HBO shows, including HBO original programming, hit movies, sports, documentaries, comedy specials and more. This includes full seasons of the best of HBO, plus bonus features and special behind-the-scenes extras. HBO GO on Apple TV requires a subscription to HBO through participating television providers.

WatchESPN on Apple TV delivers a one-stop video destination for sports fans with live access to ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, ESPN3 and ESPN Buzzer Beater/Goal Line to those who receive ESPN’s networks as part of their video subscription from affiliated providers.

You can learn more about today’s update in Apple’s press release.

The New TweetDeck for OS X

TweetDeck used to be this sort-of all powerful Twitter console before Twitter bought it, dumbed it down in some aspects while improving it in others, and changed the icon from yellow to blue. It’s only a 2-star app on the App Store, but I don’t think it’s given enough credit. The changes rolled out around the same time that Twitter’s own iOS app went through the same kinds of changes, and I was receptive to it since I thought the TweetDeck refresh was generally more accessible to the public. I haven’t used TweetDeck much in the meantime, so I’m looking at today’s refresh as a returning user with some familiarity of the previous version.

TweetDeck 3.0 is still a web app, acts like a web app, and will misbehave like a web app. Expanding and collapsing the new sidebar currently breaks the interface — right clicking and reloading the app fixes the missing sidebar.

Otherwise, it’s fairly solid. TweetDeck is known for its multiple columns, and filters have been reintroduced through drop down menus that are quite nice. Per column, you can adjust what users you see, only view tweets that contain a certain keyword, or exclude a hashtag of your choosing. You can even receive alerts for tweets that match your query. My impression of TweetDeck is that it’s not an app I’d want to use all the time as it’s optimized for following events like a big media campaign or something like the WWDC Keynote.

TweetDeck has live streaming for all of its columns, although direct messages don’t refresh in real time if you’re replying to someone and they reply back. Through the app’s settings you can adjust font sizes and column width, although you’ll likely have to pan across the trackpad with five or more columns on a MacBook. Columns can be used for just about anything from lists, to searches, to mentions. For example, TweetDeck gives me flexibility in watching replies to our MacStories Twitter account (or another blog’s if I’m interested in a response to a post), and that stuff will update in real time. There’s a column where you can customize Interactions as well, for keeping an eye on new follows, retweets, or favorites.

It’s not a native app, there’s a bug or two, but I can’t help but think there is some clear improvement over the last update. It continues to omit Facebook or LinkedIn integration (sorry folks — that’s probably gone for good), but a lot of new features have been added since. Custom filters per column don’t prevent the app from continuing to be relatively easy to use. My current complaint is that you still need a separate TweetDeck account (which is used for syncing columns and filter preferences), and you’ll need to authorize with Twitter on top of that.

You can download TweetDeck for free from the Mac App Store.

A Quick Rundown of Microsoft’s Office Mobile for iPhone

I can’t say I’m terribly excited about what Microsoft is offering in Office Mobile, but it’s a start. Now available on the iPhone, Office Mobile requires an Office 365 subscription, which will give you access to all of Microsoft’s Office apps on up to 5 PCs or Macs, 20 GB of SkyDrive storage, and 60 minutes of Skype calls for $9.99 per month or $99.99 a year for Home Premium.

Why you’d want it

Lots of iPhone apps can view Office files, but few render them properly. Office Mobile, with Microsoft’s layout engine, should at least be able to display your Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and Powerpoint presentations as they were intended. It also gives you a chance to make small edits on the go, but I wouldn’t use it to write a novel.

Some of the cool stuff to be found are features like Resume Reading, which automatically opens Word documents at the place you last left off on your PC. You can also flip through mini PowerPoint slideshows to practice your talking points before a big presentation.

But I wouldn’t bother

It’s basically the equivalent of Google Drive for the iPhone, which is to say it isn’t very good.

Office Mobile will aggregate Office files from your SkyDrive folder, which is nice, but the editing options offered are finicky. Microsoft prefers their own controls before iOS’ own standard actions, making editing a frustrating experience. Doing basic things like select text in Word or tapping on cells in Excel is a chore, and editing itself is complicated.

If you have an Office 365 subscription, it’s something extra that will give you the option to review files, leave comments, and fix typos when you’re away from your Mac or PC, but I don’t see this being a great incentive for jumping into the latest office apps if you’re content with iWork or an older Office suite.

Office Mobile is free to download from the App Store.

I Wouldn’t Mod the New AirPort Extreme→

9to5Mac ran a quick piece this morning about hacking the new AirPort Extreme. Apparently Apple kept the hard drive caddy in place for the new AirPort Time Capsule, but left out any internal connectors.

In the worst ‘case’ scenario, DIYers could use the USB port and wire a bus-powered 2.5 inch hard drive (up to 2TB currently) or SSD around inside the case.

Don’t do this. You don’t really save a lot of money (if any by the time you paid shipping for a new 2TB HDD and USB compatible cable), and then you’d be using up an available USB slot that could be used for other things, like even more storage or a USB printer. If you want a hard drive, just pay more upfront for the AirPort Time Capsule.

Permalink

Flatness and the Dimensionality of iOS 7→

David Cole, product designer at Quora, writes:

The big, obvious change to the look in iOS 7 is the flatness. This change is being characterized as a stripping away of dimensionality. I’ll propose something else is going on here: the move to flat screens actually affords a ramp up in dimensionality. When an individual screen gets flattened together, you can treat it as a single object that you can then manipulate and relate to other screens. This concept is at the heart of the biggest changes to the iOS 7 interaction paradigms.

Permalink

So What’s New With Apple’s MacBook Air?

 

Image credit: iFixit

Apple’s new 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Airs now last 9 and 12 hours on battery respectively, a 4 and 5 hour improvement over the previous generation. Lots of sites have started poking and prodding at the new machines, including iFixit, known for their great do-it-yourself gadget repair manuals.

iFixit’s (mid 2013) 13-inch MacBook Air teardown

Last year’s 7.3V, 6700 mAh battery has been supplanted by a new 7.6V 7150 mAh battery. Apple noted that Flash storage was 45% faster in this revision, and that’s due to the move from a SATA based solid state drive to a PCI Express based SSD. The AirPort card has also been updated to support 802.11ac. It’s still a very proprietary machine: RAM is soldered onto the logic board and many components aren’t meant to be user replaceable or upgradeable, despite otherwise easy access to its insides.

 Wired on how Haswell saves so much power

The MacBook Air is packing a big battery, but those substantial energy savings are owned to Intel’s latest round of fourth-generation processors, known as Haswell. The new Haswell chips in today’s MBAs are part of a special low-voltage series of chips designed specifically for Ultrabooks, which Intel claims is twice as energy efficient as the previous generation.

AnandTech quick and dirty benchmarks

Something to keep in mind is that the new Haswell chips in Apple’s MacBook Airs are officially Intel HD 5000 based and not Iris.

Macworld puts the new MacBook Air through read and write paces

Macworld has the most comprehensive benchmarks at the moment, showing that the new MacBook Airs get substantially better read and write speeds with their new PCIe based SSDs. However, Haswell is pretty much in line performance-wise with the last generation of processors.