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New Apps & Tools For More Efficient Writing

For the past week, the entire MacStories team and I have been focusing on finalizing our coverage of Mountain Lion, which, according to recent speculation, may be coming out next Wednesday, July 25th. As you may have noticed, we have been posting less frequently on the site, but we wanted to get our coverage just right, and I think we’ve managed to come up with a good plan. More details soon.

In the meantime, I’d like to share some links of apps and tools I have been using to research, write, and edit my review of Mountain Lion. As a general tip, make sure to check out our Reviews section, as several of the apps we have reviewed recently have a spot on my iPhone or iPad Springboard. But I’ve also discovered some new gems that, while working on the review, have helped me organize all my material more efficiently.

Scrivener. Per Dave Caolo’s recommendation, I decided to give Scrivener a try as a desktop app for writing and researching articles, and I’m glad I did. I’m still a novice – Scrivener is very complex and feature-rich – but here’s a few things that immediately enhanced my workflow: possibility to organize ideas and drafts as outlines, text, or visual notes; support for file attachments and OPML; document references for webpages; split-mode for comparing “snapshots” of document copies without creating duplicates of a file. I have been using Scrivener to compare various edits of my review, and I love it. An iPad app is coming, and I also got this book to learn my ropes around the app. Even better: Scrivener can sync to Dropbox, so I can make additions using the app I prefer. For iOS integration, I’ve been testing an app called Index Card, though I’m still not entirely sold on its implementation of the cork board.

Marked. To preview Scrivener’s contents (written in Markdown), I use Marked. Its exporting features are fantastic, and I have been using the outline navigator to get a better sense of my review’s structure. If you write on a Mac, you need Marked.

Keyboard Maestro Markdown Library. I only found out about this collection of macros this week, when I was looking for ways to automate link insertion in my article with Markdown. It turns out, the Keyboard Maestro Markdown Library contains macros for links, formatting, lists, and even images. I have tweaked them to better suit our site’s requirements (for instance, I have added captions to my image macro, and article titles to the link one using this tip), and, in total, I’m pretty sure they have already helped me save minutes I would have spent copying & pasting HTML instead. Amazingly useful. More on why I love Keyboard Maestro here.

OmniOutliner and CarbonFin Outliner. I have recommended these two apps in the past, but they’re worth a second mention. For my review, I created an outline on my iPhone months ago and started adding new ideas and notes from there. On iOS, I like Outliner because it supports Dropbox and has a simpler interface than OmniOutliner for adding notes and indenting elements. But on the Mac, I rely on The Omni Group’s app because it’s got the best support for keyboard shortcuts and notes – which are both essential to my workflow.

NoMoreiTunes. I had to look up several iTunes applications in the past week, and this Safari extension did the trick (read: it doesn’t launch iTunes when Safari opens an iTunes link).

Markdown Service Tools. Because sometimes I want to use my Mac’s contextual menu to quickly generate HTML off some Markdown.

Macdrifter’s Dictionary Macro. Mountain Lion features a new three-finger single-tap action for Dictionary lookups and file previews, but some apps don’t recognize this gesture. If you use Keyboard Maestro, this is a nice way to forward any selected word to Dictionary.

Evernote. While my writing happened in Scrivener, all other research material that didn’t strictly belong to the article went into Evernote. With it, I use a combination of other apps and hacks that make it easy to save URLs, images, and just about anything. I use EverWebClipper to quickly beam URLs into Evernote from Mobile Safari; lately, I’ve also been playing with EverClip, which doesn’t feature a bookmarklet but can run in the background (“listening” for every new copied file) for 10 minutes. It’s sort of like Pastebot, but for Evernote, which is nice. To automate the process of saving links while on my Mac, I use a couple of AppleScripts put together by our Don Southard, which are obviously configured to work with Keyboard Maestro.

Captio. Indispensable utility to quickly save new tasks into my OmniFocus database.

iFiles. Following GoodReader’s somewhat unexpected removal of its iCloud-based file storage, iFiles came out with a similar functionality, and it works pretty well. iFiles hasn’t received a major update in months – apparently, the developer is working on a 2.0 version – but this iCloud integration is interesting, and works as you’d expect from an iOS file manager.

Last, IFTTT. If I’m not writing, I’m typically distracted by Internet while I browse around looking for interesting stuff. To make sure I can focus on writing without missing out on cool links, I have set up IFTTT to backup favorite tweets and starred Google Reader items to my Evernote and as a text file in my Dropbox. This way, if these services go down or will someday cease to support these functionalities, I’ll still have a complete archive of everything I had saved.

Get A Sense Of What A 7.85” iPad mini Would Be Like

Rumors of a smaller iPad were back again this week with a report from Bloomberg and since then the rumor mill has been in full swing. Not much detail was in the rumor, other than it’s a smaller iPad and that it’ll launch later this year. Earlier in the year, the display was rumored to be around 7.85” and A.T. Faust of AppAdvice gave compelling reasons as to why it makes sense. That number seems to have stuck around with this latest round of iPad mini rumors.

“The reason we [won’t] make a 7-inch tablet isn’t because we don’t want to hit [a lower] price point,” Jobs said. “It’s because we think the screen is too small to express the software. As a software driven company, we think about the software strategies first.” - AllThingsD

When I read the rumors this week I sighed, not again. I wasn’t the only one either, an iPad mini seems like a compromise, with little advantage. Plus the old Steve Jobs quote about 7 inch iPads just kept circling around. But others weren’t so closed minded and were considering whether it might actually have a place in Apple’s product line.

The biggest issue I have is with the screen, and whether the screen can still be sufficiently useful at the smaller size. To find out, I decided to do the old hack of making a little paper template of the iPad mini and see how it looked. I decided to stick with the 7.85” diagonal display size suggested and use a bezel only slightly smaller than those on the current iPad. For comparison I also made a paper template for the current iPad and versions of both with the bevel colored in. You can download, print and cut them out for yourself.

Note: make sure when printing that it isn’t being scaled up or down, as that will adjust the size of the “screen”. Check the little measurement guides to ensure it printed out correctly.

That was all good and well, but it didn’t really give me a sense of what the UI might look like on an iPad mini. So I decided to take some screenshots and shrink them down to the appropriate size. But I also made a duplicate copy of the screenshot and using Photoshop, reconfigured the UI to fit on a 7.85” display without adjusting the size of the buttons. To my mind that’s the only way that Apple would do this - Apple does frequently remind iOS designers to keep buttons at a tappable size (mentioned prominently in iOS Human Interface Guide), just shrinking the current iPad display would make buttons more difficult to tap.

Finally I put it all together into a Keynote presentation so that I could view it on my iPad and visibly see and compare how it would look. I’ve uploaded it, so you can do the same yourself. You just need Keynote for iOS and go into presentation mode to look at it yourself. If you want to go the extra step, cut your iPad mini template out and place it on top of your iPad whilst viewing the screenshots.

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MacStories Interviews: Brett Terpstra

In our ongoing series of interviews with developers and creators in the Apple community, I recently had the chance to talk with Brett Terpstra, developer of Marked, Senior Developer at AOL Tech, TUAW blogger, and “mad scientist” with a knack for finding great solutions through code. When he’s not making awesome things or writing at his personal blog, Brett tweets as @ttscoff.

The interview below was conducted between January 17 and July 4, 2012.

MacStories: Hey Brett! Could you introduce yourself to the readers who haven’t heard about you or haven’t tried any of your apps & scripts before?

Brett Terpstra: Hey Federico,

I’m the original author (now working with Elastic Threads) of a Notational Velocity fork called nvALT, which seems to be what I’m best known for. I also sell an app in the Mac App store called Marked; a MultiMarkdown previewer that watches your text file for changes and updates the preview every time you save it. I’m a bit of a plain text nerd, and a lot of my work focuses on working with and manipulating plain text, as well as keeping data portable and application agnostic. Most of what I do is pure experimentation, coding for the joy of problem solving. Mad science, if you will. Read more

The Current State Of Music-Making and Discovery On The iPad

I have a confession to make: I’m a nerd. Yes, and I’m proud of it, because I think being a nerd means two things: I’m constantly curious about details, and I don’t hesitate to try out new stuff. To satisfy my curiosity, I’ve always dived into Apple’s ecosystem and the latest hardware related to it. Fortunately, my passion for Apple correlates with my love for discovering new music. I’ve been playing guitar since I was eight years old, and I love electronic music from the bottom of my heart as well. I’ve always found myself interested in both the traditional (perhaps organic) hardware side of music, and the more modern, digital software production process.

When the iPhone came out, many blogging colleagues and people around me predicted that its new software system, combined with the mobility of the device itself, would change the way people produce music and think about audible art as a whole. Three years later Apple unveiled the iPad. iPhone music software was indeed present at the time, but people soon recognized that the device’s screen was too small to create usable professional software for it — playing on-screen keyboards was nearly impossible and attempts to build high-end software synths like ReBirth or drum machines ended up in cluttered, untidy screens.

This problem seemed to get solved with the large screen of the iPad. Professional software retailers like KORG immediately started coding software versions of their most successful hardware. For instance, the iElectribe was one of the first apps available after the device’s launch. Over the years, I constantly tried out music apps for the iPad, tested hardware accessories (made possible with the release of iPhone OS 3), and never stopped investigating advantages, problems, and future possibilities of all those apps. Now, five years after the launch of iOS and the iPhone, I think it’s time to look back at how Apple’s mobile devices, with the focus clearly on the iPad, have changed the world of music and how they’ll continue to affect the future.

To do this, I recently went through my app archive and analyzed which kind of music apps remained installed on my devices, and which ones I liked when I tested them, but didn’t gain a place in my personal workflow. I discovered that I had to clearly divide music apps in several areas when discussing them. I distinguished between eight types of available music apps: promotion, discovery, entry level playing apps, handy/learning tools, sketching apps, recording, and professional software.

Throughout this post, I will cover each of those areas separately and point out their current state by discussing the most elaborate app(s) in their respective areas. I will point out the advantages and problems iOS brings to them, and predict — as far ahead as possible — what the future might hold.

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MacStories Interviews: Brett Kelly

In our ongoing series of interviews with developers and creators in the Apple community, I recently had the chance to talk with Brett Kelly, Evernote extraordinaire, founder of NerdGap, and creator of Evernote Essentials. When he’s not making things with words and computers, Brett tweets as @inkedmn.

The interview below was conducted between February 3 and July 3, 2012.

MacStories: Hey Brett! Could you introduce yourself to the readers who haven’t heard about you before?

Brett Kelly: Ahoy Federico! I sure can…

My name is Brett Kelly. I’m a writer, podcaster and software developer from Southern California. By day, I’m the Technical Communications Manager for Evernote where I write user documentation and build cool software tools. I write a blog at nerdgap.com and I’m probably best known as the author of the popular getting started guide for Evernote, Evernote Essentials. I’m happily married to my first wife and we have two crazily wonderful children who are crazy.

MS: I’m a proud Evernote customer myself – I use the service every day – and I have read your Evernote Essentials guide. How did you get started with Evernote in the first place? Getting to work for the company you’re already passionate about sounds like a dream job.

BK: Always nice to meet a fellow Evernote user.

Back in early 2008, a friend of mine send me an invite to the private beta for this thing called “Evernote”. I gave it a brief spin and, as soon as I realized that I could stick stuff in there and it would sync between my work and home computers, I was hooked. Remember this was before the iPhone app, as well as the App Store!

I immediately started using the crap out of it; work stuff, personal stuff, it all ended up in Evernote. Almost four years and over 10,000 notes later, I’m a bigger fan of the product than I was last week and I’m both proud and humbled that I get to work with such a ridiculously smart group of people. Read more

Five

It’s easy to look back at five years of iPhone and say that it was just about technology.

Five years ago, the original iPhone launched in the United States to much hype and a slightly different world. Apple was a much smaller company; Obama wasn’t President of the United States; R.E.M. were still together. The interface design behind the iPhone was, too, a little different than the bits we touch and swipe today. Both Ars Technica and Macworld have published solid retrospectives about the past five years.

The iPhone has created an economy that’s spurring the creation of jobs and new positions all over the globe. It reignited the mobile phone industry, and, in one fell swoop, turned competitors upside down as they struggled to keep their eyes open to the new wind blowing in their direction. The App Store didn’t launch until 2008, but its numbers are the very example of the software revolution spearheaded by the iPhone.

Unlike most inventions of modern history, though, the iPhone created a culture. And that’s because – unlike the ATM or the cordless telephone – the iPhone brought people together. By allowing developers to craft software for consumers willing to pay for it, the iPhone took down the wall between creation and consumption – the virtual barrier that normally separates an inventor from people using a product.

Both sides affected by this change – developers and users – ultimately became the starting point, the goal, and the focus.

The iPhone is about the people.

Like any other company looking for a profit, Apple has always needed to make money with the iPhone. But, after five years, I like to think that there can be a good cause behind profit and industry strategies – that there can be a purpose to “make great products”. And maybe I’m wrong, but I believe the iPhone has proved to be one of those major changes that have made people’s lives better. By combining breakthrough hardware design with the human touch, iPhone didn’t just change the way people communicate, work, and play: it saved lives, improved workplaces, told stories.

Sometimes there’s more to progress than just technology.

[image credit: Flickr]

Different and Familiar

Ted Landau speculates on what might happen with the next version of OS X:

This means limiting software on Macs only to apps that come from the Mac App Store (possibly also allowing Gatekeeper-approved software from elsewhere, but I doubt it). It would also mean cutting off end-user access to the Mac’s operating system (a trend begun with Apple making the user’s Library folder invisible in Lion, but which would vastly expand in 10.9). It would mean the ejection of any third-party software that “tweaks” the operating system. Apple would also remove its own system-level utilities, such as Terminal (Apple doesn’t permit anything like Terminal on iOS devices). It is even possible that the Finder would be eliminated (as I previously considered). Finally, it would mean that the software used to develop software (e.g., Xcode) would no longer run (just like you can’t now develop software for iPads on iPads).

In his speculation about a possible OS X 10.9, Landau envisions a Mac ecosystem where Pro machines (MacBook Pro, Mac Pro) will run the “real” OS X, with consumer products (MacBook Air, iMac) left with a “simpler” version of the operating system that’s basically iOS with a keyboard and Mac apps. I think this speculation is misguided.

Apple knows that Mac users are loyal to the platform because it is different from iOS devices. Mac hardware revenue may not be at the same level of iPhones and iPads, but in the last quarter, it still represented 13% of the company’s revenue with 4 million Macs sold. Not to mention that, as Tim Cook himself has noted on several occasions, the “halo effect” has helped Apple transition iPhone and iPad users interested in a similar, yet different platform to the OS X ecosystem.

The key is familiarity. By refining the feature set and enabling new functionalities across Mac and iOS devices, Apple is ensuring an iPhone user can have a basic understanding of a MacBook Air, and vice versa. “iOS-ification”, as this process has been called for convenience numerous times in the past, has really turned into the simple strategy of allowing familiar features to act the same across devices, while leveraging the differences of each device to make it intuitive and easy to use. Notification Center works the same on iOS 6 and Mountain Lion, yet on the Mac, you get support for Hot Corners. Familiar, but also unique.

If users wanted an iPad with a keyboard – because that’s effectively what Landau is proposing – they’d get an iPad with a keyboard. The problem is, this possible scenario has already been addressed by Apple: at the Q2 2012 conference call, Tim Cook famously noted how some would like to converge a toaster and a refrigerator – with unpleasant results for the users. People have different requirements: millions of customers decide to buy a Mac every quarter, and it’s very likely that the majority of them already owns an iPhone or iPad. They know the differences, but they also appreciate the familiarity.

This speculation is reminiscent of old rumors about a “simpler” iPhone nano – a mythical device capable of running a slimmed-down version of iOS. Why would Apple want to separate OS X into two products when, by default, the OS retains many of the “simple touches” of iOS? The Mac’s greatest strength is customization – Apple puts a Launchpad in your Dock, but you can explore the contents of your filesystem with the Terminal if you want. Putting functionalities on the same level no matter the device you’re using hasn’t impacted the nature of the Mac in a way that has turned OS X into a completely different product. If anything, it made the Mac better.

Apple already makes a separate version of OS X, and it’s called OS X Server. That is an entirely different take on the operating system, with features that wouldn’t appeal to the average consumer (or even professional). But does its existence somewhat justify the theory of new OS X Consumer product?

To paraphrase Craig Federighi, OS X makes it easier than ever to work with the devices we already have in our lives. And that has been possible thanks to an effort to turn the Mac’s nature into a more comfortable and familiar habitat for users interested in a different kind of experience. Landau thinks OS X “Professional” would come without any restriction (“restrictions” can already be disabled in Lion and Mountain Lion) and even drop some “iOS-related features”. How would that help the ecosystem? And why do we keep thinking of “professional users” as weird-looking programmers who don’t like anything Apple has brought to OS X – even going as far as suggesting features should be dropped?

Professional users enjoy the improvements made to OS X as much as the 99% does. I believe that features like Notification Center and Power Nap are additions that will unarguably make OS X easier and more powerful (and they are both iOS-inspired). How would pro users react to an unarguably worse Mac without those great functionalities?

OS X won’t magically become more “professional” by excluding features and familiar elements. The way I see it – and judging from recent statements and keynotes, the way Apple sees it, too – Apple simply needs to keep making OS X a better product by refining patterns and interactions based on decades of computing with today’s technologies and trends in mind. That might mean a Library hidden by default, or a different file save dialog box that makes iCloud front and center in Mountain Lion. There have been bumps on the road (Sandboxing criticism; iCloud issues), but I’d argue that both Lion and Mountain Lion haven’t taken anything away from the pro user, for as much as many have been crying wolf in regards to filesystem access and the Mac App Store (case in point: Gatekeeper is coming to OS X 10.8).

Apple will bring more iOS-inspired features to OS X. Or perhaps they will add OS X functionalities to iOS. The point is, in doing so, I have no doubt Apple will consider the unique traits of each platform, and they will develop the features accordingly. But splitting OS X in two just for the sake of easy profits (“It’s an iPad laptop!”) sounds like a step backwards and one towards fragmentation. Furthermore, we shouldn’t associate Apple’s delay with a “real” update for the Mac Pro line with the future of OS X.

Ultimately, the goal isn’t to forcibly transition every iOS user to the Mac as part of an evil plan blindly based on “money”. It’s to provide a great ecosystem of products that keeps users happy, and Apple profitable. And in a solid ecosystem, differences aren’t seen as disadvantages: they are core strengths if they can work better together.

Why Upgrade Pricing Isn’t Coming To The App Store

The 2012 WWDC keynote has come and gone, and we now know which of the many rumored announcements turned out to be true and which turned out to be false. But there was one unrumored announcement many developers were hoping would be true that failed to materialize altogether: the option to offer paid upgrades and true demo versions for their apps.

Demos and paid upgrades are something that App Store developers (where “App Store” encompasses both iOS and Mac) have long since wanted, as Wil Shipley explained in his blog post “The Mac App Store Needs Paid Upgrades” and as John Gruber and Cabel Sasser discussed on episode 5 of The Talk Show. No doubt there are many Apple users, especially longstanding Mac fans, who would be happy for the opportunity to support their favorite developers and be rewarded with lower prices for new versions of their favorite apps as well (the “99¢ IS TOO EXPENSIVE” crowd need not apply). As Shipley’s post lays out, it would seem there are many good reasons for Apple to implement these. So why haven’t they?

I think it comes down to one of Apple’s core values: simplicity.

The fact that Apple chose to name their online retail presence the “App Store” is, I think, telling. Remember that Apple aims squarely for the mass market (much to the consternation of some advanced and pro users) and remember what shopping at a real life store is like for that market.

When most people go to a store, they don’t expect to take home products that catch their eye and try them out for a limited time. They don’t expect to get reduced prices on the latest version of a product they’ve paid for before. The retail model of a typical store from a consumer’s point of view is simple. You walk in, look for something you want, pay for it, and walk out. This is exactly how Apple’s physical stores work, and it is how their digital stores are designed to work as well.

Whether this is the way digital stores should work is another discussion, and one that is certainly well worth having. But if we assume that this is how Apple wants their stores to work, their policies for not allowing demos and upgrades make sense. In Apple’s physical stores, and indeed nearly all retail establishments, take-home trials and upgrade pricing is nearly unheard of. At best they offer demo units of products you can try, but only ones they choose and only while you remain at the store. Try insisting on half-price for the next-gen MacBook Pro with Retina display because you bought a 13” MacBook Air two years ago and see how far you get before you’re asked to leave.

Developers and longtime computer users may be used to the shareware, time trial, pay-full-price-once-upgrade-cheaply-forever model of buying and selling software, but regular people, the mass market that Apple continues to court first and foremost, aren’t. Adding demos (“I thought this app was free, but now it’s telling me I have to pay to keep using it? What a ripoff!”) and paid upgrades (“Wait, I bought this app last year and now I have to pay again to keep using it? Screw that!”) would introduce a layer of confusion and make buying an app a more arduous process, which would result in people buying fewer apps.

At least, that’s the rationale behind Apple’s decision not to implement them. To be clear: what I just wrote is not my opinion of how things should be. This is only my guess at Apple’s reasoning.

So if Apple is basing their digital stores on their physical ones, how should developers like Wil Shipley and Cabel Sasser handle the problem of making enough money from past and future customers in order to eat and make more cool software? I think Apple thinks they should take cues from how Apple handles their own software transitions: no upgrade pricing, just one reasonable price that is palatable to its target audience. Make your software great and easy to buy, and more people will buy it.

Yes, there are edge cases where some unlucky customers will fall through the cracks (those who bought your old app right before the new one came out) and those who won’t be happy to pay again for the “same” app regardless of how much time has passed (two words: “Tweetie 2”). And it would be great for customers and developers alike if Apple implemented a way to stop selling an old app but still let devs provide bug fixes. But Apple knows that while you can’t please everyone, you can make good money by pleasing the majority. And as long as the majority likes affordable, straightforward app-buying, that’s what they’ll continue to offer.