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iOS 6: Our Complete Overview

Taking the stage at WWDC, Apple’s head of mobile software Scott Forstall kicked off his iOS 6 presentation noting how, with over 365 million iOS devices sold through March, Apple’s mobile software is doing very well in the market. The latest publicly available version, iOS 5, has been installed on over 80% of available devices. Released in October 2011, iOS 5 has seen exceptional adoption: over 140 million iMessage users have sent over 150 billion iMessages to date, making it over 1 billion on average every day. Directly integrated into iOS 5, Twitter saw a 3x growth increase, with over 10 billion tweets sent from iOS 5. The numbers go on and on.

There’s no denying on Apple’s part that iOS 5 has been a success for developers, the companies involved, and, ultimately, the users. iOS 6, previewed and released to developers as beta today, is a major new release that, with over 200 new features, will take iOS devices in “entirely new directions”.

Jump past the break for our complete overview of the next major release of iOS, shipping this Fall. Read more

Harry McCracken Reviews the Original Apple MessagePad→

Harry McCracken Reviews the Original Apple MessagePad

When Jobs decided to shut down the Newton division, color screens were still unaffordable, touch input was crude and wireless data didn’t get much more exciting than two-way paging. When he launched the first iPhone nine years later, technology allowed Apple to build the sort of devices it wanted to create in the 1990s, but couldn’t. He may have killed Newton, but he didn’t kill the dream behind it so much as press a giant pause button–and after finally spending quality time with a MessagePad, I’m more convinced than ever that he made the right call.

Apple’s MessagePads were devices that were both ahead of their time and poorly executed. It embodied everything Apple wanted to do — its tie-ins with the iPhones and iPads of today are clearly evident — but the Newton platform and the MessagePads just barely teetered on self-proclaimed success before their eventual hiatus. Despite the MessagePad’s lack of sales and its post-designation as a failed product, Harry McCracken re-visited John Sculley’s infamous product, reviewing the original MessagePad while investigating market demand and how the press received the product at the time of its unveiling. The three page article left me with some interesting take-aways about the climate of technology at the time of the early 90s, and how the Newton platform itself contributed to Apple’s later successes in both hardware and software design. A bulk of the article focuses on the technology introduced with the original MessagePad itself, but that insight is used to build a timeline of the product’s evolution whose concepts lead us to the devices we have today.

Image Credit: Time Techland

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Game In-App Purchases: A Conflict Between Developer Economics & Goodwill

In-App Purchases for iOS games. It’s a bit of a sensitive topic really, not many people like them at all, and quite a few people hate them and the impact they have had on the iOS games market. But today I want to explore the reason for their prevalence and explain why it has become an important part of the market for developers. I also want to reframe the discussion from one of “In-App Purchases are a problem” to one where we consider how they are being used and what developers could do to improve their implementation.

Below the break is Part 1: The Economics, in which I tackle the reason for their prevalence and importance in the iOS games market. Following that is Part 2: “Developers and Goodwill To Customers” in which I discuss how they are being used and perhaps what might be some best practices.

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Using an iPad to Report from Pit Row→

Using an iPad to Report from Pit Row

I upgraded to the iPad 2 over the winter for the weight break and camera, and all has gone smoothly in 2012. I no longer bring my MacBook Air on the road, and am thrilled that the TSA doesn’t require that the iPad be removed from my carry on! Using the iPad for what I do has proven to be efficient and entertaining. And, as usual for an Apple product, IT JUST WORKS. I’ve had to put a baggie over it a time or two in a rain situation, but other than that it absolutely does the job.

Jordan Golson of MacRumors has written a fantastic report on Dave Burns, a Pit Reporter for ESPN who covers NASCAR Nationwide and Sprint Cup series races with his iPad. Burns’ use of the iPad is the focus of the story here, and he does an excellent job explaining how he ended up choosing the gear and accessories that best suited his needs on the track. Not wanting to deal with the bulk of paper, but then having to compensate for sun glare, heat, and occasional rain showers, Burns had to devise a system that helped him stay mobile yet offered the greatest potential benefit. Equally as important as the process that Burns’ shares, the report gives insight into just how adaptable the iPad is. Proven to be much more than a generic business tool, the iPad is being used in unexpected places for unique applications: in this case it’s being used to bring you coverage from pit road in America’s most exciting motorsport.

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Diet Coda From An iPad Blogger’s Perspective

I am no web developer – I write prose, not code – but I just bought Panic’s highly-anticipated, fantastically-named Diet Coda for iPad from the Italian App Store. I want to show my support to the great independent developers of the iOS and OS X community. Furthermore, I want to help disrupting the long-standing meme that the iPad can only be used for “content consumption”, whatever that has come to mean in 2012. I didn’t know I could still find Diet Coda useful for my iPad-based writing and blogging workflow.

I can’t review Diet Coda – as I said, I wouldn’t be able to fully understand its functionalities and judge its (possible) shortcomings when compared to the (also coming today) Coda 2. But I can recognize software crafted with care and attention to detail. Diet Coda immediately stands out as one of those apps where pixels aren’t just there to fill the screen – they’re the epitome of design enhanced for function.

Take the custom text selection method Panic built. It’s not entirely custom – it’s still fundamentally based on “drag handles” and a “zoomed-in view” of the cursor – but Panic reworked it to allow for faster selection by swiping on the left (where numbered lines are) and to visualize a larger, rounded “zoom selector” (they call it the Super Loupe) when you’re moving the cursor between characters. It feels much better than standard iOS text selection – faster, and somewhat more accurate – albeit it really needs to be experienced “in motion”, rather than through the screenshot I have embedded below.

I wouldn’t mind seeing Apple drawing some inspiration from Panic’s Super Loupe and Hooper Selection for the next major version of iOS.

Or, again, search. Within a document – Diet Coda can edit files on your server with syntax highlighting for languages like HTML, PHP, or JavaScript – you can hit the search icon to initiate a query with options for Find & Replace, Case Sensitive settings, Regex, and Search in Selection. I can’t tell you how many times I wished a text editor would implement search through selected text within a document the way Panic did.

It’s about getting the details right, yet making sure the main foundation is also solid to begin with. Diet Coda features a perhaps not so innovative, yet reliable column-based navigation for browsing folders and opening files; at any time, the column view can be “enhanced” with thumbnail tabs (also called “document shelf”) displaying open files, the main Sites page, and Terminal along the top of the screen.

And if you go back to the Sites page – where you add the servers you want to connect to using Diet Coda – and enter “wiggle mode” to edit the sites you’ve configured, Panic added a nice button at the bottom to confirm you want to exit the wiggle animation. You could stop it anyway by touching anywhere on the screen, but this is a nice extra visual cue.

Same for buttons: the purple ones “glow” when tapped, and the Delete action is, again, custom by Panic, yet incredibly nice to use on iOS.

I may not write a full review of Diet Coda, but I was sure happy to find out Panic’s latest effort will find its well-deserved spot in my iPad writing workflow. Diet Coda, finally, allows me to copy the public URL for images uploaded to my FTP server. That’s a small feature, but you’d be surprised to know how many FTP iPad apps end up lacking it amidst dozens of other “power user options”. I wish Diet Coda would let me upload from the Camera Roll – hopefully that’s coming in a future update. However, together with buttons to copy the public URL and file path, Panic added options to copy an image’s HTML <a> and <img> tags to the system clipboard, making it extremely easy to paste the code into Blogsy, my blogging app of choice. The simple, yet often ignored “copy URL” action will play nicely with Writing Kit’s shortcut for inserting images into Markdown, too.

Even without fully utilizing Diet Coda’s set of features, I’m happy to see the app filling a particular void in my workflow – and even better, with style and prowess.

We will have more detailed looks at Coda 2 and Diet Coda later this week on MacStories; personally, I believe Panic’s latest iOS effort will redefine the category of web code editors on the iPad, proving once again that the platform has moved beyond “consumption” – and that’s just up to users to accept it now.

Diet Coda is now available on the Italian App Store and other international stores (same for Coda 2). Diet Coda and Coda 2 will be available here and here, respectively, on the US App Store in a few hours.

iOS 6 and Files.app

Rene Ritchie thinks Apple should provide direct document access with iOS 6 through a dedicated Files.app:

A unified document repository, modeled after the existing unified image repository, rounded out with more consistent attachment options, could be the best of all worlds. Users wouldn’t have to remember which folder a document was in, nor which app. They wouldn’t have to jump around to edit or share. Users could simply open any app capable of editing or sharing a certain type of app and go to work.

I agree with the notion that the current Open In, app-based document transfer model of iOS is broken. The simplicity brought by iOS freed average users from the complexities of the filesystem; people who like to get their daily work done with iOS devices, however, miss a unified document filing system. Paradoxically, the “simple” iOS, with its “Open In” menu and multiple copies of the same document, requires people to manually manage more.

In February, I envisioned something similar to Rene’s proposed Files.app solution:

So, I had an idea. I think the same iTunes File Sharing feature would work a lot better as a dedicated, native iCloud app for iOS devices (and maybe the Mac too). After all, if Apple is providing an iTunes-based file management utility for Mac users, why couldn’t they build an app that enabled any third-party iOS app to save and import files from iCloud? This app would be built into the system and allow users to simply collect documents, like iTunes File Sharing. Developers could easily add options to their apps to import files from “iCloud File Sharing” and export files to it. Users would have the same feature set of the existing iTunes File Sharing, only with an interface they are already familiar with, because iCloud File Sharing would resemble the existing file management workflow of iWork for iOS or iCloud.com. The only difference is that it would be integrated on a system level, work with any iOS app, and basically be an extension of the “Open In” menu that already allows apps to communicate with each other through supported file types.

After having tried the latest developer releases of Mountain Lion and putting some more thought on the matter, though, I am not so sure about the centralized repository system anymore. Namely, I am not convinced it should be a separate app.

Rene rightfully compares the possible Files.app to the existing Photos.app for iOS. Files could present document folders the same way Photos displays image albums, and it could have the same systemwide hooks to let other apps access documents from the unified repository. However, there is a difference worth noting: Photos.app gets its contents from a primary, hardware-based component of iOS – the camera. A user takes a picture, it goes into Photos. Same for videos and screenshots – the interaction is simple.

What is a file, though? Is it a text document? RTF or .txt? If so, does Files.app come with preview capabilities for those file types? Or is it about PDFs, .zip archives, folders, and .cbr files? And how do you get documents into Files.app?

Even by only slightly mimicking the Finder, Files.app could reset the past five years of “simple” iOS interactions in one big fell swoop. Photos itself, which is extremely straightforward, is criticized for its file management features. Now imagine that applied to the general concept of “files” with folders, views, sorting options, settings, and previews.

Today, I think what I wrote back in September could make for a better solution: inter-app communication.

Why can’t Apple build an invisible layer that lets Elements edit a text document from Evernote and Pages access the same file?

It turns out, a possible implementation of such layer already exists, but iOS won’t let apps communicate with it. Enter iCloud Documents & Data:

The same interface is available on OS X:

And in Mountain Lion, the standard file-saving dialog has been enhanced with the addition of an iCloud option (image via Macworld):

The design is slightly different since the first Mountain Lion Developer Preview that Macworld reviewed, but the concept has stayed the same throughout betas: Apple apps like TextEdit and Preview can “hold” documents into a special iCloud folder (located under Library/Mobile Documents/appname/Documents on OS X); these documents also show up on iOS under Documents & Data; currently, they are not available on iCloud.com, nor is Mountain Lion’s file-saving UI allowing, say, Preview to easily grab a file from TextEdit’s own iCloud “folder”. However, on Mountain Lion, Apple says that you can get your “existing documents” into iCloud by dragging them from the Finder or “other apps”.

If the system Apple has been putting in place is of any indication, I think enhancing the app-based model with better communication would actually outmatch the possible benefits of a separate Files.app. Documents & Data could become a document picker developers can enable in their apps with an API; because apps register file types they support, Apple wouldn’t have to worry about creating a Files.app capable of previewing every single format out there. GoodReader could open a PDF from Pages’ iCloud, and Pages could later access that same PDF with the changes made by GoodReader.

I am arguing that apps should become their own centralized locations that other apps can access and interact with – without creating duplicate files. Apple can’t provide the basic preview/edit functionalities of Photos for every possible format supported by Files.app, but 600,000 App Store apps might have the solution for that. Rather than creating an additional layer of management – disconnected from apps – iOS 6 could turn the interface already in place into a document picker that gives files their proper meaning: the app they belong to. Only with the addition of inter-app access and “universal save” to avoid duplicates.

Making changes to a single file with a variety of apps is something we do every day on our Macs. On OS X, there’s the Finder that acts as a glue between apps and files. By design, the technical constraints of iOS have turned non-destructive editing into a clunky and confusing experience, as we’ve seen with iPhoto. I am arguing that instead of building a “Files.app” or “Finder for iOS”, Apple could leverage the existing iCloud Documents & Data UI, and rework the iOS architecture to allow for changes to the same document from multiple apps.

The centralized Files.app idea is certainly appealing, but Apple has heavily invested in the app metaphor for the past years, and rather than replacing it with a new layer, I wouldn’t mind seeing it get smarter.

Four Years of App Store: Developers Weigh In On Search, Discovery, and Curation

“The App Store is a grand slam, with a staggering 10 million applications downloaded in just three days”. That’s how Apple co-founder and late CEO Steve Jobs saluted the launch of the company’s new storefront for iOS (née iPhone OS) applications on July 14, 2008. Almost four years and over 25 billion downloads later, the App Store has evolved into a brand that spans two platforms (iOS and OS X), three different iOS devices (iPhone, iPod touch, iPad), a variety of Macs, and that hosts over 600,000 apps from more than 200,000 registered developers. Albeit minimal in terms of revenue for a company that makes billions off iPhones and iPads, the App Store created a new economy that nurtures an ecosystem ultimately aimed at selling more devices, as well as showing consumers that, nowadays, software is revolutionizing the way they approach work, entertainment, and other personal tasks. In spite of its tremendous growth, however, little has been done to improve a basic premise of the App Store: finding new apps.

“Discovery and search has been a huge concern of mine for a long time”, said Craig Hockenberry, Principal at design and development studio The Iconfactory. Hockenberry and his team were among the first developers to support the App Store in 2008 with Twitterrific, a Twitter client for iPhone that has expanded to the iPad and Mac, with different versions available on the App Store and Mac App Store. In 2009, a year after the App Store launched, Hockenberry offered a series of suggestions to Apple in order to improve certain aspects of the App Store – namely, following early discussions with developers that decided to sell software on the “iTunes App Store”, he noted how there was “still much room for improvement” to turn the App Store into a viable and reliable business platform for developers who weren’t simply interested in experimenting with it.

Hockenberry’s “Year two” post still rings true today, in spite of the functionalities that Apple fixed, improved, or brought to the App Store in the past four years. For instance, Apple created a “New and Noteworthy” section on the homepage of the App Store that is refreshed on a weekly basis to showcase apps Apple deems worthy of attention; promotional codes, which Hockenberry listed as one of the tools that had helped them sell more products, were made available internationally in late 2010; either on print, its website, or YouTube, Apple has kept pushing ad campaigns to educate iOS and Mac users on the importance and convenience of the App Store.

The very motto that started the app revolution, however, didn’t meet an equal amount of attention by Apple in terms of improvements for the infrastructure behind it. As Hockenberry wrote in 2009, “it’s incredibly hard to find the “that” in “there’s an app for that.” Between keyword spamming and the sheer volume of choices in each category, customers can’t find what they want”.

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Flipboard’s Move From “Social Magazine” To “Internet Magazine”

Last night, Flipboard released a 1.9 update for its iPhone and iPad app that, among various fixes and new features, introduces one important addition to the social magazine: audio. As the company writes on their blog:

Our Content Guide is now chock-full of some of the best sounds we could find. We’ve launched new partnerships with NPR and PRI and scoured SoundCloud’s massive community of sound creators to bring you some of our favorites—artists like Snoop Dogg and Diplo; music labels like Atlantic Records and Ninja Tune; podcasts from The New Yorker and Slate; and segments from shows like Radiolab and Science Friday.

Right now, support for audio content is mainly implemented through SoundCloud, which received a new login option in the app’s settings, and NPR and PRI, which have agreed on a partnership with Flipboard to make content available in the app’s content guide, properly reformatted to fit Flipboard’s unique style and interactions. In Flipboard 1.9, support for audio means you can start playing a podcast featured in the content guide (such as TWiT or TNW Daily Dose) or any content available in your SoundCloud account, and go back to browsing links and photos as Flipboard can keep playing audio while you’re reading something else. The app will show up as an audio source in the iOS multitasking tray, and you can control audio playback from within the app itself too with a “note” icon in the upper toolbar (on iPhone) that will display a folder-like animation for viewing and pausing audio.

Looking back at Flipboard’s evolution over the past months, I think support for audio in version 1.9 is yet another example of how the company has been gradually and relentlessly drifting away from a system that simply aggregates “your social links” to embrace a broader vision that’s turning Flipboard into “an Internet magazine”, whether it’s social or not.

Flipboard started off as a neat app to give a magazine-like layout to links shared on Twitter and Facebook. Then came Google Reader, Flickr, and Instagram with more content types and visual previews. The company started announcing partnerships with publishers to display their content beautifully inside Flipboard, and with more content came an explosive growth that led to a re-imagined version 1.5, focused on showcasing “popular stories” and making more great content available to users through a content guide that wasn’t necessarily social – rather, it was aimed at letting users know that more content was available on Flipboard beyond their existing social accounts. After that, Flipboard released the long-awaited iPhone app, unifying accounts with over-the-air sync and bringing Cover Stories – a dedicated view for interesting and popular stories – over to the iPad app.

While still prominently “social” in the way it puts the focus on accounts and supported services, Flipboard has become perfectly usable and enjoyable even without necessarily configuring a Twitter or Facebook account. The company has put great effort on building a content guide that spans different countries, themes, content types, and publishers. Flipboard aggregates top content shared by Pocket, it collects the best things found on the Internet under the “Cool Curators” section, and, alongside the usual Tech and Business news, displays popular videos from YouTube, Vimeo, and even Colbert Report in a Video category. With version 1.9, audio has been brought into the mix.

The social component of Flipboard is still strong (version 1.9 also brings “related sections” for social networks, such as “tweets mentioning you”), but it hasn’t been the only way to enjoy Flipboard for quite some time, and this is more visible than ever in the latest update. Flipboard doesn’t simply create a personalized magazine out of content “being shared with me” anymore – it still does that, but at the same time, it allows me to find other great content that I wouldn’t have discovered otherwise.

More than a “social magazine”, the “Internet magazine” aggregates and reformats content that is also social, but not strictly so. Curation and APIs are keys here. Flipboard was already rumored to be considering support for movies and TV shows last year. Would it be too absurd to think the app will someday gain compatibility with Rdio and Spotify to let you find the best music from your favorite streaming service? How about YouTube and Vimeo, to let users also find videos that are bring shared in those social accounts? According to TechCrunch, “Flipboard will look into other ways it can do more with video”.

With social accounts, APIs, search, and curation, Flipboard has become more than a social magazine: it is restructuring Internet content for the screens of mobile devices with the help of a strong social counterpart.

The iPad Is The Future Of Education

For the past years, Apple has been showcasing the educational advantages of devices like Macs, iPhones and iPods on its Apple in Education website. Since the introduction of the iPad in 2010, however, the company has been making an effort to position the device as the best tool now available to teachers and students to improve the quality of education and level of engagement. The dedicated iPad in Education webpage showcases recent moves by Apple such as iBooks Textbooks and the iTunes U iOS app.

While we have covered schools and educational institutions adopting iPads in the past, the latest profile posted by Apple today on their UK website is quite possibly the best example of iPad in education to date. Those of you who have been following the progress of iPad deployment in schools may remember Fraser Speirs’ iPad Project, which made headlines throughout 2011 as it was the first one-to-one iPad deployment to every people in a school. Speirs documented the process of giving an iPad to every teacher and student at Cedars School of Excellence (Scotland) on his personal website, and today Apple has posted a video profile showing how “Cedars students boost learning with iPad”.

The full video is available here, and it shows teachers and kids using the iPad as a modern, regular tool in their daily lives that has improved the way they create and share content of any kind. One particular segment towards the end of the video struck a chord with me:

I don’t think we could ever go back from where we are right now with the iPad. The only way’s really forward – to more access to knowledge, more empowerment, more creativity…all these things in the classroom”.

As I wrote before, Apple’s education strategy will be interesting to follow. Actually seeing kids and teachers who have been using the iPad as a real substitute for and enhancement over old learning tools for over a year now, however, reminds me that, no matter Apple’s strategy as a company, software is the future of education, and the iPad is giving our kids a bit of that future today.

Detractors of the iPad as a learning tool point at the management required by connected devices to ensure that, in the classroom, the possibilities offered by the Internet don’t get in the way of teachers’ requirements and students’ attention. Fortunately, this is something Apple has been addressing since day one, and that has recently improved with more tools.

Every major change in our society and culture will be awarded an equal amount of optimism and skepticism. As someone who’s been lucky enough to find his dream job in the possibilities offered by the Internet and software, I tend to see skepticism as a challenge, rather than a roadblock. People like Fraser Speirs are proving that, beyond analysts and blog posts, a better education for our kids is possible, today, every day, with a device that’s making kids eager to learn.

Free of the constraints of paper and old, disconnected learning material, the iPad brings new challenges and practical issues to overcome. With time, patience, and willingness to look past rules established in societies different than ours, we must make sure these devices we have built and ecosystems we have nurtured won’t be remembered for Angry Birds, because among other things, our kids deserve a better, modern education. And we have to start building it today.