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Two New Options for Combining Screenshots

Readers of MacStories know how I like to present my screenshots. For the uninitiated, some context: screenshots from iOS apps that end up on MacStories are usually modified to have a clean status bar and, for iPhone apps, they’re usually presented side-by-side with various layouts. I like how screenshots are displayed on MacStories, and, combined with a new workflow to optimize the resulting images for our CDN, this gives me flexibility and considerable savings (for both costs and time). I can take better screenshots spending less time editing them and less money hosting them.

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve been playing with two new iPhone apps for combining screenshots on the iPhone – LongScreen and Tailor.

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Mobile First→

Great article by Ben Thompson on building products and businesses with a mobile-first approach. At the end, he makes a solid point about the rumored MacBook Air with a single port:

True, it would be nice to have a keyboard to type longer emails, reports or papers, or a larger screen to watch movies, but those capabilities – again, for most people, not all – are nice to have, not essential. Moreover, all of those capabilities depend on the same cloud services as the phone: email, social networking, photos, all of it comes over the (wireless) network, not a cable.

In this world, a Mobile First world, what exactly is the point of a port?

As I argued on episode 21 of Connected, I’m not sure about the idea of a MacBook Air that combines multiple connections in a single port, but I’m also intrigued by the reason why that could make sense.

In the show, I brought up AirDrop, Mail Drop, cloud backups, and iCloud Photo Library as examples. As more Apple users move (in addition to iCloud) towards local file sharing systems either based on WiFi or BLE and power users continue to rely on MacBook Pros and Mac Pros, would moving away from ports really be that absurd for a new Air?

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Overcast’s 2014 Sales Numbers→

Speaking of sales numbers, a must-read article by Marco Arment on how Overcast did on the App Store in 2014:

The biggest unknown in the App Store is what happens after the launch has settled down. I don’t know what 2015 will bring, or where sales will bottom out. (With past apps, February was always my worst month, and not just because it has fewer days.) Promisingly, sales in the last 6 months have stayed within a fairly narrow range and aren’t showing a clear downward trend, although the bumps in November and December can be easily attributed to temporary boosts from Serial and Christmas.

Marco worked on Overcast full-time for about 15 months. Apple made $70,343 from Overcast in 2014.

Overcast is a fantastic podcast player that does things other podcast apps can’t do. Marco found a niche big enough to sustain a business and managed to build a product that is useful and commercially viable. I believe that Overcast is a great example of how innovation in apps can still be possible and profitable.

And I can only nod in agreement at the last sentences:

I can work in my nice home office, drink my fussy coffee, take a nap after lunch if I want to, and be present for my family as my kid grows up. That’s my definition of success.

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The Success of Crossy Road and Monument Valley→

I’m always interested in learning how the App Store market is working out for indie developers and small studios. Over the last few days, we got a glimpse into the business of iOS games thanks to numbers and stats shared by the developers of two quality titles – Crossy Road and Monument Valley.

Crossy Road implements a freemium model and it has grossed over a million dollars with ads. The developers used video ads in an effective way:

“I played Disco Zoo and thought that video ads were a really good way to earn money without getting into people’s faces. We just needed to figure out a fun reason for players to watch them”. In the game, watching ads earns coins. Players can use coins to buy new characters that hop across the endless dangerous road in new and often hilarious ways. But it’s also possible to simply buy them with real money or just collect coins in the game.

Monument Valley, on the other hand, is an excellent premium game that allows players to download extra levels as additional purchases (the so-called paymium model). In a widely popular post, ustwo shared the numbers behind the game. Most notably:

  • 2.4M official sales, 1.7M of which on iOS
  • 575k upgrades to Forgotten Shores
  • $5.8M in revenue, 81.7% of which on iOS

The numbers, however, also include more specific and interesting stats such as the number of players who completed the game (lower than I expected) and sales by country. I find it illuminating to see the effects of Forgotten Shores and Christmas compared to winning an Apple Design Award or releasing the game on Android.

Crossy Road and Monument Valley are two profoundly different games. Monument Valley had a big budget (for an indie production), a moderately large team, and it reaped well-deserved rewards. Crossy Road uses freemium mechanics with a unique twist, respecting the user’s time and commitment to the game. In both cases, they are quality games, and two examples of the multifaceted (and crowded) App Store market.

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Connected: Mac Skills, iOS Skills, and Myke→

This week, the Europeans and Stephen discuss some follow-up then move on to some fake Blackberry news, smartwatch companion apps and RSS.

If you’ve been following my tweets about NewsBlur and RSS lately, this week’s Connected features an update on my ongoing experiment and a discussion about our RSS usage in the post-Reader era. You can listen to the episode here.

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Virtual: My Dad Is Mario→

This week’s episode of Virtual was recorded straight after Nintendo Direct on January 14th. Expect conversation about Majora’s Mask, amiibo, the new 3DS and so much more.

On yesterday’s Virtual, we talked about the Nintendo Direct announcements and discussed some games we’ve been playing lately. You can listen to the episode here.

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Due 2 Review: Effective Reminders

Due has been around for a long time. Created by independent developer Lin Junjie (who later went on to launch Dispatch and Clips with Hon Cheng), Due was launched in late 2010 as a simple reminder app for iPhone to never forget the things you had to do. Over the years, Due expanded to more platforms and received an iOS 7 redesign, but, at its core, it remained a streamlined utility to set reminders and always complete them. With a combination of clever design and thoughtful snooze settings, Due ensured you’d never ignore an alert (or pretend it wasn’t important).

The original Due was, however, a product of simpler times. In five years, thousands of reminder and timer apps have been released on the App Store. As widely documented by the indie iOS dev community, it’s hard to survive in a market driven by a tendency to lower prices and to add features atop features. People’s workflows change (often, from modest to more advanced needs) but, unlike others, Junjie has shown remarkable restraint in changing how Due works. He’s an exception. I can’t think of any other 1.0 app that lasted this long.

Four years after the original Due (which I discovered thanks to John Gruber), Due 2 launches today with a completely redesigned interface and interactions updated for the modern era of iOS 8 and larger phones. And yet, in spite of its new look, Due 2 is still unmistakably Due – a testament to the developer’s deliberate efforts to make a specific type of app that doesn’t compromise its nature.

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An Old Fogey’s Analysis of a Teenager’s View on Social Media→

Danah Boyd makes an important point about Andrew Watts’ article on teenagers and social media:

Andrew’s depiction of his peers’ use of social media is a depiction of a segment of the population, notably the segment most like those in the tech industry. In other words, what the tech elite are seeing and sharing is what people like them would’ve been doing with social media X years ago. It resonates. But it is not a full portrait of today’s youth. And its uptake and interpretation by journalists and the tech elite whitewashes teens practices in deeply problematic ways.

Many (including myself) failed to mention that Watts’ article was only reflective of a segment of teenagers who use social networks in the US. Danah’s comments on Twitter and Ferguson are especially apt: some teenagers may not see the point of Twitter, but the network proved to be an essential information sharing tool for many citizens of Ferguson through the use of hashtags, photos, Vines, videos uploaded elsewhere, and more. Danah’s post is an important reminder and I recommend reading it.

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Apple Pay in Slow Fast Slow→

Studio Neat’s Dan Provost writes about how they integrated Apple Pay in the latest version of their iPhone app, Slow Fast Slow:

Integrating Apple Pay into the app wasn’t too difficult, but it wasn’t trivial, either. In a future post we will dive into the nuts and bolts of how we implemented Apple Pay. As far as we know, we are the first “indie” company to utilize it in an app.

We are excited to see how this integration affects sales. In theory, it is now much easier to purchase a Glif, so hopefully sales will trend upward, even as traffic to our site moves downward. We are also offering free shipping on the Glif, if purchased with Apple Pay; to grease the wheels, as it were. If you want to check out the redesigned ad with Apple Pay integration, simply tap the S/N logo on the home screen of Slow Fast Slow. If you are on a device that doesn’t support Apple Pay, the buy button is replaced with a button to studioneat.com.

Slow Fast Slow is an excellent app for slow-motion videos and I’m looking forward to playing with the new version (especially now that I have a new friend who will soon want to run and jump daily). I think it’s clever that Studio Neat is leveraging software to sell hardware and the experience of buying with Apple Pay in-app is intuitive and fast. I hope the experiment goes well.

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