This week, Myke, Federico and Stephen re-visit iWork and product screenshots, then discuss the iPad Air and Everpix.
Also: our new Tumblr website. Get the episode here.
Brought to you by two excellent sponsors:
Ramp Champ was one of the first iPhone games I bought in 2009 after I got my iPhone 3GS. I remember spending hours with Ramp Champ trying to beat my records and get the highest scores – we’re talking about the days when you couldn’t buy Smurfs with In-App Purchases and he called the shots.
The Iconfactory then sold Ramp Champ, which is back today with a version 1.2 that adds Retina graphics and support for the 4-inch screen. I’ve been playing Ramp Champ after three years and I can gladly confirm that it’s still fun and powered by great graphics and sounds. As reported by TouchArcade, Ramp Champ 2 is in the works under the new owner Seven Gun Games.
Ramp Champ is an App Store classic – and it’s a free update if you bought the original app in 2009. If you’re not familiar with the game, make sure to read Louie Mantia’s original design article.
Nathan Barry and Jeremy Olson have released the iOS 7 edition of The App Design Handbook, a fantastic guide for anyone who’s interested in iOS app development but doesn’t know where to look or how to start. I have read the book today – even if you’ve been working with iOS for a while, Nathan and Jeremy explain iOS 7 with practical examples and why the changes the OS brings aren’t just cosmetic (or “flat”). The style of the book is informative and concise and several aspects of app planning, design, development, and marketing are covered. I’ve known Jeremy for years, and he knows how to make good apps, pitch them, and turn them into financial and personal successes. These guys know what they’re talking about.
What I like is that you can choose between various options for purchase, starting from the standalone book to the $199 package that comes with 9 interviews with folks like Mark Kawano and Marc Edwards, 9 video tutorials, and 5 resources for app design and development.
With the holidays coming up, The App Design Handbook makes for a great gift to friends or relatives who think they have a potentially good idea but don’t know how to turn it into a successful app. Nathan and Jeremy did a great job and you can buy the book here.
Released in late September, Skitch 3 for iOS was a great reimagination of Skitch, but it lacked some handy features like Maps integration and an Open In menu to send annotated images to other apps. I called Skitch 3 “a fun, quick annotation app with a lot of tools but a focus on speed and straightforwardness”, noting how it became my go-to image annotation app (again).
With today’s 3.0.4 update, Evernote has brought a series of minor but welcome enhancements that make Skitch more powerful and integrated with other iOS apps. Notably, an Open In option has been added to the sharing menu, allowing Skitch to send annotated images directly to iPhone and iPad apps (in my case, Droplr).
As detailed on the Evernote blog, other additions include an overflow menu that contains a Crop function and a “Clear All Annotations” shortcut; possibility to annotate your current location on a map view; and new controls for Evernote notebooks. While Skitch 3 wants to be an annotation app that can be used without Evernote sync, users who want to send images to Evernote can now choose a default notebook in the Settings.
I like today’s Skitch update, especially for Open In support (my Skitch > Droplr > Tweetbot is now much simpler). Skitch 3.0.4 is available on the App Store.
Apple responds to iWork criticism:
The new iWork applications—Pages, Numbers, and Keynote—were released for Mac on October 22nd. These applications were rewritten from the ground up to be fully 64-bit and to support a unified file format between OS X and iOS 7 versions, as well as iWork for iCloud beta.
These apps feature an all-new design with an intelligent format panel and many new features such as easy ways to share documents, Apple-designed styles for objects, interactive charts, new templates, and new animations in Keynote.
In rewriting these applications, some features from iWork ’09 were not available for the initial release. We plan to reintroduce some of these features in the next few releases and will continue to add brand new features on an ongoing basis.
I’m glad I didn’t believe Apple was a company that didn’t care about advanced users anymore (as the narrative goes in some corners of the Internet these days). I still think that Apple should avoid this kind of software launches (no criticism is better than criticism, after all), but I’ll take promised features over nothing. If Apple can’t afford to ship more complete rewrites on day one (and it’s not like Apple didn’t think this would happen), being communicative about future changes is obviously better than silence (and we have plenty of precedents).
AppleScript “improvements” have been announced for Numbers and Keynote, but not for Pages (who’s going to tell Pierre Igot?). Seems like a curious omission.
Disclaimer: The folks at Doxie purchased a MacStories sponsorship for this week and sent me a Doxie Flip as a gift. I didn’t promise any review or coverage in exchange for me selling the sponsorship and receiving the device. As always, this article contains my impressions and honest opinion.
Like many others, I’ve been trying to go paperless and get rid of paper documents as much as possible. Aside from the fact that paper is a waste of storage space, it’s easy to lose and it’s impossible to search: even with a solid archival system, it’s likely that you’ll eventually misplace an important receipt or lose hours trying to track it down only to find out it was in the drawer under your desk. And what about old photos or notebooks? Unless you take action and find a way to digitize them today, time will get ahold of them and they will be gone. I bet that you don’t have fancy equipment to preserve your personal documents and photos for decades (or centuries).
It’s much better to use a database that can hold digital copies of your documents, allowing you to trash the physical counterparts or, in general, have the peace of mind that time doesn’t destroy pixels (although it does come with a whole new set of problems). The barrier to entry to paperless workflows, though, is pretty high: while there are great “getting started” resources such as David Sparks’ book, there are many questions that follow the decision of going paperless. Which storage service should you use? Is it preferable to keep documents as PDFs or JPEGs? 300, 600 DPI, or more? Should you use a dedicated scanner or an iPhone app? Dropbox or Evernote? And so forth.
I decided to go paperless about a year ago and I’ve been tweaking and improving my workflow since then. I have scanned hundreds of health and work-related documents and when I thought that the system I had set up was future-proof, it miserably failed and I needed to rewrite it. I struggled to find iOS apps to scan receipts on the go, and I had to go back and reimagine several aspects of my workflow because apps that I relied upon were updated and their feature sets changed. If I haven’t detailed my paperless workflow on MacStories yet it’s because I’m still ironing out the kinks on the software side.
As far as hardware goes, I’ve been a satisfied Doxie user for almost two years now. We have two Doxie scanners at home (a Doxie Go and a Doxie One) that we regularly use to scan documents (paper sheets) and old photographs we want to keep on our computers or upload somewhere (usually Facebook). I think that Doxie makes good stuff and I like the company’s focus on enabling cordless and PC-free paperless workflows. The Doxie One and Go aren’t the world’s most powerful scanners, but they produce good quality, searchable PDFs and we like them because they don’t demand any desk space as they’re small and portable.
For the past few weeks, I’ve been trying the Doxie Flip, the company’s new flatbed scanner that, unlike the One and Go, is meant for pocket notebooks, old photos and postcards, books and magazines, and just about anything that you can put above the device’s 4x6” glass surface – or below, as you can remove the lid and flip the scanner over. The Flip retails for $149, and, like other Doxies, it saves images to an SD card that can be used in conjunction with a dedicated Mac app or on iOS through Apple’s Camera Connection Kit.
You need no introduction to Banca, a beautiful converter that lets you quickly get the exchange rate between any currency currently in use. Redesigned from the ground up, Banca repurposes the best parts from apps like Convert and marries them with the functionality of a basic calculator for quick conversions. Fluid animations, a stowaway units pad, and thoughtful touches such as the option to flip conversions with a tap of the arrow reveals an app made with care. The app refreshes the world’s exchange rates automatically, providing up to date information in a simple, customizable interface. A free update on the App Store for previous customers, Banca can currently be downloaded for $1.99.
From the Everpix blog:
It’s frustrating (to say the least) that we cannot continue to work on Everpix. We were unable to secure sufficient funding in order to properly scale the business, and our endeavors to find a new home for Everpix did not come to pass. At this point, we have no other options but to discontinue the service.
I’m sad that Everpix is going away. For a very long time, I debated whether Everpix was worth trying out: the service looked good, and I was only hearing great things from happy customers. So after the discussion we had with Bradley on The Prompt, I signed up, imported seven years of photos, and then paid the annual membership to support Everpix and unlock all features.
I’m not disappointed about the money (Everpix says that all paying customers will be refunded) – I’m just sad that an amazing service is going away because they couldn’t figure out a business model. Everpix was fantastic: photos were grouped by year and pulled from a variety of sources like Instagram and even Messages for OS X automatically. The Flashback feature showed me each morning photos that I took on the same day years ago. They weren’t always the most pleasant memories, but they were my memories, and as such they were cherished. That part – the magic of this software going away – is what saddens me as a user, not just as a customer. I genuinely loved what Everpix was doing.
If there’s a lesson to be taken away, it’s that building great products doesn’t equal building solid businesses. It’s a harsh reality and it’s applicable to any kind of entrepreneurial endeavor – the product that you love crafting for yourself (as Everpix did) doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve created a sustainable business. The Verge has a good story about Everpix, and I’d like to highlight this bit:
The founders acknowledge they made mistakes along the way. They spent too much time on the product and not enough time on growth and distribution. The first pitch deck they put together for investors was mediocre. They began marketing too late. They failed to effectively position themselves against giants like Apple and Google, who offer fairly robust — and mostly free — Everpix alternatives. And while the product wasn’t particularly difficult to use, it did have a learning curve and required a commitment to entrust an unknown startup with your life’s memories — a hard sell that Everpix never got around to making much easier.
Rimer put it a bit differently: “Having a great product is not the only thing that ultimately makes a company successful.”
I loved my three weeks of Everpix. It would be great to see an open-source version of its engine, or perhaps Apple taking everything that made Everpix great (including its team) and using it for the ridiculous mess that is iPhoto (and Photo Stream).
I don’t know if I’ll have the energy to fall in love with another third-party photo service any time soon. I’m just glad that I never stopped backing up my JPEGs.
In Tweetbot 3, Tapbots removed the ability to post tweets longer than 140 characters using built-in services for text upload. While I understand that it wasn’t one of Tweetbot’s most used features, its removal got me thinking: would it be possible to replicate the feature using Dropbox and plain text files in an automated iOS workflow? I came up with a solution that requires Launch Center Pro and Drafts, and I’m quite happy with it.
