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Nasturtium Player→

Nasturtium Player

I first mentioned the public beta of Nasturtium Player back in November 2012. Nasturtium is an interesting take on an “iTunes mini player” mixed with a queuing system and a way to play videos from YouTube within a single interface. I wrote:

The concept of combining local music with YouTube videos resonates with my music workflow. While I tend to listen to music on Rdio, there are some older albums and songs that I need to keep locally either in iTunes or, most recently, Plex with PlexSync; similarly, there are YouTube videos of older demoes or live concerts of my favorite bands that I want to access every once in a while. I like how Nasturtium unifies search of local media and YouTube videos in a single interface.

Nasturtium has been out on the App Store for a few weeks now, and I like the improvements that went into the final version. There are keyboard shortcuts to control playback and playlists, and YouTube videos (while not resizable) now have preview thumbnails. Adding items to the queue is still as easy as hitting Enter, but you can also drag a song (from either iTunes or YouTube search results) into the main playlist interface, or use a “+” button. I particularly appreciate the possibility to collapse headers in search results to filter down results to Tracks or Albums (sorting options are also available).

As usual when trying new apps, it’s the care about small details that stands out to me. I like the thinking process that went into Nasturtium. The amount of minutes “remaining” in a playlist is available in the status bar at the bottom, but you can click it to show total minutes; similarly, while you can click the Play/Pause buttons to trigger playback, you can double-click the Play one to skip a track. As detailed in the app’s Help page, you can search by rating and genre as well simply by typing the information you need. I recommend reading more about the design process of the app here.

Nasturtium Player is $5 on the App Store.

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Apple Releases iOS 6.1 [Direct Links]

Apple has just released iOS 6.1. The software update, available in beta for the past few months, is available at the moment as over-the-air download. It should be available in iTunes soon.

iOS 6.1 brings LTE support for more carriers (as announced by Apple at the latest earnings call), possibility to purchase movie tickets in the US with Siri and Fandango, and a feature to download songs from iTunes Match individually using iCloud.

Apple details the updated list of LTE-compatible carriers here. According to a press release also posted by Apple, iOS 6.1 adds LTE capabilities to 36 iPhone carriers and 23 iPad carriers worldwide. Apple also shared more numbers:

To date, iOS users have uploaded over nine billion photos to Photo Stream, sent over 450 billion iMessages and received over four trillion notifications.

In the same press release, Apple has updated the statistics on the number of available App Store apps:

The revolutionary App Store offers more than 800,000 apps to iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users, with more than 300,000 native iPad apps. App Store customers have downloaded over 40 billion apps, and Apple has paid over seven billion dollars to its incredible developer community. Customers can choose from apps in 23 categories, including newspapers and magazines offered in Newsstand, games, business, news, sports, health & fitness and travel.

Earlier this month, Apple had announced that the App Store featured 775,000 apps with “more than 300,000 iPad apps”.

We will update this article with direct links to iOS 6.1 as soon as they’re available. Apple also released an update for the Apple TV, adding Bluetooth keyboard support, Up Next, and improvements to iTunes in the Cloud. Read more

Sponsor: Pixa

My thanks to Shiny Frog for sponsoring MacStories this week with Pixa.

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Pixa is a Mac app to manage pictures that strips-away all the frivolous features: the need to manually add images to a library, and even some of the chores such as tagging images and sharing them. Pixa puts your library of images front and center in a clean and easy to use interface.

Pixa supports all the image formats you need: psd, ai, svg, jpg, png, Acorn, Sketch, and Pixelmator, among others. It comes with auto-tagging (for color, size, and web address information), and a feature called “Live Folders” that allows you to organize your images in Pixa without moving them from their original location in the Finder. I’m personally intrigued by the app’s support for OpenMeta tags and the tips the developers have been sharing on a dedicated Tumblr blog.

Find out more about Pixa here.

Evernote Image Extractor→

Evernote Image Extractor

Nice AppleScript by Chris Sauve:

A recurring knock against Evernote has been its poor exportability. The best option for moving my library would have been to export the Evernote notes as HTML, but any images that were captured using Evernote’s web clipper come out with inscrutable names, each of which would have to be changed manually. So, I did what I have been doing lately: I built an Applescript.

Evernote is often criticized for its exporting options, but the app has been improved from this standpoint in the past major updates. For instance, I like how you can select multiple notes containing attachments and save them to a folder in the Finder. More importantly, I like how Evernote keeps supporting AppleScript and how they’re still introducing more scripting features (it happens rarely these days). Chris’ AppleScript is a great example: it offers a simple interface to pick a notebook containing notes with images, and it’ll export those images using the filename of their respective notes – not the name of the image files.

Go download it here.

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Apple Launches Three-Week Mac App Store Productivity Sale

As first noted by MacRumors, in its weekly refresh of the App Store homepage Apple today launched a three-week “productivity sale” on the Mac App Store. The sale includes discounted apps from the “Get Stuff Done” section: Clear, Things, 2Do, Due, Todo, TaskPaper, The Hit List, and BreakTime. The custom Mac App Store page says “Week 1” and includes apps of the “Prioritize” kind; it’s safe to assume Week 2 will feature “Organize” apps, ending with “Utilize” apps in Week 3.

Interestingly, the old link for the Get Stuff Done section no longer displays apps that had been assigned to that section, suggesting that Apple may be picking only some apps previously collected in “Get Stuff Done”.

Both on iOS and OS X, Apple has been curating a series of custom sections for the past two years. As we’ve noticed before, after a redesign of the App Store in mid-2012 with the first iOS 6 betas, Apple started increasing its curation efforts – an area that several developers indicated as Apple’s best option for showcasing apps from the App Store. However, in spite of sections being a shared effort across the iOS and OS X App Stores, some changes remained exclusive to iOS: recent examples include App and Game collections, or redesigned categories.

The timing for this sale is interesting. The App Store turned 2 in early January, and in my look at two years of Mac App Store, I noted how many developers had progressively grown tired of Apple’s unclear Sandboxing policies and restrictions.

Sandboxing has undoubtedly left a scar that won’t go away any time soon. While the world hasn’t ended, Sandboxing – and Apple’s vague stance on some technical aspects, not the best policy when combined with multiple delays – has led to a dichotomy: in spite of Apple’s best efforts, developers are still dealing with two ways to sell their apps – the Mac App Store, and their own websites.

In the same article, I noted how – after a whole year – the Mac App Store charts were still dominated by the same number of Apple apps, and how – according to AppShopper data – growth had considerably slowed down. I offered a variety of reasons to try to motivate how developers felt in regards to the Mac App Store, and what users should expect going forward.

A sale is interesting for two reasons: it highlights great software and it helps third-party developers. Apple can only benefit from letting users know that great apps for a simple, immediate concept such as “Get Stuff Done” are available on the Mac App Store. The obvious consequence is that promotions typically help sales: developers can still make a fair amount of money even at 50% off; users are happy because they can buy at a discounted price from Apple’s own store; and – at least theoretically – the featured apps should go up in the Top Paid charts.

At the moment of writing this article the Get Stuff Done apps are still not listed in the Top 10, but they’re rising quickly (plus, the Mac App Store homepage was refreshed only a few hours ago). The Mac App Store benefits from charts that aren’t dominated by 8 Apple apps out of 10.

Effectively, Apple is now doing app promotions. There have been similar initiatives in the past – Two Dollar Tuesday comes to mind – and even “bundles” grouping multiple apps together, but they weren’t Apple-sanctioned promotions. (Update: there were some apps on sale for Apple’s Back to School promotion in the summer of 2012. However, we can’t dig up any screenshots or links. Apple is also doing a similar “Back to Uni” initiative in Australia now, but there are no apps on sale.)

It’s easy to imagine how, in the future, if this will also be extended to the iOS App Store, developers will look forward to being included in Apple’s official promotions. Developers will get the exposure of the front page, the benefits of built-in social sharing on the App Store, and, possibly, a tweet from the @AppStore account – which has been posting links to apps on a daily basis. Apple is mixing the editorial aspect of the App Store (only apps “chosen by Apple” – therefore synonym of “quality” – end up in a section) with the universal appeal of discounts to generate word of mouth, sales, more variegate charts, and, ultimately, a nice 30% cut for the company.

Right now, this is just the first week of a first promotion Apple is only doing on the Mac App Store. It might as well be an isolated experiment that Apple won’t repeat again. Perhaps they will simply return to launching some promotions for Back to School in the summer. But considering the popularity of their Free App of the Week initiative, I wouldn’t be surprised to see more frequent Apple-approved promotions in the future. Apple needs a healthy, thriving third-party ecosystem, and third-party developers need Apple’s promotional and marketing machine. Old-fashioned sales might just be what (some) developers needed.

The Verge: Redesigning Google→

The Verge: Redesigning Google

Excellent story by Dieter Bohn and Ellis Hamburger at The Verge on Google’s efforts to find a new design consistency across its apps, services, and platforms. Make sure to watch the video (as usual with The Verge, their video material is top-notch).

The central design metaphor that Duarte and the team eventually landed on was one he’d used before in webOS: cards. The cards in Google Now also show up in Google search, when it displays “Knowledge Graph” results on the web. In both cases, cards seem to represent the information Google gives you directly instead of through a list of blue links. Cards are like a digital equivalent to the traditional architectural concept of marrying form and function — so that the way a thing looks is inseparable from what the thing is. “These are objects,” Duarte says, “They feel, not necessarily real, but they feel virtual. They’re not trying to be fake things, not … fake leather, fake wood, fake brushed aluminum.”

Right now, I can count three Google apps on my Home screen: Chrome, Gmail, and Google Maps. I’ve always been a fan of Google’s Search app – the one that was actually well designed and intuitive before Google started redesigning its other apps – but I keep that on my second screen.

I like the design choices Google made in the past months, but I primarily use Google’s new apps for another reason: they work better than Apple’s apps for me. It takes seconds for Google Chrome to sync a bookmark or an open tab; I wish I could say the same for Safari and iCloud. Google Maps works better than Apple Maps in my area. The Gmail app isn’t perfect, but it makes going through Gmail faster than dealing with Apple’s Mail app.

It used to be that if you liked Google’s apps more than Apple’s ones and if you relied heavily on Google services, then you should have considered switching to Android. But I don’t want to switch to Android: I use some Google web services, but I like Apple devices and iOS for everything else. The iOS third-party ecosystem is thriving and a source of continuous inspiration and workflow improvements. iOS is my platform of choice, but Google is behind many of the services that I prefer.

For this reason, I’m glad Google found its design voice on iOS.

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TaskAgent for Mac→

TaskAgent for Mac

I like Francisco Cantu’s TaskAgent. It’s a simple iOS app that lets you manage to-dos as text files in Dropbox. I previously covered the app when Francisco released version 2.0 last year, and I also described how I was integrating it with my Dropbox writing workflow.

Francisco has released a first Mac version of TaskAgent today. The Mac app comes with the same settings of the iOS clients: you can link it to Dropbox, create multiple lists (which are actually multiple text files), move done tasks to the bottom of a list and new ones to the top. On the Mac, there’s also an OmniFocus-like “quick entry” to bring up a panel with a keyboard shortcut; from the panel, you can quickly add a task to a specific list.

There are some improvements that I’d like to see in a future version of the app. The interface is a bit rough and the app could use more polished toolbar icons; the quick entry panel should be automatically dismissed after you hit Enter; I’d also like to be able to drag & drop tasks between lists and have hyperlinks recognized as clickable. I am confident Francisco is already considering these fixes.

For existing TaskAgent users, TaskAgent for Mac is a worthy companion. The app is available at $3.99 on the App Store.

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App Icons→

App Icons

Louie Mantia (former designer at Apple and Square, among others) has a thoughtful take on designing app icons:

Consider walking down a candy aisle at a drugstore. If you have a craving for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, you know how to find it. Of course, it’s the bright orange wrapper with a bubbly yellow word on it. Instant. Most candy bars have very distinct brands which can be instantly recognizable at a glance of the entire aisle. This should be precisely how you approach your app icon design.

An ideal app icon reminds users of an app through shape, color, and texture. Take the Phone icon, for instance. It has evolved a tiny bit since Steve introduced it in 2007, but has remained mostly the same. Today, it is a bright green, with diagonal stripes, and a white phone symbol. These three elements together (read: by our powers combined) form an instantly recognizable mark for users. When a user needs to use the phone, it’s a no-brainer.

I may have argued in the past that the iOS Home screen needs improvements, but I would never argue against a well designed icon. I use Alfred on my Mac to launch apps, but I also rely on the dock to quickly reach out to an app and make it visible. On iOS, I rely less on Spotlight (though I use it regularly) and I value the “recognizability” of icons in the Home screen.

Read Louie’s post about app icons here. His suggestions for new Zappos, Amazon, and Apple icons look great.

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iOS Automation and Workflows with Drafts

The latest update to Drafts – a “quick note capturing” app that I’ve covered several times on MacStories – adds a series of features aimed at increasing the possibilities of workflows automation on iOS devices. Obviously, this is something I’m interested in.

It seems like enabling users to save time while using apps has been a common thread in the past few months. The success of Launch Center Pro probably “raised awareness” in regards to the whole concept of URL schemes, but it’s been the increased adoption of x-callback-url and interest in automated workflows that proves better inter-app communication is something that (at least) third-party developers are thinking about. Google included a powerful URL scheme in Google Maps and Google Chrome; more recently, Mr. Reader showed how to enable a “services menu” by requiring users to mix URL schemes from other apps with parameters for an article’s title or selected text. These aren’t ideal solutions, but it’s all we have for now.

Greg Pierce, creator of the x-callback-url specification, has improved Drafts in ways that not only make the app more useful to get text onto other services, but also broaden the possibilities for automation through the use of URL schemes.

There are three main new features in the new Drafts: Dropbox actions, URL actions, and an improved URL scheme with support for callbacks and action triggers. I am going to explain how they work and include various actions and bookmarklets to demonstrate different use cases. Read more