Mapping The Entertainment Ecosystems: A Brief Revisit

In mid-October, we published a story on the entertainment ecosystems of Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon - looking at to what degree their music, movie, TV, eBook and app stores were available in international markets. Apple on the whole seemed to have the best average availability - slightly losing to Microsoft for the app stores and Amazon dominating everyone in the eBook store.

I’ve decided to briefly revisit the topic today because the original post garnered quite a lot of discussion and feedback and because of two “events” that have since happened. Firstly, Apple yesterday announced an expansion of the iTunes Music Store into dozens of new countries (and Movie store in a few additional countries). Secondly, I have since found two pieces of data on which countries Xbox Music is available in (for some odd reason I cannot find any official Microsoft document detailing the countries it is available in). So below is an update to the Music and Movie diagrams and graphs.

 

Note: Read the original ‘Mapping the Entertainment Ecosystems’ post which includes diagrams for eBooks, TV and App Stores.
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Improving The iOS Keyboard→

Improving The iOS Keyboard

Chris Bowler, writing about possible improvements for the iOS keyboard:

The negative with writing on the iPad is typing. It’s a bit of a mixed bag experience — the iOS autocorrection is (at times) brilliant and I can fly along with confidence, knowing the OS is going to correct my typos. But when mistakes are made and are either not autocorrected, or autocorrected incorrectly, then the iPad becomes a less comfortable environment.

Remember when, ahead of the original iPad’s announcement in January 2010, rumors tended to focus on what the “tablet keyboard” would be like? Here are a few examples. In spite of the iPhone having shown that Apple simply wanted a regular keyboard’s appearance translated to multitouch, several people wondered whether Apple should do something different for the bigger screen. The answer was that they simply designed a “full-screen” keyboard.

As Chris notes, over the years third-party developers have extended the iOS keyboard with additional bars. Look at Writing Kit, Pythonista, Textastic, and iA Writer for examples of these modifications.

I think the discussion on the iOS keyboard often mixes writing with editing. Personally, I believe the iOS keyboard is great for writing, because it’s just a normal keyboard, but iOS text selection is in serious need of an update, because it feels outdated. I’m not sure the average user cares about better text selection, but for the sake of the argument, I will say that a better solution should be explored.

If you read those old pre-2010 posts on the “iSlate keyboard”, you’ll notice a common thread: that Apple must build something revolutionary for text entry. I recall some people guessed a split keyboard could be a possible implementation, and, in fact, that one came true in 2011. But what about text selection? I don’t think keeping on adding bars above the keyboard is feasible. Especially on the landscape iPad, a single bar alone sensibly diminishes the space available for writing – space being one of the most commonly cited advantages of the iPad against 16:9 and 16:10 tablets. On the iPhone 5, it’s an acceptable solution thanks to the taller screen, but, then again, the bar is too narrow to be a meaningful improvement.

Rather, I would say entirely new ideas for text selection and manipulation are the future. It’s the reason everyone got excited for the Hooper Selection: once you saw it, it just made perfect sense. Too, I wouldn’t completely forget about features that Apple put on the shelf, as they tend to come back.

So here’s my hope for the future of iOS for writing: the same keyboard, but also new, fresh ideas for text selection and editing.

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YouTube for iOS Gets iPhone 5 and AirPlay Support, iPad Version

Following a major update to Gmail for iOS, Google has today also released a new version of its YouTube app, which includes AirPlay and iPhone 5 support, as well as an iPad version that makes the app Universal.

One of the new features is the Guide of channels that you can access by tapping on the YouTube logo in the title bar; tap it, and you’ll go back to the app’s main sidebar, listing your account’s options and Channels. On the iPhone 5, YouTube is now optimized for the taller screen – a glaring omission that has annoyed several iPhone 5 users since the device’s release. Among other improvements – including clickable links in video descriptions and ability to add or remove a video from your playlists – a notable addition is AirPlay support: you can now natively stream videos to any AirPlay-compatible device such as the Apple TV or a Mac running Reflection (which is what I tested).

The iPad version of the app is rather obvious, but still welcome: it packs a sidebar on the left side, and main content on the right side of the screen. When you tap on a video, the right portion becomes the main view hiding the sidebar and displaying suggested videos on the right. Interestingly, you can’t browse and watch videos at the same time, as the sidebar will always be hidden after you click a video’s thumbnail.

For everything else, both the updated iPhone app and iPad version share the same features that I covered in my original review of the app, and today’s changes are definitely improvements worth checking out – it’s especially good to see Google supporting AirPlay right after the 1.0 release. Both on the iPhone and iPad, Google offers a feature in the Settings to open links in Chrome, also available for both platforms on the App Store.

The updated YouTube app is available on the App Store. More screenshots of the iPad app are available below. Read more

Gmail 2.0: A Year Later

Despite Google’s persistence on adopting web views in an iOS frame, Gmail’s iOS app has been consistently improved since its inception. For the amount of ridicule Gmail for iOS has received, whether it be for its mobile web disguise or a lack of support for multiple accounts, it’d be a shame not to recognize some of the substantial improvements that have been made to the app. While I didn’t think Gmail was a great app, I didn’t think of it as a bad app, offering a native Gmail experience for account holders who want to take advantage of Google’s quick search capabilities, labels, and importance markers. On iOS, the main benefit is near instant notifications, something that Apple’s native Mail app can’t take advantage of unless Gmail is set up as an Exchange account. (And that notification sound? One of the best.)

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Evernote Business and Related Notes→

Related Notes

Related Notes


Today Evernote officially introduced Evernote Business, its new platform that comes with dedicated features for teams and organizations to get the most out of Evernote. Announced earlier this year, Evernote Business builds on the existing foundation of Evernote for regular customers, but it adds more storage, an admin console, Business Notebooks, and the Business Library, a way for members of a team to get direct access to a collection of notebooks.

The Business Library is a collection of selected Business Notebooks that are accessible to the entire organization. At Evernote, our Business Library includes everything from important HR documents to design assets to product schedules to media mentions. All employees have the ability to publish some of their Business Notebooks into the Business Library. Administrators have full control over the Business Library, and can further elevate notebooks into a Recommended set that they feel are particularly valuable to employees.

With Business, Evernote has updated its platform for the new type of accounts that, however, can still merge Personal Notebooks (which are private) with Business Notebooks, which are shared with members of an organization. There’s an admin FAQ and user FAQ available, and the Evernote native and web apps have been updated for compatibility with Evernote Business. The service starts at $10 per user per month, and for now it is available in seven countries. More details (including a video with CEO Phil Libin) are available on Evernote’s blog post.

As I tweeted this morning, however, a big change for me is the addition of Related Notes for both business and normal Premium accounts. As Evernote explains:

This is where things start getting magical. In the latest version of Evernote for Mac (coming soon to other platforms), as you type a new note or view an existing one, Related Notes will appear at the bottom of the note area. The more you type, the more contextually relevant the notes will become.

Essentially, Related Notes is a section that lives underneath the note panel showing up to three related notes. In my opinion, it is a great way to rediscover notes that you may have forgotten about. That has certainly been a problem with the way I use Evernote, because I tend to clip a lot of material from the web, and it often gets lost unless I access it on a regular basis. From what I’ve seen so far, Related Notes works surprisingly well in capturing existing notes about the same subject; I’d be interested in knowing what kind of algorithm Evernote is using here – whether they simply look at keywords or also consider location, tags, time stamps, and other metadata.

Related Notes are available in Evernote 5.0.2, released today for non-Mac App Store users.

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iTunes 11 Interface Innovations→

iTunes 11 Interface Innovations

I don’t use iTunes as my default media player on a daily basis. However, since the release of iTunes 11, mainly out of curiosity and to see my wish granted, I’ve forced myself to listen to some music and do some movie watching with it. I was considering a separate article, but Adam C. Engst perfectly summed up the issues I find myself having with iTunes 11:

In the end, it’s good to see Apple trying to extend interface concepts with all these new approaches in iTunes 11 and some, like the use of color and the new approach to application typography are welcome. But there’s a distinct lack of consistency and attention to discoverability that renders the single-window model and multifarious button menus less successful than they might be. I cringe at the thought of trying to help someone use iTunes 11 over the phone — it will be nearly impossible to describe the screen successfully and to walk someone through different actions if you can’t do so in person.

Overall, I believe iTunes 11 is an improvement. I like the expanded album view, the new Store’s consistency with iOS, the device popovers, and the MiniPlayer. But at the same time, as a non-power user of iTunes 11, I found it to be extremely complicated and confusing in other areas: the Done button to dismiss the device window, the separation of sections, views, devices, and Store buttons across the entire window, and the non-native sharing of the iTunes Store. And yes, even other inconsistencies such as the inability to go back to Apps view, the lack of visual hints for songs added to UpNext using the “+” button in the popovers, and the standalone Downloads window that should have probably worked like Safari’s.

It’s not that I don’t like iTunes 11: in fact, I do – overall. It’s that, even from my perspective, there’s a surprising lack of minutiae in the design of iTunes 11.

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Slogger and Day One Memories

Slogger is a fantastic script created by Brett Terpstra. With a bit of manual setup, Slogger can run on your Mac and, on a daily basis, pull entries from various Internet sources – such as Twitter and RSS – and put them into Day One automatically. It is a way to fill Day One with social updates for stuff that you write elsewhere. Brett is awesome, he’s working on new stuff for Slogger, and you should definitely check it out (and consider a donation) if you’re interested in its functionality.

I, however, have turned Slogger off a couple of weeks ago and removed the entries it created. This happened soon after the release of Day One with tags and search, which made me realize “automated logging” is not for me. Slogger was a placebo, not a medicine to let me write more. Somewhat intrigued by its scriptability and automation, I fell short of my own promise:

In twenty years, I’m not sure I’ll be able to remember the songs I like today, or the faces of people that I care about now. I don’t even know if I’ll be around in twenty years. But I do know that I want to do everything I can to make sure I can get there with my own memories. We are what we know. And I want to remember.

It took a while for me to realize I wasn’t fixing the right problem. Instead of making an effort to document memories I care about, I was passively watching another Internet pipe feeding a digital archive of my life with tweets, liked items, starred posts, and everything in between. Brett is awesome, but Slogger is not for me. At least not with the current version of Day One, because there’s no way to meaningfully separate “social entries” from “actually-written-by-me entries”. My wish is for Slogger to eventually mature into a standalone app for “social archiving”, separate from Day One.

I want my thoughts – not my stupid Twitter jokes – to be read by someone who, for some reason, will care about the life I had. There are several aspects of my digital life that I like to improve, but I won’t automate my memories.

Day One is a personal experience, and as such, I want it to be mine.

The Unarchiver AppleScript, iOS App, and Archive Browser

I have been using The Unarchiver for years now. It’s been listed in my Must-Have Mac Apps roundups, and I recommend it to every friend who, after switching from Windows to OS X, asks me about “WinRAR for Mac”. The Unarchiver is a powerful and simple extraction tool with support for multiple formats and a set of user preferences to configure in the Settings.

There have been some updates to The Unarchiver lately. The free Mac app, The Unarchiver, received initial AppleScript support with a dictionary that supports extraction and various options such as location of extracted files and originals. Whilst The Unarchiver is pretty straightforward in itself, AppleScript support means you’ll be able to put together automated workflows with loops, if conditions, and different settings than the app’s ones. More importantly, you’ll be able to extend The Unarchiver and make it communicate with other apps installed on your Mac (an example: automate downloads with Transmit and extract with The Unarchiver in AppleScript). Here’s a sample extraction script for the file currently selected in Finder:

tell application "Finder"
	set sel to the selection as text
	set the_file to POSIX path of sel
	
	tell application "The Unarchiver"
		if isRunningExtractions is false then
			unarchive the_file to Original with deleting Original
		end if
	end tell
end tell

Developer Dag Agren has also released a paid iOS app for The Unarchiver. Initially buggy, Dag has been busy improving it and making it more reliable on iOS 6. Called Archives, it is based on The Unarchiver, which means you’ll get support for a plethora of formats. The app lets you look inside archives and preview files before extracting them; you can open a file in other apps that support the format using Open In, you can save images to the Camera Roll, and check out advanced information for each file. I have found Archives to be particularly useful in previewing files from Mail or Safari. Archives is $1.99 on the App Store.

Last, inspired by Archives for iOS, Archive Browser for OS X is a paid version of The Unarchiver with support for browsing and previews before extraction. It supports Quick Look, and it’s $3.99 on the App Store.

The Daily Shuts Down→

The Daily Shuts Down

The Daily, one of the most discussed Apple-related rumors of late 2010 that turned out to be a poorly designed iPad-only magazine, is shutting down on December 15. AllThingsD reports, in fact, that parent company News Corp. will “cease standalone publication” of the app later this month. Technology and “assets” from The Daily will be folded into News Corp-owned The New York Post, a tabloid. News Corp.’s Murdoch was quoted in the press release:

From its launch, The Daily was a bold experiment in digital publishing and an amazing vehicle for innovation. Unfortunately, our experience was that we could not find a large enough audience quickly enough to convince us the business model was sustainable in the long-term. Therefore we will take the very best of what we have learned at The Daily and apply it to all our properties. Under the editorial leadership of Editor-in-Chief Col Allan and the business and digital leadership of Jesse, I know The New York Post will continue to grow and become stronger on the web, on mobile, and not least, the paper itself. I want to thank all of the journalists, digital and business professionals for the hard work they put into The Daily.

Quite a departure, unfortunately, from Murdoch’s original statements on the future of his venture:

The Daily is not a legacy brand moving from the print to the digital world. We have license to experiment. We believe The Daily will be the model for how stories are told.

Murdoch’s intent may have been noble enough to justify the effort, but The Daily – as an app – was flawed since the first issue. The interface was clunky and confusing; the app required large downloads, and, in just a matter of weeks, its readership substantially decreased, in spite of heavy promotions by News Corp, including a commercial that aired during the XLV Super Bowl.

The Daily was launched in early 2011 as part of Apple’s new subscription feature for App Store apps.

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