The word processor is far from dead, but Microsoft had better start fighting if it wants to keep Word at the top of the market. Because this year, word processors are the big thing in web apps. Word — and even Google Docs — haven't really made the mobile transition, and neither of them are really designed for writing for the web. That's left a huge gap to be filled.
Today saw the release of Quip, the newest online writing app that's an attempt to reinvent the word processor for 2013. But it's far from alone. Here's the newest online contenders from the web app throne, linked to my AppStorm articles about each of them:
iWork for iCloud — Apple's new beta web app versions of their iCloud suite make up the prettiest — and most feature-filled — set of office apps on the web. They're nearly perfect copies of their iPad counterparts, and work amazingly great on the web. Just … no collaboration features, at all, right now.
Draft — My favorite web app of the year, enough that I've written about it multiple times already, Draft is a Markdown writing app for the web with an editing service, tools to publish to WordPress or save to Dropbox, and more. Much more. It's great, and the one of this list you've got to try since it's so unique.
Editorially — The new collaborative writing app from Jason Santa Maria and Mandy Brown of A Book Apart fame, Editorially is a Markdown app similar to Draft, but in a more traditional interface and built around teamwork. It's slick, but in private beta.
Quip — The newest entry, from a former Google and Facebook team, Quip aims to reinvent rich text collaborative writing for the iPad age. It's great — but far closer to Word and Pages than Draft and Editorially mean to be, in a fully unique way. Another app you'll have to try.
Can I include a Mac app here, too? Ok, good. Ulysses III is the writing app that's won me over this year. It's amazing for us writers that already use Markdown day in, day out, but it's simple enough that it's the only Markdown app I've ever seen that has a chance at converting the normal Word user to Markdown. And that's really cool.
Yup. It's a fun time to be a writer that loves trying out new writing apps.
Another of my recent articles from AppStorm, this time digging into the features of SimplyMpress and LetterMpress, the two best apps to make letterpress style art on the Mac and iPad. I've been following LetterMpress since it was first on Kickstarter, and have been excited to see their team follow though on the original promise and take it further.
For a quick summary: you'll likely find SimplyMpress easier to use for making a quick letterpress-style design, but LetterMpress is more impressive and lets you feel like you're using a real printing press. But, both feel more at home on the iPad's touchscreen than they do on the Mac. Not too surprising for a ported app, but I was hoping they'd be a bit better on the Mac than they are.
Now, read the full review for the rest of the scoop.
If you're sharing small files all the time, Droplr's the sharing app you should be using. From Web.AppStorm, here's why I finally switched from CloudApp to Droplr — and why I think you'll find yourself very happy if you switch as well.
2 days over a month since Techinch Magazine hit the App Store, and 2 days under a month since Techinch Magazine Issue 1 was officially released, here we are again with Issue 3. And it's the best issue yet, if I may say so myself.
This time, instead of just articles from yours truly, we've also got an article from Nathan Snelgrove, a writer from Canada who's worked with me at AppStorm and recently penned an article that was published in The Loop's magazine (coincidentally also a TypeEngine-powered magazine). He brings us an insightful article about finding the right balance of tech for your life. Nathan's a great writer — and a great friend — and I'm very excited that he's been able to write for Techinch Magazine.
Then, you'll also notice that Techinch Magazine is a bit shiner this time, thanks to the hand-drawn graphics in two of the articles from the brilliant London-based illustrator, Jason Ramasami. He'd gotten in touch with me via App.net when I first launched Techinch Magazine, and put together some rather stunning illustrations for my articles this time. Hope you enjoy them this time, and look forward to seeing more of his work in coming issues.
Go Check it Out!
So, if you have a minute, go download it the latest issue from the App Store, or get your PDF/ePub copy from Gumroad. I sure hope you enjoy it — and to all of my subscribers, thank you so much for joining me in this venture. I really, really appreciate every one of you taking the time to read the articles — and for buying a subscription.
It's not too uncommon for me to spend a dollar or ten on an impulse app or eBook purchase. But hardware's a totally different matter. I planned my MacBook purchase months in advance, saved and thought and debated before finally buying an iPhone, and maxed out my backup drive (and then managed to erase half of the stuff on it) before I bought another 1Tb external USB3 drive. The [Nifty MiniDrive] was nearly an impulse buy, but at $30 it was cheap enough to take a chance on.
Today, another device convinced me to buy it only an hour after first hearing about it: Google's [Chromecast]. It's a $35 HDMI stick — practically the same as the USB flash drives and 3G connectors we're used to — powered by Chrome OS. Just connect it to your TV, where it'll likely be 100% hidden (assuming your TV can power it over HDMI; otherwise, you'll need a power cable. Still, not bad), and open Chrome on any of your devices or a supported app (YouTube, Netflix, Google Play on an Android device, and a handful of others coming soon). Find what you want to watch, then tap the button to "cast" it to your TV. And anything online will work, or at least it's supposed to, including any site with HTML5 or Flash video. Next thing you know, your online video will be playing on your TV via the Chromecast, in full HD.
It's obviously going to be compared most to the Apple TV, which can stream videos from a number of online services, play iTunes media, and mirror your entire Mac or iOS device's screen via AirPlay. But it's 3 times the cost of the Chromecast, and is yet another set-top box. If browser-based videos make up the majority of your viewing, then the Chromecast is perfect. And I happen to bet there will have to be ways to get it to play local media via a personal server — that's something I shall have to try out. But if you're already using Netflix+YouTube for your streaming entertainment, the Chromecast would be perfect — and it comes with 3 months of free Netflix streaming, making it effectively $24 cheaper. And somehow, it would only make sense now if Google could figure out a way to bring Google Play videos to iOS (Update: turns out they already have. Buy a movie/TV show in Google Play, and you can open it in the iOS YouTube app under the Account->Purchases tab. Thanks for confirming, @failgunner).
But hey, at $35, it's cheap enough to come up with extra use cases. Imagine this: you can carry a Chromecast in your laptop bag, and when you give a presentation just have the media team stick it in the projector, and you can give a full projected presentations via Google Docs (or, hey, iWord for iCloud, or even the Powerpoint Web App). Or, imagine if Google brings full-device mirroring to the Chromecast for Macs and PCs — that'd make it the perfect way to make any TV into a wireless display.
I'll still want to get an Apple TV sometime if only for full-screen AirPlay Mirroring — and not just the Chromecast's Chrome Tab mirroring — but I happen to think that the Chromecast will cover most of my streaming media needs. And that's really cool. I can't wait to get mine.
Hey Google, good job. You just sold this Apple fan a device.
*****
Now, if only the Ubuntu Edge was coming sooner than next year, I'd be sorely tempted to buy another non-Apple device. What is happening?!?
Matthew Butterick, a typographer and lawyer who'd previously written the book Typography for Lawyers, just released a brand new book: Practical Typography. Yet, rather than printing it and releasing it as a normal for-pay eBook, he turned it into its own eBook web app designed 100% for reading in your browser. Its content — the basics of typography explained for anyone to understand — is impressive enough, but the book's web app is equally impressive.
You'll find chapters devoted to everything from quotes and apostrophes to text formatting with OpenType features and the line spacing settings you should use. There's a Typography in Ten Minutes chapter to get you going quickly, font recommendations so your documents and sites won't look outdated, sample documents, and more. All of it, for the low price of free — but if you find it useful, you should check out the ways you can pay for the book. It's more than worth it, and it'd sure be neat to see more books released like this.
Oh, and the book recommends Pitch, my favorite monospaced font, in the font recommendation section, which is neat to see. It also lists Source Sans — the font used in Techinch and Techinch Magazine — as exceptions to the rule that with free fonts, you get what you pay for. Also nice to see. Perhaps I have somewhat decent taste in typefaces.
But why are you still here? Go check out Practical Typography, make some time to read it, and bookmark it for reference. That's exactly what I'm doing.
It's been two weeks since I officially launched Techinch Magazine, and I've finally got Issue 2 out the door. If you've already downloaded the app or subscribed via email, you should have received a notification about the new issue. If you didn't noticed the notification, though, go check it out.
Here's what you'll find this time around:
Welcome to Techinch Magazine Issue 2
You Are Not Your Tools
Making a Smart Home
Automate All Your Stuff
The Tools to Build Techinch Magazine
This time, I've included PDF and ePub download links in the iOS app version of the magazine, so you can read Techinch Magazine on any of your devices.
At just over 6,000 words, it's longer than Issue 1, and hopefully at least as enjoyable as the first issue. Hope you enjoy it, and we'll be back with Issue 3 in two more weeks — and that issue will have an article from a new guest writer as well!
"A Maximum Viable Product is a product that is as good as the market will bear." Allen Pike, Steamclock Software
What everyone should aim to build: the very best stuff they can.
If you're tired of the App Store being dominated by freemium junk games and ad-ridden knockoffs, this should be your new manifesto.
Now, if only Apple would get wholeheartedly behind helping others make work they're proud of, instead of focusing on promoting free apps and hampering building sustainable businesses on the App Store. But then, Panic and others are proof that the App Store can work for Maximum Viable Products as well, so perhaps it's just a problem of developer and consumer perspective.
Either way, here's to the next generation of Maximum Viable Products. Go build them. We can't wait to use them.
It's a rare day when I use only one or two apps in my work. I'm usually switching around between so many apps, I had to try hard to trim down my list of apps I use for AppStorm. But when I decided to take on making an iOS magazine app, I needed a set of tools just for that — some brand new to my workflow, and others old favorites I just needed to spend more time in.
So here's what I used to take Techinch Magazine from idea to inception:
The new writing app from The Soulmen has grown on me over the past few months, and it's now where most of my daily writing takes place (sorry, iA Writer). When I first started writing my article outlines for Techinch Magazine, Ulysses III wasn't around, and even when it first got released in April I didn't switch to it at first. But it's such a nice app, it seemed a shame to not put it to use — so I decided to make it the app to write and organize all of my Techinch Magazine content, even if I didn't use it for my other writing. It wasn't long after that I started using Ulysses III for everything.
Here's how I use it for Techinch. I made a Techinch Magazine folder, added sub-folders for each issue, then started article drafts under that. I can then jot ideas down in Daedalus touch, write articles in Markdown, preview them in Marked, copy them directly in Markdown to the TypeEngine console for publication, or export them together for my eBook versions. All of that's saved on iCloud, but I copy it to Dropbox also, just in case.
Ulysses III keeps everything together, works great, and looks great at the same time (especially with my favorite settings: full-screen, Pure Mode, Freestraction theme, and 17pt Pitch font). Now, the built-in search tool just can't come soon enough.
I love web apps, but I'm still not generally fond of doing all my writing in a browser (chalk that up to having way too many half-written articles lost because the internet connection dropped, an app logged me out, or a half-dozen other reasons). Still, Draft has found a spot in my Techinch Magazine workflow, thanks to its copy-editing service. I spent $5/article, and got some rather valuable edits on the two longest articles in Issue 1. It's also a great place to share documents with friends and others, to get their thoughts on something before publishing it — with all the changes in plain text and Markdown. It's great stuff.
Techinch Magazine is primarily an iOS app, but I wanted anyone who wanted to read it to be able to, so I made PDF and ePub versions of it as well. There's better tools out there for making eBooks, but you know what? Pages worked.
I exported everything from Issue 1 in RTF from Ulysses, then tweaked it a bit to get the fonts and colors the same as in the app. It took a tiny bit of work to add a background color to the PDF to make it look like the app (tip: you actually have to make a rectangle, stretch it to the size of your page, then move it to your document's section master from the Format -> Advanced menu), but everything else worked as you'd expect. I put it all together first for the PDF, then had to delete the auto-generated table of contents before exporting as ePub, because Pages automatically recreates an ePub style table of contents when exporting. Everything else worked great.
It might not be the best app for making eBooks, but it sure worked fine for what I needed.
Photoshop
I'm a writer, not a graphics designer or photographer, so I didn't initially plan to do much in the way of graphics for Techinch Magazine, especially since I had the new logo that Jaume Estruch designed for Techinch.com in April. But, making an app takes a lot of images — the app logo, magazine covers, launch images in more sizes than anyone should have to manage — not to mention mockup ideas and such. Then, I decided that I should go beyond the generic logo and make real covers for Techinch magazine, and it was time to pull the camera out (a Sony Cybershot DSC-W630).
For all of this, Photoshop was my handy tool. Sure, I didn't use even 10th of its features, but it was nice to have around for the magazine (and I still use it daily for logos and screenshots at AppStorm anyhow, despite not being a graphics guy). I'm rather sure Pixelmator or Acorn could fit the job too, though.
The Techinch Magazine app is in the App Store, where Apple takes care of downloads and billing and everything else, but the eBook versions are left for me to take care of. That job I outsourced to Gumroad. For 5%+$0.25 from each transaction, they let you sell your goods and have them sent directly to your customers — and then will pay you via bank deposit or PayPal. It's insanely easy to use and customize, and even lets you make subscriptions. You just about couldn't ask for more.
It's no secret that I'm a fan of Kirby CMS, the flat-file Markdown powered CMS that runs Techinch.com. When it was time to get a page added for Techinch Magazine, our app privacy policy, and more, Kirby made it simple to just write up what I wanted to say in Markdown and FTP it to the site. It's great stuff.
Email, Skype, and App.net
Working with a team to get an app in the App Store takes a lot of communications. With the TypeEngine team, I've had hour-long Skype calls and sent numerous emails back and forth. And, we've used App.net Private Messages quite a bit to chat about smaller details. I've found that App.net's private messages end up working a bit more like a private chat room than Twitter's DMs ever have, perhaps just because of the larger character limit in messages. Plus, I originally heard about TypeEngine on App.net. At any rate, we would have found it hard to get the app out the door and in the App Store without all of these communications tools.
That's a Wrap!
So there you have it: the apps that helped me get Techinch Magazine written, edited, developed, and in the App Store. Of them all, Ulysses III and Draft are the major stars: they're great, and if you're a writer, you should be using them already.
Oh, and Kirby. But you should already know that.
*****
Have you tried out Techinch Magazine yet? If not, I'd be terribly proud if you'd give it a try — in iOS app or eBook form. It's just $1.99/month, with a 2 week free trial.
I just wrote an overview of NeoCities, the new GeoCities take-2, on Web.AppStorm. NeoCities is a fun project designed to let anyone code their own site from scratch, with 10Mb of free hosting space. That's not much, but it's plenty to put together a basic site and more — one built with your own code, something you can't do on most blog engines and such. Go read my full review at the link below, or just check it out yourself.
NeoCities is an exciting project, if for no other reason than the fact that hopefully it'll inspire younger people to actually hand-code sites instead of just using pre-made WordPress themes. Sure, it'll have a ton of ugly sites, but I sure hope to see a lot of genius there too.
Perhaps you — or someone you inspire to start learning to code — can make that greatness.
