Wherein I try out a new article style for AppStorm, exploring the story behind an app. First up, the 2013 Apple Design Award winning Evernote 5 — the notetaking app I've been itching to write about again after the latest updates have won my heart all over again. It's really, really good, and it's no wonder at all why Apple picked it for this year's award.
∞Apple just released a new prose motto, one that could almost rival "Here's to the Crazy Ones". Almost.
This is it.
This is what matters.
The experience of a product.
How it makes someone feel.
When you start by imagining
What that might be like,
You step back.
You think.
Who will this help?
Will it make life better?
Does this deserve to exist?
If you are busy making everything,
How can you perfect anything?
We don't believe in coincidence.
Or dumb luck.
There are a thousand "no's"
For every "yes."
We spend a lot of time
On a few great things.
Until every idea we touch
Enhances each life it touches.
We're engineers and artists.
Craftsmen and inventors.
We sign our work.
You may rarely look at it.
But you'll always feel it.
This is our signature.
And it means everything.
Designed by Apple in California.
∞My AppStorm teammates and I are liveblogging the WWDC keynote — from Bangkok, London, and more! Join in the conversation below or at http://scrbliv.me/115266.
Adobe and Microsoft are both switching their software suites to subscription models, moves that have rather upset a large swath of the public (at least the part of the public that posts angry comments on blogs). But in both cases — and especially Adobe's — I think much of the anger is unwarranted. If anything, the new subscriptions work out cheaper for many customers, and they definitely make the upfront cost of getting Office or Creative Suite far, far lower.
I personally own both Creative Suite and Office (CS6 Design Standard for the former, Office 2010/2007/2003 Pro for PC and 2011 Home for the latter). I also, like many, got started with cheap copies from student discounts, and then bought retail-priced upgrades to the latest versions post-college. With Adobe's software, the student discounts are especially significant, letting you buy a suite for around 1/4th of the price of a full retail-value suite — about the price of a normal upgrade. Once you're started, you can then keep getting the upgrade prices each time, with the overall cost-of-ownership far lowered by the student discount.
Honestly, I would have likely never bought Creative Suite at retail price, but the college discounts and subsequent upgrade pricing were approachable enough that it made sense. That's something I'm grateful for, since I've been able to use Adobe apps professionally since then, even if I'm not a designer.
I just wrote a post on Mac.AppStorm about why I think the new subscription model makes sense; take a bit to read the post if you have the chance, as I'd really like to hear your opinion on it as well.
Here's a quick summary of my thoughts:
They're Not Web Apps: I wish both Microsoft and Adobe weren't using "cloud" branding with their subscriptions. At the end of the day, the main thing they're selling is still normal, traditionally apps you'll install on your PC or Mac. They also both have bundled cloud storage and services (Skype and Typekit, respectively), but that's it. The only reason I think they're harping on it being a "cloud" option is that people seem more understanding of paying $5/month for Evernote or $10/month for Dropbox, so they thought calling their software "cloud" services would make people more willing to purchase it as a subscription. That if anything has only confused the discussion, since so many people seem to think that Office and Creative Suite are now browser-based web apps (if only!).
The Price Isn't Bad: The subscriptions are either cheaper or realistically not much more expensive, if you would have purchased each upgrade anyhow. I think the main complaints are coming from people who purchase one version, then use it for years and years without purchasing upgrades. Microsoft and Adobe, if anything, are trying to get out of supporting older versions, and now it's the latest or nothing. Not so crazy, per se. Now, what makes it more expensive with Creative Cloud is now you have to either get just one app (for around $19/month) or get everything (for $50/month), with no in-betweens. A mid-level option that included everything in Design Standard, say, would make a lot more sense for lots of us. And hey, either way: If you don't own Creative Suite already, Creative Cloud makes it tons cheaper to get started. Really.
Will I upgrade to CC? I'm not decided yet, but I likely will just to try it out at least. Plus, I really want to give Muse a shot. Either way, though, it's rather hard for me to believe that Creative Cloud has people upset as much as it does. It's not like the old pricing was that approachable anyhow. All I can figure is that it's frustrating people who were already invested in it; if you're starting out today, it's hardly a bad deal.
And again: for more thoughts on this, check my full article about subscription software on Mac.AppStorm. And stay turned for more CC related stuff if I do upgrade.
P.S.: One more thing: Adobe also has quite a few awesome free apps and services that you should check out. Yup, that's another Mac.AppStorm link you should read.
I've been an avid Instapaper user for years now, and even though I tried out Read it Later back in the day, and even paid for a Readability subscription when it first came out, I've always come back to Instapaper. It's familiar, works great, and I always liked the fact that it had an obvious business model that didn't include selling our data to advertisers (beyond the ad from The Deck in the web app) or getting bought out and shut down.
Then Marco sold Instapaper to Betaworks, and suddenly it felt like time to look around again at the reading later app landscape. Practically everyone kept telling me I had to try Pocket, so I finally did.
Jump over to the full article on Web.AppStorm to see how that worked out.
tl;dr: Instapaper and Pocket both have their strengths and weaknesses. Neither are bad, and I'd be highly inclined to stick to Pocket just for its speed, app selection, and syncing read position (a major, major plus). But I ended up returning to Instapaper for the built-in network (Instapaper's most underrated feature), the iOS apps' font selection, and the full-text search.
∞The best software lives at the extremes. Extreme feature sets, extreme polish, extreme choices. Opinionated software. Software that has a voice of its own, so to speak, one that tells us exactly how it was meant to be used.
Take, for instance, the two writing apps I use most: iA Writer and Sublime Text. It'd be hard to imagine an app comparison more drastic. The former is an app, quite literally, devoid of choices. No settings, no options, nothing. It's the closest to a typewriter that one could have on a computer, a well-oiled machine for writing, and nothing else. Contrast that with Sublime Text, the quintessential configurable text editor. It's designed around options, so many that it offers them in a json file rather than a traditional options screen. It has a package manager and its own command system. It can be anything you want. It's practically an operating system for text.
Neither app is bad. In fact, both are polished apps, the epitome of their particular style of editor. They're both text editors, but that's where the comparisons should rightly end. That is, comparisons of their feature sets. For both apps share one other quality that makes them both apps that have continued to be important: they're opinionated.
iA Writer is opinionated to the extreme, some would say. Its designers picked how they wanted the app to work, and declared their choices best. End of story. On the other hand, Sublime Text caters to those who are picky, and want to tweak endlessly to make their text editor their own. It's far from opinionated, we would say.
Except that's anything but the case. Sublime Text is an opinionated app too, though in a totally different way. It's designed specifically for those who love text editors and want to tweak them, and thus exposes every possible setting so you can extend it and make it what you want. It doesn't try to make things simpler for everyone else with a settings dialog or other graphical interfaces. It's opinionated that text and keyboard commands are best, and if you don't like that, you'd best find another text editor.
It's these defining features that have made both iA Writer and Sublime Text apps that have continued to be worth talking about. They're interesting because of the choices their developers have made. Far too often, app simply hit the middle. They try to perhaps please everyone, and end up thrilling no one. The very best apps, however, stick out and do something different. Maybe that difference is having a very curated set of choices, maybe it's in letting people work in a unique way, and maybe it's in giving far more freedom than any other app.
If you're building an app, give us some reason to talk about your app, something that makes it stick out. Otherwise, it'll soon be forgotten, bypassed by the apps that — while either simpler or more complex than yours — actually changed the way we work.
If you've got an iPhone and your carrier allows it (or you've paid the extra in the US to use it), Personal Hotspot is one of the best features in the iPhone (or Android phone that supports tethering). Turn it on, and within seconds you can be browsing on your laptop or Wifi-only iPad. I used to have a data plan on a 3G USB adapter so I could work on the go with my MacBook regardless of whether the place I was working had Wifi, but ever since I got my iPhone, I've used its Personal Hotspot instead. It's simple, gets comparatively great speeds, and gives me one less thing to keep up with.
There's only one problem: sharing the internet connection over Wifi goes through your battery rather fast. It's still not that bad, but it'll easily eat 50% of your battery in a 2-3hr session. Tethering over USB alleviates that problem, at least for your iPhone, but it means you've got a cable to remember to bring and keep up with.
There's another solution that I never even thought to try until today: Bluetooth tethering. It sounds archaic and slow, but actually worked out better. And it wasn't slow, either: the speeds were essentially the same as I typically get through 3G already, or around 1.5Mb down and 1Mb up. Comically, it was faster to connect. I always seem to have a somewhat tricky time getting my iPhone's Wifi hotspot to show up in areas with tons of Wifi networks, but connecting via Bluetooth literally took two seconds. You pair your phone with your laptop, if you haven't already, then click the gear icon in your Bluetooth settings and select Connect to Network. Put your laptop to sleep and wake it up, and repeat those steps, and — no joke — it'll connect the entire way in 2 seconds.
That's faster and simpler than connection to my iPhone's internet over Wifi, and it was definitely easier on my MacBook Air and iPhone's battery life.
So there's you a little mobility tip to try out.
"The mouse will be the new command line, beloved by geeks and graybeards, and puzzled at by everyone else."
~Ben Thompson, stratēchery
Spot-on analysis of how the iPad changed the world of computing, written right after the iPad was initially unveiled by Jobs.
∞It was sometime in 2007, during the summer before I started college, that. I first tried out WordPress. I didn't have any hosting of my own, and was rather certain nothing I could write was worth publishing, but I found it facinating to try out locally. I'd already done some basic web design, and played around with the wonders of CSS Zen Garden, but still knew I was far from being able to develop my own professional sites. And here was this free software, WordPress, that let me add some quick tweaks to a theme and turn some basic HTML pages into a modern, powerful site. I was hooked.
So, a couple years later when my Business English professor made making a blog one of our class assignments, I turned to WordPress.com. It lacked some of the power I'd already grown to love, but it was free and worked great. Suddenly, writing online was fun, addictive even, and I was hooked all over again. That basic blog led to to my first paid writing job at Labnol.org, which led to writing at HowtoGeek.com, which led working for AppStorm. All of which were, obviously, powered by WordPress. My entire career, in fact, has been based around writing on WordPress-powered sites.
WordPress was, and still is, Matt Mullenweg's baby, but it's grown far beyond what, surely, anyone could have dreamed of in its early days. It's made web development simpler, and given writers and more a voice on the Internet. It's used for everything from blogs to eCommerce sites, support systems to internal social networking. It powers over 66 million sites, covering everything from CNN and the NY Times to mommy blogs and everything in between.
It's grown up, and gotten more complex, making it better for use as a large CMS for teams and relively less nice for indivual writers. But it still works great, regardless, and even though I personally love lite CMSes like Kirby these days, WordPress is still the best choice for most people. It's the first thing I'd recommend to anyone wanting to start a new site, since it really just works, and empowers you to do more without any coding. And it's rather amazing how, of all CMSes out there, WordPress made blogging practical for the rest of us, and if anything it inspired the rest of the blog engines we love these days.
So, congrats to WordPress on a decade on the 'net, and here's to the next decade. Or century. It sure deserves it.
We're used to the term "getting things done" or GTD being thrown around when discussing to-do list and project management apps. It even comes up when discussing note apps and strategies, especially when they involve bucket apps like Evernote that have tags and folders like popular GTD to-do list apps.
What people forget is that GTD is actually a method for productivity, not something that can be encompassed in a particular app. People use GTD as short-hand for productivity apps that fit their bill of what they need to do. They forget that, at its core, David Allen's original Getting Things Done idea was that you capture anything that has your attention, find what you need to do with it, organize information, and make the best choices about what to do at a given moment. All good, practical ways to keep your brain clear and focused on your work instead of being constantly distracted, but not something that precisely one app can encompass.
Instead, how about tools that let you get what you need to do, done, without having to remember to come back and finish stuff up? That can be very, very valuable to keeping you productive and sane, without leaving dozens of tasks half-completed every day.
And that's what the best new apps do these days. Take the iPhone email app Triage, for example. It lets you check your mail — one message at a time — and quickly either archive/delete the email or save it as unread in your inbox to read/reply to later from your computer. It's an actionable app, one designed with a specific workflow to make you productive and get what you're doing, done.
The best example of this, though, is the new Mac app Minbox. It's designed to make sending large files faster, with a specific workflow. You drag the file(s) you want to send to your menubar, enter the recipient's email address and a brief message, and hit send. Done. No more waiting for Dropbox to sync files, or for a file to upload to your FTP server, and then remembering to email your colleague about the file. Nope. Now, you just think of the file you need to send, and send it.
I mentioned to the developers that the app was GTD in a way since it let you get the task of sending a file out of your mind by letting you fully complete a task that used to take hours in seconds. And maybe I'm stretching the term here, but I think it's apt.
It's another reason why I've fallen in love with Evernote again: the menubar app and the web clipper make it take almost zero thought to archive stuff I find to Evernote and build up my own info database. It's the same with Sparrow: I can't replace it because every other Mac email app I try takes more steps to accomplish the same tasks, and that's frustrating. It's why Google Now has already won fans, because it takes steps out of, say, finding directions to get home.
Preview is my favorite image editor for quick crops and resizes because it doesn't do tons more than that, and is dead simple for it (especially with customized keyboard shortcuts). And iA Writer's lack of settings — and perfect default settings, for my tastes at least — combined with a single shortcut to copy HTML from my Markdown writing for my AppStorm articles make it a writing app that fits like a glove. None of these may be GTD apps, per se, but they sure help me get things done by making decisions for me and taking steps out of my work.
I want to see more apps that let me accomplish what I'm setting out to do without having extra steps, especially those that will have to be done at a later time. Reduce steps, especially theses that require us to remember to complete them when we're likely to forget. Make apps like that, ones that actually save people time and give them less they have to remember to complete a task, and you're just about guaranteed to have a market for your products.
They'll be choosy apps, apps that decide for the user what's best, but I think that's the best. And the market for simpler apps sure seems to be validation of that.