Google has released a standalone version of their calendar app for iPhone. No iPad version currently. Download for free on the App Store.
Federico Viticci on Life After Cancer
Federico Viticci, on how iPhone and iPad apps are helping him stay healthy:
I want to be healthier, I want to eat better, and I want to take the second chance I was given and make the most of it. What started as an experiment has become a new daily commitment to improve my lifestyle and focus. And it wouldn’t be possible without my iPhone.
App Store Pricing On the Move
On episode #112 of The Talk Show, Paul Kafasis joins John Gruber to talk baseball and doorbells – but starting at the 2 hour mark of the episode 1 they have an interesting discussion about app pricing in the iOS App Store.
They come to the conclusion that for a certain genre of app on the App Store – productivity/tool apps – it’s not sustainable for developers. If developers can’t make money, they won’t be able to continue developing. Period.
There’s some interesting factors that affect developers inability to make money on the App Store:
- No upgrade pricing. On the Mac, outside of the Mac App Store, developers can offer a new version that sells for $50 but offer it for $25 to people who had bought the previous version. On the iOS App Store it’s either sell it as a new app or give it away for free to all previous purchasers.
- Apple’s sold 1 billion iOS devices. Which seems like a huge market. But how many of those devices are actually used by individuals? In our own house we have 2 iPhones, an iPad and an old iPod touch that all use the same App Store account. 4 devices, one sale to the developer.
- The race to the bottom that has long been a struggle with all things online. Apple, as great as design as they’re supposed to be, hasn’t been able to figure out a way to design an App Store that surfaces great apps, not just popular apps.
- Related to that: the occasionally insane success story of a small development team making millions off of an app masks all the great developers who give up after one or two apps because they can’t make a living. See Panic’s 2014 annual report where they spell out their amazing iOS apps don’t make them as much money as their Mac apps despite selling basically the same unit numbers on both platforms. It’s troubling if a development shop like Panic can’t make it.
Gruber and Kafasis started their discussion with the fact that Gruber’s app, Vesper, is raising it’s price instead of dropping it. And Gruber, in an interview with Jason Snell for SixColors.com, calls on to other developers to join them:
Instead, we want to embrace the users who are looking for the best app, and who are willing to pay a fair price for it if they think Vesper might be it. Going low didn’t work; we lose nothing by trying to go high. I would like to see other developers follow.
I’m all in favour of developers raising pricing for quality apps. You don’t have to be a professional software pundit to figure out that $0 for software isn’t sustainable as a business model – even with crappy ads thrown overtop.
Until Apple figures out a better way to search the App Store though, cheap apps will always rise to the top. Hopefully some of Apple’s recent hires, such as former Mac journalist Chris Breen, point to a more curated App Store.
In much the same way as I rely on blogs and the people I follow on Twitter to point me towards great apps, the average App Store user needs help sorting through the millions of apps to find the best ones in whatever category of app they’re searching for.
If you’re at all curious about the history of the iOS App Store, you should listen to Myke Hurley’s excellent series starting with episode #27 of Inquisitive: Behind the App. Even as someone who was around during the unveiling, it’s amazing how much has changed in what feels like a relatively short time.
Podcasts can’t longer than 30 minutes and be successful! they say.↩
My Favourite iOS Podcast App Gets an Update
If you asked me before today which iOS app was my favourite since iOS 8 came out, I’d have told you Pocket Casts.
Then today Shifty Jelly updated Pocket Casts to version 5 and it became my slightly more favourite’er (it’s a word ok) iOS podcast player.
Then we noticed that not only was Transmission, Kyle & Kenny Roderick’s awesome podcast, featured heavily throughout the website and app, they also used a hint of Show Me Your Mic‘s artwork on their blog post announcement:
Maybe someday I’ll become blasé about seeing my podcast show art pop up around the web, but that day is not today.
After you’ve set up Pocket Cast on your iOS device of choice, be sure to check out their web app at play.pocketcasts.com.
By the way, here’s a few things that are new in Pocket Cast 5:
- Refreshed for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus.
- Handoff support. For those of you that use our new web player you can now tap one button on your mac, and it will open the same episode in the web player, auto-loaded to where you’re currently up to.
- Actionable notifications. You can now add to Up Next and download directly from a notification, without having to open the app.
- Per podcast notification settings, you can now choose to receive notifications for only the podcasts you care the most about.
- Auto downloads any new episodes that come out for that podcast, a huge boon for the hourly podcast fans among us.
iPhone 6 Slow-mo Comparison
I shot video of my brother-in-law over the weekend with the iPhone 6’s 240fps mode – also available on iPhone 5S’ as well- and then wanted to quickly upload it to YouTube or Vimeo to share.
The problem is under iOS (iOS8 too), the share sheet upload option apparently compresses the footage more than using the native YouTube Capture or Vimeo apps for iOS. But if you just go grab the video clip in your Camera Roll and try uploading to YouTube it doesn’t have the slow motion “effect” applied.
My Workflow to Get Slow-mo Clips to the Web
I started by putting the slow-mo clip into iMovie for iOS, turning on the fade-in/fade-out options, choosing a theme which adds background music and then saved it back to the camera roll. Slow-mo settings still intact.
Then I used the aforementioned YouTube Capture and Vimeo apps to upload to each service.
Which service does a better job of compressing/presenting the video? (YouTube ads notwithstanding. I pay for a Vimeo Plus account for client videos.
Vimeo
YouTube
Make sure the “HD” option is set.
Can you tell the difference?
►Daily(ish) 40: Happy iOS 8 Day
iOS 8 will be released sometime today – a few thoughts and a word of warning regarding iCloud Drive.