With iTunes 10.3 and iOS 4.3.3 you can enable certain iCloud features from tomorrow, today.
On your devices using iOS 4.3.3, open the Settings app and select Store to turn on automatic downloads for music, books, and apps as you desire. On your computers using iTunes 10.3 or later, use the Store tab in Preferences and check what you want in the Automatic Downloads section.
Too bad there is still not an option that keeps iPhone apps from automatically downloading to your iPad.
I don’t even think it’s an issue of the average consumer comparing the offerings and then making an educated decision that they want an iPad instead of a Xoom or a PlayBook or a Samsung Galaxy Tab. The average consumer likely doesn’t even know about all the other tablets that are out there. To them there is the iPad and there are some knockoffs they saw zip-tied to a cardboard end cap at Best Buy while they were buying a printer.
Many thanks to Roben Kleene of 1Percenter for sponsoring the RSS feed to promote his iPad app, Review.
Review is a very clever app idea, and is something that strikes me as being perfectly suited for iOS. You use it to make, keep, and review quotes, facts, tips, notes to self, and the like. It’s not a to-do app, it is a self-training app:
Review is for things where the date isn’t important, or that you don’t want to just check off and be done with. For example, an inspiring quote you might want to read periodically, perhaps for the rest of your life. Review works best for things you want to make a part of yourself.
Right now Review is $5 in the App Store.
There hasn’t been an Apple keynote like this since January 2007.
Right now the air around Moscone Center, and in the Mac-centric community, is electric. Not unlike when Steve Jobs first introduced the iPhone at Macworld. That was a this changes everything type of moment. But it was more than that — it was an electric announcement. When Steve Jobs announced the iPhone we sort-of all knew it was coming. But we didn’t know what was really coming. It was one of those moments when what was actually announced blew past expectation.
When Jobs introduced the iPad, we also knew it was coming. And it too was a this changes everything type of moment. But, there wasn’t the same type of electricity in the air after the iPad. When we saw the iPad, we though it was just what we thought it would be. It wasn’t until you got one in your hands and began to use it that you realized how great it was.
Up until this week, a lot of people had the hunches about iCloud, the music locker, Lion, iOS 5, et al. And as in the days of the original iPhone announcement, our guesses were not just met, they were exceeded. We had no idea what was coming.
Obviously iCloud was the announcement with the most far-reaching impact. It was the one product that Steve took the stage to announce, and it was saved for last. Ten years from now we won’t remember 2011’s WWDC as the year we got Notification Center on our iPhones. We’ll remember it as the year Apple cut the cord.
iCloud is the most ambitious new product since the original iPhone.
Of course, that is not to say that the features announced in Lion and iOS 5 are chopped liver. By any means. In fact, Monday’s jam-packed keynote could have been three separate WWDCs. It was a wonder they fit all of it into just 2 hours.
Over the past year, 73% of all new Macs sold have been laptops. The iMac used to be Apple’s flagship Mac. Now it’s the MacBook. (I don’t know if this is a result of Apple’s marketing to their consumer base, or if it is them responding to their customers.)
I have this theory that Apple is building OS X Lion with one particular device in mind: laptops with SSDs.1 Even the demo computers that Craig Federighi used to show off the new features in Lion were laptops. I can’t ever remember a keynote where a desktop computer was not used.
When you take a look at some of the features in Lion — full-screen apps, version saving, session saving, and others — they are features that (a) run optimally on a SSD; and (b) look best on a laptop-sized screen.
Apps which run in full-screen mode are cool, but the bigger the screen, the less cool they are. Running one Lion’s Mail or Safari in full-screen mode on a 23-inch cinema display is just awkward. Running it on the 15-inch display is pretty good. And from what I’ve heard, those with the 13- or 11-inch MacBook Pros/Airs appreciate full-screen apps even better.
Steve said at the front of the keynote, if hardware is the brain then software is the soul of their products. A lot of thought and attention has been put in to Lion.
There are many incredible refinements which make Lion even more polished and attractive than its predecessors. Moreover, there are many new functionalities which make it even more simple and easy to use: LaunchPad, the Mac App Store, auto-saving, and more. These are all an assault against the role of the teenage son as the family tech consultant.
It’s hard to sum Lion up with a single sentence, but if you’re going to twist my arm about it then here goes:
Lion is the the world’s most beautiful and simple operating system.
This is not your average iOS update.
Once Scott Forstall had gone through the premier new features coming to iOS 5 I couldn’t think of one thing which I felt they had left out. That is not to say that iOS is finally perfect, but this one is jam packed with big stuff.
Usually, when an OS update is announced there are a a handful of things we were wishing for or bothered by in the old OS that didn’t make it into the new one. Not so with iOS 5. I cannot think of one thing in iOS 4 that irks me which hasn’t been addressed in this next update.
Not only were several of the biggest wants and needs addressed — such as notifications, faster camera access, and over-the-air updating and “syncing” — but many new things were added as well that we didn’t know we needed. Such as iMessage. It’s as if iOS 5 was built with 4 years of listening behind it.
The future is mobile, and the path to that future is paved by the cloud.
iCloud cuts the USB cord between our computers and our iPhones.
It “demotes” the Mac and the PC to the same plane as the iPhone and the iPad. It lets you activate and update your iPhone from inside the car when you’re on your way home from the Apple store. It is something that lets you listen to a song on your iPod even though you bought it on your work computer.
But iCloud isn’t just a way to cut the USB cable. iCloud is an exciting and ambitious vision. It is the missing piece to get mobile computing to act the way it ought to.
The “newsstand” price for a single issue of Wired on the iPad is $4. You can now subscribe to Wired on your iPad for either $20/year or $2/month. If you subscribe to the print edition (which is also $20/year) you get the iPad issues for free. I think it’s odd that they are even selling such steeply discounted, one-month subscriptions to Wired considering that it is a monthly magazine.
The “newsstand” price for a single issue of The New Yorker is $5. They also have a monthly subscription for $6/month. But The New Yorker is a weekly periodical, and so a monthly subscription option seems to make more sense.
I read Wired, just not every month. But now I’ll be subscribing on a month-by-month basis.
When I want to put on some music I reach for iTunes. That afternoon playlist is akin to the morning cup of coffee.
Listening to music should be fun and make you feel good. And so it’s unfortunate that some of the cloud-based music landscape is so depressing.
Amazon and Google have both recently announced that you can upload all your MP3s to their website and listen to them there, instead of leaving them on your hard drive. Pandora, is good internet radio, letting you build a radio station based on your favorite song. And then new services like Rdio and MOG provide you with access to their vast music library, but you don’t own any of the music.
I tried Amazon and it just made me depressed. Though I haven’t received my invite yet, the others who have tried Google Music have all said how pitiful it is. Rdio and Pandora are both fantastic at what they do, but the songs you listen to don’t belong to you.
Let’s take a closer look…
To set up your Amazon Cloud Drive you have to sign up for it on the Amazon website. You get 5 GBs of storage for free forever (and it doesn’t just store music).
Once I signed up and was ready to add music to my Amazon Cloud Drive I had to download their uploader. Once I had done that, it made me install Adobe AIR, then scanned my laptop for MP3s and playlists, compared what was on my computer with what I may already have in their Cloud (which at that time was nothing).
Once the uploader had scanned and found all the music on my laptop it was then ready to upload it. All of it.
The default option was to upload everything. But I chose to opt out of uploading it all and I only uploaded one album. And I’m glad I did. I uploaded “Waking Up” by One Republic and it took 45 minutes. This one album accounts for 0.1 GB of my 5 GB limit. If I had chosen to upload to the max of my 5 GBs it would have taken over 33 hours. If I were to upload my entire music collection, which is around 40 GB, it would have taken 11 consecutive days.
I fear what would have happened had I chosen to go with the default and just upload my entire music collection. Would I have been automatically upgraded to and charged for the 50 GB, $50/year plan? How would I have survived for 11 days while my bandwidth was being eaten alive by the uploader?
It’s unfortunate that any albums you have purchased on the Amazon MP3 store in the past are not automatically added to your collection. We know they’ve got the files already up there on their servers, so why not just say: we see you have this album that you bought from us last month, we’ll just add it to your Cloud Drive now without making you upload it and waste 45 minutes of your time.
The reason Amazon doesn’t automatically add songs they have that are in your library to is that they cannot. Legally, since they didn’t get permission from record labels, they have to only provide a storage area for us to upload the music that we already bought. It’s like we’re simply copying it from one hard drive to another.
However, if you buy an album after you’ve signed up for the Amazon Cloud Drive then you can have that album added to your cloud straight away. And if you want to download it from there you can do that as well.
Something else Amazon is so happy to tell you is that if you buy an album from their MP3 store it does not count against your storage limit. Moreover, after your first purchase then you also get 20 GBs of storage for free.
However, these special perks are only for albums you buy after you’ve signed up. Any album you bought from Amazon before you signed up for their cloud will still count against your quota when you upload it. And moreover, the extra 20 GB is not the same as their 5 GB for free forever deal. What you actually get is a free one-year trial of their 20 GB plan.
Fortunately, the 20 GB plan will revert back to the free 5 GB plan once your year is over.
Amazon wants you to buy your music from them, but they need additional compelling reasons. Their prices are usually better than iTunes but that is not enough. The perks of buying an album from Amazon combined with the “perk” of what their Cloud Player offers, are meant to add up to a compelling reason to start using Amazon MP3 store.
But even these new perks don’t add up to much. In Safari on my laptop I’m having a very difficult time getting it to play one song after the other — especially if I want to start in the middle of an album.
Moreover, Amazon Cloud Player does not have a native iOS app, nor does it really support listening in Mobile Safari. Though you can technically get it to work, the website and streaming is next to worthless on the iPhone and iPad.
But if you want to power through and listen to your Amazon music from your iOS device, go to this URL from your iPad or iPhone: https://www.amazon.com/gp/dmusic/mp3/player/
Once there, you:
– Log in
– Tell them you don’t care that your browser is not supported
– Enjoy trying to listen to music on a player that was not optimized for the iPhone
In theory the multi-tasking works, and you can listen to music in the background. But I had a hard time getting it to work well. Also, skipping forwards or backwards via the multi-tasking bar doesn’t work.
One of the whole points of a cloud player is so you can listen to all your music when you’re away from your main library, right? Well driving around Kansas City, streaming my Amazon music through Mobile Safari on my iPhone was just about worthless. It buffered several times, and flat-out stalled a few times. It was no way to listen to music in the car. Granted, Amazon doesn’t officially support iOS and so technically they can’t be blamed for the horrible streaming.
It’s funny though because streaming over 3G on Pandora is awesome — we especially use it at Christmas time to listen to Christmas music and drive around looking at lights. Streaming on Amazon is lousy. Perhaps those with the official Amazon app for the Android device have had a better experience.
So, why no iPhone app? My theory is that since Amazon wasn’t winning against Apple with price they’re adding cloud sync and streaming music player in hopes to sell more music. Their story is: “Why buy from iTunes when you can get the same album for less, auto-added to your Amazon Cloud Player, listen to it anywhere you like, and you can still download it to your laptop and play it in iTunes if you want?”
But I am confused as to why Amazon has completely disregarded iOS. Why wouldn’t they want their cloud player to work on iPhones and iPod touches? Either: (a) they did submit a native App and it was rejected but none of us know about it; (b) they are working on getting better in-browser player; or (c) they flat out don’t want to compete against iTunes and are just not trying.
I want to say that it’s (b) — that Amazon wanted to get their cloud player out ASAP and will worry about adding compatibility with iOS later — but my gut tells me it’s (c). Because why ship with an Android app out of the gate and not an iOS app?
I still haven’t received my invitation to check out Google Music, but from what I have read about it, it is nearly the same gig as what Amazon is doing.
You upload your music and then you can listen to it on any web browser or Android device. But here’s the other thing: Google Music Beta is miserable.
Though you can’t take my word for it, because I haven’t yet had a chance to use it. I am still waiting for my invitation from Google. However, from what I’ve read it sounds like it’s even more frustrating to use that Amazon’s cloud player. And so we’re back at one of my first point that listening to music should be fun and make you feel good.
Pronounced “ar-dee-oh”, Rdio is a Web-based subscription music service. You pay $5 or $10 per month and get unlimited access to their entire music library. The $5 plan gets you web-only access, and the $10 plan allows you to stream and download music to your iPhone or iPod touch.
The solution that Rdio offers is three-fold:
And I think it’s a pretty good deal. The web app is good, the iPhone app is stellar, and streaming is strong. All in all, Rdio is a top-notch user experience and worth the money.
Rdio also has a desktop app for Mac. It allows you to use the hardware keyboard keys for controlling your music, and it will scan your iTunes music directory and add all your songs to your Rdio collection automatically. However, it requires the Safari flash plugin in order to work.
I used Rdio for a while when it was in beta and enjoyed it, but I jumped ship once they started charging. There are many people I know who use it and rave about it. Since I’m on this kick of fiddling with Cloud Music Players I thought I would re-activate my Rdio subscription and scope the landscape once again.
Here I am listening to Rdio right now, in fact. As I write these words I have Coldplay streaming via the Web app which I have running in Google Chrome. (I’d like to install Rdio’s deskop app for my Mac but am not really wanting to install Flash in Safari again.)
I have nothing but good things to say about the quality of Rdio’s service, its price, or its music collection. However, there is something about Rdio that just doesn’t settle for me. And I think it’s the fact that I’m listening to music I don’t own.
A lot of people have been championing for music the trend which began with movies so many years ago: that access is better than ownership. This is Netflix’s bag: rent all the movies you want, whenever you want, for one low monthly fee.
It’s the same idea with Rdio — you are, in a sense, “renting” an album. Though you never have to return it, so long as you keep paying your monthly dues.
However, I have a different attitude towards movies than I do towards music. I will maybe watch my favorite movies once or twice a year, at the most. A great album that I love I will listen to every day for months and months.
Movies are entertaining. Music is personal.
And so I don’t know if the paradigm that access is better than ownership has the same effect on our music library as it does for our DVD collection. The music we listen to, in many ways, is a definition and extension of who we are.
All this to say, that what excites me right now is the idea of access and ownership. I want to own my music, but I want to have it available anywhere and everywhere and on each of the music-playing devices that I own.
These are all just rumors at this point, but the “iTunes Locker” sounds like it will be Apple’s new service that allows you to store your songs and movies in the cloud. You would then be able to stream them to any computer or device running iTunes or iOS, such as your Mac, Apple TV, iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.
The reason an iTunes locker sounds appealing to me is primarily because my iTunes library is on an external hard drive up in my office and I am currently writing downstairs on my couch. My iTunes library is far too big for my MacBook Pro’s 120 GB Solid State Drive, and so I had to move it to an external drive.
At first I tried storing the music folder onto my Time Capsule so I could access it via the local network here in my house and still listen to music on my laptop no matter what room I was in. But that was a nightmare. So I put it onto an external hard drive and plug that drive in whenever my laptop is at my desk.
In an ideal world I would always have access to my whole iTunes library from my laptop, Apple TV, iPad, and iPhone. Most people solve this by purchasing a Mac Mini and setting it up as the shared media library for the house. This is a pretty good and clever solution for home media library, and would solve most of my problems. The trouble is that: (a) a Mac mini isn’t cheap; (b) if I’m not at home then I don’t get access to those songs; and (c) if I don’t use the mini for syncing my iPhone and iPad then I can’t get all the music and movies I want onto those devices.
If and when Apple opens their iTunes Locker it could potentially solve my dilemma, as well as providing some other great services.
From where I’m standing, I see 4 significant advantages that Apple will have with their music streaming and syncing service that Amazon and Google do not have:
I cannot imagine Apple not saying that “all the music and movies you have bough through iTunes are already waiting for you in the Locker.” The question is will that music bought in iTunes be free to stream or will the be an “upgrade” charge?
This would beat down one of the biggest shortcomings of streaming: the time it take to buffer. Once you “get going” then you usually don’t notice a pause in playback, but jumping from song to song (as opposed to listening to an album straight through) means you have to wait for the next song to buffer.
iTunes is the largest music store in the world and is already a big part of how you listen to music. Which means with iTunes Locker your music could be available on all your Apple devices that have an internet connection. Instead of buying a Mac mini to use as a media center so your iMac, Apple TV, and laptop can all get access to your music and movies, you could just sign up for the locker instead.
There are likely going to be several things that will give the iTunes locker an edge over Amazon and Google, but the premier advantage will be its integration: integration with your current library and integration with your current music-listening lifestyle.
J. Eddie Smith regarding the $20 price tag of OmniOutliner for iPad:
It might sound weird coming from a non-seller of apps, but I like seeing higher prices in the App Store. If the market will support higher prices, that’s a really good sign that the App Store is becoming a quality marketplace, not just a snack machine.
I use both free and paid apps that are probably worth hundreds of dollars to me based on what they do for me. Value is worth paying for, and the more profit potential the App Store offers, the better development we’ll see in it.
The Omni Group is helping to raise the perception of app value, and I applaud them for it. If you want apps that are free or cost less than a pack of Juicy Fruit, then you should probably check out another mobile platform. But then again, you won’t find apps like OmniOutliner there.
I couldn’t agree more. For example, the $40 OmniFocus iPad app is, in my opinion, the best of the three-app suite. The Omni Group is not just using the iPad to make apps which act as windows into your documents, their iPad apps are, in some ways, their best apps.
Compared to six months ago, when doing personal computing people are using their desktops less, their laptops less, and their iPads more. More charts from Business Insider’s survey results here.
Last October I wrote about the potential of MobileMe:
When MobileMe re-branded and re-launched in July 2008 it was somewhat of a disaster. In an internal email to Apple employees, Steve Jobs said that “The vision of MobileMe is both exciting and ambitious.”
In its current state as “exchange for the rest of us” MobileMe seems neither exciting nor ambitious. As a web-app, me.com is beautiful and extremely functional. But I for one never use it. Instead I use the native OS X apps. And iDisk? Well, that is also collecting dust.
What would be exciting is an open service that bridged the gap for all the data which is shared between our Macs, iPhones, and iPads. What could be more ambitious than killing the USB cable?
Software development is no longer a contained relationship between a single piece of hardware and the software installed on it. Just as people who are serious about software should make their own hardware, people who are serious about mobile software should make their own cloud.
We know Apple is serious about mobile software and hardware, and it looks like they are getting ready to prove that they’re also serious about the cloud.
There have been many rumors about an iTunes digital locker, a rebranding of MobileMe, and a major software / hardware announcement in the fall. It is exciting to think that in the next several months we may see some significant new software products from Apple.
And so, as any respectable Apple-centric blogger knows, it’s part of the job description to post wild speculations about what we think will happen and when. Below you will find my iCloud predictions.
Here’s an unordered list of what I think iCloud will look like in 2011:
I see this as being one of two premier features of iCloud touted at WWDC. I also imagine it will be one of the main focal points of the September iPod event.
I see this as being the other premier features of iCloud when announced at WWDC. Because this will allow 3rd-party developers to use iCloud as a server so users can sync an app’s information between multiple iOS and Mac devices.
It will be great for Developers and could replace what Dropbox has become for apps like 1Password and the multitude of note-taking applications that use Dropbox for sharing of text documents.
This feature will also be huge for the average user. All they’ll need is their Apple ID and they can set up their app to sync with their other iOS devices.
Find My iPhone: Will continue to be free for everyone with an Apple ID, just like it already is.
iBooks Syncing: Will continue to be free for everyone with an Apple ID, just like it already is.
Email: The @me.com email addresses will still be available but at a subscription cost like they currently are within MobileMe. However, I suspect the cost of a subscription will be less than the current pricing of MobileMe’s $99/year.
File-storage: 2 GB for free and meant for sharing and accessing your documents on multiple computers and iOS devices. More than 2 GB for a price.
I don’t think iCloud will be a Dropbox killer as nerds and power users like us might think. It may be one day, but Apple is focusing on making mobile apps and data stay in sync more than they are worried about improving how nerds and power users like us move, share, and sync our large working docs.
In short, it’s likely that we will keep on using Dropbox just like we always have been.
My guess is that there will be two pricing plans for iCloud: free and paid.
The free features, available to everyone with an Apple ID, will include the basic syncing services (contacts, calendars, bookmarks, 3rd-party apps) and small amount of file storage for sharing documents between devices.
The paid service will include the above, as well as the iTunes storage and streaming, email addresses, and extra storage. And I bet the price is dropped from $99/year to something closer to $49.
Here are my wild guesses of when I see these features being rolled between now and the end of the year:
At the June 6 keynote of WWDC I suspect we’ll see a preview of iOS 5, an announcement of iCloud, and an explanation of how integral iCloud will be in bringing OS X and iOS together.
It’s also likely that the iOS 5 beta will be made available for devs, and the updated SDK will allow for 3rd-party devs to utilize iCloud in their apps, and allow users to sync their app data between multiple iOS devices using their Apple ID.
Lion is scheduled to ship this summer we may see it in July, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it shipped in early August. Apple has never shipped a version of OS X in June or July — 5 of the 7 major public releases of OS X have shipped in the fall (August, September, or October).
I expect that iCloud will first become available to the public as part of Lion and include the basic OTA Mac to Mac syncing and perhaps OTA Mac to iPhone syncing.
It’s probably that the iTunes locker will ship with iTunes on Lion. While it seems to make more sense that this feature would ship in September along side the music-centric iPod event, I think Apple is chomping at the bit to get iTunes streaming out to the public. Who knows, maybe it’ll come as a major update to iTunes in June.
Since the September iPod event is always focused around iPods and music, in some ways it makes sense that this is when the iTunes Music Locker feature is rolled out. But, as I said above, I think Apple wants iTunes streaming out sooner than the Fall.
I think the September event will focus on iOS 5 and will be the final stage of the iCloud rollout. This is when we’ll see the iTunes streaming come to our iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches, and hopefully our Apple TVs as well.
Developing an app is only half the battle. Once you’ve shipped it you have to sell it. And changing hats from developer to marketer can be hard.
Marketing is a very different skill set than developing. Marketing is much more than buying an ad or a sponsorship. Marketing involves storytelling, connecting with others, getting the word out, building conversation, and more.
Perhaps the biggest difference between developing an app and marketing it is this: control. When trying to market and promote your app you simply do not have the same control as you did when you were developing it.
As the developer you have 100% control of your app. The design, functionality, user experience, feature set — they are all within your control and are simply a matter of building and implementing. Some aspects of development come easier than others, but even if you hit a brick wall you at least have the confidence you can conquer it even if by sheer force and man hours.
Marketing, however, is not fully in your own hands. You don’t have that same control to get what you want or need in terms of exposure, sales, adoption rate, positive feedback, etcetera.
I remember the morning I published “Beginning” — the announcement that I was taking shawnblanc.net full time. I remember sitting there with my mouse cursor hovering over top of the Publish button for about 5 or 10 minutes. I just sat there. Because up until that moment my plans and ideas for taking the site full time had been 100% under my control; they were bulletproof. But, as soon as I made my announcement, then it was no longer under my control. It was in the hands of all the readers and potential members.
Shipping your idea is scary. Marketing can be intimidating, frustrating, and cold hearted. The best way to tackle it is with honesty and gusto. Stop worrying about what you can’t control, and go full-steam with spreading the word about your app in the most personal, thoughtful, and inviting way you can.
There are many possibilities, ideas, and dynamics that go into a successful marketing campaign for apps. So much so that entire books have been written about them.
I want to focus on just one element: emailing online media sites to let them know about your new app.
Once you’ve launched your new app, you should at least start by emailing your friends and family. Ask them to check it out, and let them know that next time they’re in town you’ll buy them lunch in exchange for them buying your app and giving it a good rating in the App Store.
The more downloads and positive ratings that your app receives from users then the better the chances of being automatically promoted from within the iTunes App Store. Also, new and potential new buyers will look at the average ratings and read the reviews before they buy.
Once your friends know about your new app, you’ll want to let blogs and online media know about it. This is perhaps the single best thing you can do in terms of marketing. And in my experience a lot of developers do it wrong.
I regularly get email from people letting me know about their new app or service. These emails can be summed up into three general types:
You can spot these from 30 feet away. The biggest giveaway is how my name (“Dear Shawn,”) will be in one font and then the body of the email is in another. These emails usually are too long, too impersonal, and are wanting me to do a review.
I understand that sending personal and specific emails, one at a time, is time consuming. But sending impersonal emails is flat out a waste of time.
This is from the developer who feels like they are inconveniencing me simply by emailing me. They are shy about their app and a bit embarrassed to promote it.
To them, I simply say that it is okay to be bold and excited about your app.
This one’s just right. The email is personal and thoughtful. They know who I am (or at least have done enough homework to fool me), and they are very excited about their app.
Here are my recommendations for best practices when pitching your new app to someone via email:
Start with your favorite bloggers and podcasters. Write personal, thoughtful, and specific emails to each of them. Give them a promo code (or two — one for themselves and one for them to give to a friend). Tell them why they might like your app and give a few quick points about why. Don’t give an entire feature list, simply mention some previous articles of theirs and touch on why you think your app would be interesting to them in light of what you know they have already written about.
Don’t shy away from pitching it to the seemingly small guys. A lot of the writers and editors who work for the mega-sites (such as Macworld, Ars Technica, Engadget, TUAW, Mashable, et al.) are just regular bloggers who happen to read the smaller guys’s sites.
In The Social Network the way Facebook got adopted by Baylor was by not allowing Baylor students to sign up. Instead they opened up access to the smaller, surrounding schools and once the friends of students at Baylor were getting access to Facebook then the Baylor students wanted in, too.
Once you’ve emailed your favorite sites, find the rest of the larger, influential sites. Write them specific and thoughtful emails as well. As Craig Mod suggests:
Be thoughtful. The goal is to appeal to editors and public voices of communities that may have an interest in your work, not spam every big-name blog. A single post from the right blog is 1000% more useful than ten posts from high-traffic but off-topic blogs. You want engaged users, not just eyeballs
Which is why, at the end of the day, the single best thing you can do is make an app that people will want to use.
Good marketing gets people to show up the first time; a good product will get them to show up the 2nd time and the 3rd time.
I agree with Nick in that many of my most-used and most-beloved iPhone and iPad apps are the ones which look and feel like they were made by Apple. A good rule of thumb is, when in doubt, use the same UI design found in Apple’s native apps. If you are going to do something custom then have a good reason why and do it better than Apple would do it.
See also this article from Marco Arment on optimal iPhone UI.
Nice tip. (Via Ben Brooks.)
When I open up Reeder on my iPad I am always reminded by how many websites do not have a WebClip Bookmark Icon.
Fortunately, setting up a custom WebClip Bookmark Icon is quite easy. Here’s how:
apple-touch-icon.pnghttp://example.com/apple-touch-icon.png
That’s it.
This png file is the image that Reeder will use when listing your site in the feeds folder. And this is the image that iOS will use as the icon when saving your site as a web clip to the Home screen.
So why 129×129? Because that’s the size Apple uses. However, the exact size that the icon should be is debatable. Mine is actually 158×158 pixels (left over from when Nathan Borror suggested that size in 2008). Jeffery Zeldman’s is 120×120 pixels, Marco Arment’s is 128×128 pixels, and 5by5’s is 144×144 pixels, for example.
And, so long as we’re on the subject, here are four of my favorite WebClip Icons. Left to right it’s Zeldman, Blankenship, Kottke, and Van Damme.
Kyle Baxter, talking about Apple’s new iPad advertisement:
[Apple is] trying to build an entirely new type of device where, for the first time in the history of computers, technology is secondary to what it does.
