Patrick Rhone:

I believe Apple should set a standard for what specific gestures should do and what results a customer can expect from them. While I don’t think these should be enforced through the approval process, I do think it should provide developers with a baseline as to what users should expect a gesture to do and that not doing so means you will be working against said expectations and intentions.

Two thoughts:

• In a way, Apple already created a baseline for how to implement gestures in 3rd-party apps: iOS 7. In the same way that the stock apps in iOS 7 give a baseline for 3rd-party devs as they design their apps, the stock gestures in iOS 7 give a baseline for how 3rd-party devs should consider adding gesture support to their apps.

Right now the main new system-wide gestures are slide left-to-right to go back and slide up from the bottom to bring up Control Center. Which is just 2 more gestures than there used to be (sliding down for Notification Center). So, in short, gestures are being added sparingly. But I bet we’ll see more gesture support in future iOS versions because…

• As I’ve been using and testing iOS 7 on my iPhone, I find myself wanting to do even more gestures that don’t even exist. Such as a 2-finger pinch to close an app and return to the Home screen.

In short, as you get used to gestures which are implemented right, they feel incredibly natural. Just as swiping a list view gives a quick and jitter-free scroll of that list makes you feel as if you’re actually manipulating the pixels underneath your finger, so too does being able to control the interface with gestures.

A 160GB iPod Classic holds 40,000 songs. If want to know what that would look like if you owned them on vinyl, click the link. Or, call my dad and ask if you can come over to his house. (Via Mr. Apple Spotlight.)

Yay! Though no support for Smart Streams yet.

This is Ben Thompson’s third article in his series on enabling sustainable business in the App Store. (The whole series is quite fantastic, I suggest you start at the beginning: I, II, and IIb.)

In this third piece, Ben talks about the business model and mindset that Apple has towards the iOS App Store, and how it may be the foundation for why it can be difficult to build a sustainable business around productivity apps. In short, he makes the case for why it is that the apps which truly set iOS apart (the killer apps) are not the ones which make money hand over fist. The hand-over-fist money-making apps are casual games. And casual games are not the must-have apps of iOS, nor are they platform differentiators (you can find most popular iOS games on Android as well).

Stephen Hackett, who was a Genius in training, working the sales floor on iPhone launch day:

The demo iPhone I unboxed was the first iPhone I’d ever seen. I just turned it over in my hand, over and over several times before turning it on. When I did, I was blown away.

I remember having that exact same reaction. Everyone did.

When the original iPhone launched, I still had a few months left on my Verizon contract. I wish I had stood in line for an original, but instead I waited until later that fall to avoid paying a $350 cancellation fee.

I did, however, go down to the Plaza Apple Store with a friend later on launch night. The store was open until Midnight, and I think we went down around 11. There were no lines at that point so we had plenty if time to fiddle with the demo units. I still remember just how cool they were. Also: remember those fancy paper bags they came in?

“In the wake of Google Reader’s demise, we now have many feed-sync services with public APIs, all of which are accumulating users and customers, including Feedly, Feedbin, FeedHQ, Feed Wrangler, Fever, NewsBlur, The Old Reader, BazQux, and probably one or two more that launched while I was writing this sentence and somehow already got added to Mr. Reader.”

A big update to the Droplr iOS app shipped yesterday that brings iPad support, a polished UI, and more.

Droplr has been my link-, file-, text-, and screenshot-sharing service of choice ever since its beta days back in 2010. And since I do a fair amount of work from my iPad I’m very glad that I can finally access all my Droplr resources, as well as create new links and upload files to Droplr from my iPad.

Season 2 started a few weeks ago and is already 3 episodes in, but I just noticed yesterday. I’ve only watched the David Letterman episode so far, and man is it hilarious. Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee is probably my favorite thing on the Internet right now. It is so funny and so well done.

Lex Friedman tried out oodles of RSS services and apps so that you wouldn’t have to. He’s using Feedbin as the backend, syncing to Reeder on the iPhone, Mr. Reader on the iPad, and then using the browser on the Mac (this was obviously written before today’s ReadKit update).

Me? I’m using Feed Wrangler as the backend, syncing to Mr. Reader on the iPad and ReadKit on the Mac (while waiting for Reeder’s update that will support Feed Wrangler).

Been holding your breath for a Mac app that supports Feed Wrangler or Feedbin? Me too. Well now you have it thanks to today’s update to ReadKit. ReadKit also supports Fever, Instapaper, Pinboard, Pocket, Feedbin, and more. Hot dang. (Now if only it had some keyboard love.)

Just $5 on the Mac App Store.

Jeremy Olson, while in the midst of an iOS 7-friendly redesign of his app, Hours, has written down some great points about redesigning an app for iOS 7:

Winning apps won’t merely take Apple’s default look and mimic it. Think about how boring it would be if all of our apps looked like iOS 7 Calendar or Settings. It would get old really fast. But that’s nothing new. Think about if all the apps on iOS 6 looked like iOS 6 Calendar and settings… Yep, it would be really boring.

Feed Wrangler is my Google Reader alternative of choice — its Smart Streams, filters, and Instapaper integration are very clever. However, I’m not the biggest fan of the native apps.

Fortunately Reeder has announced its plan to support Feed Wrangler. And today Mr. Reader was updated to support Feed Wrangler, Fever, Feedbin, Feedly, and more.

I downloaded the Mr. Reader update and logged into my Feed Wrangler account without any trouble. It took a few sync attempts before everything downloaded, but then it all worked just fine. After marking an item as read or starred in Mr. Reader, that same item’s state would be synced to the Feed Wrangler iPhone app and on the website. Just as it should be.

Most of all, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Mr. Reader treats Smart Streams and filters like first-class citizens. Tapping and holding on one of them in the side bar brings up the option to edit. From there I can add or remove search terms, and select which feeds I want included in the stream, etc. The only thing missing is the ability to create new streams or filters from within Mr. Reader.

Update: You can add a smart stream or filter: just tap and hold the “plus” icon in the top-left corner. (Thanks for the tip, Ed.)