The Shape of Everything: How to Know When Apple Finally Gets iCloud Right
In about three weeks, Apple is going to talk a lot about how great iCloud is for everyone, and hopefully demonstrate a few ways that it’s gotten even better. Gus Mueller explains a few simple ways to verify.
Free Trials and Tire Kickers – Marco.org
The “App Store needs free trials/paid upgrades/higher prices” discussion is going around again, and I think that’s a good thing. Apple has been pitching third-party apps as a headline feature of the iPhone and iPad practically since the first day of the store’s debut in in June 2008. But in terms of fixing the problems of longterm sustainability for developers and usability for customers, it hasn’t improved a thing in nearly five years.
Marco isn’t sure that adding free trials to the App Store and pushing prices up into desktop ranges like $30 and more is the solution, and I agree. After all, most mobile software is, by definition, a streamlined experience that doesn’t offer as much of the power or flexibility of desktop OSes.
But I wonder if paid upgrades could be the key to balancing the equation. Some regular 99¢ apps could bump their prices up to $2-4, then charge 99¢ later when the major 3.0 update lands. Heck, 99¢ apps could charge 99¢ again months or a year down the road. Customers can continue paying the extremely low prices that fuel the massive App Store economic boom, and developers get a realistic way of creating sustainable apps instead of throwaway, gimmicky, empty App Store calories.
The App Store took about four years to hit 25 billion downloads. It just doubled that in a single year.
Electronic Frontier Foundation – Who Has Your Back? 2013
When you use the Internet, you entrust your conversations, thoughts, experiences, locations, photos, and more to companies like Google, AT&T and Facebook. But what do these companies do when the government demands your private information? Do they stand with you? Do they let you know what’s going on?
In this annual report, the Electronic Frontier Foundation examined the policies of major Internet companies — including ISPs, email providers, cloud storage providers, location-based services, blogging platforms, and social networking sites — to assess whether they publicly commit to standing with users when the government seeks access to user data. The purpose of this report is to incentivize companies to be transparent about how data flows to the government and encourage them to take a stand for user privacy whenever it is possible to do so.
I’m surprised to see Apple and Amazon among the worst ranked (though AT&T and Verizon aren’t surprising). Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, and Dropbox go to bat most often. I’ve never seen this EFF report before, but I’m glad I have now.
I recently reviewed and compared Mophie’s two battery cases for the iPhone 5—the Juice Pack Helium and Air. In it I praised the company for dropping what I thought was a universally reviled snap-in design in favor of a typical … Read more →
Daniel Jalkut with a tough thing to say, but probably the right thing: As the sheer number of Apple developers increases, the capacity of WWDC remains the same. The goals of the conference both for Apple and for developers are increasingly … Read more →
Got an estimated $50,000 laying around? Take a shot and bid to have coffee with Tim Cook for charity. Yes, it’s legit.
Apple hangs onto your Siri activity for quite a while, but creates a random number on its servers with which to associate all your activity. If you disable Siri, Apple deletes all that information immediately. I agree with the ACLU lawyer … Read more →
More and more people have been asking how I make iOS videos and GIFs for Finer Things in Tech and 1Password, so I thought I’d answer with more than a tweet. You’ll need at least two of these things, three … Read more →
iMore: Swinging for the stars: On Apple’s hiring of Kevin Lynch
Rene Ritchie, insightful as always, on Apple’s contentious hire of a former Adobe Flash evangelists:
My guess is that Apple is willing to take risks in people the way they are in product. They often promote from within, but not always. In this case they took a risk, brought in new blood, and it didn’t work out. These recent missteps, in part, inform the reaction to Kevin Lynch. But only in part. Lynch is also undoubtedly more than the sum of a few Flash fiascos.
