Posts Tagged "app store"

Content creation apps: Make your users look good

Posted on Apr 7, 2012 in iPad, Opinions

The latest star on the App Store is Paper, a drawing and sketching app that has been getting lots of praise recently.

Apart from the lovely UI and hipsterific moleskine imagery, I was wondering how this particular app had managed to garner so much more attention than other similar apps. Penultimate and others offer similar features (and have done well), but didn’t get the same amount of buzz.

I think the secret is that the default pen that is preselected in Paper makes a typical user’s horrible tablet ‘strokes’ look stylish and slick. Try it! Scribble a note in one of the other drawing apps and then write the same note in Paper: in most apps my notes look like my handwriting – horrible. In Paper my notes actually look fairly decent and even have a vague hint of calligraphy.

Penultimate:

Paper:

Writing in Penultimate is certainly not terrible, and you could even argue it’s slightly more legible, but Paper’s default presentation feels more “artsy” in a good way. Paper also has a few other tricks up its sleeve (free to get started, innovative ‘undo’ gesture and customizable moleskine-esque notebooks) that probably contributed to its success, but the results you can achieve with the free drawing tools are certainly a good way to hook users in.

It’s the same principle you’ll find in Apple’s iLife and iWork apps: there are alternatives out there that give you more freedom to express your own creativity and style, but in the hands of untrained users, the results are disappointing. But it’s easy to create a slick trailer in iMovie or a nice presentation with Keynote, without having to go through a steep learning curve.

So if your app is designed for content creation, it’s probably a good idea to make sure that even untrained users can achieve great looking results on their first go.

Mac App Store thoughts

Posted on Nov 7, 2010 in Mac, Opinions

The long-rumoured Mac App Store has finally been announced and developers have started to post their reactions and opinions. So far, everyone seems cautiously optimistic and despite some concerns and understandable misgivings about handing over 30% of application revenue to Apple, there have only been a few developers who have categorically rejected the Mac App Store.

So how will the Mac App Store really impact developers? The answer depends on what type of developer you’re talking to and what kind of products they sell. These three groups come to mind:

The lone Mac Developer

These guys are going to love the App Store. Until now, they’ve had to take care of their own marketing, sales, licensing, online store, support, etc, all in addition to writing their apps. Being on the App Store won’t magically make these additional jobs go away, but it remove some of pressure to do all of these simultaneously.

App Store approval process = quality?

Posted on Feb 9, 2010 in iPhone, Opinions

Over on the 37signals blog, David makes the argument that the App Store review process doesn’t actually serve to improve the overall quality of the apps posted to the store.

iPhone vs. Mac app quality

If you compare a typical Mac app with a typical iPhone app, you’d probably have to agree with David. I’ve experienced far more issues with some fairly popular iPhone applications than I have with popular and successful Mac applications, despite the lack of any sort of approval process.

David argues:

Only good stuff in the App Store: Ha! The App Store has some 140K+ applications. I can guarantee you that the bulk of that is less than average. There are some 100 fart apps for christ sake!

[...] In fact, lots of software has lower quality because of the App Store process. Developers can’t easily get bug fixes out and they certainly don’t release new versions as often as they otherwise would. This harks back to the era where software was really cumbersome to release on CDs, so you did it much less frequently.

His argument, as I’ve understood it, is basically: there are shitty apps on the App Store because updating an app is so cumbersome and slow, so developers can’t iterate as often.

I think that’s an oversimplification though. A large number of developers on the App Store are probably new to Objective-C programming and its pitfalls. The iPhone’s limitations also mean that apps are more severely affected by problems that wouldn’t affect a desktop app (memory issues for instance) – another reason that iPhone app quality is lower than Mac applications.

There are definitely other reasons as well, but I think those go a large way towards explaining why so many apps on the App Store are pretty mediocre, when compared with desktop Mac apps.

Newbie developer + extremely limited hardware resources = poor software quality.

If the App Store didn’t have the approval process, you’d still have a lot of crappy apps.

But what about “real developers”?

But let’s ignore the shitty apps on the App Store for a second; Does the approval process improve the quality of apps made by respectable, experienced software developers?

In my experience, it does.

On the Mac, built-in update mechanisms (such as the excellent, ubiquitous Sparkle framework), make it easy for a developer to push out a release and fix any issues almost instantly.

An iPhone app doesn’t have that luxury, precisely because of the delay caused by the approval process. Instead you’re stuck with 7-14 days of angry customers and lost sales due to poor reviews.

So “real developers”, with a reputation to protect, are forced to test and review their own apps more extensively before submitting them to Apple for approval.

In that sense the approval process is a blessing and a curse for consumers: it forces developers to test their apps more thoroughly, but it also means that if a bug does slip through the cracks, you’ll be forced to put up with it for quite some time.

So is the approval process a good idea?

Assuming the approval process forces developers to test more and therefore does improve the quality of apps – is it beneficial overall for consumers?

I’d still argue it’s not. Every piece of software has bugs. The approval process means developers spend a large amount of time hunting down the million and one things that could go wrong – time that might be better spent adding new features or polishing another area of the app.

And when an issue inevitably does crop up, the artificial delay means your paying customers will be stuck waiting 7-14 day for a (probably tiny) fix that a Mac developer could have pushed out in an hour or two.

I think one solution would be for Apple to insist on a very thorough review for initial releases, but then only quick reviews for updates and fixes.