Great mini-series with David Barnard on the Release Notes podcast:
David shares very interesting case for how important search traffic is for building financially successful apps.
Pixelmator comes to the iPhone
The offerings sound impressive. The trouble, of course, is making them useable on the iPhone. Other apps have brought powerful image editing tools to the iPhone before, but they've generally failed at making them easy to work with.
This is the question indeed. Would be great to see new UI ideas for the tasks like advanced photo editing, which traditinally belonged to the realm of "real" computers and now move to mobile.
Dropbox for iOS to get document editing functionality
New Dropbox app for iOS announced on their blog along with highlights for future versions:
In the next few weeks we’ll be adding the ability to create Microsoft Office docs right from the Dropbox iPhone and iPad apps, so you won’t have to wait until you’re at your computer to start a project or write down notes. The Word, Excel, or Powerpoint file you create will be saved into whatever Dropbox folder you were in when you tapped ‘Create document,’ so you can access it on any of your other devices or on the web.
This looks a lot like Google Drive's document creation/editing functionality, but for Dropbox it feels a little bit over the top. For many (myself included) Dropbox is desktop-first mobile-second service. It is nice to be able to access my files from anywhere and document previews come in very handy on mobile, but editing – not so much.
This scenario
The best part, though, is how these features work together. For example, when you’re meeting with a client to brainstorm ideas for an upcoming project, you can use the recents tab on your iPhone or iPad to quickly pull up your last project for reference. Then you can create a Word doc to take notes as you discuss. After the meeting, you can @mention your client in a comment, so they have the notes and can add anything you’ve missed. Then when you get back to your desk, you can turn that Word doc into a full project plan.
sounds compelling, but the difficulty is in making users to remember to go to Dropbox app, when they want to quicky start taking notes. Firing something like Byword or iA Writer, which open with a new document ready to take your input, and saving it to Dropbox after the meeting is a lot more natural.