David Barnard on being successful in apps business
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.
Photoshop Touch out, Photoshop mobile apps in
Adobe has announced that Photoshop Touch (photo retouching app for iPad and Android tablets) will be discontinued on May 28, 2015. Development focus will shift to a family of more specialized mobile apps like Photoshop Mix,Photoshop Sketch, Brush CC, Color CC, and others.
We recognized that bringing core Photoshop technology to mobile would open many creative opportunities for our customers, but it had to be done right, which meant nailing the experience. To do that, we needed to distill very complex desktop workflows and features into a naturally intuitive touch environment. We’ve also sought to provide a solution that helps people achieve great results quickly. So we’ve recently focused on creating individual mobile apps that each perform core tasks, rather than provide all-in-one solutions that mirror the desktop versions of our applications.
This move is interesting in many regards.
First, this is one more proof that super powerful all-in-one applications are not always a good fit for mobile uses and workflows. Mobile needs apps – smaller well-defined utilities, which serve few (ideally only one) purposes. More content creation activities move to mobile and they are fulfilled by sets of highly focused independent apps. This will prompt more sophisticated inter-app communication capabilities in mobile OSes.
Second, pay-for-app is getting way for pay-for-service. Apps like Comp CC, Shape CC, Brush CC, Color CC only make sense if you use Adobe applications on desktop and subscribe to Creative Cloud. In this setting mobile apps serve complimentary role and create value added for the CC service.
Looking forward to see how Adobe's Project Rigel, which promises serious retouching for mobile, will come out in late 2015.
Google, Microsoft, Facebook & Adobe’s iOS Apps
MacStories published an interesting piece with stats on how major non-game app developers maintain their apps in the iOS App Store. The article compares Google, Microsoft, Adobe and Facebook. The choice of companies for research is very interesting because
- Google maintains its own successful mobile platform
- Microsoft also maintains its own (although, not as successful) mobile platform and until recently was very reluctant with bringing their major apps to iOS
- Adobe has always had its traditional market and audience on desktops
- Facebook represents new-age service originated from the Web and cannot move forward without mobile.
Definitely worth checking out.
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.