by Christopher Paul on December 6, 2012 Icon Factory released their, much anticipated, update to Twitterific. It’s fifth major release, the whole app was redesigned from the ground up. It’s fast, it’s beautiful and simply powerful.
No notifications (which isn’t a bad thing, really, considering the amount of apps that send me notifications) and no ability to mute hashtags or users (which just means I shouldn’t be following them in the first place). But the Twitterific sets the bar pretty damn high for all apps – not just Twitter apps. And no wonder, Icon Factory set the bar for Twitter clients when it first released Twitterific in 2008 after Apple first created the App Store.
Between Letterpress and Twitterific, I’m excited to see how the iOS ecosystem reacts to catch up.
by Christopher Paul on December 5, 2012 by Christopher Paul on December 5, 2012 Chris Bowler believes the iOS keyboard needs work. Specifically, he wishes it had more features like iA Writer, Byword, and others which have cursor arrows, common punctuation, and quoting buttons. I agree these features are valuable – I use them a lot. But I don’t feel the iOS keyboard needs these improvements; I don’t think it needs improvement at all.
I feel the iOS keyboard is just fine for average typing. If you’re a power iPad user, you’re already using iA Writer and like apps because that’s what power users do – use more powerful tools. Or, like me, you have a Bluetooth keyboard for your iPad. The average user wants simplicity. And the power users will never be happy with any inspiration Apple might get from these virtual keyboards. Fans of Byword won’t be happy, neither will fans of iA Writer. Complicating the iOS design is a no win situation for Apple and the app developers are better off having a distinguished product to separate themselves from.
This business of geeks, developers, or power users – bloggers who have a specialized writing workflow – wishing Apple would make incremental improvements to their products has to stop. If those users got their wishes, Apple’s devices would be a mess. That’s not to say Apple can’t improve things at all. But adding highly specialized rows to the virtual keyboard sounds like it will overly complicate things.
To me, for average tasks, the iOS keyboard is fine.
by Christopher Paul on December 5, 2012 Adding to Kottke’s list of questions on this video:
Question #6: How come so many drivers end up on the wrong side of the road?
by Christopher Paul on December 4, 2012 I received the email from Stamped saying Yahoo had bought them around 1:45 today. I’ll be honest and say it took a while to register what Stamped was; I had forgotten about it until now. But I did enjoy it for a while and stopped because it seemed that only the tech elite used it. It was a simple, beautiful, but usable recommendation tool. Although I had no skin in the game or knew any of the Stamped team, I liked what they made and it’s good to know that Yahoo is picking up this talent. I especially liked this:
The Stamped team will be creating a brand new product and engineering office for Yahoo in NYC’s Bryant Park. After everything we learned from building Stamped, we’re excited to start work again on something big, mobile, and new — but we can’t discuss the details just yet. And we’re really stoked to be able to hire lots of talented engineers and designers for this new project.
Good for Stamped. Good for Yahoo. Good for New York City. I’m excited to see what’s next.