Notes

  1. Present and future of the App Store and Gatekeeper

    In a recent post, The Mac App Store’s future of irrelevance , Marco Arment make some points on the actual state of App Store, and it’s possible future.

    Marco Arment:

    But now, I’ve lost all confidence that the apps I buy in the App Store today will still be there next month or next year. The advantages of buying from the App Store are mostly gone now. My confidence in the App Store, as a customer, has evaporated.

    The Mac App Store is in significant danger of becoming an irrelevant, low-traffic flea market where buyers rarely venture for serious purchases. And I bet that’s not what Apple had in mind at all.

    I believe Marco is somehow right, and unluckily for some kind of apps the best option is to buy them outside of the app store. As of today the App Store, and the Gatekeeper are far from perfect and the impossibility for a developer properly market, updates and discounts. Combined with the strict sandboxing is a great obstacle for an everlasting and healthy adoption both for users and developers.

    Yet I do think the App Store is still a far superior shopping experience. In fact, it’s so delightful that, many of us bought the same software twice, once the App Store came out, just to have it connected to it, and relieving the pain of dealing with licenses and updates.

    But Apple can easily fix that. For example they could grant certified developers the rights to both, use iClouds APIs and sell, on the App Store, non sandboxed apps. They can achieve this by properly marking the app and, maybe, hiding it beyond an option in the Security and Privacy settings. By doing so the will ensure the security of the App Store, but also allow those of us who are willing, or need to, use non sandboxed apps to leverage it’s power and simplicity.

    Also I do believe that on the long run, as it’s happing on the iOS, the terms and conditions, for an app to be considered sandboxed, will get more flexible. Allowing more of them to jump in.

  2. Meteor Raises $11.2M from Andreessen Horowitz

    Congratulations to the Meteor team for raising such a big sum for an open source project.

    For those new with the matter Meteor is an open-source platform for building web apps in javascript. What is differentiating it from the competitors is the availability of the same APIs for both the front-end and the back-end, allowing super fast development. You should really take a look at the live updating leaderboard example.

  3. Good design is invisible

    The Verge interviewed Oliver Reichenstein on design typography and OS GUI.

    Oliver Reichenstein:

    Good user interface design takes care of irritations before they appear

    This is something that should be true on regular basis.

  4. An analysis of sparrow sales

    David Barnard:

    Sparrow did everything right. They built an incredible email app with broad appeal and released it into the hottest software market the world has ever seen. And yet it was a financial flop.

    After a comparison based on App Store ranking and it’s own experience selling Launch Center Pro, David made the point on why the Sparrow team, who had to repay for investments, had to sell to google to keep the team going.

    One of the main point on the HackerNews discussion is that they should have adopted a recurring revenue model. I do think that what they did tried with the yearly subscription proposal for the push notification was an attempt to steer in that direction. But as it turned out it wasn’t such a popular move.

  5. Acrylic acquired by facebook

    I didn’t notice at first, but also acrylic got acquired yesterday. This time the buyer is Facebook

    Our products and services have not been acquired by Facebook, and while there are no plans for further development on them, Wallet and Pulp will continue to remain available for download and purchase in their current form. We’ll certainly be the first to let you know of any updates or changes here in the future.

    So In one day I'we lost future updates for both a great e-mail client and a good password manager.

  6. Google buy Sparrow

    Dom Leca:

    We will continue to make available our existing products, and we will provide support and critical updates to our users. However, as we’ll be busy with new projects at Google, we do not plan to release new features for the Sparrow apps.

    It’s a good move for the Sparrow team, but it’s also sad that such a well crafted app will not see future improvements.

  7. Digital Literacy

    Alan Kay, “User Interface: A Personal View”:

    The ability to “read” a medium means you can access materials and tools created by others. The ability to “write” in a medium means you can generate materials and tools for others. You must have both to be literate.

  8. HTTPie - cURL for humans

    @jkbrzt:

    HTTPie is a CLI HTTP utility built out of frustration with existing tools. The goal is to make CLI interaction with HTTP-based services as human-friendly as possible.

    HTTPie does so by providing an http command that allows for issuing arbitrary HTTP requests using a simple and natural syntax and displaying colorized responses

    A very nice finding that eased my day.

  9. Raspberry Pi goes bulk

    Great news, I’m looking forward to get one to play with.

    According to a statement published today by the Raspberry Pi foundation, the manufacturers are producing approximately 4,000 units every day.

  10. Google is moving from the web to our life

    Stephen Shankland :

    The more powerful Google’s services become, the more intrusive they become, too. Now is not a time to blithely grant Google whatever it wants. Perhaps one or two people will think about that in the coming years as “googling” means, well, living.

    Interesting thoughts about Google future plan and our lives.