Category: Apps

Several developers have recently shared information about their sales, including the company behind Saved, a budget tracker for the iPhone.

While Saved’s numbers are far smaller than some recently shared figures, Allen Ding’s bit about the first version of app jumped out at me:

Just one problem. We just didn’t make any money. The conversions sucked. The app sucked. The business model sucked. I don’t really know. And I was still answering all these support emails. In multiple languages. I tried everything. Hundreds of emails to friends. Display Ads. More Ads. Sponsorships. But nope. Nada. There just wasn’t any traction.

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Over on The Sweet Setup, Steve Owens picks the best app for sharing tasks with others.

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Sometimes, a tool is announced that seems like magic. Audio Hijack 3 lands squarely in this category.

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I waded through a bunch of weird, not-so-good RSS apps for the Mac to pick the best one. TL;DR: it’s Reeder.

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The hardest part of working on The Sweet Setup is keeping older reviews updated. The vast majority of the apps we look at receive updates on a regular basis, and sometimes, that march of progress means we need to revisit the whole thing.

iOS Pinboard apps have seen an incredible year, and as of today, we’ve chosen a new favorite: Pinner.

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This is follow-up to Friday’s post on ripping audio from YouTube and sending it to Huffduffer with Workflow for iOS.

As I wrote on Friday, Dropbox’s handling of shared links doesn’t play nice with Huffduffer, so I was sending my audio out to a remote server via Transmit for hosting.

Turns out, there is a way to do this with Dropbox and Workflow. It does require Clean Links from the iOS App Store.

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Workflow has already become an incredibly useful iOS tool. It’s letting me do things on my iPhone and iPad that I previously could only do on my Mac.

For years, I’ve stripped the audio from talks uploaded to YouTube and listened to them in my podcast client via Huffduffer.

In the past, seeing a link to something while on the go means having to send the URL to Instapaper and having to remember to rip the audio and upload the file to Dropbox or S3 when I return to my Mac.

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Jason Snell, at The Sweet Setup:

Because Apple makes it, Mail is for everybody. But it’s not for everybody. Apple designed it to serve the masses, and if you want more–or less–from your email client, Apple Mail may not suit you. Maybe its old-school approach to mail, lifted from classic mail clients like Eudora and NeXTMail, just doesn’t fit the modern emailer. Maybe you want deep links to productivity apps on your Mac that Mail just won’t provide. Or maybe you’re just tired of being in a dysfunctional relationship with Mail.

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Back in May of 2013, I took a look at all of Apple’s software in the Mac App Store and walked away with the conclusion that a lot of Apple’s first-party Mac apps were in pretty sorry shape.

Let’s revisit that, and see how things shape up here at the end of 2014.

Please note that all prices listed below don’t take into account that many of these apps are free for with new Macs. Ratings pulled from the Mac App Store on December 14, 2014.

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Federico Viticci:

I started using the official Twitter client as my main Twitter app on my iPhone and iPad.

For the past six months, I’ve been reevaluating my entire Twitter experience based on the apps I use to read tweets and interact with people. The idea made a lot more sense once I stepped out of my preconceptions: I wanted to understand what 2014 Twitter was like and if that meant sacrificing my nerd cred and use a Muggle’s Twitter app, so be it. But at the same time, I’ve gone back and forth between Twitter and third-party clients, primarily out of habit, but also because they still offer powerful features and design details that I appreciate.

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The business model isn’t what I thought it was:

Is this advertising?

No. Evernote does not get paid based on the number of views or clicks. We have no financial incentive to show any articles or other content. We only show things that we think are useful to our users. We don’t share user account information with our partners and we allow users to determine which Context sources they want to see, or to turn the feature off completely.

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Earlier today, Greg Pierce, the developer of Drafts tweeted:

Welp. Enjoy the Drafts Today widget while it lasts. Apple has required me to re-submit w/o the buttons to create drafts or open the app…

— Greg Pierce (@agiletortoise) December 2, 2014

@johnvoorhees No buttons. I was told the Today view is for information presentation only, essentially.

— Greg Pierce (@agiletortoise) December 2, 2014

If this is true, it would mean Today widgets from apps like Evernote and the just-re-blessed PCalc are in trouble.

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