Chris Gonzales:
If there’s one takeaway from my experience with Pocket Casts 4, it’s that the developers have put an enormous amount of work into overhauling the experience. What I used to think was a crummy app has made a surprising comeback and overtaken Instacast for the top spot in its field, which is exactly the sort of thing that makes the iOS App Store such an exciting place to watch.
Speaking of Evernote, the company had some big announcements today. While I’m not sure I want green elephant socks, an integrated ScanSnap scanner sounds pretty sweet.
My buddy Brett writes the go-to book on Evernote. If you’ve used the app for years and want to learn more, or are wanting to check out for the first time, this is the place to start.
For the iOS 7 launch, Realmac Software announced Clear for iOS 7, a new, universal, paid app that was to serve as an update to Clear for iPhone, the firm’s highly-praised to-do list app.
As the App Stores don’t have a paid update mechanism, many developers toil away, updating apps for free, forever. Many developers took iOS 7 as an opportunity to drop support for legacy versions of iOS 7, give their app a visual overhaul and charge again for it.
Greg Scown over at Smile:
When you update to iOS 7, you may find that TextExpander doesn’t work in some apps which did work on iOS 6. Due to a change in iOS 7, those apps no longer have access to shared snippets. We have communicated with developers whose apps support TextExpander, and we’ve provided them an updated SDK with a new way to share snippet data. Many developers are working hard to ensure their apps are updated. Bear in mind that review times and other issues are beyond their control.
Today’s a big day.
With iOS 7 rolling out now, most iOS customers are seeing a deluge of app updates on their devices. I’ve seen 17 so far today, and that’s just on my iPhone.
In thumbing through these apps today, it’s amazing how much work and care the developer community has put into these updates.
Last month, I wrote about how I feared many apps would lose their personality thanks to the changes in iOS 7’s UI:
Leading off a week of lots of app news, Perfect Weather has launched. It’s been on my home screen since the first beta, and it’s great. The animations are smooth and the data is accurate. It’s a winner all around.
Crickets.
David Chartier:
Logic Pro X does not have a downloadable demo from the store or Apple’s site. It costs $200. The previous version that was available the day before Logic Pro X also cost $200. Apple balanced its price at a perceived value for both new and existing customers and, to my knowledge, none of its apps have ever gone on sale.
That’s it, there’s your answer. Apple didn’t need a blog post or an interview or a leaked memo, it spoke through action.
My friend Federico Viticci just published his first book:
An extended edition of an article originally published on MacStories.net, “Writing On The iPad: Text Automation with Editorial” contains an in-depth review and detailed guide to Editorial, a revolutionary Markdown text editor for iPad with unique automation features. After reading this book, you’ll have a new perspective on what is possible to accomplish on an iPad with Markdown and text automation.
Michael Tsai:
I’ve re-read the Mac App Store Review Guidelines, particularly rule 2.21 and section 7, and it seems clear that none of the existing rules forbid what The Omni Group was trying to do.
Apple’s rules aren’t the problem. It’s the gray area between them where the company really gets things wrong sometimes.
My apologies: I’m afraid we will not be able to offer upgrade pricing to our Mac App Store customers after all. So long as we continue to sell our apps through the Mac App Store, we are not allowed to distribute updates through other channels to apps which were purchased from the App Store.
The program Case is referring to was called OmniKeyMaster. Here’s what it did:
OmniKeyMaster is a simple app that finds App Store copies of Omni apps installed on your Mac, then generates equivalent licenses from our store - for free. This gives Mac App Store customers access to discounted pricing when upgrading from the Standard edition to Professional, or when upgrading from one major version to the next. Another benefit: since they don’t have to wait in an approval queue, our direct releases sometimes get earlier access to new features and bug fixes. OmniKeyMaster lets App Store customers access those builds, as well.