The Weird Voodoo Necessary To Spawn Great Apps On Your Platform

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“Android users don’t buy apps”, people will tell you. I have no idea whether that’s true, but I do know I switched to The Mac in part due to the presence of great apps, apps not present on Windows. I don’t think it’s a stretch to claim that a platform will gain in popularity by virtue of having great apps. Which makes launching new platforms difficult. Inherently, new platforms won’t have many apps at launch and unless some really good ones are written fast, your platform might never take off.

Let’s define a great app as being an app that’s simple, beautiful, solves a problem for you, and is fast and stable.

I like Windows. I’ve used it for a decade. There are window-management features I still miss, having switched. I hope Windows 8 will do great. But I can’t say Windows ever had great apps; Windows had good apps. I particularly miss Directory Opus, an over-the-top-powerful file management application with integrated FTP, regex file renamer and too many nice features to mention. This was a good app, and I would love a Mac version. But it’s not a beautiful app. It’s got an uninspiring icon, the UI is cluttered by default, the bundled icons don’t look good and the app itself is only as pretty as Windows native UI is. But does it matter that an app isnt’ beautiful?

My noodling on the matter says yes. During the formative months or years of a new operating system — case in point, OSX — the apps that come out will generally dicatate what follows for that platform. If a slew of functional, great-looking apps come out, these apps will define where the bar is set. Once the platform, for a variety of reasons including the presence of aforementioned apps becomes popular enough, it will obviously attract a slew of crappy apps as well, sure. But the higher the bar was set initially, the fewer crap apps will follow. There’s simply no need to look beyond that one app that filled a niche.

Back when I was still powerusing Windows, ALT-tabbing and generally working things to my liking, I was surprised at my Mac friends and their utter determination to make sure all their dock icons were pretty. Sure, I can appreciate a good icon design, but an app can be good without a great icon, can’t it? This mac-using-friend-determination went further and involved criticising the lack of native UI in the Firefox browser, an otherwise tech-hipster darling at the time. I couldn’t care less at the time. As Yogi Berra said: if the app is good the app is good. Right?

Right. And also sometimes wrong. Windows has good apps, but few of them are beautiful. That’s how it’s always been. As the PC has grown from its DOS infancy, apps have improved in both features and looks. But Windows itself, although functional, was never particularly beautiful to look at. Almost reflecting this, neither were Windows apps. Still, it was the platform with the most apps by far, probably still is. The downside is that most of them are crap. Google windows video converter and you’ll more results than is funny. How are you going to find the one good one among them?

The Mac, on the other hand, made a clean break with OSX. Apps had to be rewritten from scratch, and the operating system itself had received a “lickable” design — it was very pretty to look at by yesteryears standards. The Mac was in a bad place at the time, marketshare-wise, so the trickle of new OSX-ready apps wasn’t overwhelming. Still, because of the clean break and the presence of a userbase, apps did appear. For some reason, these apps were simple, beautiful and userfriendly. Like the OS. You could think the Mac developers at the time felt their apps should reflect the sense of taste the OS itself exuded. Whatever happened, a philosophy of building the one app to rule each niche seems to have been born at this time. Microsoft never made this clean break with Windows, so there was never an opportunity for developers to stop and rethink their apps, and the standard for “pretty” was never very high. The result is a billion apps that do the same thing, because no developer filled a niche in any significant fashion.

I sound like a long-time Apple lover, which I’m not. I switched to The Mac because of the UNIX commandline. Make no mistake about it, there are things about The Mac Way that I sincerely loathe. OSX Lion, for example, is the worst $29 I’ve spent in years. I’m also firmly entrenched with The Android, the Gmail app and seamless syncing is enough to ensure that.

But thinking about the weird voodoo necessary for a new platform to take off, it’s really hard to get around both the Mac and the iPhones portfolio of apps and the standard they’ve set. While it’s all a bunch of evening noodling and gut-feelings, this all tells me that if you want great apps on your platform, you need to combine a beautiful UI with a clean break. It appears Microsoft may be taking this route. Android take note.

Countering The App-Based Web

Far too little do I visit websites, these days. I mostly stay within the comfortable uniform walls of Google Reader, clicking j or k to navigate from one item to the next, in a carefully mixed personal newsstream. Which means webdesign is usually lost on me. Not only that, but with very few exceptions, I prefer the clinical design which Google Reader homogenates everything into. I can even favourite, share and otherwise discuss or manipulate individual news items, right then and there. It’s a great way to browse the web.

So what of webdesign in five years? Will it exist as it does today, or will it drown in an app based web which wraps every content item into viewer into viewer, turtles all the way down?

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If more and more websites are read through these web-goggles, here’s a few wild guesses as to what it’ll all mean:

  • Likely, RSS feeds will get its content designed, things such as ads, logos and copyright notices included in each item. Maybe even even colors and font sizes will be tweaked
  • Websites will primarily serve to advertise their RSS feed, and subscribing will be sponsored by Amazon 1-Click
  • Way more RSS feeds will become excerpt-only
  • Blog comments will continue their death spiral and their move towards social media

The focus of this speculation is whether traditional webdesign will have a place in the future, so please omit web-app websites like Gmail or Google Docs from these criteria.

Steve & Rupert, Sitting In A Tree

Apples vision is that of an app-based web. Large media companies that can afford iOS apps, will get their content wrapped in a distributable container. They can put a price tag or even a paywall on these apps and the content is usually presented in a fashion that is more “delicious” than “just a website”. Which when put this way, appeals to control freaks like Rupert Murdoch. The situation is that small individual websites like this one, maybe even yours, may be slowly dying as an editorially tailored, individual news stream. It’s easy to worry that in the future, all a website will be is a content teaser and a large subscribe button. Or a suggestion in an app-based feed-reader, where once subscribed, all visual distinction will be exorcised. Like the web killed newspapers and iTunes killed the album, so Google Reader killed the blog. This house is clear.

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I don’t think the app-based web is the future of the internet. Wrapping your web-accessible content into something that has to pass through the App Store to end users is a fad, inspired by the joy it is to use a well-designed iPhone app. It’s also artificial respiration for Ruperts vision of control. In my mind, it’s only a matter of time before executives and recent iPhone switchers stop yelling “we need an iPhone app” — wait, maybe not — but it is only a matter of time before end users will avoid these non-apps like the plague. What will survive the age of enlightenment, are feed-readers, even ones that take your content and present it in book-like, newspaper-like or even magazine-like fashion. Ultra-personalized, tactile, Minority Report-esque, flying, folding, flipping rotating throbbing super feed readers.

The Consequence For Webdesign

I like a pretty weblog. I spend a profuse amount of time designing my own websites, not to mention client sites. It’s a joy to look at a content-well that’s well-crafted and put-together. My worry is that the designed website is going the way of the dodo, in favor of something that has to be “installed”.

At the same time, I like the idea of the personal news-stream. Using my Google Reader and staying inside it, I’m instrumental in making this change happen. I also don’t bookmark websites anymore, or type in web-addresses. If I visit a website, it’ll be the odd situation when I step out of my reader, or visit a link you sent me. As much as I love it, I smell death on your lovingly crafted blog.

In one future that is forming, we search, and we use web-apps that have prominent app-like bookmarks. We read sock-off-knocking personal news-streams, and in this future, the RSS standard has been elaborated upon in a fashion that allows a modicum of interactivity and customization. It’s a future where a feedreader called “Duper Reader” combines RSS with HTML5, CSS, Javascript and extensions, and some of your design will survive its stripping and aggregation powers.

The Earth-Two Personal Website, Where URLs Survived The Great Purge

In another future, we still do type in web-addresses. In this one, the blog you spent time designing has a shot, and it doesn’t involve you excerpting your feeds. In this future, your well-written blog which features real content and not “song of the day” or “latest lol-cat”, will be visited outside of feed-readers. These websites work as they do today: users might star or favourite an item in your reader and then actually visit the website to discuss it with the author.

Depending on which future you believe in, what you want to do is ask yourself: do I care enough about my webdesign, that I want to give people reason to leave their feedreaders?

If the answer is no, then do the following:

  • Love the reader. Screw your design. Use a service that makes it incredibly fast to post, like Tumbleblog, Posterous or Buzz.
  • Make sure your RSS feed icon is large and super well advertised on your website.
  • You absolutely must provide a full-text feed.
  • If you want to monetize, put … gasp … ads in your RSS feed items.

If you can answer yes, then do the following:

  • Write well.
  • Provide means to share your columns.
  • Put effort in your webdesign and set yourself the goal of out-designing the feed reader: your design has to be at least as easy and preferably more comfortable to read than an RSS item. Trust me that this is no trivial task. It involves font sizes, paragraph styles, column widths, and lack of text shadows.
  • Find an app-based website you like. NY Times or Jamie Olivers iPhone apps, perhaps. Study them. Then grow the skills it requires to translate these reading paradigms to your website. I’ve seen what you can do in HTML5 and JavaScript. Leverage this to make a delicious, quick-loading, tactile reading experience, where the page jogs that are usually associated with loading webpages are minimal.

I sense it in the water; a purge is coming. If you can manage to build a great website before then, your website will survive feed-reader obscurity. If you cannot, embrace the reader.

From iPhone to Android

From iPhone to Android is a very balanced take on the Android experience as seen from a long time iPhone user. One thing this user gets, is the pro (in transferring music) and con (in requireing a PC or Mac) that iTunes represents:

One thing I’ve never understood about the iPhone and iPad is its reliance on a Mac or PC to sync data. With Android, you enter your Google account credentials and it will fetch all of your data. With the iPhone, you can do this with a MobileMe account but that’s another $99 a year. It gets better with Android’s 2.2/Froyo release. Google will not only sync your email, contact and calendar information, but also third-party application data so whenever you switch phones it will automatically pull your data from the cloud.

Very accurate.

How Eric Schmidt Lost His Mistress, His Partner And Steve Jobs

From a piece on Valleywag:

Schmidt’s mobile phone rang on the highway between Reno and Burning Man’s movable city in Black Rock Desert. It was Jobs, angry. The call then dropped; bad signal, middle of nowhere. The disconnect couldn’t be blamed on a flaky iPhone connection: Schmidt had long ago given up on the Apple handset because he couldn’t stand the on-screen keyboard. His wife had tested a prototype, but didn’t care to keep it. Schmidt, we’re told, ended up giving his iPhone to Bohner as a gift.

Schmidt located a convenience store and used a pay phone to call Jobs back. The Apple CEO “shouted” at Schmidt and “railed” at him, furious about his smartphone plans and duplicity, said our source. After all, Schmidt sat on Apple’s board and was supposed to be a partner on the iPhone, providing internet services like maps.

In this increasingly ridiculous feud, I find it important to remember that the Nexus One is simply a phone, one which Google doesn’t even produce but simply deliver software for. How is Google supposed to deliver good mobile software without a platform on which it can install its Voice app? I’m surprised that Jobs is surprised at Google for doing this, and I think his anger betrays his belief that this is a legitimate threat to the dominant iPhone.