App Store Listings Unethical

Nope, I'm not talking about developers adding special characters or numbers to their app names to get attention, I'm PO'd about Apple engaging in false presentation of apps.

A "Featured" list would be fine to display apps whose developers pay advertising revenue to Apple. I would think the apps in the banners at the top of the AppStore or in that band below "New" listings would fit that bill.

Unfortunately, Apple seems to be deliberately making all their lists on the splash page "featured" lists, making it difficult for consumers to find and choose apps. This is misleading, and unfair.

For example, I browsed the app store on launch day, and want to check to see if any new apps have been released (updates I don't need - get them automatically). You would think that the place to look is at the top of the apps store under the new heading. Unfortunately, if you click to display 'new' you get a very abbreviated list of apps, many of them not new at all. Furthermore that list comes presorted with 'featured'. If you sort by 'release date', you get reverse chronological order, but again it is missing many, many apps. For example, there are no apps listed for 17 July there. See this screen shot:

If you go to the pane on the left of the app store, and select "All iPhone (or iPod Touch) Applications", and then sort by "release date" you get a very different list that isn't included under the "New" heading. Yup, several released on 17 July. Sure, some of these are updates, but not all of them. Apple isn't doing us any favors by misleading us, and is wasting my time in particular.

Another example is from the "Games" listing in the left sidebar. If you click that, you get a page with frames for different categories of games, such as Action/Adventure, Casino/Card, Family/Kids, Racing/Arcade... I was trying to find a Solitaire game that I was playing as a web app - Cookie Bonus Solitaire. I clicked on the "See all" link for Casino/Card Games and I get this very small list of games:

There, that's it. Just eight games! And no Cookie Bonus Solitaire. I could find CBS by searching for its name in the PowerSearch. And if I search for "solitaire" alone, I get TWENTY TWO apps (including a few MahJong type games).

WTF is going on, Apple? Are you deliberately misleading customers to make certain developer's products fail? Or are you truly this selfish that you cannot do what's best for the consumer? Very, very disappointing, unethical, immoral, and plain stupid.

Please fix this yesterday.

Nifty Little Mac Apps

So much for my MBA review... maybe I'll have time on my upcoming break. 

Recently, I'm impressed with the spate of small, useful apps out there for the Mac. I'll share a few of my favorites, and some new ones for you to try.

Twitter is an interesting webapp, which I've begrudgingly started to use. Unfortunately, it's no fun powering up the browser or opening up an new browser window to access your account. If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, you can use the web app Hahlo from Dean J. Robinson.

There are some Mac Twitter clients that have been out there for a while, such as Twitterrific ($15) and TwitterPod (free). I encountered two new clients while browsing new apps at iUseThis that look very promising. The first is twhirl, a small client that uses Adobe Air tech. This app is currently in v. 0.8.1, so it is still being developed. It's free, cross platform, and I really dig the setting to adjust the opacity of the window when the app isn't active. The color of the twhirl window is not so great for some, however.

The other new client is NatsuLion, which means "Summer Lion" and is from "akira" - a Japanese developer. NatsuLion windows look more like an OSX app, and you can change the color of the text/background. I didn't install NatsuLion, but apparently some people think it's quite good.

Screen capturing seems to be the rage, and even TUAW bothered to review several screen capture apps recently. When reading that review, I was bothered that they didn't include ScreenSteps, which uses screenshots to help you build step by step instructions. But one surprise I saw was the app Skitch, which previously looked like eye candy nonsense when I first encountered it. Skitch allows users to take screenshots or webcam shots, and immediately upload them to an online storage site. From there you can share these via easy to copy urls, so you can upload them into blogs, flicker, etc. You can even determine the level of sharing for each image (private, secret, public). You can take timed shots, and the crosshairs that Skitch uses to select what you want to shoot are balls. Skitch has some very catchy annotation tools (text, arrow, shapes), and is fairly simple to use. I like the convenient menu bar access to pop up the Skitch window. Image resizing isn't clear to me, nor how to dump the current contents without losing them. My original dislike for this app is the color scheme of the logo - too pink, and too gay. However, with this functionality, I can over look it. Skitch is free for now (in beta stage) and you need to sign up an account with them.

A similar app to Skitch that wasn't in the TUAW review is GrabUp. GrabUp installs as a pref panel and remains active in your menubar. GrabUp intercepts the usual OSX screen grab command (shift+apple+4) and sends the output to an online database. You can access the location of your image via the GrabUp menubar icon, or you can just do a paste command (GrabUp automatically puts the image url into your clipboard). This is very handy for quick and dirty screen caps when writing blogs or uploading images on screen to some photo site. Interestingly, you don't sign up with any particular account to use GrabUp, so I'm guessing that there is a common online database that stores these images. So, it seems you won't be able to access your GrabUp images from another computer via the app, and I have to wonder how long they will store your images on line. GrabUp is a compromise compared to Skitch, because it allows very, very quick screen grabs, but you sacrifice global access to your images. Grab up is FREE, though, and Skitch will move to paid status eventually. Hmm...

The third app I want to talk about is another one in beta, Evernote. Evernote is a 'by invitation only' beta (I have 20 invitations left if anyone wants them). Actually, you can download the app for free, but the internet account requires an invitation. Evernote is crossplatform (Win/Mac) and I would describe Evernote as a hybrid notebook and image collector. You can use iSight to photograph something, or just drag and drop images, clip a screenshot, clip a screenshot of a webpage. Evernote will upload those with any text you add to the image to your online Evernote account. It keeps each entry you upload, and allows easy syncing between multiple machines. Apparently, any uploaded image will be scanned for text and the OCR will make those terms searchable in your entry. I tried it with the TUAW article mentioned above, and it worked great. I could search for any word and it would be highlighted. You can also tag each entry, and use several notebooks. I was a bit bothered I could not shrink the size of images in the Evernote notebook window. This seems to limit its use for note taking if the captured images overwhelm the text. Syncing between two different machines seems to work perfectly, and I have to say that this app has a lot of possibilities. You can also upload (and view) content from your mobile phone - making this a very useful service, even when you aren't at your computer.

Well, give these apps a try, and see what you think. Each of them is very nice, and will undoubtedly be improved in the near future.

Conjure - Check it out!

Conjure is a very interesting app. Here you have a virtual pasteboard on your desktop that you can add text or links to any app or folder, graphics or even movies (or screen shots from your iSight).

It's kind of like a 'roll your own' desktop and launcher.

Neat! Maybe a good app for kids learning a computer or even just a way to keep track of various things during your time on the computer.

The app is still a bit rough around the edges, and people trying this out should keep this in mind. I would also think that the price ($35.00) might be a bit steep for now.

If Conjure could be set to your desktop background - or even pop up as a screen saver - that would add some functionality.

I also wondered whether this interface would be great on a mobile phone or even a PDA (or the new OSX iPods?).

I would encourage anyone interested to give this app a try and email the developer with your feedback. He is very responsive to questions and suggestions.