The Apps in the Apps Store are a huge success. There has been just the outpouring of creativity and innovation that everyone expected. But the App Store itself is very inadequate.
First of all, try navigating around in it. Slow and sometimes just unresponsive. But that is par for the course when you consider the music store has always been that way. The iTunes store works as an online store, but it could work a lot better, especially considering it is a specialized piece of software communicating with a specialized server.
Second, it clearly does not meet the needs of the developers or the users. Consider how many developers right now are communicating with their audience through updating the description of the app. Notes are sometimes changed daily with little messages about updates and such. Clearly the description area is not where this should be. Perhaps a notes, messages or developer mini-blog are needed. Perhaps the store just needs to make it clearer to users that they should visit the developer’s Web site for information like this.
Two-way communication also seems to be a problem. Users are using reviews as a way to talk to the developer. Maybe this is because developers are being unresponsive? Or maybe it is because there is no clear line of communication between the developer and the users. Or maybe it is because the barrier to entry for a developer is so low that a single person can soon find themselves with tens or hundreds of thousands of paying customers, but no system in place to respond to requests.
What is clear is that reviews should be reviews. That needs to be fixed. Apple already fixed it somewhat by requiring that you purchase the product in order to leave a review.
Perhaps the App store should be taken out of iTunes altogether and put on the Web where it can be faster, presumably. We’ve done it at MacMost, sort of, by creating our own iPhone Apps directory. I enjoy using it myself just because I can quickly and clearly see what apps are new each day.
You can get free iPhone ringtones from MacMost.com. Just subscribe to the free iPhone ringtones podcast. You can then download the 100+ free iPhone ringtones to your iTunes library, and then set up your iPhone to make them all available to be used as ringtones.
Gary Rosenzweig looks at two ways to convert video files to mp3 audio files so you can listen to them on audio-only devices. The first method uses QuickTime Pro and iTunes. The second method uses FFMpegX.
Since the launch of the iTunes App store for iPhone and iPod Touch apps, there has been a ton of attention given to iPhone Apps. Having so many third-party developers pour their creativity into applications that run on the little iPhone is creating a renaissance in the world of software development.
As a user, it is also a great thing. Every day new and interesting apps appear in the iTunes store that could be useful. The iPhone gets more and more powerful with every app release.
But I’ve been disappointed in the experience of finding iPhone apps. The iTunes store is not a great way to find things — whether it is apps or music.
I dreamed of an iPhone app directory that would show me what’s new and allow me to sort and filter.
So I built one. Announcing the MacMost iPhone Apps Directory. I’d consider it to be in beta stage now, but it is still pretty powerful. For once thing, it makes it a lot faster and easier to check to see what’s new, or to just see what apps have just been updated.
Anyway, check it out and send some feedback. I’ll be adding some more features soon.
Go to the iPhone Apps Directory.
When Steve Jobs announced that the big new feature in iTunes 08 was Genius, a music recommendation service, I, and many others, said: “Huh.”
First of all, this sort of technology has been around for a long long time. It was years (6, 8?) ago that I first used Amazon’s feature to find similar artists based on what people bought. I used that to discover new artists, in fact. More recently, Pandora has introduced some very sophisticated music matching techniques that suggest new music based on the music itself. I’ve also used sites like AllMusic.com to find out which artists I may like.
But Genius fails in a way that Apple is usually very good at — it really feels like it is selling you something. I feel that it is pushing me to buy music, not suggesting music I may like.
It reminds me of my high school job, which was working at a record store. Now I worked at a cool record store. We didn’t go out onto the floor and bother people by trying to sell them more records. (By the way, by “records” I do mean vinyl). But at other stores you’d get some kid trying to suggest something: “Have you heard the latest Smithereens album?”
Genius feels like that. I feel like telling it: “Don’t bother me, kid, I know what I want.”
And what is with the name? A “genius” is how you would describe someone who takes one song and then suggests others? That’s not a “genius” — that’s just Jack Black in High Fidelity.
I’d at least expect it to be smarter than Amazon or Pandora, but most of the suggestions I got were just for other songs by the same artist. And it doesn’t even seem to know that Anna Waronker was in That Dog — there are no suggestions between them.
And what happens if I select a Beatles song? I can’t find anything! That’s weird on so many levels.
And it has nothing to do with my Beatles songs coming from CD instead of the iTunes store — most of my music is that way. It may have to do with The Beatles not being sold on iTunes, but as a music lover I don’t really care about Apple’s legal issues.
Anyway, I’m sure that Genius will help Apple sell more music. It can’t hurt, right? I’m sure that was part of their reasoning.
But now that I’m not reviewing it, I’m turning it off.
So two bits of Spore news. The first is that the iPhone version will not be released until later this month. All reports previously had mentioned that it would be out the same day as the full PC/Mac game.
The second is that the game isn’t “Spore” but “Spore Origins.” It appears to be similar to the first part of the full PC/Mac game where you evolve a single organism floating around in a primordial ooze.
We’ve got to point out how we predicted this back in March in the post Why We Won’t Really See Spore on the iPhone. The second bit of news, in the same press release by EA, is that the game will use the iPhone-specific controls: the motion sensor, and pinching and pulling on the multi-touch screen. This should make for a unique experience on the iPhone and iPod Touch. There are supposed to be 2 modes and 35 levels — we’ll see what that means when the game comes out.
Meanwhile, Spore Origins has been released for the iPod Video, Classic and iPod Nano third-generation.
Electronic Arts also announced several other titles for the iPhone in the same press release, but no specific release dates: Yahtzee Adventures, EA Mini Golf, Lemonade Tycoon, Mahjong, Monopoly: Here & Now The World Edition, SimCity, Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 09, Need for Speed Undercover, and The Sims 3. SimCity, in particular could be a powerful game on the iPhone.
Update: Spore Origins is out and costs $9.99 at the iTunes App Store. It is basically just the first part of Spore, where you float around in the primordial ooze.
