My essential iOS apps — Part 1

January 7, 2014
by Riccardo Mori
Software

First things first

This article may disappoint some people. It doesn’t want to be an in-depth guide to “The 30 best iOS apps you must have on your iPhone or iPad”. It’s not going to be another piece along the lines of “The best iOS apps introduced in 2013” or “iOS apps that everybody must have”.

Instead I wanted to focus on a selection of apps that have proven to be indispensable to me over the years, making this article more akin to a retrospective of sorts rather than a review of ‘what’s hot in the App Store now’. Perhaps you’ll find something useful among my ramblings.

Part 1 — On the iPhone

The impact of the iPhone on my digital life has been enormous. It revolutionised my personal computing for the third time, after the Macintosh Duo system and the Newton. When Steve Jobs announced it in January 2007, I knew I wanted one. At that time, although I was generally satisfied with my SonyEricsson K700i (mostly by its long-lasting battery and overall reliability), I also felt that mobile phones could do better than that. At the same time I wasn’t attracted by those high-end smartphones of the pre-iPhone era, because they looked too much ‘feature-stuffed’, so to speak. Their interfaces looked too unnecessarily complicated and cramped. They lacked intuitiveness (when trying a few of them I always had the feeling I would have needed to study the instruction manual to make the most out of them). Some of them had ridiculously small buttons to navigate their interface, or ridiculously small styluses. I was looking at the beauty and simplicity of the Newton’s UI, and wishing that something of that kind could make its way into a smartphone. When Jobs demoed the iPhone at the January Macworld San Francisco 2007 keynote, I immediately felt that all my mobile-phone-related wishes had come true. 

As you may remember, we in Europe had to wait 2008 and the iPhone 3G to have a first-hand experience with an iPhone (unless of course you obtained a first-generation iPhone and jailbroke it). I spent 2007 in excruciating wait to have an iPhone, and I was one of the first adopters when the iPhone 3G was available here in Spain. Given my limited budget, my iPhone 3G lasted as my primary phone from July 2008 to April 2011, when I upgraded to an iPhone 4 — which is still my current iPhone.

My use of the iPhone subtly changed over time. When the iPhone 3G got its final iOS update (4.2.1), I used to have a lot of apps on it, and I was using the iPhone for practically everything when I was on the move. When I upgraded to an iPhone 4, I really started focusing more on iPhone photography, given the abysmal difference between the 2MP camera of the iPhone 3G and the 5MP camera of the iPhone 4. I still had a lot of apps on my iPhone 4, and it still was my computer in a pocket, but I was especially enjoying it as my ‘everywhere camera’. When I purchased an iPad 3 on June 2012, many apps I typically used on the iPhone (news apps, feed readers, photo editors, writing apps, etc.) were definitely more enjoyable and useful on the iPad. So I started using fewer apps on the iPhone, and even the need of upgrading to a better model (such as the 4S before and the 5 later) was somehow attenuated by the iPad. The iPad had become my ‘productivity device’, and the iPhone’s usage became more focused on selected tasks: light browsing, email, photography & video, music/radio, social networks, occasional ebook reader and weather checker, and little else.

This verbose preamble should explain why my selection of essential iOS apps on the iPhone is limited to a few, tried-and-trusted apps. As I said in the excerpt, these are the apps I would pick if I were to set up an iPhone as a new device with a minimal selection of apps.

Dropbox and Simplenote — My basic syncing needs are fulfilled by these two apps. I’m currently looking into more powerful and versatile apps to handle my Dropbox, but for now the official client does a decent-enough job for me. Simplenote got better at every update and I never experienced any data loss when syncing with the Simplenote app for Mac or with Notational Velocity.

Google Maps — Apple’s Maps app is still not accurate or reliable enough where I live. Google Maps is, and it has happily taken a spot on the iPhone’s home screen, while the built-in Maps app lies hidden in a folder far away.

Photo apps — As I said, I’ve used my iPhone a lot as a dependable ‘everywhere camera’, that’s why there are quite a few essentials in this category: 

  1. VSCO Cam is probably the app I would put in my dock if I had one more slot (and it is in the dock of my iPhone 3GS). On my iPhone 4 running iOS 7 it’s the snappiest third-party photo app after the built-in Camera app. I like the clean interface, the filters (which feel like true photographic filters, not just gimmicks to give all iPhone photos a vintage look) and the powerful yet simple-to-use editing tools. And I really love the VSCO Grid, the place where you can show off your best shots taken with the app. My VSCO Grid is here. If you want to read a nice, detailed review of VSCO Cam, I suggest this article by Nick Heer.
  2. KitCam [No longer in the App Store] is probably the most complete photo app I’ve used. For shooting, it follows a Hipstamatic-like paradigm where you use a combination of virtual lenses, films and frames. It has three focus modes (Auto, Spot, Manual); lockable, touch focus & exposure points; video stabilisation; face detection; live exposure histogram; low light boost; four flash modes; an auto white balance toggle, and much more. Then it has a wealth of editing tools (White Balance compensation control, cropping & straightening, Auto adjust & Clarify, Exposure & White Balance, Colour Balance, Levels, etc.). Yes, its interface can become a bit crowded and some of the (many) filters it offers feel a bit unnecessary; it’s also a bit slow to launch on the iPhone 4. Yet to me it’s an essential app because of a few particular features, which I absolutely love: 
    • [a] Its black & white Film Noir pack, with three virtual films that imitate three Ilford black & white films (HP5 plus, Delta and XP2 Super 400 if I’m not mistaken) and do a great job at that, so much that now I use KitCam to shoot black & white photos almost exclusively.
    • [b] It can be configured to upload photos automatically to a FTP server, which is a sharing feature I haven’t seen much in other photo apps. It can be quite handy to have a series of photos automatically backed up on your server.
    • [c] Best of all, the beauty of KitCam is that editing is not destructive. You can take a photo with a 16:9 aspect ratio, a black & white filter and a black frame, but you can change everything later and have it become a square photo with popping colours and a white frame if you like. I still haven’t found another (good) iOS photo app that gives me this level of freedom after taking a photo.

    3.  

  3. Hipstamatic was probably the third-party photo app I used most on my iPhone 3G. When Hipstamatic debuted in late 2009, I thought it was one of those photo apps whose appeal would quickly wane after the initial ‘cool’ moment of discovery. Instead, I kept using it and kept purchasing film/lenses add-ons (‘paks’). I believe Hipstamatic developers have managed to keep things interesting over time, and with all the paks I’ve bought so far I can create a lot of different film/lens combinations which, if chosen carefully, can produce fantastic results.
  4. Hueless is another great photo app. You use it to shoot exclusively in black & white, and the results are really nice. I like “VictorianDavidJ” review on the App Store, which very well sums up what I love about this app: If you want a solid black-and-white photo app that is first-and-foremost a camera, this is the one. I love the colour filters, and the way you can adjust the percent of filter applied. These are proper colour filters in a black-and-white environment, too, affecting tone but not applying tint. Contrast adjustment is slick and easy, and there are preset slots for common shooting modes. Overall a very nice, true camera app.
  5. Mattebox by Ben Syverson has been a great, serendipitous discovery. It’s one of the rare apps I have really found by chance, browsing the App Store aimlessly one day, probably looking for something else. You should really check the Mattebox revamped website to get an idea of the look & feel of this app. When I started using the first version of Mattebox, I immediately loved its clean, intuitive interface and the presence of very few selected filters which, as in VSCO Cam’s case, all gave my photos a very natural, ‘film’ look. After a long wait, now Mattebox 2 is out and it’s even better. I really love what Syverson did with the filters: now they’re live, you can easily create them and share them, and I’m truly amazed by the general quality of the filters offered by the community. Again, take a good tour of the website if you’re not convinced, but if you ask me, Mattebox is really worth the $4.99/€4.49. (Fair warning, the app’s performance on the iPhone 4 is good enough, but not stellar in my experience.)
  6. Snapseed — Although you could use Snapseed as an app to take photos and then edit them, I use it as a separate photo and image editor. Powerful tools (Selective Adjust above all, in my opinion), ease of use, fast performance (even on my humble iPhone 4), and it’s free. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

 

Scotty — This app transfers photos and videos between iOS devices or from an iOS device to a Mac, over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. There are probably a lot of similar apps out there. I find Scotty to be a no-nonsense, fast, reliable app and so I don’t see why I should look for alternatives.

iMDB — The iOS app of the Internet Movie Database is a must-have to check information about movies, TV series, actors. Of course it’s part of my essentials.

Episodes — It’s an app for keeping track of the TV series you’re watching or interested in. I’ve been using it since its early days when it was just a Web app. I like it for its simplicity and clean UI. Those who want a more iOS 7‑looking app may want to check another recent favourite of mine, TeeVee.

Eucalyptus — I remember scoffing at the idea of reading anything longer than a news article or blog post on the screen of my iPhone 3G (when it was my primary phone). Eucalyptus made me change my mind and made me actually read more books. Eucalyptus is not the kind of ebook reader like Stanza or iBooks, you can’t feed ePubs or PDFs to it. Instead, it’s a great tool to read English-language, out of copyright books stored in the huge Project Gutenberg archive. Yes, it’s expensive. No, it hasn’t been updated to sport the look of iOS 7. And yes, it doesn’t matter at all, because you use the app to read books, and when you’re reading you only see the book’s pages, and when you flip the pages, you really feel you’re flipping the pages of a real book.

Wikipanion — My favourite app to read the Wikipedia. Its new iOS 7 UI makes it look like a built-in app. Enough said.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary — Being a translator, I have a few dictionary apps on my iOS devices. Of the monolingual dictionaries, Merriam-Webster is the one I look up more frequently, and that’s why I picked it for my ‘essentials’ collection. I also like the fact that it supports voice search (powered by Dragon): as a non-native English speaker, I often use it to improve my English pronunciation. 

Radium — A recent, very pleasant discovery which has quickly become a must-have for me. Radium is (you guessed it) an Internet radio player. I already was a user of Radium for Mac, but in recent times I basically stopped listening to the radio. Since installing Radium on my iPhone, though, I picked up the habit again and listen to the beloved BBC in the mornings. Its iOS 7‑ready UI is just beautiful. 

Spotify — The only music streaming service I’m subscribed to, so of course its app is part of my iPhone essentials.

Pushpin for Pinboard — As you may have guessed, it’s a Pinboard client. Is it the best? It’s not my place to say. I like it a lot. It’s simple, fast, and easy to use. I’ve been beta testing it for a while since I was asked to provide the Italian localisation for it. The main developer is a great guy and I know he cares about the app. And that’s enough for me.

Vert — I often need a unit converter when translating documents and books containing measurements in imperial units that need to be converted to their metric equivalents. Vert is a very complete app with a great iOS 7 user interface that’s a pleasure to use. (On my iPhone 3G I still use Converter by Architechies, which is another nice unit converter that has been on the App Store since the beginning, and probably one of the first third-party apps I bought for my then-new iPhone.)

[Update, Feb. 5, 2014 — I have to add Unread to my list of essentials. Unread is a great RSS reader for the iPhone. Read my brief review about it.] 

Social apps — I don’t have a Facebook account, and I’ve stopped using Instagram actively since it was acquired by Facebook. Therefore, the only social places you can find me are Twitter and App.net. For Twitter, I’ve been a Twitterrific user since day one. The app has always been perfect for my needs, so I’ve never looked elsewhere. For App.net, things aren’t as clear-cut, and at present I have more than one favourite. I like Netbot and Felix, because they’re both rich in features and they both make crossposting to Twitter very easy. But I’m also enjoying Riposte more and more lately, especially because it has an Interactions section where I can see at a glance if one of my posts has been favourited or reposted, and I also love how thoughtfully gestures are implemented (I don’t like apps whose UI relies on gestures too much because, if not done well, things can get confusing. Riposte has it right, in my opinion. Gestures are simple, easily discoverable, memorable, predictable.) 

Finally, I needed an app to exchange messages with my wife without resorting to SMS texts (expensive). We cannot use iMessages because I’m on an iPhone and she uses an Android phone. And frankly I also wanted to avoid apps like WhatsApp or Line because I don’t like their interfaces much and I’m not sure how secure they are. In the end I (we) chose Telegram Messenger because the developer seems to really care about privacy and security: among the many features of this app, I especially like the ‘secret chat’, which uses end-to-end encryption so that the message I exchange with the other person are really private (at least one hopes so nowadays.) For more information, read the security FAQ on the app’s website.

 

I guess that’s it for Part 1. In Part 2 you’ll find an overview of my essential iOS apps on the iPad. Thanks for reading.

A selection of favourite Mac apps

December 31, 2013
by Riccardo Mori
Software

Looking back at my 2013 with regard to Mac applications, one thing that has struck me is how stagnant it has been. If we put aside the Games category, my purchases have been scarce overall, and there hasn’t been any particular ‘whoa’ moment or remarkable new application to enter my workflow. One possible exception could have been Everpix, but we all know how it ended. (If you don’t know what Everpix was, check this brief review I wrote not long before the company shut down.)

So I thought I’ll take the chance to mention a few essentials I’ve been relying upon for a while, the majority of which are tried-and-trusted applications you’ve certainly heard of, but there are also a couple of little unsung heroes.

I’ve talked about this batch of utilities in detail two years ago in What I use: the essentials. I still use and greatly enjoy these applications and I really couldn’t work without any of them. TextExpander, Dropbox, f.lux and Hazel in particular are what I consider ‘mission critical’ apps.

Other long-time favourites

What would I do without Bare Bones software? I’ve been a happy user of BBEdit since version 3.0 and it has been my text editor of choice ever since. When I go back to my vintage Macs, it’s often to write in BBEdit. On my main machine I find I use TextWrangler more, but I turn to BBEdit for more complex projects and when I need to handle very big text files. When it comes to powerful search & replace tools and multi-file searching, BBEdit’s prowess is unparalleled.

It started as a Bare Bones product, then Rich Siegel gave it a home of its own: Mailsmith is a versatile email client I use on a daily basis together with Mac OS X’s Mail app to handle a bunch of secondary email accounts. I love Mailsmith because it deals with thousands of messages without a problem, and because I can perform very fine-grained searches, a really useful feature when you’re subscribed to a few interesting mailing lists and you need to find a particular email buried in your archives.

My image handling and editing needs are fulfilled by Graphic Converter (€34.95 / $39.95), another essential I’ve been using since version 3.0; and Acorn ($49.99 or $29.99 if you upgrade from a previous version). With these two powerful-enough tools, I really don’t need Photoshop. Recently I even discovered that Graphic Converter can handle vector files (I rarely deal with them, that’s why it took me so long to figure it out). Both these app are worth every penny.

To watch videos I still rely on an old version (0.6.8) of Movist which, despite being more than three years old, still works fine under OS X Mavericks. When Movist fails to handle a certain video file, I turn to VLC, of course. To convert video files, instead, Handbrake is a must-have tool.

The only social networks I’m active in are Twitter and App.net. For Twitter, I was a Tweetie user since the beginning, and used it until it no longer worked. But another long-time favourite client has been Twitterrific, which I use both on my Macs and iOS devices. It serves me quite well — though I think it’s time for an update of the Mac client — and I see no reason to change. (For App.net I happily use Wedge. Others prefer Kiwi, which is more feature-rich and polished, but for my needs Wedge is just fine.)

Another long-time favourite, which I’ve been using since the Mac OS 9 era, is of course Transmit. On Panic’s site you can read: “You need to transfer files. Maybe to an FTP or SFTP server, or the cloud via Amazon S3, or using WebDAV. You maintain a website, do backups, or upload photos. You need Transmit, the #1 Mac OS X FTP client.” It’s all true. Transmit is the most reliable and delightful FTP client I’ve ever used, and another of my ‘mission critical’ apps.

Speaking of mission critical apps, I simply cannot function without MarsEdit. If you write a blog, you need MarsEdit, period. And its developer, Daniel Jalkut, is a gentleman. Friendly, kind and helpful. A pleasant interlocutor. 

To handle PDF documents, I’ve been using Skim for longer than I can remember, and I think it replaced Adobe Reader in my workflow somewhere between version 7 and 8 of Adobe Reader. I also use Mac OS X’s Preview more often since it started to get better (from Mountain Lion onwards). I still rely on an old version of Adobe Acrobat Professional on my Power Mac G4 Cube when dealing with difficult PDFs that give me a hard time with text selection and whatnot.

Another great, dependable little utility I use frequently is Thomas Tempelmann’s Find Any File. As I wrote in this old article, When I need to perform searches that dig deeper into the system, or I need a more readable & customisable search results window, I resort to Find Any File, which I love because its UI is based on the Find File application in the Classic Mac OS, and also because it lets me search for files even inside application packages and in places of the System where Spotlight is not allowed to snoop. I’ve used it since it was in early beta, and has a permanent spot in my Dock.

I can’t emphasise enough how amazing Icon Factory’s Xscope app is. Even though I’m not a Web designer or developer, in so many circumstances Xscope has proven useful to measure on-screen elements to perfect the look of my humble website, or to extract the colour values of an element I needed to replicate elsewhere for consistency.

To remove apps I no longer use, or demo/trial versions of software I download and don’t find useful, I still rely on AppZapper. I also use it as a search tool, especially when I need to know where an application keeps all the usual related luggage that gets disseminated in various folders during installation or after the first launch. (Read this old article for more information.)

Recent entries

As I said, 2013 hasn’t been a year of great Mac software discoveries for me. But a few nifty apps worth mentioning are:

  • Glui — A simple, lightweight, and very useful app to capture and annotate the frequent screenshots I take, whether I need to feature them on my blog or send them to a developer for feedback (and even interface localisations). Before that, I used to rely on LittleSnapper by Realmac Software (now Ember), but Glui is really fast and well-designed, the perfect tool when you quickly need to take a screen capture and add a note on the fly.
  • ReadKit — After Google discontinued Google Reader, I could no longer use my beloved Reeder, so I started looking for alternatives. ReadKit is a capable replacement. If you come from Reeder, ReadKit has a familiar interface, and it connects to a lot of services (Instapaper, Pocket, Readability, Pinboard, Delicious, Feedly, Fever, NewsBlur, Feed Wrangler and Feedbin), so that you can have “everything in one place” as the website says. I particularly love using ReadKit to read and navigate my increasingly huge Pinboard archive.
  • Mou — For a specific project I’m working on (which I hope to announce very soon), I needed to have a text editor with Markdown capabilities — side-by-side preview, most importantly — and I found Mou to fit my needs quite well. I’ve also heard great things about MarkDrop if you’re looking for this kind of software. MarkDrop features, among other things, full Droplr integration.
  • DaisyDisk — An amazing tool to scan and explore my Mac’s internal and connected disks, it has proven to be essential to discover a lot of junk that was taking up precious gigabytes. Thanks to DaisyDisk, I’ve successfully reclaimed more than 35 GB on an external drive in a specific occasion where I had to salvage some files on a failing hard drive and I didn’t know where to copy them. I can’t recommend it enough.

Special mentions

  • Raskin — Raskin is the only application I use to navigate the filesystem on my Mac other than the Finder. Read my brief review for more information.
  • Disco — If you still handle optical discs and need a reliable tool to burn CDs and DVDs, I suggest Disco. Works with both PowerPC and Intel Macs. It’s not developed anymore, but it still works great and I never encountered any problem with it. Read my review for more information.

And that’s it, I think. I may have forgotten something, but these are really the key third-party apps I use, most of them on a daily basis. For questions and/or suggestions, you can reach me on Twitter and App.net (I’m @morrick on both), or send me an email. Happy 2014 to you all, dear readers!

That Writer Pro affair

December 28, 2013
by Riccardo Mori
Software

It’s been a rocky launch for Writer Pro by Information Architects. The application is presented as an austere (I won’t use the term minimalist) writing environment for writers. It has a clean interface, and implements four ‘modes’ that represent a typical writing workflow: 

Writer Pro’s simple workflow is built around how you work: Start with your ideas in Note, flesh them out in Write, progress to Edit for refining, then move to Read when you’re done. Rather than a limiting modal interface, these Workflow states act as environments to focus you on the task at hand. A document’s state syncs via iCloud across connected devices, and each state has a task-specific font and color.

The most notable feature in Writer Pro is Syntax Control: working in a similar way as iA Writer’s Focus Mode, Syntax Control “dims everything but the chosen syntax, helping you to control your writing style.” [I’m quoting again from Writer Pro’s website]. By way of a slider, you can highlight sentences, adjectives, nouns, verbs, prepositions, conjunctions, to check your writing style (if you’re using too many adjectives too often, if you’ve made repetitions, and so on). It’s a neat idea, and when Writer Pro was announced a few days ago, it made a great impression on me.

As you may have read (among other things, I’ve read this article by Jonathan Poritsky, this article at The Verge, and all the links in this post by John Gruber, who links to what’s probably the best summary of the whole situation), iA took a very protective attitude towards Syntax Control, a feature whose implementation the company considered original enough to submit a patent application for it. I don’t know if what prompted this protective attitude has been a suggestion from an overzealous lawyer in iA’s legal department, but what quickly developed over these few days has definitely been a series of public relations’ faux pas, raising criticism among developers and tech bloggers. Finally iA has decided to backtrack, publicly stating that they will drop their patents pending regarding Syntax Control. 

Back to Writer Pro now. Yesterday my friend Donovan Bond asked me over Twitter if I had purchased the app, and my reply was: I was interested, but all the fuss that ensued has left me a bit put off. I mostly use Daedalus and the old iA Writer. I believe that other people in my position — prospective buyers of Writer Pro who followed the recent brouhaha over the ‘Syntax Control situation’ — are probably feeling the same way. I think it’s understandable. 

While I may have lost a bit of enthusiasm towards Writer Pro, at least for now, I still believe it’s a solid app worth considering, that its value may become apparent over time, not after trying it casually for a few days. Instead, I also happened to read some other type of criticism towards Writer Pro from people who, expressing their disagreement about iA’s behaviour, have decided that they won’t buy their products, that they don’t intend to support iA in any way… and that Writer Pro isn’t worth the $20 anyway.

I’ve been wondering whether this attitude is fair or not. I don’t think it is.

Is the app expensive? By iOS App Store’s standards, yes it is. There is also a companion Writer Pro for Mac, which also costs $20. That is not particularly expensive for a Mac software. Of course it makes sense to want to purchase both apps (to take advantage of iCloud syncing, for example), and in that case $40 may feel too much for some. And I’m not arguing that. But what doesn’t feel right to me is dismissing an app, its value and its potential because its developer has acted in ways we don’t like or agree with. 

What does the developer’s attitude have to do with how well an app is designed and built? In a rush to protect its work, iA has undoubtedly made a few mistakes and attracted criticism, and some of that criticism was valid and constructive, there’s no denying that. But how iA acted shouldn’t negatively affect how we consider a piece of software. 

Sure, iOS complicates matters because you can’t try an app before you buy it. And when an app costs $20, you have to rely on how well the developer presents it. You have to take a leap of faith, so the process that leads to a final decision (you purchase the app, or you decide not to) is not entirely a cold, rational one. It’s understandable that some people choose not to purchase an app on principle[1], their message being something along the lines of: I dislike the developer’s attitude, so I won’t support them by giving them my money. In many cases, and speaking in general, I’m all for acting on principle — there are services and social networks I don’t subscribe to exactly because I don’t like certain policies or behaviours of the companies behind them.

But disparaging an app or a product because of something the developer said or did, well, ultimately doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. The whole Writer Pro affair was a bit sad to follow. Again, iA’s attitude deserved criticism, but I also noticed how quickly many have jumped on the iA-bashing bandwagon. I’m glad iA reversed its decision regarding the Syntax Control patent in the end, and that iA did so after considering the most constructive and informed criticism. What iA doesn’t deserve, however, is people trashing Writer Pro in the light of what happened around it. I may be okay with saying I won’t buy Writer Pro because I think iA are a bunch of morons and I don’t like their attitude, but I think it’s unfair to say I won’t buy Writer Pro because I think iA are a bunch of morons, I don’t like their attitude and the app is not worth $20 anyway. In the end, who knows, perhaps Writer Pro is really not worth $20, but I wish people weren’t so always ready to pass judgement. 

 

 

  • 1. Or rage-deleting one, like some did with Camera+ after its developer attacked other developers in the release notes accompanying a recent app update. ↩

 

Frequent crashes

December 15, 2013
by Riccardo Mori
Briefly

In his first-impressions piece about the iPad Air, when listing the negative aspects of his iPad experience, my friend Fabrizio Rinaldi writes:

Crashes. Safari crashes A LOT. The Springboard crashes. And too many times (at least 6 or 7 just today) everything freezes and I have to restart the device. When I’m working, this is no fun at all. Just a few minutes ago the screen turned black and the white Apple logo appeared. Go to hell white Apple logo.

I’ve noticed this issue, frequent crashes, coming up increasingly often on the Web and in the social networks I frequent, and I wanted to compare it briefly with my experience since updating both my iPhone 4 and my iPad 3 to iOS 7.

I updated my iPad 3 to iOS 7 as soon as it was available, and the iPhone 4 a few days later[1]. So, on both devices, I’ve been using iOS 7 for roughly three months now, going through each minor update released in the meantime. On the iPhone, I’ve only seen one crash where the screen would suddenly turn black and the device would self-reboot. It was unexpected and it scared me a little. If I remember correctly, it happened while I was navigating the multitasking interface, trying to switch from the app I was using to another that I’d used a while before but was still appearing in the multitasking interface.

On the iPad, in three months I’ve only seen crashes like those experienced by Fabrizio happen twice. Again, they were quite unexpected, and in each case I was doing something different. Once I was simply swiping across my screens of apps, in another case I was browsing the Web using Coast (by Opera, a cool browser I’ll talk about in another post).

One thing I’ve noticed in all these iOS 7 crashes is that the self-reboot process is really short compared with the cold boot when you take a powered-off iPhone or iPad and you turn it on, or when you force-reboot it by simultaneously pressing the Power and Home buttons. The screen goes black, the white Apple logo appears briefly and then you’re back in the Springboard, with no animations or transitions.

I don’t know for sure why these crashes have happened so rarely on my iPhone 4 and iPad 3 as opposed to the “6 or 7 just today” in Fabrizio’s case (just a few days ago one of my contacts on App.net was complaining that his iPhone 5s crashed at least five times in the same day). I did notice one thing, though: the vast majority of these complaints come from people with the latest iOS devices: iPad Air, iPad mini with Retina display, and iPhone 5s. The common denominator here is the A7 processor and the 64-bit architecture. Maybe these crashes have something to do with the A7 being particularly fussy when running apps still not 64-bit optimised. I definitely do not have the expertise of a technician here, I’m just making an educated guess. It would be interesting to know how iOS 7 has been treating other people with older devices.

 

 

 

My simplified app evaluation system

December 11, 2013
by Riccardo Mori
Briefly

Tristar

In the past few days, there’s been some chatter about (iOS) apps prompting the user to rate them in an insisting, and thus annoying, fashion. I very much agree with John Gruber’s suggestion. It’s something I did in the past in some extremely annoying cases: apps that offer the Leave a Review — Remind Me Later — No Thanks alternative, you choose No Thanks, and a few days later the “Rate this app” prompt appears again.

But I wanted to take the opportunity to share the little simplified system I’ve been using for a while now to evaluate iOS apps in general.

I very rarely take the time to actually write a review. It’s not because I don’t want to, or that I’m lazy. I just don’t have time to do that. But if I like your app, I will certainly mention it on App.net or Twitter (I will let my followers know and I will look for your app or developer App.net/Twitter account to let you know). If I’ve found it particularly useful or ingenious, I will take some time to write a brief review here. 

What I often do, instead, is to leave a star rating on the App Store. But only using three of the five star options:

  • 5 stars: Great app!
  • 3 stars: Average app. Not lousy, but not stellar either.
  • 1 star: Terrible app.

 

If you think that’s unfair or not-nuanced-enough, I’m sorry, but looking back over five years of purchasing apps on the App Store, the sheer majority of apps I’ve encountered have invariably fallen in one of the three evaluation tiers mentioned above.

I think it’s a very honest evaluation system, and every star-rating I do is always pondered and usually happens after having used an app for a while. The only notable exception: if your app bugs me with frequent “Please rate this app” prompts, you’ll get one star no matter how great your app is.