Dark Sky 5

For iPhone 6 users, we are also including the option to turn on automatic pressure sensor reporting. The iPhone 6 comes with a built-in barometer, primarily used for determining altitude. But there also exists the potential to revolutionize weather forecasting. If you opt-in, your phone will periodically submit pressure readings which will provide us with extremely useful meteorological data. We’ll hopefully have lots more to say about this in the coming months.

Chances are regular computing devices can get sensors and other non-computing features faster than regular electronics will get computing capabilties to form Internet of Things.

Future of the Apps

I presented at the ITEM 2015 and shared my view on the evolution of the business of applications and offered some advice to startups looking to build their company around application(s).

Here is the gist of my talk:

• Applications play increasingly important role in our digital lives. On the last WWDC keynote Apple mentioned that the average person has 119 apps (check out other numbers from the keynote).
• The industry is huge. Last year developers received $10bln on iOS App Store alone (cumulative paymnets of $30bln this year against $20bln announced last year).
• Apps have gone a long way from multi-hundren dollars packages full of floppies and manuals to nearly free downloads available instantly. We continue to withness "race to the bottom": $1.26 is not that much for an average price of app.
• With widespread subsidization of mass consumption applications (e-mail, calendars, notes, contacts, etc.) acqui-hiring has become fairly common way to monetize apps in this category. It may be tempting to follow the example of Sparrow, Mailbox, Accompli, Wunderlist and others, but it is difficult and very uncertain.
• Working in a niche on a specilized application gives far greater chance to build a business around app development.
• New niches often form around new devices, which inspire users to find new ways to use technology products.
• What is even better for our multi-device always-connected environment – services.

Take a look at the slides below. I'll the video, when it becomes available.

Future of the Apps: what startups need to know from Dima Malenko

Freemium is hard indeed

In discussion with Shuveb Hussain, who admits that he Killed App Sales By Going Freemium, Marco summarizes it nicely:

Freemium is hard. Its effectiveness depends on where you can put that purchase barrier in your app. Many app types simply don’t have a good place for it.

Pricing is generally hard. Especially, if the magic "free" is involved.

It usually good idea to have free users "pay" for basic service by spreading the word about your application or service (of course, you have to provide them with ability to do so). Once they grow to depend on you and grow the need for advanced features, they would start paying for real. And finding the boundry between basic and advanced determines the success of freemium model for a particular app.

Microsoft acquires Wunderlist. Official

Yesterday's rumors confirmed today: Microsoft acquired Wunderlist.

6Wunderkinder acqui-hired for reportedly $100 million to $200 million.

Pixelmator comes to the iPhone

The offerings sound impressive. The trouble, of course, is making them useable on the iPhone. Other apps have brought powerful image editing tools to the iPhone before, but they've generally failed at making them easy to work with.

This is the question indeed. Would be great to see new UI ideas for the tasks like advanced photo editing, which traditinally belonged to the realm of "real" computers and now move to mobile.

Cross-platform cloud clipboard

The company is now working on a cloud clipboard app called OneClip. The app is designed to let the user copy whatever they want and access it on whatever device they need it on.

We usually think clipboard, when we need to pass data between applications on a single device. When transferring data between devices, we think files.

Will be interesting to see which UX solutions Microsoft would offer to manage the cloud clipboard and how they handle sync, when something is copied to the clipboard on multiple devices.

Photoshop Touch out, Photoshop mobile apps in

Adobe has announced that Photoshop Touch (photo retouching app for iPad and Android tablets) will be discontinued on May 28, 2015. Development focus will shift to a family of more specialized mobile apps like Photoshop Mix,Photoshop Sketch, Brush CC, Color CC, and others.

We recognized that bringing core Photoshop technology to mobile would open many creative opportunities for our customers, but it had to be done right, which meant nailing the experience. To do that, we needed to distill very complex desktop workflows and features into a naturally intuitive touch environment. We’ve also sought to provide a solution that helps people achieve great results quickly. So we’ve recently focused on creating individual mobile apps that each perform core tasks, rather than provide all-in-one solutions that mirror the desktop versions of our applications.

This move is interesting in many regards.

First, this is one more proof that super powerful all-in-one applications are not always a good fit for mobile uses and workflows. Mobile needs apps – smaller well-defined utilities, which serve few (ideally only one) purposes. More content creation activities move to mobile and they are fulfilled by sets of highly focused independent apps. This will prompt more sophisticated inter-app communication capabilities in mobile OSes.

Second, pay-for-app is getting way for pay-for-service. Apps like Comp CC, Shape CC, Brush CC, Color CC only make sense if you use Adobe applications on desktop and subscribe to Creative Cloud. In this setting mobile apps serve complimentary role and create value added for the CC service.

Looking forward to see how Adobe's Project Rigel, which promises serious retouching for mobile, will come out in late 2015.

Automatic Developer Platform

Automatic released a set of APIs to power applications with automobile driving and even real-time events data.

This can be first widely available Internet of Things type of system, where data gathered from thousands of drivers can each of them improve driving experience. Just a few ideas:

• plan routes for drivers in a given area such that they all spend minimal time on the road
• optimize engine parameters for particular driving patterns to maximize MPG

Microsoft celebrates 25 years of Solitaire with a tournament

Solitaire. Tournament.

It almost hurts to think how much time has been wasted on Solitaire around the globe in these 25 years.

Ceasar Salad app

Promoted on the last Talk Show was The Best Ceasar – app all about the ceasar salad. If you recall that, for instance, AutoCAD is also an application, this would be a vivid example of how wide the notion of "application" is nowadays.