iBooks supports loading of books that weren’t bought in the iBooks Store, but the standard way is to connect to iTunes, and drag the book into iBooks using the File Sharing feature. That’s a huge pain, especially if you’re away from the computer you sync with. Luckily, there is a better way.
You’re already using Dropbox, right? Of course you are. The next time you buy a book, download and unzip the files somewhere in your Dropbox account. I keep a folder just for ebooks. Then, open the file in Dropbox on your iPad. It will first have to download the entire file, so may take a few minutes depending on the size.
Once the book has been downloaded, Dropbox will tell you it doesn’t know how to open it, but Dropbox supports opening files with other apps. Tap the icon in the top right corner, and it will give you options to open the file in another app that support the file type.
Choose iBooks, and it will automatically be imported into your library.
The iPad drawing app Paper has gotten a lot of attention in the past week. One of the interesting bits about Paper is that the app is free, and gives you access to one of the 5 available drawing tools. To access the others, you have to buy them for $1.99 each. So to get the full functionality of the app, it costs $8.
This doesn’t bother me, in fact I kind of like this model. You can try out the app for free, which is nice since there are no trials on the app store, and is preferable to me than having Paper Free or Paper Lite. If you don’t use the watercolor brush, you don’t pay for it, so the app is cheaper than it would be otherwise. This all makes sense to me as a user and developer, and seems like a good approach.
But there is a reason we don’t see this model more, and it’s because most users seem to hate this. They feel like they’re being ripped off, nickel and dimed for each piece of functionality.
A post on Macdrifter sums this up nicely:
I would have simply preferred an honest version of the app with all of the tools for a single price. Yes, through IAP, I can get all of the “essential” tools for one price. It feels sneaky to me though…
Here’s the rub with IAP: I’m left wondering if cut-and-paste as well as zoom were omitted only to be added as additional purchases. When an App is dependent on IAP, I’m doubtful that much attention will be given to updating the core functionality.
It’s a valid criticism, and I can see why it would make some users uneasy. Next time they release a new tool, I may have to cough up another $2. This free app might cost $50 after a while. If you look at the app store reviews, you’ll find the majority of the negative reviews of the app are really about the business model, which is a shame.
I’m a bit torn on this, between a better experience for the user and making things sustainable for the developer. Releasing a $0.99 app and supporting it for free forever is not feasible. Maybe the solution is in-app purchases or maybe paid upgrades or maybe built-in support for free trials. Regardless, it’s good to see developers experimenting, and hopefully we’ll find a nice middle ground.
The other day, Austin Kleon tweeted:
This was a promotion for his new book Steal Like An Artist, which is great by the way. So I retweeted, and a few days later I have a personalized1newspaper blackout:
Amazing. It’s pretty incredible to me that I can buy a book, and a few days later get a piece of personalized art from the author. I can’t think of a time it’s been so easy to connect with the people whose work you admire.
I saw a blog post by tap tap tap a while back with a way to create user friendly links for redeeming iOS app promo codes. This is so much easier for the user than sending them a code and giving them precise instructions on the way to redeem it, especially if they’ve never done it before. You can send a link and they can get a free version of your app with one-click.
I hadn’t come across a way to do the same thing for the Mac App Store until yesterday, when I was downloading the Mountain Lion preview and saw how Apple did it. You can use the following format to send out promo code links for your MAS apps:
macappstores://buy.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/redeemLandingPage?code=YOUR_PROMO_CODE
Obviously, replace YOUR_PROMO_CODE with your promo code. If you don’t include the “?code=” portion, it will just open the redeem code landing page, which is pretty handy as well. Digging a little deeper, it seems the Mac App Store has two different URL schemes: “macappstore:” and “macappstores:”. The latter—with a trailing s—is for secure URLs. If you’re trying to direct link to something in the Mac App Store, and you get a “Cannot Connect to the App Store” error, try it with “macappstores:” instead.
Jason Fried, giving a preview of the all-new calendar in Basecamp Next:
There is one thing in particular I love about this calendar. Instead of the standard month-at-a-time view, it shows the next 6 weeks. You can see the current week and 5 weeks into the future. It’s one of those things that is so incredibly obvious once you see it. Why doesn’t every calendar do this?
Calendars are primarily future-oriented. We care about what is scheduled to occur, or what is happening now. You may on occasion need to find the date of something in the past, but that is relatively rare. Yet, at the end of the month, we have to deal with the noise of over three weeks of past events.
Unlike their paper predecessors, computer calendars aren’t static, pre-printed a year at at time. They should take advantage of the fact they can dynamically update the interface based on the current date, and adapt to our needs. There is no reason they need be stuck on rigid day/week/month boundaries.
