Linked List: March 22, 2011

Tuesday, 22 March 2011

Touring the Amazon Appstore 

Justin Williams is on fire lately. Great overview of the Amazon Appstore experience.

Dan Frommer on How Amazon Could Become a Tablet Player 

Dan Frommer makes the case for Amazon as a potential tablet competitor. This tweet by Jeff Kibuule makes the case succinctly:

Amazon is the only other company than Apple with a complete ecosystem of movies, music, apps, and web.

And, of course, user accounts backed by credit cards.

One problem seemingly no one addresses in reviews of Android tablets is how one is supposed to, say, load them up with a movie or two for an airplane trip. Google has no answer for that. Amazon could.

Eight Easy Steps 

Justin Williams on the process of installing the Amazon Appstore on your Android device:

There should never be an eight step installation process in mobile computing. Unless Amazon is able to net a killer, exclusive application that’s unavailable anywhere else, I am hard-pressed to find any logic or reason why this will succeed.

I think this is Amazon’s first step towards launching their own Amazon-branded (or perhaps Kindle-branded) Android devices, where the Amazon Appstore will be preinstalled, and the devices will ship from Amazon with your Amazon credentials already set up on the device (as with the Kindle hardware today). They’re launching now, for existing Android devices, to work out the kinks and build the library of available titles.

Even with the arduous installation process for existing Android devices, I wouldn’t be surprised if Amazon’s store soon surpasses Google’s Android Market. Amazon knows how to sell digital content; Google doesn’t.

Amazon Appstore for Android 

“Appstore”, closed up, looks weird to me, but perhaps it’s a bit of defense against Apple’s trademark lawsuit over “app store”.

Everyday 1.0 

Speaking of cool new apps with Sandwich videos: Everyday, an iPhone app for taking daily pictures of yourself and then, after you’ve accumulated a bunch of them, putting them together into a “looking at me, getting older and getting haircuts and shit” time-lapse video. $1.99 on the App Store.

Flow: Task Management and Online Collaboration for Teams 

Very attractive new web app (with an iPhone companion app) for task management, with team sharing features. This is the closest thing I’ve seen to my ideal task management setup. You owe it to yourself to at least watch their Sandwich video. Update: Expensive, though: $10/month for a single account.

Digital Subscription Prices Visualized 

The NYT is way out of line with what people are accustomed to paying for online services.

Project Chameleon 

Open source framework from Sean Heber and Craig Hockenberry:

Chameleon is a drop in replacement for UIKit that runs on Mac OS X. In many cases, your iOS code doesn’t need to change at all in order to run on a Mac. […]

Our approach with Chameleon was to use native AppKit constructs in the context of UIKit. The glue that holds these two frameworks together is Core Animation.

It ends up the current Mac version of Twitterrific was built using Chameleon. Great stuff, and they’re raising money to fund further development.

The Daily’s Pricing 

Patrick LaForge on Twitter:

One test of the @Gruber “simplicity theorem” will be Murdoch’s The Daily iPad app, built with full Apple support and promotion.

The Daily has Apple’s support and some promotional help, but I certainly wouldn’t call it Apple’s “full” support and promotion. It’s a News Corp. venture, not a joint News Corp./Apple venture.

But the bigger point is that I’m not arguing that simplicity of pricing is the only thing that matters. Everything matters. I’d say The Daily’s success depends on three things: the quality of their software, the quality of their journalism, and their pricing. They’ve got the pricing nailed: $1/week or $40/year. The software stinks, though, and so far, I’m not a fan of their journalism. If The Daily fails, it doesn’t mean they got the pricing wrong.

There’s no doubt in my mind that The New York Times is worth more than The Daily. I’d pay double what The Daily charges for The Times, without batting an eyelash. But The Times is charging at least five times more.

One more thought on The Times’s pricing: What’s the thinking behind charging more to use their iPad app than their smartphone apps? If I’m paying for the content, what difference does it make how big my screen is? To me, the extra $5/month they’re charging for iPad app access indicates that they see iPad users as suckers to be fleeced.

Update: We’ll see how long it lasts, but at this moment, The Daily is at the top of Apple’s top-grossing apps list.