This is a video produced by Apple to encourage developers to make apps for iOS.
Here's last year's, if you didn't catch it at the time. It's equally heartfelt.
It’s worth reading this Lifehacker piece just to discover Autograph. PopClip is pretty awesome, too. You can read on for that.
Shawn Blanc writes a fantastic article, which (annoyingly) nails a point I always find difficult to explain when discussing the way I work to others: It’s all about apps. Shawn can get his work done with just an iPad. But it wasn’t always like that:
When the iPad was new, many of us had ambitions of one day leaving our MacBook Pros at home and traveling only with our iPads. But, at least for me, that idea quickly faded away as I ran head-on into the fact that I just couldn’t get a lot of the work done on my iPad that I needed to do. The iPad was by no means useless, it just wasn’t the laptop replacement I wanted it to be.
But that was nearly three years ago. And, like I said, a lot has changed.
The solution? Apps.
I too was an early adopter of the iPad, picking up the first generation device on impulse in June 2010. Whilst I probably could work entirely using nothing else, I would rather use what I feel most appropriate: for me, that’s OS X.
To me, iOS is more fun to use than OS X — although that gap is rapidly shrinking. My iOS devices are my “treats”, once I’ve done some serious work on the Mac.
Yes, that says Billion.
There’s been a total of over 40 Billion iOS apps downloaded in total, with almost half of those coming from 2012. These shockingly huge numbers start to paint a picture of how big iOS really has become — and how huge growth is still happening.
Tom Warren writes a good summary of the recent Microsoft Build event in Seattle. The following sentence, where he compares the improvements of Windows Phone 8 to Windows Phone 7 is worth noting:
Microsoft launched Windows Phone [7] with a marketing effort designed to minimize the importance of apps — with ads about smartphone addicts — but it now finds itself reversing on that message and focusing on apps with Windows Phone 8.
It seems Microsoft originally bet against apps with Windows Phone1. Now they've reversed on their position. Whilst it's good that their position has switched, I can't help but ask why the software giant didn't realise the importance of apps earlier.
1: Either that, or they majorly downplayed the importance of apps due to the lack available for their new platform.