October 25, 2015
Desk: The publishing app
(Originally posted on 2014-12-01)
Desk is a new publishing app on the Mac OS. It is available in the app store and costs $29.99. It lets you write a mix of markdown and WYSIWYG and post to several of the more popular blogging engines.
It is at version 1.0, so we are at the start of the journey of this product.
The stated features/goals of Desk are the following:
- The Experience: “True distraction-free interface,” both “Markdown and WYSIWYG,” “speed and efficiency,” and media integration.
- Technology: “Your platform” (WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, Facebook, Typepad, Movable Type, Squarespace, and more to come soon), “everywhere you are,” “post management,” and “community powered.”
- Philosophy: “Never changing,” “a storytellers app,” “decisions not options.”
I am going to write this review keeping in mind the goal of the app and the stated motivations of the developer. And I am going to start at the bottom of the above list of goals.
Storytelling
I agree completely with the developers fascination with stories and the need to tell them. It was interesting for me to read someone else’s take on what I believe. We are the sum total of our stories and we should share, because out of this sharing comes understanding, wisdom and love. I read the developers blog on Storytelling, and found a shared value system. That was the reason behind me buying the program.
Decisions not options
A lot of these minimalistic text editors seem to share the developers take on feature bloat. He states “Every time you give a user an option, you are asking them to make a decision. When a user doesn’t care or understand the option this ultimately leads to frustration.” Makes absolute sense. Only the developers of Microsoft Word would disagree with this notion. Unfortunately, it can be carried a little too far. I like writing with Nitti as my font of choice. The developer doesn’t give you the ability to change the font. It is not a bad font that the program uses. It is actually quite usable, but the choice of a font is not a technically complicated decision. We have been all using computers for a while and we get the mechanics of changing fonts. You want me to live in this program, give me the ability to choose the font I want. This gimmick made sense when iA Writer used it first, that was what? Seven years ago? We are over it. Now can I please use the font I want in my documents?
I understand the need to reduce complexities. I understand that when you take away the preferences, the resultant benefit is the reduction of distractions, but I really like my font, and it’s absence is distracting.
Never changing
The developer addresses the issue of consistency with the following statement, “Just as we have our favorite notebook and our favorite pencil and/or pen, I hope that Desk becomes that emotionally involved in the user’s writing experience – that they can wake up knowing that the app hasn’t changed and so they can do what they need to do: Just simply write.” I find myself agreeing with the sentiment. We are creatures of habit and it feels good to know that my writing environment is going to stay the way it is. There is a comfort to that. It is a little strange talking about emotional attachment to software, but I understand the sentiment. I am emotionally attached to Ulysses III, I live in it. It is always open on my computer, I am always writing in it. I am getting to know the ins and outs of the program and it is my tool of choice. I remember when the first version of Ulysses III was released, I was absolutely distraught, I ranted up a storm. It didn’t have the features I really wanted, it did things I didn’t want it to do, and it did some things badly. I was equally agitated with the first update, but over time, it got better. The developers iterated, the product improved, bugs got fixed, and now I live in the program. Can Desk achieve that kind of an emotional connection with its users? Only time will tell. But consistency is one factor in the road to that kind of emotional connection and the developer of Desk has the right idea.
Desk does a great job of supporting most of the common blogging platforms, and there are more to come. I would like it to support ghost.org and squarespace more comprehensively but that maybe a problem with the blogging platforms not having a public API available for the developers.
Everywhere you are
Desk supports iCloud and local storage. So, you can access your work from multiple computers. I find iCloud very temperamental, I avoid using it. The local storage in Desk for me, is a Dropbox folder. That gives me the benefit of working on my Desk documents wherever I want to, with whichever Mac OS machine is handy.
Post management
Desk lets you manage and edit all your existing posts in the blogging platforms it supports. That makes it easy to revise and update posts from the past. Very useful feature.
Desk runs a forum for its customers. The interaction between the users and the developer is going to address the areas of further development of the product. It is seemingly the preferred way of the developer engaging with the users. Small indie developers who are in the App Store have a problem in that they don’t really know who their users are and this is a great solution to the problem of disconnect between the developer and the product. Ulysses developer, The Soulmen, solve this problem by being hyperactive on Twitter. Long time BBEdit developer Bare Bones Software, solves this identical problem by being very active on Twitter and also by running a Google group.
It is not enough to be engaged with users. You have to listen to their suggestions, be responsive to their feedback and add value to the interaction. Community building is a worthy goal but it takes at the minimal, time, involvement and a worthy product. Good examples to emulate would be the Sublime Text community, the BBEdit community, and the Scrivener community. I like the goal, this is what will give the product stickiness in the long run. We shall see how this works out.
I am a little hesitant about the prospects of building a community around Desk. It is a publishing app. There are a lot of writing apps around. Desk is distinguished in that space by its publishing feature. In that space, the competition is a little narrower: MarsEdit, Blogo, and Byword are the ones which come readily to mind. Is it possible to build a community around a blogging app? That is the question. I don’t have the answer, but I have some observations. Communities build around products which are:
- Customizable or extendable. SublimeText, TextMate, and Ulysses are good examples of this category. Desk by its design is not customizable or extendable.
- Complicated and deep. BBEdit, Adobe Photoshop, Alfred, are good examples of this category. Desk by its design is neither complicated nor deep.
- New to the world. In the sense that the products challenge the prevalent way of doing things. They cause, in equal measure, discomfort and ecstasy on the part of the consumer. Scrivener and Ulysses are good examples of this category. Desk by its unique design shows some traction in this space.
- Designed to let the user express their individual preferences and choices. Almost all the products I have been talking about exhibit some tendencies towards this customization. Desk by its very nature is anathema to this ability to customize and extend.
Thus my hesitancy in predicting the growth of a community around Desk. However, I am willing to be proved wrong. So we shall see.
Now the juicier parts, the experience of using Desk. Remember, this is version 1.0. There is a lot of room for growth and change. This is a take on the product as it stands today.
A true distraction-free interface
The product is very well designed. Like iA Writer, before it, all the chrome disappears when you start typing in the program. It is an interesting effect, and it helps you to concentrate on your words. It is obviously designed with care and love and it shows all throughout the product.
However, the full-screen implementation is all but broken. It might be usable on a portable Mac, but on a 27inch iMac, I don’t want to have the line I am working on spread across the whole screen. That is impossible to write in. A smaller window with line breaks at 60, 80, or 120 characters, would make it usable. Byword, iA Writer, and a host of others do a much better job of this.
If you are going to introduce a writing application, you have to enable typewriter scrolling. I don’t want to be staring at the bottom of the screen all the time while writing. All of the competition in the writing space implement this feature. Ulysses does it best by being flexible and giving the author the ability to choose any spot on the screen for the feature.
I have noted earlier that the absence of font choices doesn’t curb but cause distractions for me.
Markdown and WYSIWYG
I understand the need for implementing WYSIWYG. There are a lot of people who are not conversant with markdown and they are comfortable with the WYSIWYG method of styling content. It makes sense to cater to them. But if you are going to cater to markdown users you have to implement all of markdown, and do it well. Users can have a choice of mixing and matching if they want, but if they want to just write markdown, they should be able to do that too. In that case, your syntax highlight should work. At this point it works sporadically, as evidenced by the figure below:
This leads me to another issue. Desk saves its files as .dpm files. This is a proprietary format which is understood only by Desk. In reality it is a bundle much like a folder and in the package is a text file and a settings file. The presence of the text file, which contains all the text content of the post, provides me with some hope that if the program goes away or if I want to cease using it, my data will still be available to me. I would prefer it if the program would let me export a markdown file. At this point, it exports to Docx, PDF, HTML, and RTF. I write in markdown. I would like to keep a markdown file for my backup. I know I can always copy and paste to a text editor and get across this problem, but it would be nice to have the function built in.
Shortcuts
I like the plethora of shortcut commands that Desk provides the user. They are much appreciated. Being the “avoid trackpad at all costs” kind of guy, it is a great environment to work in. I like the “quick publish” feature too. Makes the transition from Desk document to published post really simple.
However the shortcut to full screen mode is ⌃ + ⌘ + F (Look at the iWorks apps). That is the system wide shortcut. Why are you making me learn another one? ⌘ + enter is not standard for full screen mode.
Another very nice feature of the program. It is going to be appreciated by the poster who uses a lot of images. Makes the writing and publishing of blog posts completely frictionless and that can only be a good thing.
Conclusions
I like the application. It is very well-designed. It provides a well-designed home for your blogging.
I am looking for the following improvements from the product:
- Font choices
- Full-screen mode needs work
- Typewriter scrolling
- Full support for Markdown
- The ability to export as Markdown
As a publishing solution, this is a great new product in the marketplace. Has the ability to reduce the friction involved with blogging, and that is a very important feature to have.
Recommended.
macosxguru at the gmail thingie
Some other takes on Desk
Desk: A painless writing and blogging tool for Mac | TUAW: Apple news, reviews and how-tos since 2004
Desk
Mac OS
October 25, 2015
Record Smooth HD video using iMovie
(Originally posted on 2014-06-22)
Use iMovie to record smooth HD video.
In iMovie you can record video clips directly within the application. Launch iMovie. Tap on Projects.
Tap on the + Sign at the bottom right corner.
Tap on Movie.
Tap on Create Movie.
Tap on the Camera icon at the bottom of the screen.
See the 1080p/30fps notification at the bottom right corner? Tap on it.
The 1080p/30fps notification changed to 720p/120fps on the iPhone 5s. On the iPhone 5 it might just be 720p/60fps.
Higher frame rate recordings are smoother and more lifelike, capturing more of the motion than lower frame rates. One added benefit of higher frame rate recordings is that it is possible to convert them to slow motion footage without any significant blurring.
You can achieve the same effect through Filmic Pro.
macosxguru at the gmail thingie.
iMovie
HD
iOS
October 25, 2015
Predatory pricing and a humbler Marco
(Originally posted on 2015-10-14)
This is the first attack on the Overcast: Podcast Player pricing model Building Twenty — Overcast’s not-quite-predatory pricing by Michael Anderson.
This is Marco Arment’s defense of his pricing model Pragmatic App Pricing — Medium.
This is the second attack on Marco, Overcast, and his pricing model The Elephant in the Room — Samantha Bielefeld by Samantha Bielefeld.
I must admit that I am not interested in the podcast player category. Podcasts just doesn’t interest me. But it is still software and a competitive space, so I am intrigued. I don’t know any of these people. I have followed Marco’s blog for a while, but these two other folks are new to me.
Does Michael Anderson expect any of his competitors to care for the following?
Where, now, is the market for those apps? How can you possibly expect to gain any traction against high-quality, entirely free alternatives?
So a competitor in a space is expected to make the environment lucrative for other competitors? His pricing strategy has to leave a window for his other competitors to make money in the market he is in? Why? There is an independent developer rules of conduct at work here? Really? What is this? We are all going to agree on a price and then the best icon will win?
Frankly, whether Marco is a millionaire or a pauper is irrelevant to the argument. He is playing in the podcast player field, he has the right to try to restrict competition. He has the right to try to dominate that market. If he is afraid that there are going to be bigger competitors coming into the market with free offerings, he has the right to get there first. Build a customer base and a revenue stream any way he can. What is the problem? Oh, I forgot. The independent developers rules of conduct. What are those exactly? Where are they available? Because it smells to me like price-fixing and I want to see it.
When Marco first unveiled Overcast, he made clear that one of his prime objectives was to safeguard the third-party podcast app market from proprietary takeover by the likes of Stitcher.
If the marketplace is going to rush to free, and Marco gets there first with his loyal users, his podcast user base and his blog readers along with him, that will effect both the big players and the small ones. He is allowed to do that. In fact, every one of his competitors would do the same thing if they could.
Samantha Bielefeld states:
What he is most certainly doing is increasing the odds that no other third party podcast app will feel viable in the market by charging up front for their offering.
Really? Twitter is a free app. Tweetbot is still making money. There are a lot of examples of categories where there is competition from free products and there is a market for paid products too. Isn’t Podcasts from Apple a free product in the podcast category?
If you look at the marketplace of apps, there seems to be a mix of free and paid apps in almost every category. The paid apps are surely facing problems with adoption if there is a free product in that category, but they can still thrive. If you do it right, if you provide value, if you can get the word out, you are going to be able to find your niche. And if you are lucky, it is going to be a profitable niche.
Samantha Bielefeld goes on to state:
In an attempt at increasing market share for his app, he is helping to reaffirm the incorrect thinking that software should be free to the end user.
Really? A niche product in a tiny product category is going to achieve that? I keep a close watch on the topic #nvALT on Twitter. It is free software. It has always been free software, it’s antecedent, Notational Velocity, was free software. Every few days, I see a host of people begging Brett Terpstra for a paid version of nvALT, they can support. I think the causation that free software makes people expect all software to be free is hogwash. There are people who given a choice between free and any sum of money will always choose free. There are also people who are grateful for free but if you provide them a compelling reason to switch to a paid alternative, they will do that with aplomb.
Samantha Bielefeld goes on to say:
The argument that paying for Tweetbot provides for a much more enjoyable Twitter experience over the free alternative holds a lot of ground for many people. There isn’t much of a case to be made when comparing the completely free Overcast to paid apps in the same category.
And that is Overcast’s fault? If you cannot differentiate your product offering from the free ones in the marketplace, it is the fault of the free offering? I don’t have any nice way of saying this, “Stop whingeing, and get to work. Make your product better than Overcast. Add features that it doesn’t have. And get the word out.” If you can’t do that, you are going to be toast in the marketplace, and it is not Overcast’s fault. If you can’t beat Overcast on features and functions, then, Overcast is the category leading product in both price and features. You just have to accept that and move on to a different category.
Overcast is doing what it can to survive. Marco is entitled to do that.
Samantha Bielefeld adds:
Few app developers are able to enjoy the launch day success that comes from having major sites like iMore, Macworld, MacStories, and 9to5Mac all launch reviews of their app in unison on the day of release. The result is a chart topping, traffic driving experience that results in even more downloads than the people who follow his work would provide.
This is just marketing. This has nothing to do with feature sets, with Marco’s popularity, software design, coolness of the icon. This is just marketing. The problem is that some independent software folks don’t seem to understand the process, or the utility of marketing. You are in the business of doing business and if you don’t know how to do that get someone who does. You do the coding, they do the marketing. If you cannot get the top outlets to cover your product make sure you get the next level of outlets to cover you. There is always the blogger looking to write a review of a product.
I have been following this debate over pricing of software for a while and it makes my blood boil. There will always be the asshole customer who will complain every opportunity they get irrespective of what you charge for your product. Ignore them. Decide on your price and go to market. Make sure that your product has managed to differentiate itself from the competition and don’t worry about the free products in the marketplace. If you manage differentiation and can convey that to the customer, you will have provided enough reason for the initial group of customers to adopt your product. Look after these people. Be on twitter, correspond through email, give the customers an opportunity to enhance your product either through feedback or through enhancements (themes in SublimeText, workflows in Alfred, Scripts in BBEdit, you get the idea). Churn. Fix bugs. Get to version 2.0. Look at the landscape and improve the product with every iteration. Market the hell out of it. Do that. You might find that you will not need to whinge at what your competitors pricing strategy is.
Update: I am obviously out of the loop. I read this article by John Welch after publishing my piece. I am disgusted by the response of the cool kids to the Samantha Bielefeld article. I think my criticisms are valid, so, I will keep it posted.
macosxguru at the gmail thingie
Pricing
Strategy
October 25, 2015
My SublimeText 3 Preferences
(Originally posted on 2015-09-29)
I have been threatening to post my preference files from ST3 for a while. Here they are:
User Preferences for SublimeText
Markdown Preferences for SublimeText
Distraction Free Markdown Preferences for SublimeText
macosxguru at the gmail thingie
SublimeText3
Preferences
October 25, 2015
Leafnote - One to Avoid
(Originally posted on 2014-12-07)
One thing it does well
Leafnote does one thing well. If you have a project (a collection of documents) and its contents are broken up into different sections (each individual document), you have the ability to move the sections around in your document. Conceptually, every section, is its own document and you can determine the order of the project as a sequence of different sections. So, effectively, you write the sections, then you order the sections into the best order that you can conceive. Then you export. This is a feature shared with Scrivener, Ulysses, and every other outlining program in the marketplace. Other writing programs let you achieve the same effect, but it is not as smooth and easy as in Leafnote.
All the other things
Nevercenter, the developer describes the product as "super-minimal." They are not kidding.
There is no preference panel. None. You don't get to choose the font you write in. You don't get to tweak the look of anything. You don't get to do anything to customize the appearance. You have to work, as is.
That has some benefits. Like I said before in the review of Desk, the developers who design these minimal apps believe that preferences are distracting and they are interested in reducing all distractions. A commendable goal, however, I like writing in Nitti, and if I am going to be staring at the screen for hours on end, I want to see the font I want, and not some arbitrary font chosen by the developer.
There is no typewriter scrolling. No dark mode. No ability to change the font size. No ability to change the leading, the amount of vertical space between lines of text. Nothing. The developer makes no effort to provide an environment conducive to writing. I am writing this review in Leafnote and I already have the start of a headache. The font is too small, the space between lines is too scrunched and it is uncomfortable to be here.
What is even more disturbing is that there is no find function. If you have any number of notes, you are going to have to find the right one you are thinking about. That exercise is going to be manual. I have no words to describe how painful that process can be. This is a product designed by someone who doesn’t write much, or has a much better memory than me.
This is a non-standard writing app. It doesn't support some of the basic features you take for granted in any text editor/note-taking/writing program. This is not a comprehensive list of all the useful stuff which this application does not support:
- Doesn’t let you select a word and hit ⌃ + ⌘ + D for dictionary lookup.
- Doesn’t let you hit ⌘ + + or ⌘ + -, to increase/reduce the font size.
- Doesn’t implement a find function. You have no ability to find anything in this program. The find function does not exist. So the find exercise is completely manual.
- Doesn’t let you move a line up or down. You can move sections up and down your master document if you have broken up your content into sections, but individual lines? Only through cut and paste.
- No sort fuction.
- No fullscreen option.
Conclusion
Leafnote provides a demo for you to try out. You can try it out.
My recommendation is to avoid it.
If you are looking for a writing/note-taking app, you will do much better with a whole slew of alternatives available in the marketplace. This is not a comprehensive list of alternatives which are better than Leafnote at providing you a better designed writing environment:
People who disagree with me
Leafnote: A text editor that's powerful in its simplicity | TUAW: Apple news, reviews and how-tos since 2004
Leafnote review: Focus on writing, not on how to use the app | Macworld
Taking note: Leafnote
macosxguru at the gmail thingie
Leafnote
Mac OS