Apps

Marco Arment on his approach to requesting app reviews from his customers in apps he’s developed. My strategy to get good App Store reviews is simple: Make an app good enough for some people to love it. By nature, you’ll lose some people along the way, but that’s OK: an app that strives to satisfy as many people as possible will usually only get people to kinda like it, not love it. Accumulate a huge surplus of goodwill from those customers with a combination of step 1, usefulness, delight, and adding more functionality over time. Make it easy to rate the app with a button that’s never annoying or in the way, like the Settings screen. This is one facet of why I love Marco’s apps and will choose to use them over others. The passive aggressive “Do you like our app?” which leads to two different options for providing feedback is one of the things that grates on my nerves1 the most in an app. Oftentimes it causes me to leave the app altogether to avoid having to make the right decision to get back to what I was doing in the first place. That’s a terrible experience for a customer to have and Marco’s advice is solid wisdom to other developers.

My iPad mini just got a lot more productive. Federico’s review is right here.

Evernote just released a major update of their web clipper for Chrome. This update is specific to Chrome for the desktop right now but I’m sure it’ll roll out to all the other major browsers soon. Version 6 brings a huge chunk of the toolset typically found in Skitch straight into Chrome with the click of a button. You can now markup any web clip as soon as you’ve made your selection. Another massive change comes in the form of telling the Web Clipper what chunk of content you want and how you want it formatted in a concise manner. This has always been unclear to me in previous versions of the extension.

The best GMail application for iOS just got updated to be optimized for the iPad.