I’ve heard rumblings from some in the iOS community about the new App Store design regarding density of information. “There are fewer things on screen, so there’s less being featured” is the gist of the argument.

Uh, no.

By definition, to feature something is to make it stand out. The more items you “feature” on a screen at once, the less effective any one of those features will be.

There may be fewer featured items on any particular screen, but these larger featured items are far more likely to grab the customer’s attention, in other words.

Looking at the current App Store now, especially on iPhone, I’m not surprised at all that “being featured” isn’t bringing in the downloads as effectively as it used to. It’s very easy to get lost on any screen in that sea of icons and small banners.

My impression of the new App Store at first glance was “Finally. This looks like an Apple Store, not a bargain basement.”

Others have compared the layout to a nice high-end magazine, which makes sense, given the design language borrowed from the News app. The point is, the new App Store is clean, beautiful, and focused. And just like the Apple Stores, it invites people to come and hang out, not just run in when they need to buy something. It’s somewhere you want to visit. To learn. To engage. And then maybe to shop.

This is a good thing.

Apple learned a great deal while becoming the world’s most successful retailer. And that knowledge has finally made its way to this new digital storefront.

And about that “featuring fewer things” argument: It ignores another important fact about this new App Store.

If it’s not obvious from the title of the first tab, the store will for the first time now be getting updated, at least in part, daily. That’s a big change from the weekly update schedule Apple has maintained since the beginning of the App Store. You can’t name something “Today” and then not update it every day. So instead of a few new items getting featured once a week, something new will be featured every single day. There are also different categories of features, including profiles with developers, tutorials, curated collections, behind the scenes looks, and more. Apple also says it will be refreshing content all over the store every few days. This is going to take a tremendous amount of work to maintain, and Apple has staffed up in order to maintain it. That’s big news.

Apple has been known from time to time to put one or two people on important projects and expect too much from them. From what I’ve heard from little birdies around WWDC this week, App Store Editorial is getting resourced appropriately for this new increase in curated content. They are committed to it.

What this means is that there will be many more features than ever before, not fewer. And people will have more incentive to visit daily and take a look at each feature.

And it’s worth noting that you don’t necessarily need to be a giant company with insider access to get featured (though I’m sure that doesn’t hurt). Visit appstore.com/promote and tell Apple your story. Impress the editorial staff, and you have a decent shot at getting into one of these features.

Time to hone those sales pitch skills, indies.

Currently, App Store is an app you only use when you already want to buy something, not a destination unto itself. This new design aims to change that. Only time will tell if it works, but I think Monika Gromek and her team have done a tremendous job with it. I’m sure they will adjust and refine the design over time as it gets out into the wild.

The more people there are hanging out in the App Store to read about featured content, the more likely they will eventually buy something. That’s retail 101. If you give people a reason to visit daily, you will increase sales organically.

I have a lot more to say about the App Store redesign, and I’ll be talking about it more in the coming weeks, both here and on the podcast. If you have apps on the App Store, go watch every WWDC video related to App Store, iTunesConnect, and StoreKit. I know all that Machine Learning and AR stuff is tempting, but your slick new app won’t be going anywhere if you don’t present it effectively in this new store.

Some folks had a little fun with me yesterday, when I posted about not outsourcing your online presence to Facebook. Once the link was tweeted by Marco Arment (thanks, Marco!) my site promptly got bombarded. And because of poorly configured cache settings on my part after a recent update (long story), my entire server crashed hard.

Maybe you should have posted that to Facebook?

This wouldn’t have happened on Facebook!

And so on.

Fair enough. I deserve that.

Here’s the thing, though: In the face of this issue, in fewer than 24 hours, I managed to move that post, along with my entire blog, onto a new server^[1], using a completely different blogging engine, point my DNS over to the new server, and maintain the same link retweeted yesterday, so that article can now continue to be read for years to come. And I can do that again whenever new technology either makes that necessary or desirable.

Try doing that with a Facebook link.

The original post by Marc Haynes was public, which I know because I do not have a Facebook account, but here’s what it looks like for me without being a Facebook user — a full one-third of my window is covered by a pop-over trying to get me to sign in or sign up for Facebook. I will go out of my way to avoid linking to websites that are hostile to users with pop-overs.

(via Daring Fireball)

As someone who hasn’t logged into Facebook for more than three years, I have to say, I totally agree with the sentiment here. Whenever I follow a Facebook link, and the crap banner pops up trying to get me to log in, I immediately hit the back button and curse the jerk who tricked me into clicking.

Look, I get that I’m the nut who doesn’t want to use Facebook. I’m not even saying don’t post your stuff to Facebook. But if Facebook is the only place you are posting something, know that you are shutting out people like me for no good reason. Go ahead and post to Facebook, but post it somewhere else, too. Especially if you’re running a business.

The number of restaurants, bars, and other local establishments that, thanks to crappy web sites they can’t update, post their daily specials, hours, and important announcements only via Facebook is growing. That’s maddening. Want to know if we’re open this holiday weekend? Go to Facebook.

Go to hell.

It’s 2017. There are a million ways to get a web site set up inexpensively that you can easily update yourself. Setting up a Facebook page and letting your web site rot, or worse, not even having a web site of your own, is outsourcing your entire online presence. That’s truly insane. It’s a massive risk to your business, and frankly, stupid.

So Apple has made a studio available during WWDC for people to record podcast episodes during WWDC. This is one of those things that sounds really cool when you first hear about it. But then you spend a few minutes thinking, and you start to wonder “What’s the point?”

I don’t mean to trash Apple here. I think they are trying something new, and I applaud that. But let’s go over what we know so far and see how it benefits anyone making podcasts.

• Time slots are limited to one hour. This is a good thing, but it disqualifies 90% of tech podcasts. All kidding aside, if you have a show with multiple sponsors, you need to record for at minimum an hour, probably longer. (That’s the real reason those shows go on so long, folks.)
• You have to reserve on the morning of your recording, starting at 7am. If someone beats you to the slot, you’re out of luck. So you get five chances at a lottery ticket, essentially.
• Apple will record the show for you using pro equipment, and hand you the raw audio files at the end of the session. That’s it. No editing services. No posting.
• All the participants in your podcast have to be ticket-holders to WWDC, as far as I can tell.

So, given all that, who will get anything of value out of this opportunity?

Established pro podcasters with advertisers

If you have a show with a regular schedule, you probably want to record a WWDC episode. Before you heard about this studio, you already made plans to record in a hotel room, or a conference room, etc. You will pack all of your equipment for recording regardless, because you have no idea if you’re going to get one of the coveted slots in the Apple studio. So at best, you might get something to talk about for the first fifteen minutes of your show, if you happen to get a slot, and if all your hosts happen to have WWDC tickets and want to burn an hour session on recording rather than going to a lab, etc.

Newcomers to podcasting

You don’t have pro equipment. Maybe you have no idea how to record a show. You happen to win the lottery and get the studio for an hour. Great. And the end of that hour, you will have a few beautifully recorded audio files. Now what? You still have to edit the episode. Publish the episode. Get artwork[^1]. Build a web site. Find an audience.

Recording podcasts is the easy part, folks. Chances are, those files will sit on your hard drive and never be published, let alone heard by anyone.

Casual podcasters

Finally, some people who might get some benefit out of this. Maybe your mics aren’t super great, and you aren’t a sound engineer. You and your co-host(s) all happen to have WWDC tickets. You weren’t planning on recording an episode that week while you were in San Jose, but if you happen to win the lottery, sure, why not? You’ll have one great-sounding episode in your feed, and something cool to talk about (recording from Apple’s studio in San Jose.) The Apple Podcasts Studio is perfect for you. A nice perk, if you happen to get to use it.

That seems like a very small group of people who will actually get much out of this endeavor.

What if Apple, instead of simply recording a show for you, actually spent the hour training podcast hosts on equipment choices, techniques for compression, mic technique, etc? What if they showed you how to use Logic more effectively? What if they taught you how to edit for content?

Basically, an Apple lab focused on podcasts.

There are so many opportunities there for Apple to actually help improve the state of tech podcasting. But I don’t see any of that happening next week, unfortunately.

Apple is known for meticulous design in its products. I don’t see much evidence of that here. At least not based on what we know so far.

Maybe next year.

**Update: **A few people have pointed out on Twitter that perhaps some podcasting announcement is in the works for WWDC that could shine more light on this studio. Perhaps it’s a bit early to cast judgment on this whole idea. Maybe Apple has a new podcast producer app for iOS that they’l be showing off, or something. That’s fair. We’ll see if there’s more up Apple’s sleeve than meets the eye. If not, I’m sure a few podcasters will find this useful, in any case. But it’ll still be a bit of a missed opportunity if there’s no more to it than what we know so far.

When I created x2y for Mac, I had to decide, as you always do, which features would make it to version 1, and which would be pushed back until later. Very early in the process, I punted on iCloud sync of the common aspect ratios list. I had done sync for iOS devices before, but this time it would involve syncing between iOS and Mac devices. I didn’t even bother researching the process. I just figured it was non-essential and moved on.

Then, sometime after version 1 shipped, and I was deciding on what was next, I got it into my head that a simple key-value store sync between macOS and iOS wasn’t possible. (I don’t know why, but I certainly believed it for months, even though it’s totally not true.) Since the iOS version is currently using a simple key-value store sync for iCloud support, I figured sync for the Mac was now going to involve migration of current data to Core Data. It would mean an update of both the macOS and iOS versions, and it sounded like a massive headache. So I punted again for a few months.

Then a few weeks ago, I decided to have a look at just what would be involved, and I soon learned the truth, that key-value store sync between iOS and Mac is actually easy. Just make sure the container identifier is the same for both platforms, and the data will be available on both platforms.

In my case, since iOS was already using its default container, I just needed to tell macOS to use the iOS container. One value changed in the entitlements file, and I was in business.

Since x2y for Mac is quite a bit newer, there were some differences in how I was storing the list of aspect ratios. But it was trivial to convert the data and get the sync going.

It helps that I’m not doing a really robust sync here. This ratios list is the sort of thing you are likely to only change every so often. I didn’t want to risk date comparison mistakes, duplicates, etc. It’s much more of a “make a change on one device, and the entire list gets replaced everywhere else” sort of thing. Which has worked out perfectly well on iOS all these years.

At the end of the day, it’s a simple dictionary. No reason to make it more complicated than it needs to be.

I did have to add a Preferences window for the first time in a Mac app. That was fun. While I was doing that, I decided to implement an option for not saving your full screen status between launches. I have written in the past about full screen and Mac apps, and I continue to believe that far too many apps don’t save full screen between launches, which is quite annoying. But after talking with some folks on Twitter and elsewhere, it did seem reasonable that there may be some people who switch between their laptop screen and their connected external monitors who may not want the full screen state to be remembered. So I gave my customers a way to turn it off.

x2y version 1.2 is now available on the Mac App Store. As always, a review is appreciated if you are using the app and enjoy it.