Let me offer a modest proposal: If Congress fails to pass comprehensive health reform this year, its members should surrender health insurance in proportion with the American population that is uninsured.
Day: October 9, 2009
The two App Stores
marco make a convincing case about the “two” app stores; but this section really struck me:
The primary screenshots of each game also show a clear difference for people who did select either app for more information:
Skee-Ball is immediately recognizable, well-known, and obvious. But Ramp Champ looks likely to lose out on nearly every impulse purchase from people who don’t want to spend much time looking into it — which is nearly every buyer for App Store A.
It’s really remarkable just how terrible most screenshots are. You’ve got four or five slots to focus attention on what’s best in your application, and that’s assuming a buyer is willing to look at more than one or even two. But even major developers tend to waste them all on views that either aren’t instructive, or repeatedly bash the same point into the ground without really illuminating overall functionality. Bento, to name but one, uses three of five screens to show us that:
- different kinds of libraries are possible
- you can use something akin to coverflow to choose between them
–[AND]–
And this from a $5 app created by FileMaker, a subsidiary of a company called Apple. Nothing in there to imply that you can sort, sync, and customize databases between your phone and computer. Not that those are important features, apparently. Why not show us a to-do list, a shopping list sorted by need, a library inventory, and tasting notes complete with pictures and a calculation field for scores? Anything, really, would be better than what they do show: Hey! We have some different stationery pads in here.
And it’s not just Apple/FileMaker. Most apps, it seems, suffer from the “does this even do what I think it will?” syndrome with regard to screen-shots. Presumably, the creators hope you’ll just roll the dice on a sub-$X purchase such that the most basic visual information is all that’s required. The fact that most people won’t, at least not the people in the “B” app store, those with exceedingly specific ideas about what this app “needs to do,” figures into Marco’s overall equation mightily. It lands those apps with lousy descriptions or poor screen-shots directly in the “A” store, where I think it’s pretty well established: nobody cares what you’re doing unless it’s cheap and/or very popular for some reason.
Worth noting that Tumblr’s app: excellent selection of screen shots that detail exactly what it is you can do with it in informative little usage scenarios. And it’s a free app.
Compare and Contrast
Taliban: We have seen no change in his strategy for peace. He has done nothing for peace in Afghanistan. He has not taken a single step for peace in Afghanistan or to make this country stable… We condemn the award of the Noble Peace Prize for Obama. We condemn the institute’s awarding him the peace prize. We condemn this year’s peace prize as unjust.
GOP/RNC: The real question Americans are asking is, “What has President Obama actually accomplished?” It is unfortunate that the president’s star power has outshined tireless advocates who have made real achievements working towards peace and human rights. One thing is certain – President Obama won’t be receiving any awards from Americans for job creation, fiscal responsibility, or backing up rhetoric with concrete action.
I will accept this award as a call to action – a call for all nations to confront the common challenges of the 21st century and a renewed call for the GOP to confront the challenges of the 20th.
–Barack Obama, slightly revised and extended…
[T]he unmistakable message of the award is one of the consequences of a period in which the most powerful country in the world […] became the focus of destabilization and in real if limited ways lawlessness. A harsh judgment, yes. But a dark period. And Obama has begun, if fitfully and very imperfectly to many of his supporters, to steer the ship of state in a different direction. If that seems like a meager accomplishment to many of the usual Washington types it’s a profound reflection of their own enablement of the Bush era and how compromised they are by it, how much they perpetuated the belief that it was ‘normal history’ rather than dark aberration.
Josh Marshall, nailing it.
In a carbon-conscious culture that’s looking for new ways to get from A to B, is it time to reconsider the unicycle?
Billy Baker, Globe correspondent, in what may be the ultimate “trend” piece statement of all time. I consider this particular segment of journamalism to be herewith: complete.
Lemkin 