Your e-mail is getting smarter
Lately I have the feeling that my e-mail is getting smarter. I always being unhappy with most of the clients and solutions to manage my e-mails and contacts, but things are changing fast. So far I’ve been using a combination of labels and the Multiple Inbox lab feature to organize my email, so that I won’t forget the things to do and they won’t be submerged by all the incoming ones. This is what my inbox look like:
But last night Google launched a new feature for Gmail called Priority Inbox, where more important e-mails are separated from the rest. To do the trick I suppose Google consider opening rate and frequency of replies for each specific sender. Of course the filter will get better with time, but I’m already happy for seeing a big player tackling the inbox overload problem. Here’s a video that explains the feature:
So far it seems working pretty well for me and I’m sure it will improve the more I use it. This feature combined with the right plugins, like Rapportive, definitely are making me love my inbox a little more.
Posted in Whatever | View Comments
10 Marketing tips for your iPhone apps
Last night I gave a presentation at Refresh Mobile, a combination of the South Florida iPhone meetup and the South Florida Android Developers meetup, about how to market your iOS, but not only, applications.
These are the slides from the presentation:
Update:
Here’s the video of the presentation courtesy of Damian Montero
Tags: Android, Apple, iOS, iPad, Meetup, Presentation, Refresh Mobile
Posted in Marketing | View Comments
Apple announce App Store Volume Purchase Program
Apple just sent to all their developers an email announcing a new App Store Volume Purchase Program that will allow educational institutions to buy applications in bulk for their students at a discounted price.
We’re pleased to announce the App Store Volume Purchase Program. Education institutions in the United States now have a new way to purchase your apps in volume for distribution to their students and faculty. You can also elect to offer special education pricing on your app when purchased in volume.
Developers will be able to choose to offer special pricing that is 50% of their list price to education institutions when they purchase 20 or more copies of their app.
Tags: App Store, Applications, Education, iOS
Posted in Apple | View Comments
DeviantArt Muro, an impressive HTML5 application
DeviantArt just released Muro, a drawing application completely HTML5 powered. Not only that, but it perfectly works on the iPad as well, making it a great alternative to the native drawing applications present in the store. To use Muro you need a DeviantArt account, and it’s totally free for both the basic and pro modes, basic for beginning artists and pro for more experienced users. It supports advanced features such as layers, filters, multiple brushes and keyboard shortcuts. This is a great example on how powerful HTML5 could be and a perfect response to all those people who believed that HTML5 wasn’t good enough to compete with Flash in more complex applications.
Tags: DeviantArt, HTML5, Illustration, Muro
Posted in Design | View Comments
People are asking for less
Take a look at some of the most successful applications in the last few months, even in the last few years. People are craving less. They are tired of overcrowded experiences. Strong evidence of this can be found in the success of applications such as Instapaper and Flipboard.
Instapaper, in combination with the iPad, completely changed the way I consume my daily readings. Now, whenever I see an interesting article, I instapaper it so that I can read it later, when I can give it my full attention, without annoying multiple pages, overwhelming ads, and with less distractions and noise. Even Apple recently added a similar feature to their browser with Reader, a feature that lets you visualize the article à la Instapaper. Some bloggers complained that, in doing so, Apple was penalizing the websites that make their buck from advertising, but in my opinion, when a user clicks the Reader button, this simply expresses a desire for less, for clean, for readability. I’m sorry dear blogger, I love your articles, but I’m sick of your 14 blinking banners right next to it. I’m tired of having to scroll pass your Google Adsense links in order to get to the content. I hate having to go through five two-paragraph-long pages, so that I can help you spike your page views.
Similarly, Flipboard creates a more elegant and cleaner way to consume your Twitter and Facebook stream. Thanks to big images, fewer elements per page, and an intelligent usage of the space, it helps the user focus on the actual content. I feel I’ve been getting so much more from Twitter and Facebook since I have less things to distract my attention. No more cows and gangsters in the way. No invitations to the latest time sink.
People choosing to use these applications are begging developers and designers to create experiences that are cleaner and more pleasant to use. Just listen to them.
Tags: Flipboard, Instapaper, Reader
Posted in Whatever | View Comments
Where is Groupon going?
Andrew Mason, Groupon’s CEO, recently announced deals personalization, a feature initially available in six cities: Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, San Jose, and Seattle. This move by Groupon was done for several reasons, such as the necessity to differentiate itself from several clones (which are sprouting at the same rate of Groupon’s deals, daily) and an large amount of requests from businesses to be featured on the site. Deals personalization definitely made sense to me, so much so that the announcement was made just few hours before the soft launch of one of my projects, WishADeal.com. How many times have you looked at your inbox and thought, “why am I getting e-mails for pole dancing classes and spa deals?” This is exactly why Groupon is adding some level of personalization. With Wish A Deal I go even a step further by letting you pick the category of the deals you’d like to receive, and gather them from several daily deal sites in a single e-mail.
But where is this daily deals market going? My guess: now that the market is saturated by a leader, Groupon, and multiple clones, the next natural step will be to focus on verticals. Woot spun off Wine Woot, Shirt Woot, and so on. This would be a great time to launch sites such as Daily Burger Deal or Vegan Daily Offer. At this point, people are familiar with the concept of daily deals and would definitely appreciate a really specialized and targeted service. And, I’m willing to bet that this is something that sites like Groupon and Living Social will offer in the near future.
Posted in Whatever | View Comments
Design for mobile: 8 things to remember when designing for mobile
Yesterday I gave a presentation at the Miami Design Meetup where I pointed out 8 things I think you should always remember while designing interfaces for mobile apps and websites.
Tags: Apple, Mobile, User Experience, User Interface
Posted in Design | View Comments
Rapportive extension for Safari
During my “Google Chrome” phase, I learned to love some of its extensions. One of those is Rapportive. It’s a super simple CRM for Gmail, that replace the ads with the personal information about the sender based on their email address, pulling data from Twitter, Crunchbase, Linkedin and many other sources.
Since Safari 5 came out I decided to go back using Apple’s browser, but I immediately missed some of my favorite extensions, so I decided to try to port them to the unsupported platform. The first one I tried was Rapportive. I actually almost did nothing thanks to a library for porting Chrome extensions to Safari published by Michael Gundlach (author of AdBlock).
Of course this extension is unofficial and unsupported, and I’m sure the Rapportive guys are already working on a better extension for Safari (even though on the site they said the next browser up is IE). If you can’t wait for them and you want to use their great product on Safari 5, here is my version:
Update
The guys at Rapportive just released the official Safari version of their awesome plugin. To get it, just visit http://rapportive.com with Safari and click install.
Tags: CRM, Safari, Safari Extensions
Posted in Developing | View Comments
Interview on CloudPlumbing.com
This may be old news for you, but I wanted to share it anyway on my blog. A couple of weeks ago I’ve been interviewed by Ryan Parsley on CloudPlumbing.com. We mostly spoke about some of the new projects I’m starting with 39 Inc. as well as the pros in building really focused applications.
You can find the full interview on CloudPlumbing.com.
Tags: FancyDocs, Inspiration, Interview, iOS Applications, Phofolio, Web Applications
Posted in Whatever | View Comments
Twitter is getting ready for the World Cup
Since Twitter went global, I joined the translator program, helping Twitter to translate its content (not the tweets obviously) in Italian.
Last night while I was translating, one of the strings in my queue caught my attention:
World Cup 2010 Match Report – %{team_a} versus %{team_b}
Of course, the page it pointed to isn’t active yet, so we will need to wait another week to see it. It’s definitely going to be an interesting tool to enrich the game-watching experience.
Tags: Twitter
Posted in Whatever | View Comments
Find me here