Howdy, I'm MG Siegler. I’m a general partner at Google Ventures and a columnist for TechCrunch. This is where I collect things.
Some selected works. Some haikus. Some investments. Ask away.
Showing 169 posts tagged iOS
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Check out the latest updates for iPhone and iPad:
- Shoot with a brand new camera
- Create photosets
- Double tap anywhere on a post to ♥!
Another new feature: titles for link posts are now automatically fetched after a URL is entered. If you have a URL on your clipboard, it’ll be inserted for you as well.
Great stuff. Love the “heart” animation.
Gogo:
Apple devices are still reigning above the clouds, following the tablet trend with the iPad being the device of choice. Among all mobile devices being used to connect through Gogo, 84 percent carry Apple’s iOS operating system while 16 percent carry the Android operating system. If you look only at the smartphones our customers are using, the iPhone makes up 73 percent and all Android devices make up 26 percent, with Blackberry and Windows based devices each making up less than 1 percent of devices being used in air.
Android is winning.
But really, the BlackBerry and Windows Phone numbers are just pathetic.
[via Daring Fireball]
Ingrid Lunden for TechCrunch:
The new HTC One unveiled last month is increasingly feeling like last-chance saloon for the troubled Taiwan handset maker. Today HTC noted that its sales for the month of February fell by nearly 44% to 11.37 billion Taiwan dollars ($384 million), from NT$20.3 billion for the same month one year ago. Looking at the bigger picture, that NT$11.37 billion is barely higher than what HTC made in January 2010, when it reported NT$11.12 billion in sales.
This follows a quarter in which profit fell 91 percent. And that followed a quarter in which profit dropped 79 percent.
This is a two-horse race. Apple is winning the U.S. and Samsung is winning the rest of the world (with Huawei being an up-and-coming wildcard). It’s that simple.
Yes, there are other companies which help extend Android’s market share but none of them can seem to make any money. That’s not a viable long-term strategy.
There is no questioning the fact that the 955 Dreams guys are awesome at making iOS apps. So when I heard that they were setting their sights on a market that generally blows on mobile, real world event ticketing, I was naturally excited. As always, they didn’t disappoint.
Yes, CrunchFund is an investor because we generally think it’s a good idea to invest in kickass teams. More about the new app on TechCrunch.
Panic:
The good news? If someone complains that this insignificant plug costs $50, tell them it’s a tiny computer!
They ripped the thing apart and found an ARM-based SoC built by Apple, complete with its own RAM.
Their guess was that this system was meant to enable AirPlay to more easily convert video output from a Lightning connector to HDMI. But an anonymous comment they link to seems to dispel that. Instead, this may be a fairly powerful micro-computer whose sole purpose is video conversion (as opposed to doing it on an iOS device).
Sadly, the video output from this adapter isn’t all that great right now (supposedly being worked on). Still, fascinating that Apple went through all this engineering for an adapter that relatively few people will buy.
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My New Minimalist iOS Weather App
Coming soon to the App Store.
Only $3.99.
Pretty much.
Check out Sun, a great HTML variation on the weather app. Very well done, complete with gestures. [via @supertino]
Also check out Haze, another beautiful and simple (native) iOS weather app.
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UPDATE: Cool, Mailbox’s CEO agrees.
My biggest gripe with Mailbox thus far is that the default snooze options, which I generally love, do not change based on the time or day of the week, which can lead to some ambiguous situations. Around 9PM last night I wanted to merely delay an email by a couple of hours. “Later today” actually deferred the email to a little after midnight but “This Evening” deferred until 6PM the next day. Similarly, “This Weekend” and “Next Week” also seem a bit too ambiguous when it’s currently Sunday night. I really think that contextually tweaking the available options as well as some of the language could go a long way towards improving this already great feature.
I’ve been using Mailbox for a few weeks now and very much enjoy it. When I first installed it I started a list all of the things I didn’t like, but almost all of my complaints went away the more I bought into the way that Mailbox is intended to be used. The only ones that really remain (aside from the snoozing behavior described above) are the lack of an iPad or desktop equivalent, and the lack of cloud search (which is coming). I also wish that their push notifications included the first line of the message body but I know this is an iOS limitation and not their fault.
Also agree with all of this. I often go to hit one of those snoozes and have to think about it for a second. I shouldn’t have to think at all.
Everyone now has a camera in their pocket at all times. That camera is connected to the internet at all times. That camera is capable of being utilized by hundreds of thousands of apps. Those apps all have social graphs that allow you to connect with other internet-connected camera-carrying friends. It’s almost inexplicable that there isn’t a killer social photo album service yet.
And yet, despite many (many, many, many, many) failed attempts, there isn’t. So perhaps I’ll sound foolish thinking that Albumatic is going to be the one. But I’ll be damned if it doesn’t feel like it is.
I’ve probably tried a dozen weather apps for iOS. Most share one thing in common: they’re way too complicated. This leaves me defaulting back to Apple’s own weather app. Pure meh.
Conditions, by Jake Marsh, is the opposite of most of those other weather apps. You may think you want it to do more, but you really don’t. It’s a buck, beautiful, and simple.
“The utter simplicity of the iOS home screen is Apple’s innovation. It’s the simplest, most obvious “system” ever designed. It is a false and foolish but widespread misconception that “innovation” goes only in the direction of additional complexity.”
(via davemorin)
Haven’t tried the iOS version just yet, but absolutely love this app for the Mac. As a kid, I remember sitting in the car around the top-of-the-hour and waiting for my dad to turn on the radio for the news updates. This is that, but from a wide variety of sources (NPR, BBC, ESPN, etc) and always right there on your desktop. Brilliant idea.
Update: Yep, iOS version just as awesome.
Adding “fuck” right now so I can stop sending fucking “duck”.
