A while back we released Scratch v1.4 with a whole new customizable email exports system. You can create unlimited email export options with To and Cc addresses, custom placeholder-based subject lines, and have them sent instantly in the background (without showing the compose sheet) if you want.

A couple of really cool ways you can use this:

Setup an “Email Me” export (as shown in the screenshots here) and you can instantly email yourself notes after a meeting or at the end of the day.

Create a version that emails to your personal Evernote email address. Check the “Strip first line from body” box and make the subject the first line placeholder and have it send instantly. Bam, your Scratch notes look great in Evernote.

You can create as many as you want and configure them all differently. It’s pretty boss. Go get it.

Amazon Coins: A Terrible Idea For Consumers

Here come Amazon Coins! A place to put your money where you can’t get it back out and it’s possibly worth less over time and it can only be used to buy shitty Android games! Sign up today! (Lots of ca-ching! sounds and cheering.)

Amazon isn’t the only company to do this—Microsoft started Microsoft Points with Xbox and they’ve been tricking customers into spending more than they meant to for years. Microsoft points are currently worth 80 to the US dollar, meaning prices for games and media look cheaper than they are. A song for 79 points? That’s cheaper than in iTunes! Oh, wait, 79 points is actually 99¢. Oops. Amazon started their coins at 1:1 with a US penny, so that’s something, but that could easily change in the future without warning or notice. Take a peek at their coins terms of use, you’ll notice there’s nothing in there about permanence of value or guarantees against rate changes. You could purchase 10,000 coins today and they’re worth $100 USD, but there’s no guarantee they aren’t going to be worth $80 next year.

These kinds of monetary systems are designed to get customers to lock in a bunch of cash they can’t later get back out (no refunds or exchanges in this program, of course), and they’re baited with “discounts” to get people to dump large amounts of cash into the ether. If you buy hundreds of dollars of coins at once, Amazon will give you a discount on them, up to 10%. But at the end of the day, you’re still giving Amazon hundreds of dollars that you might not spend for months or that you have to worry about managing separate from, you know, your bank accounts. And if you buy coins at discounted rates, good luck remembering how much you paid for any of these apps, since your coins will be worth different amounts all the time.

We already have money, it’s called money.

Bitsplitting.org: End WWDC

Earlier this week, when WWDC tickets sold out in 90 seconds (and when I failed to acquire one), I posted to Twitter/ADN that Apple should switch the conference to a bigger venue and use a ticket lottery system. But then I read this post by Daniel Jalkut and changed my mind because he’s right: They should end WWDC entirely. Daniel lays out the stats:

The conference has room for at most 5,000 developers. According to Apple’s job stimulus statistics, there are 275,000 or more registered iOS developers alone. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that Mac developers add only 25,000, bringing the total to 300,000. Every year, 5,000 attendees are selected from the qualified pool, meaning just 1 out of 60, or 1.5% of potential attendees will have the chance to attend.

And gets to the root of the problem:

The whole point of the conference needs to be rethought, and the goals addressed from scratch using new approaches. As the greatest challenge for WWDC is in scaling to meet demand, I think it’s obvious that the rethought WWDC should be considered in terms of digital solutions. Call it WWDC if you like, but it needs to take place 365 days a year instead of 4. It needs to serve 300,000 developers, not 5,000. And it needs to take place online, not within the cramped confines of a small convention center in San Francisco.

I should really just quote the whole post, it’s excellent.

I.M.H.O.: Nobody Knows That I Use These Apps

Jake Levine says these days he’s using more push notifications and launching apps less, which he feels is impacting how companies need to track their success (instead of using launch counters and such). The statistics point is probably true, though I could care less about such things—if you’re building an app only to worry about how many times users launch it, you’re never going to be happy or successful. What I care about is how this is the exactly opposite of how I use my phone. Jake says:

Imagine an entire suite of apps with which you interact without ever opening. Imagine if app developers could send more data (images, videos) through push notifications, or even receive simple responses (“Yes” / “No”) from users without requiring users to launch the application itself.

So, basically, imagine push notification multi-media advertising. Yuck.

Our phones and the apps within them are with us at all times — they are starting to feel more and more like extensions of the brain, augmenting its inputs with sensors that don’t come pre-installed in humans.

I don’t know about you, but it doesn’t feel like an extension of my brain to get 200 Game Center challenges a day, or to get interrupted every time I try to watch a video because someone checked in near me on Facebook, etc. Perhaps Jake’s brain is just constantly firing in a million directions and he has shouting voices in his head.

I’d love to see some forward progress in notification interfaces from the major mobile operating system. That’s the type of change that could unleash a massive wave of innovation in app development.

You want innovation? Here it is: Make push notifications work like IMAP, not like POP. Instead of blanketing every one of my devices with a unique notification which must be manually cleared, be smart enough to clear notifications on my iPad when I read them on my iPhone, or vice versa. Allow me to turn notifications off everywhere with a single switch. Make this stuff less intrusive, not more.

When push notifications first landed in iOS I went nuts with them, enabling them in every app that asked. Same with my iPad, and then my Mac when OS X 10.8 was released. A few months back I had a realization that it was getting in my way everywhere and almost never being helpful.

Rather than being constantly asked to interact by every one of my devices, I switched off Notification Center on every device save my iPhone. And on my iPhone I removed sounds and banners and badge counts for anything I didn’t deeply care about (like Path messages from my family or FaceTime notifications). Instead of constantly seeing banners or hearing sounds and being forced to look at my iPhone, I only look when I want to and have time.

After a ridiculous post complaining about Software Update notifications in OS X 10.8, a bunch of folks asked which software was running in my menu bar. But that post also spurred conversation at Karbon about our menu bars (and how insanely cluttered some of them were—I’m looking at you, Bill) and it led me to further reduce and clean up with the help of Bartender.

So this is what my menu bar looks like now. The left image is what it looks like 99% of the time, with Bartender hiding. The right side is Bartender showing all the stuff I use rarely but still want around.

Always visible are Zonebox, Cloud, Dropbox, Fantastical, system clock, Bartender. Hidden items are Moom, Synergy and the rest of the system crap.

DUDE, I GET IT ALREADY YOU DON’T HAVE TO TELL ME EVERY 4 MINUTES IT’S NOT AN EMERGENCY WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT’S AN EMERGENCY OH SHIT SERIOUSLY MY PRO APPS QUICKTIME CODECS ARE OUT OF DATE FUCK ME YOU’RE RIGHT I BETTER DROP EVERYTHING AND RESTART RIGHT NOW

rentzsch: My Mother Tries an iPhone

Some excellent usability/user experience issues listed here, along with solid suggestions for future changes. One of my favorite bits, which I’ve thought about several times:

She mentioned the Clock is wrong. She thought it odd since the other, textual clocks were correct (the first on the Slide to Unlock screen and the uppermost status bar clock). The Calendar app’s date is correct, so she has no reason to believe that the Clock’s icon just happens to be static. I never noticed this inconsistency myself. […] In the same vein, she noted the Weather app must be showing the inside temperature (72°) since it’s currently in the mid-30°s outside when she was looking at it.

Also:

I told her to press the Mail icon. Again she got snagged by her deliberate movements, and accidentally triggered wiggle (icon rearrangement) mode. Apps wouldn’t launch and she didn’t know how to fix it. Suggestion: wiggle mode is such a bad idea. Better to have a dedicated app to arrange Springboard pages/groups.

From personal experience watching my family members (and wife) use iOS, I’d also recommend Apple add a “keep App Store apps updated automatically” setting. When I look at my sister’s phone and see a badge with 155 on Settings.app, I have to imagine she’s probably running into issues because she has (sometimes grossly) outdated versions but she just assumes there’s something wrong with the app itself.