Joel Spolsky recently wrote about what he’s been up to. This part about Glitch jumped out at me:

I think that in every era there has to be some kind of simplified programming environment for the quiet majority of developers who don’t need fancy administration features for their code, like git branches or multistep deployment processes; they just want to write code and have it run. Glitch is aimed at those developers.

This question about what is the right amount of complexity for creative software runs as a thread through a lot of my writing. It’s important to the rise of Sketch and Figma, it’s relevant to any discussion about app stores, and it’s at the heart of the debate over the roles of macOS and iOS.

Advocates of simpler creative software usually brush off the fact that a whole bunch of peripheral technology would need to be re-written to support their vision, usually by saying that that stuff wasn’t written right anyway. Spolsky takes a more measured approach, which I appreciate, by instead saying most people just don’t need those features¹.

Glitch is far from the only product that simplifies software by making it impossible to do complex things. Apple themselves are advocates of this approach, GarageBand and iMovie being prime examples; and the entire design of iOS is based on the premise that software, and especially operating systems, are too complicated². But it’s difficult to determine how popular these simpler versions of apps are relative to their more complicated counterparts. On the Mac App Store, Final Cut Pro and iMovie are the #1 paid and free apps in the video category respectively. In music, it’s Logic Pro X and GarageBand. Logic Pro X is the most popular paid app overall in the Mac App Store, and iMovie is the most popular free app. While this does indicate that both approaches are popular, it comes with the caveat that the free apps are subsidized by other parts of Apple’s business³.

The professional offerings like Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro X show up much more online: Their forums are more active, they get reviewed more thoroughly by the press, and they show up more prominently in online surveys. In some ways this to be expected, online communities attract the most passionate users, which will also tend to be the users who want the most features. But it gives the impression that the simpler apps don’t have fans, and they’re used because they’re free, not because they’re good.

The argument for simple creative software feels very hand wavy to me. It’s based on the premise is that there’s another group of active users, that doesn’t show up in online communities and surveys, who has the ability to do complex creative work like making movies, music, or software, while not being able to learn the complex software to perform those tasks. The only way to know for sure would be to see the usage statistics for those apps, which aren’t available. Based on the information that is available, I’m not convinced that simple creative software has an audience of anything more than people looking for a free alternative to expensive software⁴, and there aren’t enough free users to build a business around. The only company that should be making these types of apps is Apple, in the interest of commoditizing the complements of their hardware products. So why are other companies making these kinds of apps?

The 2019 Audio Developer Conference has a video of a panel titled “Mobile vs. Desktop Software: Fragmented or Converging Practices?”. It’s moderated by AudioKit Pro co-founder Matthew Fecher, and the list of panelists are:

• Gaz Williams, contributor to Sonic State
• Henny tha Bizness, Grammy-award winning producer (who works primarily on iPad)
• Henrik Lenberg, Founder of Auxy
• Matt Derbyshire, ex-Head of Product & Marketing at Ampify

Fecher also talked to a few indie iOS audio app developers who were willing to share sales numbers about their apps. This section starts at 25:36, I’ve summarized the sales numbers below.

Indie Developer 1: Audio Damage

Most of the developers Fecher spoke to chose to stay anonymous, but not Chris Randall from Audio Damage. Audio Damage has a suite of plugins, most of which are available on both iOS and desktop. Here’s how their revenue breaks down:

• There’s a 50/50 split of revenue between desktop and iOS.
• The mobile apps are priced at 1/8 the price of their desktop counterparts.
• So that means there is eight times the sales on iOS at 1/8 the price.

Indie Developer 2: New Synth

The second developer Fecher spoke to had just released a new synth on both iOS and desktop. Here’s how revenue broke down for the first two months after launch:

• 33% of revenue came from iOS.
• Desktop revenue was $13,000, and iOS was $6,922.
• The iOS app version was priced at 1/10 the cost of the desktop version.

Indie Developer 3: iPad Synth

The third developer had a synth that’s only available on iPad, their revenue broke down as follows:

• $125,000 in total revenue.
• $80,500 in proceeds, so that’s after factoring in Apple’s 30% cut and other App Store costs.
• $6,000 per month in average sales for the last three months.
• This app was not featured by Apple.

Indie Developer 4: Adding AUv3

The fourth developer shared their data after adding AUv3 to their app, which resulted in a boost to sales.

• $4,000 in revenue for the previous month before adding AUv3.
• $15,000 in revenue the month after adding AUv3.
• They calculated that adding AUv3 resulted in ~$33,000 in extra revenue over three months after adding it.

Indie Developer 5: iOS to Mac

The final developer had one music app app that was initially released for iPad, that was then expanded to iPhone and Mac. Their sales breakdown on each platform is as follows:

• 25% of sales come from iPhone, 35% from iPad, and 40% from Mac.
• $500,000 in total sales over the last three years.
• The iOS version is priced at 1/2 the price of the Mac version.

There’s Something Happening Here

There’s undoubtably something happening with iOS audio apps, it’s one of the most active creative app markets. The Audiobus Forum for example is not just the most active community for iOS music making, but possibly the most active community for music making period, fueled by a continuous stream of new apps being released.

There are some unique characteristics of this market relative to other creative app markets. For example, unlike illustration apps, a clear winner hasn’t emerged like Procreate, which is the #1 paid iPad app in the App Store. The closest to an overall winner so far is probably BeatMaker 3 which is currently the #3 paid Music app on iPad and #19 overall.

Instead of consolidating around big winners, instead the market seems to have embraced variety. In a recent iOS DAW poll at the Audiobus forum, the overwhelming winner was the AUM mixer app, which is primarily an AudioUnit host for other apps. It looks like this:

It’s fascinating to see an app like this come out on top for iOS, because the platform itself goes so far to emphasize the single app experience. That instead we have many small apps working together is likely the result of the App Store’s many restrictions making it difficult for a big winner to emerge¹. Big winners thrive on creating their own ecosystem, and that’s hard to do when Apple has so many restrictions about what and how items can be sold, and how apps can be extended.

The variety of the iOS audio app market reminds me of the golden age of OS X indie development before the iPhone. It was a time when lots of new and innovative apps were being released by small companies, often consisting of just one person. The problem with an ecosystem like that is that it’s incredibly fragile, as the release of the iPhone, and Apple’s corresponding change in priorities, has shown. Many of the apps from the 2000s indie development scene are gone now, precious few developers from that era were able to transition to healthy businesses to maintain their apps over time. The true legacy of the OS X indie app movement is the iOS App Store itself, where more developers are competing over a larger market, but it’s a market where it’s notoriously difficult to make a living.

While the iOS audio market has found a way to thrive by embracing variety, it simultaneously has some of the same problem as other creative app markets on the iPhone and Mac app stores: There aren’t enough steady businesses to serve as anchors in the industry. What I’d like to see are more successes like Adobe or Ableton on the app stores.

Federico Viticci shares FS Bookmarks, his tool for using URL schemes to jump to specific folders on iOS:

I’m happy to introduce FS Bookmarks, a shortcut that lets you create direct launchers for files and folders stored in the Files app. FS Bookmarks is a hybrid Shortcuts-Scriptable tool that takes advantage of a native Files API (which I will call “bookmarks”) to expose the filesystem path of any file or folder stored in the Files app.

At this point I stopped reading and started scanning for how he did this because I’ve never been able to figure it out myself. Here’s the trick:

Under the hood on both iOS and iPadOS, files and folders stored in the Files app have paths such as this one:

/private/var/mobile/Library/Mobile Documents/\
27N4MQEA55~pro~writer/Documents/Image Assets

That’s one ugly file path, but it’s how the system points to an app’s folder. In this case, the file path above is pointing to a folder called ‘Image Assets’ located under iCloud Drive/iA Writer. Similarly, a PDF document named ‘Expenses.pdf’ stored in your iCloud Drive Downloads folder should have this kind of filesystem path:

/private/var/mobile/Library/Mobile Documents/\
com~apple~CloudDocs/Downloads/Expenses.pdf

By themselves, these paths are useless as you cannot launch them in any way. However, I’ve recently discovered that if you combine the Files app’s shareddocuments:// URL scheme with an encoded version of the filesystem path, the file or folder can be reopened directly in the Files app. The launcher URL looks something like this:

shareddocuments:///private/var/mobile/Library/\
Mobile%20Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/Downloads/\
Expenses.pdf

You can get the part of the path that comes after /private/var/mobile/Library/Mobile Documents/ on your Mac by using the Terminal to cd first to ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents, then into the subdirectory you want to make a URL to, and finally using pwd to print the path¹. Viticci continues by describing how the FS Bookmarks shortcut simplifies creating these URLs, but at this point I’d stopped reading to go see if this actually works (it does).

For me this is a breakthrough in the usefulness of iOS because jumping to a specific folder is important for retrieving information from the file system hierarchy². There are two fast methods of retrieving information from the file system: launching and searching. LaunchBar is an example of a launcher, it’s a user-defined index of commonly used actions, whereas Spotlight, the search built-in to macOS and iOS, is an index of your entire file system. Both present a text box that you can type into to find what you’re looking for, but their use cases are different. A launcher is better if you already know exactly what you’re looking for, because its index is smaller and faster. Search is better if you’re not sure exactly what you’re looking for, because its index is larger.

A launcher does not have to have text-based interface, icons are commonly used instead³. The Dock is a launcher in macOS, and SpringBoard, the default screen on iOS, is a launcher for apps. Shortcuts makes a great launcher for everything else on iOS, and that’s what I use to open these URLs.

The key to using the file system’s hierarchy effectively is to use a launcher to jump to a standard base folder, instead of jumping directly to your final destination⁴. For example, if you have a “Projects” base folder, you’d jump to that with your launcher instead of jumping directly to a specific project folder like “Repla”. You’d jump to “Projects”, then navigate to the “Repla” subfolder inside it. Jumping to a standard base folder instead of trying to jump to the final destination is better for the following reasons:

• Keeping all of the individual project folders in your launcher means micromanaging its index.
• Individual project names often have too many hits, e.g., if you’re working on “Repla”, you probably have a lot of files with “Repla” in the name.
• By jumping into individual project folders, you’re not building long-term reusable muscle memory, you lose your muscle memory when you switch projects.

With Viticci’s URLs we can jump to a standard base folder on iOS for the first time.

The new 16” MacBook Pro is available to buy now, and it sounds like a hit, a return to form for the MacBook line. Physical Esc key, inverted-T arrow keys, and of course, a return to a scissor-switch keyboard. There are a lot of great reviews around, and Phil Schiller appeared on Jonathan Morrison’s YouTube channel. Don’t miss this part where Schiller shares some details about what’s been happening behind the scenes around Apple’s pro product lines.

The overarching marketing message is about listening to pro customers. Schiller also shared some details with Roger Cheng, at CNET, about how customer feedback shaped the design of the new keyboard:

A few years back, we decided that while we were advancing the butterfly keyboard, we would also – specifically for our pro customer – go back and really talk to many pro customers about what they most want in a keyboard and did a bunch of research. That’s been a really impressive project, the way the engineering team has gotten into the physiology of typing and the psychology of typing – what people love. […]

As we started to investigate specifically what pro users most wanted, a lot of times they would say, “I want something like this Magic Keyboard, I love that keyboard.” And so the team has been working on this idea of taking that core technology and adapting it to the notebook, which is a different implementation than the desktop keyboard, and that’s what we’ve come up with [for] this new keyboard. We’re doing both in advancing the butterfly keyboard, and we’re creating this new Magic Keyboard for our Pro notebooks.

This all sounds great, but the question remains about what had changed at Apple, that caused them to ship the butterfly keyboard after they’d been shipping laptops that everyone loved for years before that¹.

If I had to wager a guess, I’d say what changed is caution. The iPad, and above all the iPhone, have an aura of caution around them. While the iPhone does take an occasional risk, like removing the headphone jack, for the most part it feels like they aren’t released until they are perfect. Removing the home button from the iPhone X is a great recent example². I’ve yet to see anyone point out what a triumph that was. The iPhone’s core mechanical button was replaced by gestures, and people barely noticed. Gestures! The iPhone X’s home gestures are the satisfying crack of the ball meeting the sweet spot when you’ve hit a home run. It’s unequivocal proof that Apple’s still got it, and the fact that nobody’s even talking about it is illustrative of how much of a grand slam it was.

Other times caution means holding back, the iPad’s clumsy multi-tasking gestures haven’t been allowed touch the iPad’s core user experience of using one app at a time³. Because they just aren’t ready yet, putting them front-and-center in the iPad user experience would be a butterfly-keyboard-like catastrophe.

It feels to me like whatever mechanism Apple uses to refine great ideas, and determine when to hold the lousy ones back, was absent from the Mac products that shipped from 2015-2018. Since then it’s been put back in place, the guard rails are back up.

Farhad Manjoo pens an opinion column with the bold title “Steve Jobs Was Right: Smartphones and Tablets Killed the P.C.”. With a title like that, I was hoping to see evidence of shifting behaviors in a broad spectrum of consumers, towards iPads and away from Macs. But, alas, the only shift seems to have been Manjoo himself, who now prefers to use an iPad:

Ultimately, it’s the ecosystem that explains why I can’t stop raving about the iPad. When it came out, the big knock on the iPad was that it was just a big phone; today, that’s what I love about it — like the Watch or AirPods, the iPad feels intuitive and natural to me because it works just like the device I use most often, my phone.

Like a phone, in most scenarios I find the iPad to be faster, more portable and easier to use and maintain than any traditional P.C. I’ve ever owned. The iPad’s limited screen space and emphasis on full-screen apps also makes for fewer distractions than on a traditional personal computer. The iPad, like my phone, lets me log in to my bank using my face; the Mac, in 2019, doesn’t even have a touch screen.

I’m convinced that perception of the iPad online is warped by it being a great device for writing¹. The thing about writing is that it’s a baseline use case for a device, because everyone does it (even if it’s just sending text messages). As a result, it’s one of the most well-supported use cases on the device, and by extension it’s one of the most common types of apps developers create. This is why, for example, there are a seemingly endless supply of great writing apps on the iPad, but only a couple of great image editors, and only one great video editor. For each of those tasks you’re walking up a scale of how common the task is, and how much out-of-the-box support you get for it as a developer. So it’s a great device for writing, and it’s natural for writers to share their opinions online, because hey, that’s a great use of writing! So when you read opinions around online, it’s usually writers saying they’ve managed to make it work for themselves, who have one of the best supported workflows on the device.

The only time Manjoo breaks out from his own workflow is in references a conversation with Dan Seifert, deputy editor at The Verge:

The iPad still can’t do everything a laptop can, and I still have to log in to a “real” computer sometimes. I had a long chat recently with Dan Seifert, the deputy editor of the Verge, who uses an iPad every day on the subway but often finds the device infuriating.

“For someone like me, who’s been using a desktop operating system for a long time, there’s a lot of built-in conventions that I’m used to that can be frustrating,” Seifert said. In particular, the iPad doesn’t work with antiquated work flows that are built for PCs. Say you need to log into your company’s bespoke publishing system or expense program? It’s possible those won’t work on your iPad — at least not yet — because they were built for much older devices.

“Antiquated work flows”²? Really? What about the state-of-the-art way that the very website that his article is being shared on is designed and built? Sure, there’s going to be some organizational padding between an opinion columnist and those behind The New York Times digital products, but does that mean he’s really unaware that none of the tools they use to do their jobs even run on iPads?

Jason Snell writes about his podcast workflow for Six Colors. Apple Pencil is his favorite way of making audio edits:

When the new Apple Pencil came out a year ago, I integrated it into my iPad editing workflow. I can edit podcasts with the Apple Pencil at a pretty impressive rate of speed, and the precision of the Pencil means that I’m more inclined to make detailed edits on the iPad than I am when I’m editing on my Mac with Logic Pro X and a trackpad. In fact, every episode of The Incomparable that I’ve edited in the past four months has been done on my iPad Pro.

In a previous post on Apple Pencil, he elaborates more on why he likes it:

One of the great things about Ferrite is that it doesn’t have a preferred interface mode—you can use touch, keyboard shortcuts… or Apple Pencil. While I was trying out the new iPad Pros and the new Pencil, I decided to try to edit a podcast in Ferrite, and my mind was blown. Now I was tapping and sliding the pencil to delete extraneous audio. The latest update added support for double-tapping on the new Pencil, which I mapped to a play/pause toggle so I could edit more quickly without putting the Pencil down.

This is a great sign for the iPad; more than anything the success of the platform hinges on the interaction model. The only interaction I personally prefer on the iPad is scrolling, for everything else I prefer the Mac. I have an Apple Pencil, but only really use it occasionally for quick sketches. For me, the problem with the pencil for me is that, while you do get additional precision with it, everything else gets worse. Pinch to zoom, two finger tap to undo, and of course scrolling itself all range from difficult to impossible with the pencil in your hand. This combination of tradeoffs mirrors the trackpad on macOS. I use a Magic Trackpad 2 and I find it to also be poor for precise edits. But I still prefer it to a trackball or mouse, because, with multi-touch gestures, I find it to be a more comfortable device in sum, despite its shortcomings when making precise edits. Snell says in the post he’s using a trackpad when he edits on the Mac, so my follow-up question would be how does he thinking editing on the Mac with a mouse stacks up?

Snell is going to continue doing most of his podcast editing on iPad, but he still needs to use his Mac as the final step in his workflow because the audio plugins that give him the best results simply aren’t available on iOS:

Now here’s the tough one, one I don’t have a good answer for as yet. As cool as it is that I edit every episode of The Incomparable on my iPad, the fact is that all the audio files for that episode are prepped on my Mac before they get to my iPad. I sync audio tracks using a proprietary tool, then use iZotope RX to remove background noise, and finally use a compressor (currently it’s Klevgrand’s Korvpressor, but it’s the latest in a string of ones I’ve used, they’re like Spın̈al Tap drummers) to balance the volume of audio across different tracks.

Ferrite includes a compressor plug-in and a volume-leveling preprocessing feature, neither of which can I get to generate the output I desire. Korvpressor has an iOS version that I can use as a plug-in in Ferrite as I do on the Mac with Logic Pro X, but the iPad version crashes reliably, so I can’t use it. And there’s absolutely nothing I’ve found on iOS that can match the quality of noise and echo removal that iZotope provides on the desktop.

Of all the creative industries, audio is probably the one that clashes the most with iOS, both in terms of the business model and the user interface. On the business side, while all pro creative apps have cottage industries of plugins that spring up around them, for audio it’s simply on another level. I don’t see how audio plugin companies can adapt to the app store pricing race to the bottom when plugin bundles routinely run in the thousands of dollars. And on the OS side of things, the typical way of working is to have many different plugins with their own windows all running in a host DAW, which is antithetical to how iOS works¹. The audio industry adapting to the iPad is going to be a difficult process.