It's easy to buy an app from the Apple App store isn't it, go into the app store, find the app you want, click on the price and enter your password. Voila. Couldn't be easier. Could it?
Well, as you can probably guess, I'm going to disagree.
Yes, if you know exactly the app you want, it's really easy, You follow the instructions below. What if you only know your own requirements. e.g. I want an application to read RSS feeds.
Well, you can go on the best selling lists, you can search the hot apps, if you've already bought a few apps you can use the Genius feature, but these avoid the actual problem of buying apps for a platform like IOS.
For many years we've used Mice and Keyboard to activate things on a screen in front of us, but IOS invites us to get literally hands on. Some of the functionality is baked into the Operating System, but some of it is based around the way that the Application has been designed. You immerse yourself into these apps and the way you use them makes it a personal choice or feeling as to whether they work for you or not.
To use my own example, I bought an iPad and after using Newsfire for many years on OS X, I wanted a little more portability and the ability to Sync my RSS feeds.
At this point, I'd already purchased the highly recommended Pulse, which was undoubtably a fantastic looking RSS feed reader, it wasn't going to be usable for me though. After purchasing the app, I quickly found it got in the way and didn't allow me to easily browse through feeds of 50 posts. It was essentially unusable for my needs. £1.79 down the drain. Yes, it's ONLY £1.79, but I will never use Pulse again.
After doing some research on the web, I headed into the app store to see what was available. My biggest problem was that I don't pick up 10 feeds, but more than 100 feeds every day, with some publishing over 50 articles a day.
My Actual requirements were
* Can Sync with Google Reader
* Can Handle hundreds of Feeds
* Can cope with many posts
* Need to be able to quickly mark entire feeds as read after I'd browsed through them
A quick flick through the App store brought me a plethora of options, but with Prices ranging from Free to £2.99, I didn't want to be wasting more money and here's the point I wished to make.
The Apple App store does not seem to make it easy for Developers to provide try before you buy version of their apps as many traditional Desktop apps do, or maybe developers don't want to go to the extra effort.
The reality was that after looking through the selection, I downloaded all of the free options and after playing for a few days, I picked Feeddler as my app of choice, and bought the paid for version. My Slight bugbear with this was that it involved setting the app up again, fortunately with Google Reader in the Background, there wasn't too much to configure in this app.
The bottom line is that purchasing an App from the App store is easy, far too easy sometimes, but it's also really, really difficult to know whether you're going to like an app without trying it. Screenshots work for many desktop apps, but certainly not for IOS apps.
Well, as you can probably guess, I'm going to disagree.
Yes, if you know exactly the app you want, it's really easy, You follow the instructions below. What if you only know your own requirements. e.g. I want an application to read RSS feeds.
Well, you can go on the best selling lists, you can search the hot apps, if you've already bought a few apps you can use the Genius feature, but these avoid the actual problem of buying apps for a platform like IOS.
For many years we've used Mice and Keyboard to activate things on a screen in front of us, but IOS invites us to get literally hands on. Some of the functionality is baked into the Operating System, but some of it is based around the way that the Application has been designed. You immerse yourself into these apps and the way you use them makes it a personal choice or feeling as to whether they work for you or not.
To use my own example, I bought an iPad and after using Newsfire for many years on OS X, I wanted a little more portability and the ability to Sync my RSS feeds.
At this point, I'd already purchased the highly recommended Pulse, which was undoubtably a fantastic looking RSS feed reader, it wasn't going to be usable for me though. After purchasing the app, I quickly found it got in the way and didn't allow me to easily browse through feeds of 50 posts. It was essentially unusable for my needs. £1.79 down the drain. Yes, it's ONLY £1.79, but I will never use Pulse again.
After doing some research on the web, I headed into the app store to see what was available. My biggest problem was that I don't pick up 10 feeds, but more than 100 feeds every day, with some publishing over 50 articles a day.
My Actual requirements were
* Can Sync with Google Reader
* Can Handle hundreds of Feeds
* Can cope with many posts
* Need to be able to quickly mark entire feeds as read after I'd browsed through them
A quick flick through the App store brought me a plethora of options, but with Prices ranging from Free to £2.99, I didn't want to be wasting more money and here's the point I wished to make.
The Apple App store does not seem to make it easy for Developers to provide try before you buy version of their apps as many traditional Desktop apps do, or maybe developers don't want to go to the extra effort.
The reality was that after looking through the selection, I downloaded all of the free options and after playing for a few days, I picked Feeddler as my app of choice, and bought the paid for version. My Slight bugbear with this was that it involved setting the app up again, fortunately with Google Reader in the Background, there wasn't too much to configure in this app.
The bottom line is that purchasing an App from the App store is easy, far too easy sometimes, but it's also really, really difficult to know whether you're going to like an app without trying it. Screenshots work for many desktop apps, but certainly not for IOS apps.
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