DogTime > FaceTime
Pop-upView Separately

DogTime > FaceTime

A Few Words on the App Store

There are two articles on major publications covering Apple’s release of new guidelines this morning that quote me/Read It Later (one on the BBC and one on AP).

As both articles mention Read It Later’s recent rejection and my response to it, it does imply that I have a negative view towards the app store.  (No fault to the writers of these articles, they only have so much space).

I wanted to make it clear that despite Read It Later and the App Review Team’s up and down past, I still hold both them and the iOS platform in the highest regard.

There is simply no other platform I enjoy developing on more than iOS.  Hands down, not even a close second.  I owe the app store the very fact that Read It Later supports my livelihood.  I’m not sure of any other distribution channel that makes it so easy for me to push a product out to a worldwide audience.

It seems that I’m not the only one that feels this way as there are over 250,000 applications in the App Store today.  And despite a few hiccups here and there, if you consider how large a number that is to process, the review team have done a damn fine job.

The release of these guidelines, and all of the other improvements the app store have brought to developers this year shows that Apple is absolutely doing the best they can to listen to us and help us succeed.

The only continual qualm I have is simply the difficulty in reaching anyone at app review.  The guidelines mention that it’s possible to appeal to an app review board but make no mention of how to do that.  I’ve also found a lot of emails to appreview@apple.com tend to go answered or seem canned in response.  I realize the problem has got to be simply handling the sheer volume of emails and I’m confident they are working on a way to help improve developer communication.  Today was a big step in that direction.

ShareKit

screens

Overview

ShareKit is an open source framework that can be dropped into any iPhone or iPad app to instantly add full sharing capabilities.

How It Works

Integration is super easy. A developer can take a url, image, piece of text, or file and just say “hey ShareKit, share this”.  ShareKit will present the user with a list of services that support the content they are sharing, handle logging them into the service, prompt for any additional information such as a caption, and display an activity indicator while uploading. ShareKit makes it easy to access individual services as well.  A developer can simply write something like: [SHKTwitter shareURL:@”http://getsharekit.com”]; ShareKit will shorten the URL, present a dialog to let a user write a message, and even hold onto to the message to send later if the user is offline.

Features

The initial version of ShareKit already has support for Delicious, Email, Facebook, Google Reader, Pinboard, Read It Later, and Twitter.  It supports four types of content: links, images, text, and files. ShareKit even works offline.  Users can share items without an internet connection.  ShareKit will hold onto the items until a connection is available. The UI is also completely customizable. It is very easy to make ShareKit match the look of your existing application.

Developer Benefit

For developers, adding sharing features to an app is a source of dread.  It takes a LOT of work for each service that you add.  You have to learn each service’s API, probably learn OAuth, design and build UI to handle all the interactions of logging in and collecting information, and write code to make requests and handle all possible errors.  You have to do this for every service and every service has a unique API.  It makes it very difficult to add all of the services your users request. In the iOS SDK we have access to MFMailComposeViewController.  This is an Apple provided view that lets apps present an email dialog to the user.  You feed it some starting values like a subject line and body content and it pops over your existing application, lets the user do their thing and goes away when they are done. This is what I wanted in my apps.  I wanted the same controller but for Twitter, Delicious, Evernote, and everything else.   That’s what ShareKit is.

User Benefit

As it exists today, the user experience for sharing is incredibly inconsistent across all apps.  Because of the work that goes into adding each service, the services supported in an app are entirely dependent on what the developer has time to implement.  Ideally a user should be able to use any app they want and be able to share with all of the services they use.  By making sharing features a trivial development step, I’m hoping that we can see movement in a direction where we don’t have to pick our apps based on what services they support.

Additional Services and Further Development

ShareKit is completely open source and anyone can contribute patches or additional sharing services.  Modules for Evernote, Flickr, and Dropbox are already underway.  When new services are added, they can simply be dropped into any existing ShareKit project. If you are a developer and would like to help contribute to ShareKit, a good place to start is the list of issues and feature requests.