The Log

I’ve known about the apps and good repute of the folks at Overcommitted Apps for a while, but had never used their offerings myself until recently. By chance, I recently purchased two and have been really pleased with the quality.

As always, it’s the little things that make the difference.

TripMix

I love iTunes and the iPod app on my iPhone. But TripMix has been a welcome addition to my phone. It selects artists randomly and then plays 3 consecutive songs from each. It’s a great way to listen to some of the music that doesn’t come up in your handcrafted playlists.

The aesthetics of the app are also extremely well done. It’s not all good though — the app has to be running at all times, which is inconvenient at times.

Ember

An iPhone client for your Campfire account(s), Ember is another beautiful app. And there is a nice touch that makes it easier to use on the iPhone’s small screen, seen here:

Being able to quickly refer back through the day’s conversation and then instantly pop back to the latest update is well implemented — almost a necessity to make a service like Campfire usable on a small device.

Highrise

Lastly, the guys at Overcommitted were hired by 37signals to create an iPhone app for Highrise. It has all the polish you would expect with these names behind it.

The ability to add a voice memo is handy, making good use of the phone’s hardware.

(One caveat: I am in no way associated with Jordan Chang)

See For Yourself

Why take the time to write about these three different apps? Companies like Overcommitted are exactly why I love the Mac community and indie devs — they pour their hearts into what they do and the results speak for themselves.

This is just a small taste of what I love about using a Mac.

All the great developers who created these application make your product better. Please do the right thing and treat them like the professionals they are as you move us all down the path to touch computing and your closed marketplace.

Sincerely yours,

Devoted Mac ecosystem consumer.

There has been a lot of great discussion over this issue in the past, but I’m still left wishing for some consistency. Two recent downloads illustrated this nicely:

Here’s a lovely illustration that comes with the newest release of Camino. Unfortunately, it’s only that — an illustration. It does a decent job of describing to the user one possible method of getting the application into their Applications folder.

But how many users attempt to perform the action by clicking and dragging on the illustration? I’d guess it’s a significant number.

The Chrome for Mac beta installer doesn’t look quite as nice, but at least the Applications folder alias on the bottom works for a drag and drop operation.

Now if we could only expect the same behaviour every time.