On Wednesday morning Apple revealed the latest stats on iTunes video: users have downloaded 1 billion TV episodes and 380 million movies total, at the rate of 800,000 TV episodes and over 350,000 movies per day. Combined with the company’s recent revelation that it has 575 million active iTunes accounts now, one interesting takeaway is that, while the number of iTunes accounts has grown substantially in the last five years, the amount users are spending on video hasn’t changed very much.

Horace Dediu made some calculations and plotted all of the data on a chart over at his Asymco blog:

Source: Asymco

Based on these latest numbers, Dediu calculated how much iTunes users spend per year on different types of media. He says it’s “about $9/yr on Software, $2/yr on books, $16/yr on apps $12/yr on music and $4/yr on video.”

On one hand, this chart backs up something we already know: that iOS apps — via a growing number of iPhone and iPad users — has been driving those iTunes account signups. As new subscribers arrive, the category of spending seeing the most growth is apps, at $16 per user, per year. In 2008, when the App Store opened, users were only spending about $4 per year apiece on apps; that number has quadrupled in almost six years.

But what’s interesting is that even though Apple says there have been 1 billion TV episodes downloaded and 380 million movies, that number spent per user is still relatively small, hovering around $4 per user, per year. (That’s about the price of one movie download on iTunes, btw.) And that’s even with the advent and growth of the Apple TV.

Ebooks are still the smallest category, and also Apple’s newest. However, the fact that so little — just $2 per user, per year — is spent on them in iTunes makes Apple’s recent claim that it has 20 percent of the ebook market seem a bit questionable.

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When Microsoft quietly released its own editor for Office documents on the iPhone last week, it left something out: a version for the iPad. If the iPhone screen is too small for you to consider viewing and editing important documents, no worries, you still have ways to do so on the larger screen of the iPad.

Here are the currently available options that will allow you to view and edit your Office documents on Apple’s tablet.

While it is true that the existing Office app does not have a custom user interface for the iPad, the iPhone version of Microsoft’s Mobile App can be installed and run on the iPad with 2x video scaling. This may seem a little awkward at first, but you can gain access to all of the features offered on the iPhone version of the app.

While the Word document editor does not scale well by pinching and zooming using the iPad’s 2x video scaling, the Excel and PowerPoint editors do a much better job. You can zoom in an out of both Excel and PowerPoint documents to gain a better view of the document on the iPad.

If you are an Office 365 subscriber, the main advantage in using this versus the web versions of Office apps is that you can store and access your files for offline editing. Unfortunately the features available in the native iPhone app are a bit lacking when compared to their Web App versions.

Microsoft’s free Office Web Apps work just fine within Safari on the iPad. Better, in fact, since they have many features the official iPhone app lacks. For instance, the editor for Word in the web version has more features than the iOS native version.  Features like being able to change the font, adjust the document’s margins, insert tables, and even change the selected text’s style.

The major problem using Microsoft’s web apps for Office is that you cannot access the apps, or any of the files for that matter, without an internet connection.  So you either have a more fully featured web app that requires internet access, or a lightweight native iPhone app that can work with your documents offline.

A minor annoyance is that when you run Office on the web from within Safari, you still have Safari’s toolbar as well as its tab bar present at the top of the screen. This is true even when adding a shortcut link to any one of Microsoft’s web apps on the home screen. Someone needs to inform Microsoft how to set the Apple-specific meta tag keys to enable full-screen mode in online Office. Until then, there are browser alternatives like Atomic ($1.99 Universal),  Mercury ($0.99, Universal) and Dolphin (Free, iPad) that will allow you to enter into full- screen browsing mode with a single tap. It works very much like the iPhone version of Safari that does support full-screen browsing, in landscape mode only.

Microsoft only supports SkyDrive as a storage option for iOS users that access either the mobile or web app versions of Office. If you are using SkyDrive as your document repository, the dedicated SkyDrive (free, Universal) app for iOS supports viewing Office documents. You can even download the documents for viewing when you are not connected to the internet.

The one unique thing you can do from within the SkyDrive app is create links for sharing SkyDrive documents with others. Sharing links to documents can be a more effective means of sending documents as the URL can be passed along via private Twitter message, a Facebook message, or even an SMS text message.  The Office Mobile for iPhone app can only email the document as an attachment.

If you are only interested in viewing your Office documents on your iPad, there are alternatives that support more than just one SkyDrive account. GoodReader ($4.99, iPad) will allow you to connect to multiple SkyDrive accounts as well as Dropbox, SugarSync, Google Drive, Box, and any other WebDAV, AFP, SMB, FTP or SFTP server. While it may appear that an app like GoodReader is all you could ask for, keep in mind that the one thing it does not do is create a link to the document on SkyDrive to share with others.

What I believe is the best Office document solution available on the iPad today is Byte²’s Office² ($7.99, iPad). Like GoodReader, it offers online access to a wide variety of storage solutions. And like the web version of Microsoft’s Office apps, it supports a full set of editing features for all Office documents.  If you are either a DataViz DocsToGo Premium or a QuickOffice Pro HD user, you owe it to yourself to take a look at what Office² has to offer — it has many of the advanced features you are likely looking for.

One such feature is the ability to track changes when editing your Word documents. Being a native app, you can also download your documents and edit them offline. Office² also looks great on the iPad and gives you maximum screen real estate for editing. While you can email a document as an attachment like you can in the Office for iPhone app, you cannot share a link to your SkyDrive documents as you can in the native SkyDrive app for iOS.

You don’t need an Office 365 subscription to use Office² as a documents editor on your iPad.  This is similar to how things work with the documents you store on SkyDrive and edit while online with the free Web Apps for Office.  You only need a subscription if you want to use Microsoft’s  Office Mobile for iPhone app to edit your documents offline.

For Apple users, when you do sign up for an Office 365 account, you only get access to the previously available Office 2011 for Mac.  Chances are you already have this version installed on your Mac.  What you do not get is access to the Office on Demand feature that allows you to download full versions of the office suite onto any Mac you may be using; this feature is for Windows only.  Since you can still pick up a 3- install, 3-user, never-expiring license of Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac on Amazon for $125, it hardly seems worth it to start spending the current annual subscription rate of $99 per year for exactly the same product.

For now at least, the best solution for viewing and editing your Microsoft Office documents on your iPad is to use GoodReader if you just want to view your files, and Office² if you want to edit them.  The only Microsoft app that you may need to install on your iPad is the native SkyDrive app, as it is the only way to share links to documents that you have stored on your SkyDrive account.  In a nutshell, Microsoft’s Office 365 just is not quite ready for the Apple platform.  Not yet at least.

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There’s a new band of pirates loose in the Valley, and they’re out to grab the best and the brightest from companies like Netflix, Apple, Amazon and Intel: Cupertino-based stealth startup Black Pearl Systems quietly has been assembling a killer team that is out to “create a category-defining product to tackle a problem that faces billions of technology users,” as the company likes to say in its job postings.

Understatement may not be Black Pearl’s thing, but the company has some impressive creds to back up those big words: Black Pearl CEO Tim Bucher used to be in charge of engineering at Apple, where he played a key role in products like the Mac mini and the iPod. Content CTO Scott Smyers was a long-time Sony executive who also founded and led the DLNA consortium.

Senior Systems Engineer Joseph Palmer was in charge of hardware engineering at Danger. Co-founder Ain McKendrick also co-founded Palm. UX Director Jeff Ma designed the user interface of the Apple TV. Founding team member Greg Orzell used to be Cloud Architect at Netflix.

The list goes on. LinkedIn includes close to 40 people currently working for Black Pearl Systems, and the roster of employees reads a bit like a who’s who of digital media and mobile hardware development. The company was able to hire a total of 15 people away from Netflix, including both device and cloud specialists. A number of people worked for Danger at some point of their career, and Apple, YouTube, Microsoft, TiVo, Roku and Amazon’s secretive LAb126 R&D unit are all represented as well.

So what does Black Pearl do? It’s a very secretive stealth company, but I’ve been talking to sources, scouring job offers, Linkedin profiles, trademark applications and other bits of information, and here’s what I’ve been able to gather:

• Black Pearl Systems is a hardware company. The startup recently became a member of the Consumer Electronics Association, and it has already booked a suite for the 2014 CES in Las Vegas.
• One of its first hardware products will likely be an Android tablet. I’ve seen photos of a tablet that looks remarkably similar to the phased-out Sony Tablet S, complete with the slanted look that made the S a great coffee table product – which is where Black Pearl wants its hardware product to sit.
• There’s apparently also going to be a companion device that matches the tablet in colors, and is in all likelihood going to be used to stream content wirelessly to your TV.
• This is about way more than just hardware. A bunch of folks at Black Pearl have serious cloud creds, and the company is looking to hire more cloud and big data people “to build massively scalable services that will act as the brains for a seamless user experience across billions of connected devices,” as one of the job offers on its home page states.
• To that effect, Black Pearl is also building apps for existing Android and iOS mobile devices, as well as apps for PCs and Macs.
• The company has registered a number of trademarks in recent weeks, including for terms like “home data center,” “personal data center,” “data fabric” and “data mesh.” Doesn’t really sound like a brand for anything you’d expect to buy one day? Then how about this one: Last month, Black Pearl filed a trademark registration for “Lyve.”
• These guys really like that whole pirate theme. Not only is the company’s logo a pirate ship, word is that there’s a life-sized cardboard cutout of Jack Sparrow in Black Pearl’s office.

What does all of this mean? My hunch is that Black Pearl is working on some kind of home media platform that’s based on Android and extends to your existing mobile devices. Something like a Sonos, but for all your media. Or kind of like Plex, but for people who aren’t geeks.

The centerpiece may be a dedicated media tablet that doubles as a remote control and connects your TV screen to the cloud, and your existing devices will hook into the platform and be able to get your media instantly, where ever you are.

Of course, that’s just an educated guess — but I’m pretty sure Black Pearl Systems is up to something big.

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Let’s face it: Many of us live on our smartphones. We use them for mail, reading documents, checking our Twitter feed, for entertainment. We use them to run our lives and one of the biggest issues about that dependency is how hard it is to find what you need in the course of your day.

That’s the problem Gord Mangione, the former Microsoft exec in charge of SQL Server before moving on to XenSource and Citrix, is attacking with Tipbit, his Seattle-based startup that’s emerging from stealth this week. For Mangione, the tipping point was search. He could never find what he needed on his device — not on his current iPhone and not on the Blackberry he used before. That inability to find what he wanted fast led inexorably to Tipbit, which has about $2 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Ignition Partners and employees.

“Data is locked in different apps and the amount of email I can store locally is insufficient. All I do on my phone is read mail, delete the messages I don’t care about and wait to get to my ‘real’ machine to do anything useful in business,” Mangione said in a recent interview. The problem now is that the smartphone has become that “real” machine. And it’s of limited utility because, in Mangione’s words, “search remains terrible and I’m constantly switching between apps to find what I want. Why is the calendar, contacts and email all separate on an iPhone? Why can’t it all be in a single app?”

He’s hoping that Tipbit will be that single aggregation point to serve up what you need about your next meeting, your last email, quickly and unobtrusively. Users can keep using Gmail but have to allow Tipbit on grant it read-only access (via OAth authentication) to their various LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and other accounts. From all that information, Tipbit creates a private index in the cloud, accessible only by you.

“To make this work we have to index –but not store — your email,” Mangione said. Once that’s done, you can, with a single swipe option, bring up all the relevant information for an upcoming event. If you’re about to meet with Bill Gates, for example, you can pull up all the messages relevant to that meeting, what he’s been tweeting about, what his LinkedIn profile says, Google searches about him, all in one place.

“Back at Microsoft before we met with press, PR would hand us a backgrounder with all the information about that reporter — what they covered, what they last wrote etc. This is the same idea,” Mangione said.

Right now, Tipbit is for iPhone only and folks can use it for free — without fear of ads. The idea is once folks start using Tipbit in a business context,  to start charging the company for that use.

About two months ago, the company decided to go “hardcore on mobile only,” Mangione said because that’s where the action is.

He cited figures that showed that two years ago 55 percent of all messages were read on a desktop machine. Fast forward to last month when 23 percent of all messages opened were read on iPhones alone. And less than 20 percent were read on Microsoft Outlook.

There are other tools out there to help make sense of the iPhone firehose. Sunrise, for example, just updated its iOS calendar app to integrate Foursquare, Crunchbase and other site info, but the idea behind the more business-focused Tipbit is to bring in calendar, news, email and other data all into one place.

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Well, this is embarrassing. Researchers from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany have figured out that the security provided in the iPhone’s Wi-Fi hotspot isn’t actually all that secure. In fact, they’ve shown that the randomly generated password that Apple provides can be cracked in under a minute.

In a paper published this month, the trio of researchers writes:

We show that Apple iOS generates weak default passwords which makes the mobile hotspot feature of Apple iOS susceptible to brute force attacks on the WPA2 handshake. More precisely, we observed that the generation of default passwords is based on a word list, of which only 1,842 entries are taken into consideration. In addition, the process of selecting words from that word list is not random at all, resulting in a skewed frequency distribution and the possibility to compromise a hotspot connection in less than 50 seconds.

Basically, the list the passwords for protecting the iPhone’s mobile hotspot are drawn from is just too small. And the “randomly generated” passwords are not random enough, according to their findings, which makes the passwords incredibly easy to crack for someone who knows what they’re donig.

To be clear, it’s the Wi-Fi hotspot protection that has been found to be weak — not the main password for the iPhone. But it’s still a vital security concern: if someone can get into your internet connection, it can attack devices that are connected to it.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The report concerns Wi-Fi password security in iOS 6, so Apple has an opportunity to fix the problem before the public release of iOS 7 sometime this fall.

Don’t feel too smug if you’re using something other than an Apple device. The researchers note that the iPhone’s hotspot isn’t the only one at risk: “Spot tests show that other mobile platforms are also affected by similar problems.” That includes Windows 8, which by default uses only eight-digit passwords, and modified versions of Android: “[W]hile the official version of Android generates strong passwords, some vendors modified the Wi-Fi related components utilized in their devices and weakened the algorithm of generating default passwords.”

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Some good news for premium cable and sports fans today: Apple on Wednesday said it has signed deals to bring HBO Go and WatchESPN to its Apple TV set-top box.

HBO Go is only available to HBO subscribers, so this isn’t a solution for cord-cutters. However, it’s good for those who want to access to the cable channel’s backlog of content: customers can watch any of HBO’s shows at any time via the HBO Go channel on Apple TV. HBO Go has already been available for Apple’s mobile devices and on competing platforms Roku and Xbox 360.

WatchESPN is also a subscriber-only channel. Those who are signed up via their local cable provider can watch programming on Apple TV from across the company’s channels: ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, ESPN3, curated clips from ESPN.com and others.

There are some limitations, however: DirecTV and Charter subscribers won’t be able to watch HBO Go on Apple TV, and DirecTV and Dish subscribers similarly will not be able to access WatchESPN on the device, AllThingsD reports.

Three other channels are also coming. The U.K.’s SkyNews will be viewable on demand or live in the U.S., U.K. and Ireland. Programming from Japan’s Crunchyroll, an anime and news channel, will be available worldwide one hour after airing. Music channel Qello has free and paid subscriptions available.

None of this makes Apple TV a viable cable replacement for fans of premium content and live sports, because Apple TV still requires that pesky cable subscription. However, Apple is slowly but surely broadening its living room play to compete with Xbox, Roku and others. Apple’s longterm TV strategy is still very much TBD, but this is a good move toward getting Apple customers used to the idea of watching their favorite content via the Apple TV and not live via a cable TV subscription.

With the announcement of new content, Apple also gave the latest stats on iTunes downloads: 1 billion TV episodes and 380 million movies have been purchased in total. Meanwhile, 800,000 TV episodes and over 350,000 movies are bought each day.

This post was updated with more information at 7:30 a.m. PT and again at 8:45 a.m. with details about cable subscriber limitations.

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App creator Phill Ryu is a proven hitmaker. Currently working on his fifth iOS app, he is respected among his peers for his eye for design, his understanding of what users want, and his skills as a great software marketer. And right now he’s wrestling with one big uncertainty going into the launch of his company’s latest app, Hatch: what, exactly, to charge for it.

Phill Ryu, co-founder of Impending

Ever since the iOS App Store launched in 2008 and became a new distribution method for independent mobile developers worldwide, the notion of what an app is worth — and what developers should charge for an app – has changed. At first, if you wanted to be paid for your work in the iOS App Store, you simply put a price on the software — around 99 cents — and if your app was any good, saw the money (well, 70 percent of the money) start to come in.

But the golden age of the paid app is very much in the past. If you want to make money — especially if you’re making a game, like Ryu — the trend for the last several years (which still holds true today) is the free-to-play/freemium model. In-app purchases allow developers to put their apps on the Store for “free” and charge for upgrades within the app. Just about a quarter of revenue from iPhone apps in the U.S. come from paid apps — but nearly three quarters of iPhone app revenue comes from apps that are free with in-app purchases, according to Distimo.

There’s also plenty of anecdotal evidence that the companies that do the best with this model tend to be larger companies and not smaller, independent developers. The failure of Gasketball and Bombcats are some of the best-known examples of independent game disappointments — from a revenue perspective. The problem hasn’t been getting critical praise or promotion from Apple, as those and Outwitters’ flameout showed last year. The problem is in betting enough people will pay for things inside games to make up for all the freeloaders — also known as the Zynga model.

Setting up in-app purchases is a lot more involved and more resource-intensive, especially for the “indies” that don’t have a ton of resources, Ryu explained to me over coffee in San Francisco last week:

“A lot more money is being made in the top-grossing apps, but customer behavior has fundamentally changed and they are going to free-to-play. That’s sad to me — the paid app market was super friendly to these indies. Not only was it super inexpensive to implement that monetization model … to implement free-to-play you have to analytics, and it really encroaches on the design of your app. It doesn’t even work on many kinds of apps.”

A preview of Hatch on an iPhone

Ryu is no whiner. He thinks a lot about app sales dynamics — he’s been making software since he was 14 — and at 25, admits that he probably loves the App Store “more than 95 percent of the people that work at Apple.” But his dilemma is not unique: every smaller developer — including plenty who don’t have near the successful track record that Ryu and his Impending co-founder David Lanham do — are facing the pricing question. For now, he said, they’re leaning toward paid. But he keeps going back and forth.

The app Ryu is working on right now is a long-held vision of his that draws on the old NeoPets and Sim City concepts combined with our constantly present mobile devices. Hatch is due out later this summer — if you want a peek at what’s coming, check out the incredibly detailed teaser site set up for it.

If you see that page and even look back at the apps Ryu’s helped to bring to fruition — from early iOS gaming hit The Heist to Clear and more — it’s clear that these are high-quality apps. So how — and how much — should he and his partners be charging for years’ worth of work? Should they give it away for free and cross their fingers that some people will pay up?

It obviously does work for a lot of developers, even smaller ones. FiftyThree, which gives its Paper iPad app away for free, charges for additional features like pens and tools — and is consistently one of the top-grossing iPad apps. CEO Georg Petschnigg finds paid apps are limiting, because once the price of an app is set, it’s harder to take features away in future versions because people have paid for them. That, he said, can lead to bloated software.

“In-app purchase is a tremendous opportunity to offer something (like how a) chef only puts what people want to eat on a menu, we see in-app purchase as a mechanism for paring down the feature set and offering up what people want to buy,” he told me. “It keeps the software footprint small and efficient. And from a design persepctive it’s incredibly liberating.”

On the business side, he points out it means they’re not limiting their value per customer either.

The decision on pricing comes down to the type of app a developer is looking for and the relationship they want with the customer.

“I think that if we’re going to be doing buinesss here we should probably be making money off of the long-term relationship with the pets, instead of charging up front,” Ryu said. “So free-to-play matches a pet and that kind of experience. But on the other hand, we’re also interested in creating that kind of long-term relationship, and Hatch is supposed to be a happy place you go to … is it better to ask for money once or ask twice?”

This question comes up as there’s a bit of a movement afoot that smaller developers should just charge more — and forget nickel-and-dimeing their users via in-app payments. Right now $4.99 may stick out as an expensive mobile app. But in proper perspective of the software industry as a whole, $5 is nothing. It’s a coffee and a bagel in the morning. Minecraft on the iPhone is $6.99, but as a console game, on the Xbox it’s more than twice that.

Productivity suite Readdle works in a similar field as Paper, but it went the other way: charging more. Readdle, which now has 40 employees worldwide, charges as much as $7 for its apps, and they too are often listed among the highest-grossing iOS apps. And like others in the App Store, they’re seeing those numbers — download and revenue — slipping, even with promotion from Apple. Just moving to in-app purchase isn’t necessarily the obvious solution. CEO Igor Zhadanov said he wasn’t sure his users would like being prompted to unlock a certain calendaring feature while trying to get work done.

So Readdle is looking to move some of its business beyond the iOS App Store: by building up its software into an enterprise product because “we don’t want to have to rely on the App Store.”

For Hatch, as of last week at least, Ryu is thinking of charging up front. “But, then again, balanced against this past week of wondering where the paid market will be going, maybe we’ll start paid and move downward in price.”

“It’s a new world that we have to figure out or else we’re going to be stuck in the old dying world. I saw that happen with Mac developers: when the App Store opened up on the iPhone, they had a big head start, but out of matters of principles and politics, didn’t (take it). I saw so many Mac developers not make that transition,” said Ryu. “We have to make that next jump. I hope we’re not those people.”

Thumbnail image credit: Kelly Bumford via Compfight cc

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When it comes to aiding someone who is emotionally driven to kill him or herself, the right response can literally be a matter of life and death. In order to help those in crisis, Apple has updated Siri’s search response system to field suicide-related requests with an approach designed to drive users to seek help as quickly as possible.

With an update to phones running iOS 6 and iOS 7, Siri now reacts with a strong, two-fold approach when mentions of suicide come up. First, the assistant offers the number of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline and will even offer to call directly — a new feature that makes seeking help as simple as clicking “yes” on the phone. If for whatever reason the user decides to select “no”, Siri does a search of all local suicide prevention centers, offering a list and directions powered by Yelp.

It’s clear from the update that Apple wants to prevent any potential response blunder and turn Siri into a usable tool for those in crisis to get the professional aid they need. But it’s also not the first company to target specific language towards suicidal users. Google has kept a list of “trigger search” keywords to indicate a user searching for suicide since 2010, and will also send back a suggestion to call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.

Like Google, Apple is hoping that its approach will prevent users from seeking desperate methods through its services — and will get a little help instead. And it’s needed in the wake of unsettling news last month, when the New York Times reported that more Americans are dying from suicide than car accidents.

Apple’s update may be a small step, but it is one that shows that the tech community is thinking about how its products are utilized by those in need. Siri’s response to that single question or statement could have a big impact, and now the little robotic assistant can better assist people in their darkest hours.

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There was only one new laptop launched at WWDC this year and there wasn’t very much new about it. The 2013 MacBook Air looks basically the same as it has for a few years: same thin silver package, same rounded corners, same clicky black keys. But people who’ve been using the new Airs — the 11-inch, starting at $999 and the 13-inch starting at $1,099 — say don’t let that sameness fool you. There’s a huge difference that you can’t see: super-long battery life.

Here are the main conclusions from the best reviews out there:

• The Verge spent time with the 13-inch Air and puts it this way: “13 hours and 29 minutes. That’s all you really need to know — that’s how long the new MacBook Air running Safari lasted running The Verge Battery Test, which cycles through a series of websites and images at 65 percent brightness.”
• Fortune tried out the 11-inch version and was quite happy though has one quibble: ”A week with the new 11-inch MacBook Air has convinced me that Apple’s hardware upgrade—minor as it may seem—will still be enough to convince some to upgrade or buy one for the first time based on excellent battery life alone. It doesn’t achieve 9 hours in-between charges with everyday use, but 8.5 hours of Web browsing is pretty close. And while I wish Apple would offer a build-to-order option for a higher-resolution screen—the current 1,366 x 768 resolution is really starting to feel cramped—it’s a small omission on an otherwise excellent device.”
• CNET is effusive about the battery (but strangely knocks it for not having a touchscreen): “It’s easy to say that this new version of the 13-inch MacBook Air is a modest step forward, with no physical changes to the exterior, and still no higher-res display, touch screen, or HDMI port. The battery life is a very big deal, however, and when you couple that with a $100 price cut on the base model, down to $1,099, the 13-inch MacBook Air is, despite not being the newest design on the block, still one of the most universally useful laptops you can buy.”
• PC Magazine got the 13-inch to last 15.5 hours, but also noted this: “The downside of the lower-clocked processor is that the MacBook Air is a bit slower on the multimedia benchmark tests (Handbrake and Photoshop CS6), where it lags the Windows systems with faster-clocked Core i5 processors. On the flipside, the MacBook Air is still two to four times faster than Intel Atom-powered Windows 8 slate tablets on the Handbrake test, and those Atom-powered tablets can’t run the Photoshop CS6 test at all.”

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Would you buy hardware from an iPad journal company? FiftyThree, the company behind one of the most beloved (and successful) iPad apps, Paper, is betting on it. And so is an impressive group of investors: on Tuesday the company plans to reveal it has nailed down a Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Bright Capital, Highline Ventures, SV Angel and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey.

Paper arrived in March 2012 and managed to wow a lot of iPad users immediately with its beautiful design. The app enabled users to create digital watercolors, drawings paintings, journals, outlines and more on the relatively large screen of the iPad. It was chosen as the best iPad app of the year by Apple at the end of last year.

It has also been one of the top-grossing apps: it regularly appears in the top 10 iPad apps that bring in the most money.

To date, Paper has 80 million downloads and the company says 80 million projects have been created with the app.

“Since we launched Paper we’ve been profitable,” co-founder and CEO Georg Petschnigg told me. ”But for us this [funding] is about taking business to the next level.”

For FiftyThree, that next level is about adding to its 22-person team (that’s split about even among designers and engineers in offices in Seattle and New York City). It’s also about more than one app. Petschnigg foresees expanding to an entire suite of software, services and hardware.

FiftyThree’s team is actually full of veterans of the hardware industry — people who worked on projects like Microsoft’s Xbox, Kinect and Courier, as well as Sonos — so it will be interesting to see what they come up with. An obvious pairing with the app would be a Paper-branded stylus, but Petschnigg wouldn’t elaborate on what kind of hardware they have in mind — or when it will arrive.

“We’ve been focused on iPad there, but the next part we’re working on is services that will start to answer the question of how people work together and collaborate,” he added. Without giving any more detail, he seemed to imply that collaboration means among several different platforms, not just Apple’s tablet.

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U.S. vs. Apple is in its third and final week, and Apple’s witnesses are now taking the stand. Here’s what you need to know so far:

• Fortune lists Apple’s witnesses for this week, with a reminder that all of their testimony has to be wrapped up by Wednesday because summations take place on Thursday and there’s no court on Friday. “Then Judge Cote will have to write her decision. The best estimate I’ve heard for how long she’ll need is three weeks, give or take a week.”
• Apple SVP Eddy Cue took the stand for most of the day Monday and was questioned by both DOJ and Apple attorneys. Publishers Marketplace reports, “Cue, as he did on Thursday, did not offer much in the way of relevant information that would affect the price-fixing case on either side. Instead his testimony provided lots of Steve Jobs nostalgia, with additional tidbits on the late Apple chief’s active involvement in the creation of the iBookstore and the agency model.”
• A lot of the questioning has centered around emails that Jobs wrote at the time of the launch of the iBookstore. In one, Jobs wrote “Wow, we have really lit the fuse on a powder keg.” The New York Times reports, “Mr. Cue said Mr. Jobs was remarking on the company’s ability to ’cause ripples’ in the e-book industry, which was then largely dominated by Amazon.”
• Jobs had the idea for virtual page curls in iBooks and chose Winnie the Pooh as the free book that came with every iBooks app. (AllThingsD)
• After Apple VP Keith Moerer said last week that Apple has 20 percent of the U.S. ebook market, Cue said it has “grown 25 percent” from what he claimed was a 20 percent market share in 2010, i.e. that it is now at 25 percent, Publishers Marketplace reports. (It seems implausible that Apple had 20 percent of the ebook market in 2010.) Also, “Apple is apparently neck-and-neck with Barnes & Noble for the number-two spot after Amazon: ‘I believe it’s close. I’ve heard at different times we go back and forth,’ said Cue.”
• Mac vs. Windows! “Both parties showed their evidence on a projector screen. Apple’s legal team used a MacBook to shuffle between evidence documents, stacking them side by side in split screens and zooming in on specific paragraphs. In contrast, the Justice Department’s lawyers could show only one piece of evidence at a time. One video that [DOJ attorney] Mr. Buterman played as evidence failed to produce the audio commentary needed to make his point.” (NYT) Apple Insider notes that the DOJ was using HP computers.

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iOS is already the leading mobile gaming platform. But come this fall Apple should cement that lead by giving iOS app makers permission to create sanctioned devices that will turn its devices into actual game controllers. Kotaku has the first image of one of those devices on its blog today.

The slightly blurry image shows a handheld controller that fits around the iPhone like a case, with the directional pad and buttons that are standard with most controllers on either end of the device. Kotaku won’t say where it got the image, but says that it’s of a Logitech device that fits an iPhone 5.

(Incidentally, if this is a Logitech case planned for introduction when a new iPhone is announced later this fall, the fact that it’s the same size as an iPhone 5 indicates that the new model will have the same form factor — more of an iPhone 5S upgrade than an iPhone 6.)

Apple hasn’t completely detailed its vision for the iPhone and iPod touch as gaming devices just yet. At WWDC last week it briefly mentioned a new API for turning devices into a game controller and an official MFi designation for some yet-to-be-named hardware makers. But come fall, when a new iPhone is likely to be announced, Apple should have more to share about how the controllers will work and interact with other devices like Apple TV via AirPlay and which hardware makers will be involved.

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The Apple iOS app most badly in need of an upgrade was Calendar — and it’s getting one in iOS 7. And some of the coolest and most useful features in the new Calendar were, as I noted earlier, clearly borrowed from some third-party calendaring apps. One of those that provided some inspiration is Sunrise, and the small New York-based team is fighting back by almost immediately launching a new set of features that iOS Calendar doesn’t have (yet).

On Monday morning, version 1.4 of Sunrise hit the iOS App Store and with it comes even more useful integration features that help make Sunrise an easy-to-use, all-encompassing, dynamic snapshot of your day.

In addition to integrating Facebook, Google Calendar and LinkedIn into the app (and local weather and birthdays) Sunrise is adding two more: Foursquare and Crunchbase.

The Foursquare integration is no surprise: Sunrise founders Pierre Valade and Jeremy Le Van are former Foursquare designers. What this will mean for Sunrise users is that check-ins to the Foursquare app on your iPhone will show up retroactively on your Sunrise calendar. So if you ended up at a great late-night spot you can’t remember the name of — but you checked in on Foursquare — if you look back at Sunrise for that day, you’ll see where you were and when.

The Crunchbase integration is aimed at business users. The database of companies will be available right inside the app. So if you’ve entered the name of the company you’re meeting with in Sunrise it will call up additional data about that person/company without forcing you to leave the app.

There’s also going to be a slightly better way of displaying Google Maps information: instead of selecting your meeting’s location and getting pushed out to the Google Maps app, you can now see the location on a map right inside Sunrise.

It’s a small update overall, but I like how quickly the team responded to Apple’s notable advance in native calendaring.

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Very early Monday morning, Apple joined other internet companies explaining how often the U.S. government requests the personal data of its users, for national security reasons and others.

Like Microsoft and Facebook, Apple says it sought permission from the federal government to publicly disclose how often it receives requests for user data related to national security. Apple says “We have been authorized to share some of that data, and we are providing it here in the interest of transparency.”

From Apple’s press release:

From December 1, 2012 to May 31, 2013, Apple received between 4,000 and 5,000 requests from U.S. law enforcement for customer data. Between 9,000 and 10,000 accounts or devices were specified in those requests, which came from federal, state and local authorities and included both criminal investigations and national security matters.

Notably, Apple received about half the requests that Facebook and Microsoft did. What’s not said is how often Apple complies — reports indicate that Facebook, for example, complied in some way with about 79 percent of them.

Apple says the most common type of information the government asks for has to do with stolen property (likely iPhones, iPads and other Apple devices) and locating missing people — kidnapped children, Alzheimer’s patients or suicide prevention.

Apple doesn’t characterize how often or not national security played into these requests over the past six months. But it does say that it looks at each request in order to provide only the “narrowest” set of data related to it.

The company also noted the type of data it cannot share: iMessage texts and FaceTime calls. Both are encrypted forms of messaging and “Apple cannot decrypt that data.”

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For a long time I’ve been bored by iOS. While the competition has continually innovated and improved the design of their platforms, iOS has gradually come to feel stale and even a bit clunky. With this week’s official announcement at WWDC, my first reaction was that finally, we’re moving again. The design looked fresh and contemporary, there’s bold typography, smart use of transparency and layering, and nice transitions to replace the dated visual chrome and  fairly clunky behavior of prior iOS versions.

Yet quite quickly I felt myself longing for more.

Yes, Apple is still moving forward. But the competition is so much more aggressive and innovative than a few years ago, that Apple will need to speed up if it wants to be seen again as a leader in innovation and design. The question is whether it can move from being a fast follower to a faster follower, and eventually return to being in a leader position again – one that changes the game and disrupts. Then again, perhaps the bigger question is whether it even needs or wants to do that.

Much of what Apple aims to do with iOS 7 is laudable. The layered transparency is a positive improvement, as it offers continuity and context in a simple way. iOS 7 also uses space better, and there are fewer superfluous boxes within boxes (for example in utility apps like Calculator and Stocks). The transitions also help bring the experience to life, and make the OS feel more contemporary. In Safari it’s great to see the interface play a subservient role to the page content.

On the functional side, it’s nice to see Apple replacing the clumsy graphical back button with a swipe to go back. The multitasking view is also clearly improved. But the most positive improvements for me are found in the Photos app, where the smart clustering and grouping help users organize and make sense of all their photos, and in the location-aware app suggestions offered through Apps Near Me.

And importantly, the new design of iOS 7 is also truly comprehensive – nothing is left untouched.

As iOS 7 continues to rely on a grid of icons at the top level of the OS, the iconography of the native apps feels surprisingly rushed and sometimes amateurish. Since Apple in its WWDC communication so clearly emphasized the need for “perfection,” it should really deliver on that too.

In some places where translucency is used the text contrast is rather poor, and it’s tricky to read the text quickly – it’s the very opposite of glanceable design. And while the Control Center is a good idea, it’s a very busy screen – and that’s the first iteration. Imagine how it will look after a few more generations and many new functions are added!

The parallax viewing on the home screen feels like a gimmick, as does the cheesy background animation in the Weather app. The photo filter fad is also given too much prominence in the camera mode. These all feel like populist design choices (a decidedly un-Apple approach.)

Overall, iOS 7 feels just a bit too predictable. The first thing Apple apparently wants users to feel is delight and surprise (followed by love and connection). But iOS 7 doesn’t offer much cause for surprise because hardly anything in iOS 7 feels new. Instead it feels familiar, and that’s because many of the design approaches in iOS 7 have been lifted from other platforms.

For example, Windows 8 makes use of bold typography and uses smooth transitions to bring the experience to life; WebOS had a multitasking view remarkably similar to what was shown in iOS 7; and Nokia’s innovative MeeGo OS made swiping gestures central to the smartphone experience (while it also placed great emphasis on consistent and meaningful iconography). In iOS 7 Apple has clearly adopted these and others’ designs, and have aimed to further improve them. And so amazingly, in design Apple now finds itself in the role of a fast follower.

When I last wrote about design at Apple, I was asking for more fundamental changes: “a radical refresh of iOS, a category-defining entry into wearables, or a confident push into services like search or commerce.” Yes, iOS was refreshed this week, but if you look beyond the surface level, it was hardly radical. Perhaps the fact that iOS now has hundreds of millions of active users is both a blessing and a curse for Apple. With that size, its priorities have moved from disrupting others to scaling and protecting what it has. As things unfold over the next few years, Apple will probably become a new textbook example of the Innovator’s Dilemma.

In the 90′s, when Apple was in crisis and had little to lose, its “Think Different” campaign celebrated gutsy innovation. That tune has changed dramatically, and the opening video at this week’s WWDC instead celebrated patience and perfection. “If everyone is busy making everything, how can anyone perfect anything? It takes time.” Apple rose to prominence as a company that brilliantly anticipated customers’ future needs. But today Apple focuses mainly on serving their existing customers’ current needs.

When Jony Ive says that “iOS 7 is defining an important new direction,” and Tim Cook says that iOS 7 is “the biggest change to iOS since the introduction of the iPhone,” it tells me that Apple will be quite happy to continue as a fast follower. And so I will continue to admire how Apple adopts and improves the designs of others, and how it gracefully evolves iOS over time. But it seems I will have to look elsewhere for game-changing design and innovation.

Olof Schybergson is CEO and co-founder of the service design consultancy Fjord. Follow Fjord on Twitter @fjord.

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Even though Apple’s lead in mobile hardware has eroded with the rise of Samsung, third-party apps have become more important than ever. The biggest apps and developers still think iOS first — but fewer and fewer of them are remaining iOS-only. Apple’s platform and App Store provided others with a whole new livelihood, but the company is relying more than ever on third-party app makers to keep its platform ahead of the competition.

As such, WWDC was the time for developers to feel the love from Apple. But we also got to see some pretty striking changes to the now 6-year-old iOS that those developers will now have to digest. Here are the five main things to know.

Apple said it paid $5 billion to developers in the last year alone in revenue from App Store sales. And that’s great: but the reality is that the dynamics of the App Store have changed rapidly over the past few years. With the rise of free-mium/pay-to-play, paid apps aren’t making nearly as much revenue as they used to for developers. The question a lot of developers seem to be struggling with right now is whether they should go free with in-app purchase or simply start embracing higher prices for apps.

There are 900,000 apps available — and if you divide that 50 billion evenly among each app, that would be about 56,000 downloads apiece. But that’s obviously not how it works: all apps are not created equal. There are apps that have millions of downloads and some that have 10. And Apple continues to have its work cut out for it finding and removing apps that are gaming the system or using spammy tactics to artificially inflate download numbers.

But you already know this. iOS 7 is different in many ways from its predecessors — as we’ve covered extensively — and it’s going to require a larger effort to figure out how your app needs to adapt to the new OS than the usual yearly upgrade. Apps that don’t look like they belong in the new iOS 7 world will look outdated and put themselves at a disadvantage — current users may abandon an app and potential users may not download it in the first place if the experience looks inconsistent with the environment it’s in.

But, as the image above shows, the effort will be worth it. Apple has trained its iOS users well and they upgrade quickly to the latest version of the operating system — much faster than Android users (who are held back by carriers and manufacturers).

The bummer for iPad app makers is they will have even less time than iPhone developers to figure out how to optimize their app for iOS 7. The iPad beta version of the software is still several weeks away from being released.

Did you notice your iOS app update taking longer to get approved than normal this week? Some developers are already starting to see this and the beta has been out for less than a week. As developers figure out how they will incorporate the new look — not to mention new features, services and APIs into their apps to get ready for the official release of iOS in the fall — that is likely going to get worse unless Apple decides to staff up its app review team. With such a big overhaul there’s a lot less chance some app makers will sit this change out than in the past with relatively less dramatic upgrades.

Everyone and their mom seems to think they can do a better job at re-imagining iOS 7 than Jony Ive and his Human Interface team. Which is kind of hilarious, when you think about it.

Yes, it’s bright and yes it’s different, but this is technology: things change. Just like the when the internet recoils in horror at Facebook design changes, we’ll all eventually get used to this very big change. (Or most of us, anyways.) Plus, there’s little chance of going back.

It’s true that there are some changes that are a bit off-putting, and plenty of details and elements that are not quite right yet — as several designers have told me. But remember: it’s been eight months since iOS 6 came out and iOS 7 is a pre-release beta. It’s a good bet that what Apple unveiled Monday is going to be tweaked and adjusted as needed over the next few months.

And even after it’s put on a new iPhone and shipped to the masses, that’s still not the end: the iOS 7 revealed this week, just like all Apple software, will continue to evolve.

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Although Apple isn’t the topic of our GigaOM Chrome Show, we did refer to it quite a bit on this week’s episode. The newest MacBook Airs use the Intel Haswell chips we’ve been hoping for in new Chromebooks so know we know what kind of battery life boost to expect. Two new extension recommendations are available in the show, as well as talk about a $35 Chrome media streaming solution.

Can your dog help advance the Internet of Things? Ben Jacobs of Whistle thinks so and explains to Stacey Higginbotham how vets, researchers and pet owners can take advantage of data from devices worn by pets.

Lastly, our GigaOM Weekly Wrapup podcast recaps seven years of blogging as GigaOM celebrates another birthday. There’s more information on the PRISM saga and even a little gaming news: Did Sony turn the tables on Microsoft at this year’s E3 gaming convention?

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Over the years I have tried several solutions for syncing my contacts between different accounts. Even back in the days of Palm Pilot Desktop for Mac, ActiveSync, Intellisync, and my personal favorite, The Missing Sync. In the long run, they never ended up working for me. Each of them usually ends up creating duplicate records. So I have made quite a mess of my contacts many times over. But as a result, I have become quite good at cleaning up the messes I’ve made.

I’m not going to tell you how to sync your contacts across multiple accounts — that is, keeping exact copies of your contact list in sync across multiple accounts like Yahoo, Google, iCloud and Exchange.  This technique will also not help with proprietary information formats that you may have on various online services like LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook even though you may think of your friends, buddies and followers as a sort of contacts list. Rather, this is a list of helpful techniques for cleaning up the contact lists associated with your traditional mail accounts.

A lot of us have multiple email accounts that each have their own list of unique contacts. For instance, you probably have one account for personal use and a separate account for business.  I like having one dedicated to online purchases as well (that way I can keep my spam and promotional email separate from my personal and private email). On both OS X and iOS you can set up multiple accounts and view an aggregated version of your contact information across all of your Apple devices. The challenge comes when you have contacts that are represented as individual records in multiple accounts.

Don’t think of these necessarily as duplicate accounts. You may have a very good reason for keeping a copy of a particular contact on each one of your accounts. One such reason would be when accessing your account’s email from a web browser: browser-based mail clients aren’t optimized to access other accounts contact lists.   For such situations when you do have two records for the same contact in two different accounts, there is a feature within the Contacts app that allows you to treat all the records as one account. The process is referred to as linking the accounts.

On iOS you accomplish this by first editing the account in question.  Then scroll down to the bottom of the record and tap on the button labeled “Link and unlink Contacts with.”  Here you will be able to associate records with other accounts.  That way the contact will only show up once rather than multiple times.

There are times when you do end up with multiple contacts within a single account.  Finding such duplicates and resolving merge issues manually can be very time consuming. There really is no utility that comes with iOS and the one that does come with OS X is not very powerful. I have found two apps that do a much better job.

The first is a Mac OS X app called Contacts Cleaner ($4.99 Mac). Contacts Cleaner will scan the contact accounts you have set up on your Mac and produce a report of all of the erroneous information contained in the list. Cards with only one name, spaces in the first name, duplicate addresses, bad phone numbers will all be categorized and displayed for you to review. Sometimes the app proposes a resolution and you can have it fix the record for you automatically. Or if you like, it will open the contact in the native Contacts app so you can resolve the conflict yourself.

The second is an iOS app called Multi Edit – Contacts Manager ($1.99 Universal). This app does a great job at finding duplicates and merging contact information into one record. It quickly identifies contacts with duplicate phone numbers, emails and similar names. It can even filter your contacts by birthday, company, job title and email account type. Once a duplicate is found, you have options as to what information you want to merge and you can edit the contact directly from within the app. It will even show you a preview of the new contact before it performs the merge.

Depending on how much missing information, data conflicts and duplicate records you have, just spending a little time each day may be all you need to clean up your contacts.

Backing up your contacts separately from the rest of your system is important in case all you manage to just lose your contacts.  You never know when an app, device or online service may really screw up your contact list, requiring you to restore it from a recent backup.

For Mac, the native Contacts app that comes with OS X can do a pretty decent job of backing up your contacts. In fact, I relied on this as the sole menas of backing up my contacts for years before iOS and iCloud ever existed. From within Contacts (formerly called Address Book), choose Export from the File menu and click on Contacts Archive. You will be asked to choose the destination of the archive file that will be created.

On iOS it is not as simple. You do not want to rely on a full backup of the device as your sole menas to keep an archive of your contacts. Instead, the aforementioned Multi Edit – Contacts Manager has a great backup utility built in. When you first run the app, you will be prompted to back up your contacts right away.  You can then maintain regular backups as time goes on.  Once the backup is complete, you have the option of emailing yourself a copy of the backup file.

This, of course, is how you got into this mess in the first place: meeting new and interesting people all the time. If you insist on expanding your contact list, be mindful of which account you are adding the contact to. As in, don’t accidentally add a customer or client’s information to your personal address book. Where new accounts go on iOS depends on what account you have set up as your default account for Contacts.  You can change this by going into your Settings for Mail, Contacts, Calendars, scrolling down to the section labeled Contacts, and set the Default Account setting to the account you want to add new contacts to.  On the Mac, this same setting is configured in the general preferences for the Contacts app.

I tend to use Contacts more and more often.  I like to share contacts with others — sometimes these are people’s information, and sometimes these contacts are places, like from pins on the Maps app.  Knowing that I can quickly and easily clean up the messes that I make is comforting. Hopefully you too will be able to look upon your contacts as a valuable, well managed resource, rather than just another mess that you keep putting off cleaning up.

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Apple released the unfinished version of iOS 7 into the clutches of developers on Monday, and rather unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of interest in it. After all, it contains the most radical update to the design and look of iOS since the software was introduced in 2007.

Below is a graph from Chitika, which used impressions on its ad network in the U.S. and Canada to determine the share of web traffic that is being generated by devices running iOS 7. Chitika found that after three days, the iOS 7 beta is already running on 0.22 percent of mobile devices. That number should only continue to rise.

Chitika says that 0.22 percent three days later is twice as high as the amount of interest in the iOS 6 beta more than a month after its release in 2012.

Notably however, the number of impressions generated by iOS 7 beta users over our network has continued to increase. For comparison, while we previously observed users of the iOS 6 beta generating 0.11% of all iOS traffic following the third beta release on July 16, 2012, iOS 7 users are already responsible for 0.22% of all North American Web traffic from compatible devices two days after its initial release. However, it is worth noting that the third iteration of the iOS 6 beta was available on some iPad models, specifically version two and above.

You might think 0.22 percent isn’t a very big number — and relative to the 600 million iOS devices sold, it’s not. But we’re talking about a very specific and limited group that has downloaded this: Apple’s registered developers who’ve paid for the iOS SDK (and possibly some who were able to get it on the grey market). And there’s a remarkable amount of interest/fear of what Apple has done — and a lot of work they’re going to have to do to get ready for its official release in a few months.

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Games for the Weekend is a weekly feature aimed at helping you avoid doing something constructive with your downtime. Each Friday we’ll be recommending a game for Mac, iPhone or iPad that we think is awesome. Here is one cool enough to keep you busy during this weekend.

Ridiculous Fishing ($2.99, Universal) is Billy’s fishing game. And when you play Billy’s fishing game, you play by Billy’s rules.  And Billy likes to fish a little differently than one might expect.

You start off by casting the fishing line into the water off of the bow of Billy’s boat. As the hook travels downward, avoid all of the swimming fish by turning your screen like a steering wheel to the right and back to the left. As soon as the hook hits a fish, the reel will instantly start pulling up the line. On the way back up, every fish that the hook touches will be caught. Just like on the way down, turn the screen to control the path that the line takes as it makes its way back up to the surface. The deeper down into the water the line goes, the more fish the hook will have a chance to snag on the way back up. Once all of the snagged fish reach the surface, the real fun begins.

Billy likes to fling all of the fish high into the air with one big thrust, the higher the better, in fact.  Once all of the fish are airborne, Billy then likes to pull out his gun and shoot the gills off of all of the fish that were just caught. To show Billy which fish to shoot at just tap on the screen. No sophisticated aiming, Billy is a pretty good shot. However, not all fish go down with the first shot.  So be prepared to fire multiple times.  Don’t worry, Billy has plenty of ammo.

The number of shots it takes to bring down a fish will depend on the caliber of the gun and the size of the fish.  Each shot that does not destroy the fish will send it up into the air a little higher. Continuing to bounce the larger fish further up into the air is fun, and you can continue to push the fish as high as the moon if you like.  But you really need to eliminate as many fish as possible. Eventually what goes up must come down, and that includes Billy’s fish.  Destroying all of the fish before they hit the water is important because that is the only way Billy gets paid.

It is the size and species of each fish that determines how much money is earned. To maximize the payout for each round of casting and shooting, Billy needs to snag as many fish as possible on the line. And that means getting the hook to sink as deep into the water as possible. What initially prevents you from hitting bottom is the length of the line. Each fishing hole that Billy goes to has a different depth.  Fortunately, Billy knows a place where you can get some fishing and hunting gear, Shack Shoppe.

There’s all sorts of gear that you can buy at the Shack Shoppe to help Billy improve his game. You can buy longer reels, more powerful guns, more effective lures, and a wide assortment of other unconventional hunting technology like bowling balls and oil drums. There are no in-app purchases in this game, that’s not Billy’s style. You can only spend Billy’s money that he earns from casting and shooting.

As you use the upgraded gear to fish deeper and deeper, you a find wider variety of fish species.  To unlock additional fishing holes on Billy’s map, you must catch more and more species of fish.  Each new fishing hole also introduces a new variety of fish to catch.  And just like fishing in real life, each fishing hole will bring new challenges that require additional gear from the Shack Shoppe.

So if you want to keep fishing you need to keep buying more and more gear.  And in order to buy more gear, you need to keep fishing.  Sounds a bit ridiculous, doesn’t it?  Maybe instead of buying your dad another silly card this year, consider gifting him an app for this weekend and take him on a Ridiculous Fishing trip for Father’s Day instead.

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