Release Candidate One with Chris Clark

Without wanting to flog a dead horse, 37signals’ new iPad app Draft is a perfect study in why iOS needs Services. Draft brings nothing new to the digital sketchpad market but Campfire integration, and doesn’t even do that with the radically simplified interface one might expect from 37signals. It’s a nice enough app—probably in the top ten percent of sketching apps interface-wise—but it’s clear that its raison d’être is Campfire integration and little more.

While Campfire has a published API that anyone could use to add the same feature to a competing sketchbook app, nobody bothers because it’s too small a niche. Why support yet another web service when it means more code and more clutter? But consider instead a world where 37signals release a Campfire chat app instead of Draft, with a “Post to Campfire room” OS Service provided to every sketchbook, photo editor and web browser on the device.

37signals shouldn’t have had to make Draft themselves, and shouldn’t have to court third party developers to support their API either. Multitasking—in the sense of using multiple tools to perform a task—should solve this problem for them.