Myke, Federico and Stephen celebrate Valentine’s Day by taking some heat about baseball and talking about smelly iBooks, Myke’s Pebble and Flappy Bird.
I really enjoyed Myke’s report on his Pebble Steel and the subsequent discussion on wearables, which fits well with The Prompt #34. Get the episode here.
Following the unfortunate demise of Flappy Bird, hundreds of developers are rushing to release clones of the game on the App Store. Over at the Pythonista forums, however, user “bashedcrab” has created a working clone of Flappy Bird called “Jumpy Octopus”, made entirely with Pythonista (pictured above).
This started out as a Flappy Bird clone (can be done in under 100 lines of Pythonista), but I let my son do a bit of a redesign. He decided an underwater setting involving an Octopus was much more enjoyable.
The game play and physics are tuned to replicate the original Flappy Bird as closely as possible, so it is hard! If you want to make it a bit more fun for young kids, make the gap larger (Default is 360. 450 is much easier but still a challenge for young kids).
The game is available as a Python script here, which can be copied in a new file in Pythonista and run to play the game. Jumpy Octopus has sounds, keeps tracks of high scores, and uses iOS emojis as characters for the underwater setting. Of all the Flappy Bird clones that are coming out, this is an impressive open-source implementation based on Pythonista’s game creation features.
When I bought a Retina iPad mini in November, I published my first impressions of the device and promised that, like I did with the iPhone 5, I would revisit my article for a proper review. I work from my iPad every day, and I believe there is value in condensing thoughts on a product after continued and regular experience. Three months later, I think I’ve used the iPad mini enough to write my review.
Thanks to Jory Raphael for the awesome artwork.
In recording The Prompt every week, my friend Myke Hurley and I realized that we love talking about games. We love games and the community of game makers and players behind them. We’ve been playing games since we were kids, and whenever we touched upon the topic of mobile gaming, Nintendo’s history and current games, Sony and Microsoft, indie games, and everything in between on The Prompt, we felt that we could go on for hours with our discussions. Eventually, we knew that we needed a separate venue to properly dedicate ourselves to the topic.
Which brings us to today: Myke and I are announcing Directional, a podcast about games, gamers, game makers, and surrounding culture. Here’s how we like to describe Directional’s focus:
We reflect about past trajectories and current directions, old games and new hits. Directional focuses on the games that are paving the way, the games that laid the foundations and just how dedicated games consoles exist in the smartphone age.
I’m extremely excited and grateful for this opportunity, and I look forward to beginning this second podcasting adventure with Myke next week. The Prompt has been an amazing and rewarding success for us, and, again, I hope that Directional will distinguish itself for quality and opinion, not just what’s trending.
Directional will be a weekly show on 5by5, with the first episode airing next week. We have some great stuff planned, and I can’t wait to share what we’ve been working on. I think you’ll also like our music.
We don’t have a webpage or RSS feed yet, but you can follow @DirectionalShow on Twitter for updates.
If you’ve been trying to get high scores in Threes, you’ll want to check out Eric Pramono’s tips and explanation of the point system.
The game score is determined by the numbers and types of tiles you have at the end of the game. Each white tile is worth three times the score of its previous number, for example the 768 tile is worth 19,683 points whereas the 384 tile is only worth 6,561 points.
Fair warning: this may require an even larger investment of your time to play Threes, which is a great game.
Calzy, one of my favorite iOS calculators, has been updated to version 2.0, which brings several new features and design changes over the old version. I reviewed Calzy in May 2013, shortly after the app had been released on the App Store, and I appreciated its clean design and gesture-driven interactions:
I use Calzy because it blends powerful features with delightful gestures and animations. For instance, the app comes with full undo/redo support: to activate this, you can swipe right or left, respectively. If you want to clear an entire expression quickly, you can tap & hold the backspace button. And – my favorite feature – if you need to edit, not just view, single items in the current expression, you can tap & hold on the display to bring up the expression editor (with another sweet animated transition). From the editor, you can swipe to delete numbers or use a button in the top left to achieve the same functionality.
Calzy 2.0 is a free update that brings a new design for iOS 7, which isn’t dramatically different as it makes numbers thinner, brings some lightweight blurring in certain parts of the UI, and introduces themes – which I like (especially the Dark + Gold setting, pictured above). The expression editor has been revamped so you can easily reorder values in the expression, and the app has currency rounding available by tapping a button below the number pad. My favorite addition, though, is the ability to bookmark calculations with a note: tap & hold the equal sign, type a note, and a bookmark will be added (with a nice animation) and saved. Bookmarks have their own section in the History view, and I find this particularly handy to save how much I’ve spent while grocery shopping and access previous notes at any time.
Calzy 2.0 is a nice update that adds new functionality without compromising the app’s simple approach. Calzy is $0.99 on the App Store.
Our thanks to logtempo for sponsoring MacStories this week. logtempo is the easiest way to log time spent on any task: it only takes two taps.
Whether you’re a freelancer, consultant, or other professional who needs to account for time spent on client projects and tasks, logtempo removes all of the complexity and potential for error of time tracking tools and lets you focus on your work instead of your timesheet.
A natural progression from those hand-written notes and timesheets, with the reporting side already taken care of, logtempo takes a pragmatic approach: multiple tasks can be added to the app, and logged time can be added with another tap by choosing a time amount. When you don’t need a task anymore, you can remove it from your task list, but times logged against it are kept. Reports with times logged for the current day, working week, and last 7 days can be emailed or otherwise shared directly from the app, with an option to delete logged times from the summary report.
logtempo is a new approach to time tracking. Check out logtempo here, and subscribe for updates on Twitter and Facebook.
As noted by MacRumors’ Richard Padilla, Apple today added a new channel to the Apple TV to celebrate The Beatles’ debut in the United States 50 years ago:
The channel allows users to view The Beatles’ groundbreaking performance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” for a limited time, and also offers download links to The Beatles’ U.S. releases, which are available digitally for the first time on iTunes.
The Beatles made their first appearance on American television on February 9, 1964, on The Ed Sullivan Show. From Ed Sullivan’s official website:
Never before had so many viewers tuned-in to a live television program, which with 73 million viewers, was three-fourths of the total adult audience in the United States. A music group from England had never crossed over into American culture in such a way, and, at the time, it wasn’t too common for a variety television show to book an English rock band. However, because Ed Sullivan traveled to England frequently, and had a great eye for talent, The Beatles caught his attention and earned a slot on his popular variety program on CBS.
After years of negotiations, The Beatles’ digital catalogue arrived on iTunes in 2010, with Apple celebrating the event with a press release and promotion on its website and iTunes’ front page. Apple has been adding standalone channels to the Apple TV in the past several months, including Yahoo Screen, PBS, Crackle, Bloomberg News, Vevo, Disney Channel, and The Weather Channel.
