Posts in Linked

Bounden, A Dancing Game for Two Players→

Developed by Game Oven in collaboration with the Dutch National Ballet, Bounden is a new iPhone dancing game for two players. The game uses the iPhone’s gyroscope and lets you “twist and twirl elegantly, or get entangled with a friend” in an experience that seems reminiscent of Game Oven’s previous work with Fingle and Bam fu for iOS, both games aimed at blurring the line between multitouch and physical interactions in iOS games.

Bounden looks like a unique concept, best explained by the promo video above and the developers’ description:

Holding either end of a device, you tilt the device around a virtual sphere following a path of rings. You swing your arms and twist your body, and before you know it, you are already dancing.

Bounden is $3.99 on the App Store, and Game Oven published a series of Making Of videos in a Vimeo album showing the game’s evolution and first demos with professional dancers and game journalists. Also worth reading: Kill Screen’s preview of the game from a couple of months ago.

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iWork for iCloud Updated with Improved Collaboration, New Exports→

Dan Moren has an overview of the changes Apple brought to iWork for iCloud today:

Several of the most prominent updates apply to all three of the apps in the suite: You can now have up to 100 collaborators in a single document at the same time—which hopefully won’t be too confusing—and you can choose from almost 200 new fonts. There are also additional options in the color panel, and you can finally create and format both 2D and interactive charts.

Apple has been making frequent and useful improvements to its iWork apps over the past few months. After reading about today’s update for the web apps, I decided to check out the collaborative editing again, and it’s now much better than what it used to be.

Once invited to collaborate on a document in iWork for iCloud, other users can edit their display name in a sharing menu; the name will be assigned a color, which will be shown as a cursor in the document while edits are being made in real-time. The experience is highly reminiscent of Google Drive for the web, and it worked well in my tests with a couple of other users. I could see edits in real-time in the browser, and I didn’t end up with duplicates or dialogs asking me to “take action”.

I don’t know if the collaborative changes were rolled out today or in the past few months, but I’m impressed by the progress that’s been made so far and it’s worth pointing it out. The native iWork apps for OS X and iOS still don’t support the same real-time editing of the iCloud versions, which is why we can’t switch to Pages full-time yet. I really like Apple’s implementation of collaborative editing on the web (you can “jump” to a user’s cursor by clicking their name), and I can’t wait to have the same features on iOS.

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Mac Keyboard Shortcuts→

Comprehensive, nicely illustrated collection of OS X keyboard shortcuts by Matt Gemmell:

I recently wrote an article about being productive on a small screen, which mentioned my belief that the most effective route to productivity on a computer is learning the available keyboard shortcuts.

In this piece, I’d like to share some of the keyboard shortcuts and related functionality that I use every day on the Mac.

And if you also like to learn keyboard shortcuts for your iPad, don’t forget that iOS 7 supports them in both Apple and third-party apps.

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Boosting WebKit JavaScript Performance→

Peter Bright, writing for Ars Technica about the new FTL technology in WebKit:

The LLVM-based fourth tier is called FTL, for Fourth Tier LLVM (and, of
course, faster than light). It shares some portions with the third stage,
since the third stage already does important work for handling JavaScript’s
dynamic nature but has a different code generating portion.

The result is a healthy performance boost. FTL produces code that is more than
40 times faster than the interpreter, with benchmarks taking about a third
less time to run than the old three-tier system.

And from Filip Pizlo’s detailed blog post at Surfin’ Safari:

Rather than continue replicating decades of compiler know-how, we instead
investigated unifying WebKit’s compiler infrastructure with LLVM – an existing
low-level compiler infrastructure. As of r167958, this project is no longer
an investigation. I’m happy to report that our LLVM-based just-in-time (JIT)
compiler, dubbed the FTL – short for Fourth Tier LLVM – has been enabled by
default on the Mac and iOS ports.

Truly fascinating work that we’ll likely see in a future version of Safari. Currently, FTL can be tested in the WebKit nightly builds.

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Bentley Creates New Ad Using iPhone 5s, iPad Air→

Bentley’s new ad (via Jim Dalrymple) has been shot on an iPhone 5s in New York City and edited in a Bentley Mulsanne using an iPad Air with an Apple wireless keyboard.

It’s a nice promo video – if anything, it shows a wide array of accessories and apps used for the task (like Apple’s crew), and it confirms that iOS needs more keyboard shortcuts. People in the video are constantly switching between the hardware keyboard and the screen, which is uncomfortable – it’d be nice to have improvements here with iOS 8.

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Apple Updates iTunes Connect App for iOS 7→

Following OS X, iTunes, and Podcasts for iOS, Apple released a long overdue update to the iTunes Connect app today, bringing a new iOS 7 design and wider support for media sold on the iTunes Store.

If you’re a developer or content creator, you can now enjoy a redesigned app (nothing special, but nice icon) and view stats for music, movies, and TV shows available on iTunes.

iTunes Connect 3.0 is available on the App Store.

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Nintendo DS Keynote: 10 Years Later→

On the tenth anniversary of the Nintendo DS keynote at E3 2004, Federico and Myke take a look back at Nintendo’s announcements on that day and the gaming industry from a decade ago.

On May 11, 2004, Nintendo officially introduced the first-generation Nintendo DS – a console that would go on to revolutionize portable gaming and set new paradigms for touch-enabled games for the next several years.

We did a lot of research for this episode – make sure you don’t miss my Flickr set with scans of old videogame magazines showing photos of E3 2004 and the first tech demos and games. It’s difficult to measure the impact of the Nintendo DS on the industry and Nintendo itself in two hours, but we tried our best.

Get the episode here.

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Thomas Was Alone Released for iPad→

Mike Bithell’s classic indie puzzle platformer Thomas Was Alone has been released on the iPad today. The game, ported by Surgeon Simulator developer Bossa Studios, features 100 levels, a new on-screen control system designed for iOS, and the same narration by Danny Wallace for which the British filmmaker and actor won a BAFTA Games Award in 2013.

Thomas Was Alone is one of the best games I’ve played this year. I bought the PS Vita version a few months ago, and I’ve been constantly impressed by Bithell’s tasteful level design and focus on collaboration between characters to get through stages. In Thomas Was Alone, you control a group of AIs who have become sentient and want to escape the computer mainframe they’re trapped into; the AIs (Thomas and his friends) are rectangles, and each one of them has a special ability, whether it’s higher jump or the ability to float on water. To complete stages, you’ll have to think in terms of collaboration rather than individualities: there are platforms that can be reached only if one character helps another jump onto it, while water-based sections require the AIs to proceed on top of the one that can swim. The way AIs, game mechanics, and narrations are intertwined makes for a classy, precise, and elegant game that always requires you to think of platforms as puzzles that can be solved by collaborating instead of running towards the end of a level. I love Thomas Was Alone and I can’t wait for Bithell’s next game.

Polygon has an interview with Bithell in which he explains the new controls for iPad:

“On either side of the screen, we have these color balls that you put your thumb on in order to select which character you want to use,” he said. “It’s a really intuitive, easy thing that you can basically play the entire game without moving your hands.

“That was the thing. It’s on iPad. If you’re holding the iPad, I don’t want you to ever have to move your hands from flanking either side of the iPad in your hands. I don’t want you to have to put the weight of the iPad in one hand and then use your finger for something else. It’s all played in that kind of default gamer position of the two thumbs, ready to do stuff on the screen.”

Thomas Was Alone for iPad is available at $8.99 on the App Store.

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