This week, the boys throw themselves a selfie parade and Stephen reads an ancient Apple support document. Then they break down the rumors around Beats and iOS 8 on the iPad.
And don’t miss the After Dark, as it offers a glimpse of our process for picking show titles.
Get the episode here.
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.
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.
I’ve always heard good things about Bombing Brain’s Teleprompt+, a popular teleprompter app for iOS. While I don’t personally use it (although it may be worth experimenting with it for podcasts), I wanted to link to the latest version, released this week.
Teleprompt+ 3 adds rich text support for inline formatting, a quick edit mode to make last-minute changes to displayed text without leaving the current session, and a new design for a Universal app that runs on both the iPad and iPhone. Because it’s an app, Teleprompt+ takes advantage of iOS to enable features like remote control for multiple devices (have a technician adjust text and speed on a master device while text is displayed on a second iPhone or iPad), Dropbox import for text, and audio and video recording through the built-in microphone and cameras. I find it fascinating when old equipment and technologies are made obsolete by cheaper and smarter software, and Teleprompt+ is a good example of how iOS devices can be integrated in professional environments (it even supports third-party accessories).
Teleprompt+ 3 is a new version of the app, and it’s available on the App Store at $14.99 as a launch sale.
David Sparks, writing for Macworld:
We’ve been using computers with keyboards and mice for decades now, and many of us are quite adept at bending this traditional paradigm to our will. Then along come the iPhone and iPad, with no hardware keyboard and much less power, and they still manage to turn the computing world on its head. “But it’s not as powerful and I can’t script it,” some power users argue. True, but there’s a reason why we love our iOS devices despite these supposed inadequacies. Simply put, they delight us.
They delight us less when they randomly reboot or apps crash, but the underlying idea is absolutely true for me as well.
When people ask me why I like to get work done on my iPad, the hardest point to get across is that I have more fun with my iPad than my Mac.
Initially, I thought that novelty could be the reason, but after four years of iPad I don’t think that’s the case anymore. It may also be that I liked working around the limitations of iOS, but ultimately that’s a weak argument because I don’t like productivity masochism and most readers aren’t interested in complex workflows or scripts.
It’s difficult to quantify it, but I believe it’s important to have fun when working. I’m constantly amazed by the things modern iPhones and iPads can do, and I find a peculiar kind of geeky satisfaction in writing and publishing articles on the iPad or talking to people around the world with Tweetbot for iPhone. That’s why I’m always concerned when I read rumors of Apple trying to make iOS devices more like Macs – if that ever happens, I hope they won’t take the fun away but still combine delight with efficiency.
A great passage from Christian Donlan’s piece for Eurogamer about the E.T. landfill in New Mexico and lack of restraint on modern app stores:
But with that access - and without curation by companies that actually appreciated games - came a race to the bottom, where much of the good stuff was then buried by an endless deluge of miserable clones and cash-grabs that were allowed in because the gatekeepers didn’t care. Free-to-play is not the problem - it’s that publishers and platform holders and sometimes even developers let the deeper value of a game erode, that there was often a failure to find the correct free-to-play model that enhanced a game - and that some people apparently think it’s fine to refer to their most valued customers as whales.
The difference is that, thirty years from now, there won’t be a New Mexico landfill to recover old apps from.
Previously available on the web from Apple’s developer portal, the company’s iOS Human Interface Guidelines are now on the iBooks Store as a free download (via Dave Addey). The 20 MB guide is compatible with iPads as well as Macs running iBooks on OS X Mavericks, and it takes advantage of the app with inline video playback, two-page page layouts, and built-in annotations (plus, of course, font size and color controls for reading settings).
It looks like Apple did a nice job in converting the guidelines to iBooks, and annotations appear to be especially useful for developers and designers learning the principles of the iOS 7 visual language. The iOS Human Interface Guidelines are available on the iBooks Store here.
My favorite podcast client for iOS 7, Pocket Casts by Shifty Jelly, was updated over the weekend to version 4.5, which added Chromecast support and some welcome additions to the app’s built-in Charts view.
When browsing podcasts in the app’s directory, you can now see Trending shows and change countries for Top Charts. Pocket Casts still has a general worldwide view, but now you can also filter charts by country; for me, this means I can easily find other Italian shows besides the excellent ones provided by the EasyPodcast network (pictured above; EasyApple is the best Italian podcast about Apple, hands down).
Pocket Casts continues to be a solid client that I particularly enjoy because it’s also available on the iPad. It’s $3.99 on the App Store.
I am arguing that this is what we have forgotten in our chase for mobile profit, that we can’t see the creative woods for the data trees. For all our mountains of information we’ve collected about user habits and sales, the gut-level ability to give joy and inspire our audience remains the job of our industry’s creative people first and every other industry role second. Our ability to communicate to, reach and inspire the people that we make things for is the foundation for everything any artist or craftsperson ever produced.
The fundamental communication power of mobile as a platform to push gaming remains entirely intact. But the logic of chasing mountainous profit is self-defeating.
Inspiring, thought-provoking piece by Fireproof Games’ Barry Meade over at Polygon. Data and analytics should aid creativity, not dictate and restrain its genius.
If you read one thing about mobile gaming today, make it this one.
