In early January, after collecting keyboard shortcuts for Apple apps and system features in iOS 7, I created a dedicated page for keyboard shortcuts in third-party iOS 7 apps.
I’ve been tweaking and updating the page for the past three months, and it now includes 20 apps that have implemented keyboard shortcuts. The page has a custom sub-domain at ios-shortcuts.macstories.net, and it comes with an index of apps at the top to easily see supported apps and click to instantly jump to a specific one. Each app has links to iTunes, website, and additional documentation if available.
If you’ve developed an iOS app with external keyboard integration, let me know on Twitter or over email and I’ll add it to the list. Check out the page here.
Much has changed in the two years since we called Apple “the hottest property in handheld gaming” and said that the company had “changed the videogame industry irrevocably”. Between E236 and today, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs has passed away, iPhone 5 has launched and bifurcated, Game Center’s poker-table felt has been torn off in favour of a spartan interface, and a wave of licensed iOS controllers has reached the market, drawing iPhones and iPads closer to the traditional world of videogame hardware. In other respects, though, nothing is different – Apple seems no closer to infiltrating the home console business through its set-top box, for example.
But crucially – at least for the people who have seen iOS platforms become integral parts of their gaming lives – it feels like the potential we saw in Apple’s devices to become a disruptive force has dissipated. Where we once saw a promising new marketplace of fresh ideas, unrestricted creativity, and daring new ways to play, the App Store of 2014 is swamped with cash-guzzling junk, shameless knockoffs and predictable sequels. Games worth discovering still exist, but they mostly dwell on the fringes and in the shadows, while endless horror stories suggest that paid-for games are simply no longer profitable and are dying out. What happened to the iOS gaming revolution?
Great story by Edge on the state of iOS gaming, free-to-play, App Store charts, and indie development in the age of freemium and Clash of Clans.
Time will tell whether the App Store can still accommodate developers who arguably make better games than the stuff that’s in the top charts or that Apple features. There’s hope, and I want to believe that somebody at Apple is reading Edge’s piece and wondering how they can make the App Store a better place for game creators who are not King or Supercell. Reducing the visibility of the Top Grossing chart and allowing games that cover political/religious/controversial themes would be a good start and an encouraging signal.
Travel Radar is a new iPhone app that lets you track your luggage using iBeacons. By measuring approximate distance from the beacon to your iPhone, Travel Radar can fire off a notification when your luggage is nearby, allowing you to easily identify it and pick it up. The app can track up to two pieces of luggage within 20 meters, and it’s $1.99 on the App Store.
iBeacons seem perfect for this kind of short-range smart tracking, which has gotten better with iOS 7.1. The developers of Travel Radar have detailed a few options for consumer beacons in a blog post – they recommend the Estimote Beacons, which I’ve also been considering to tinker at home with a few ideas I have (see this).
According to Kotaku, the next Angry Birds game is going to be a turn-based RPG called Angry Birds Epic. The game will soft-launch in Australia and Canada (so that Rovio will have time to gather feedback from a smaller audience and tweak the game before a general release) and it will have a crafting system.
Considering what Rovio did with another genre spin-off, Angry Birds Go, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a lot of In-App Purchases for casting spells, summons, or getting more powerful equipment and items for crafting. IAPs were overused in Go, so I’m a bit skeptical about Epic.
This week Federico and Myke discuss some of the cool links and stories they’ve enjoyed over the last two weeks, before discussing why Myke thinks that ‘online’ is making games less fun and what’s happening to the Ouya.
This week on Directional, we also consider this month’s game release schedule and set up a discussion about multiplayer and online features that will certainly continue in the future. Get the episode here.
Last night, Flexibits released version 2.0.5 of their Calendar and Reminders client Fantastical 2, and there are a lot of improvements worth noting. Search is much faster for me (I use the feature several times a day) and URLs in the title of events can now be tapped; you can send birthday or invitee text messages via WhatsApp, open links in the 1Password browser, and there are new sounds for events and reminders if you use Fantastical’s notifications. I like the addition of 1Password support because if you use Fantastical to remind yourself to pay bills, you can log into websites securely and easily with the 1Browser, launched from Fantastical.
Fantastical 2 remains my go-to app to manage my schedule and todos, and it’s only $3.99 on the App Store.
As we talk into the night, hordes of agile pedestrians deftly dodge the Hanoi traffic, screens flickering in their hands like fireflies. It’s no wonder the world’s hottest game came from here. “When you play game on a smartphone,” he says, with an ever-present cigarette dangling from his lip, “the simplest way is just tapping.”
David Kushner of Rolling Stone managed to interview Dong Nguyen, the creator of Flappy Bird, for the first time since he pulled the game from the App Store. The interview is particularly revealing for the motivations behind Nguyen’s decision to remove the game, and whether it may come back or not.
Make sure to get to the end of the piece to know about Nguyen’s next projects.
I was surprised when Apple announced that iOS 7 would run on 2010’s iPhone 4, mostly because the OS seemed to make use of graphical effects, transitions, and animations that looked like great candidates for poor performance and hiccups. Indeed, iOS 7 on the iPhone 4 (and to an extend, the iPad 3) was, in my experience, insufferable: animations were slow, scrolling would often drop frames and stutter, and everything felt generally sluggish.
Ars Technica’s Andew Cunningham has run tests to measure the speed improvements of iOS 7.1 on the iPhone 4. The changes are noticeable, but, more importantly, the update makes the OS fluid and snappy – usable, at least. iOS 7.1 cuts the execution time of animations on all iOS devices, but the difference for the iPhone 4 is even more apparent.
It is a good thing that Apple is still supporting a four year-old device with the latest version of iOS (albeit with missing features), and I’m glad that iOS 7’s possibly one and only major update focused on making performance acceptable on older devices for the future.
