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.
As reported by Doug Thompson, a change in iOS 7.1 now allows iBeacon-enabled apps to look for beacons and fire off notifications even when closed and after a device reboot:
After opening an iBeacon app we hard closed it: not just putting it into the background tray but swiping it closed entirely. The phone still detected beacons and sent a message through the lock screen, something which in the past was reserved for apps that were at minimum running in the background tray.
The functionality even works if you reboot your device: after you power down your phone and start it up again, it will continue listening for beacons even if you don’t open up the app again.
As Doug notes, this is an important change for how iBeacon works with iOS apps – it sounds like it’s now more stable and it should always work, removing the need to make sure an app is running.
For retailers, museums, and any other place with iBeacon support, this means that launching an app the first time should be enough to have it always ready to listen for beacons in the future (unless the app gets uninstalled of course). And because the technology is based on Bluetooth LE, the impact on battery life should be minimal to non-existent. This seems like a great change for iBeacon.
The iTunes Store used to have a Power Search link in its page footers. You could choose to search specific types of content, and enter search terms in appropriate fields, such as Artist for music; Author for books; Actor for movies; etc. With iTunes 11, this link disappeared, but there’s still a way to get to it.
I had forgotten about this tip shared by Kirk McElhearn. If you want a faster way to access Power Search in iTunes using AppleScript, Doug Adams shows you how.
Yesterday, I wrote about CloudyTabs, a free Mac app that lets you open iCloud tabs from the OS X menu bar instead of Safari. Kevin Marchand pointed me to his iCloudTabs project, which allows you to view iCloud tabs from other devices using Alfred on the Mac. You can view tabs, open all tabs at once, and even write the URLs of all tabs to a Markdown file on the desktop. It’s a neat idea and available on GitHub.
I’ve been using a Mac for several years now, and I had no idea that the Color Picker built into OS X could accept image files. A recent Bjango blog post covers some clever uses for sampling images and swatches from Photoshop.
