Game Day: Sketchfighter 4000 Alpha

Some tweet wishes do come true.

https://twitter.com/johnvoorhees/status/953743651548598272

One of the first Mac games I ever played has made a comeback on the Mac App Store. Sketchfighter 4000 Alpha is a space-themed shooter that adds an exploratory twist on Asteroids-like controls. The game is a terrific riff on a classic arcade genre, but what holds the experience together and elevates it is the hand-drawn art and soundtrack.

Sketchfigher, by developer Lost Minds, was originally published in 2006 by Ambrosia Software, a Mac game publisher with roots in the early 90s that faded from the Mac gaming scene and finally went completely offline last year. That left fans with no way to download the app or activate existing licenses.

It’s been years since I played Sketchfighter, but as you can see from my tweet, I never forgot it. So, when I stumbled across a preview trailer for a reboot of the game, I was excited. As it turns out, Lost Minds was able to get the original source code for the game, update it for modern Macs, and release it on the Mac App Store.

If you played the original game as I did, part of the reboot’s fun is the nostalgia factor. Even if you’ve never played Sketchfighter, though, it’s a wonderful classic arcade experience. The game takes the sort of doodles so many students have scribbled in notebooks as teenagers and brings them to life on the same graph paper you’d find in backpacks.

Your goal is to maneuver a spaceship through a series of zones, avoiding obstacles and weaponry, collecting items, eliminating enemies, and fighting bosses. The controls are simple. The arrow keys control the direction your ship flies, and the space bar fires your weapons. That doesn’t mean your ship is easy to control, though. Both the flight physics and ship itself reminded me of Asteroids, which works well in this context. As you fly your ship, it drifts, carried by momentum towards walls, enemies, and other obstacles that can inflict damage, eventually leading to your demise. Along your route, there are also spots to refresh your health, which are a great place to visit before a big boss fight because once your health runs out, your ship explodes.

Sketchfighter features three save slots, so dying doesn’t mean starting over from scratch every time. Also, although I’ve only played in single-player mission mode, there are also two-player co-op and competitive modes.

There isn’t too much more I can say about Sketchfighter without giving away some of the surprises in later levels, but it’s worth emphasizing that the game’s relative simplicity is elevated above other straightforward arcade shooters by its nostalgia-evoking graphics and soundtrack. The music is a relatively short loop, but it’s incredibly catchy and the sort of tune that will stick in your head for days.

With so many games gone with the transition to 64-bit apps, I was happy to see Lost Minds take the time and effort to revitalize this small but fun corner of Mac gaming history. Updating older games isn’t trivial, which is why reboots like Sketchfighter are sadly the exception rather than the rule.

The Mac is lacking as a gaming platform in a lot of ways, but it’s perfect for quirky arcade-style fun like Sketchfighter. The game runs well on my 2018 Mac mini and has never sounded better than through my Harmon Kardon Soundsticks. What’s more, Sketchfighter is a terrific diversion when you’re sitting at your Mac and need a break. I hope it’s wildly successful and gets ported to the iPad eventually, too. It would be great fun to play with an iPad Pro attached to the Magic Keyboard with Trackpad.

Sketchfighter 4000 Alpha is available on the Mac App Store for $6.99.

Stephen Hackett on the Apple Watch’s Breathe App→

Stephen Hackett, writing at 512 Pixels:

When Apple added the Breathe feature to watchOS 3, I — like many of you, I suspect — turned it off pretty quickly. However, over the last six months, it has come to be one of my favorite things about wearing my Apple Watch.

Hackett goes on to explain some of the specific circumstances that led him to revisit Breathe, and why it’s become such a valuable tool for him.

It’s fairly common for me to forget that a feature exists because I made a decision once, a long time ago, to turn it off. Revisiting the Breathe app could be a useful thing for a lot of us right now.

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Apple TV Channels: A Great TV Experience That’s Failing

Apple’s TV strategy has produced a mix of both winning and losing. While I think the company is largely on the right track with its efforts to produce original TV+ content, and it’s also poised to take a cut of many popular streaming services’ revenue via In-App Purchases, I nonetheless think it’s clear that the company’s attempts to offer a great TV experience are failing.

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Indie Sticker Pack Debuts to Support the COVID-19 Solidity Response Fund and Equal Justice Initiative→

A group of indie iOS and iPadOS developers have joined forces to offer a pack of over 100 stickers of many of our favorite apps, the proceeds of which will benefit two great causes. According to the sticker pack’s purchase page:

All proceeds will be split 50/50 between the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 Solidity Response Fund and the Equal Justice Initiative for combatting racial and economic injustice.

It’s terrific to see the developer community come together to offer such a wide array of stickers for two excellent charities. Ever since I started attending WWDC, I’ve collected stickers of my favorite apps from the developers I meet. With WWDC online this year, I didn’t think I’d be able to add to my collection anytime soon. However, thanks to the Indie Sticker Pack, I’ll have more stickers at once than I could ever have collected at one WWDC and contribute to two great causes.

The Indie Sticker Pack is available for a limited time for $12.99 from the group’s website.

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Adobe Adds Support for Editing Lightroom Images in Photoshop for iPad Alongside Other Updates

Adobe’s Lightroom and Photoshop are complementary tools that a lot of creative professionals use together on the desktop, moving images back and forth. Until now, however, that wasn’t possible on the iPad, which has made it a frequently-requested feature ever since Photoshop debuted on the iPad late last year.

With today’s update to Lightroom, there’s a new option in the share menu called ‘Edit in Photoshop.’ When you select that option, Lightroom converts your image for Photoshop and uploads it to Adobe’s cloud service. As soon as that process is complete, Lightroom automatically launches Photoshop and loads the image. When you’re finished making edits, tap the big, blue button at the top of the screen that says ‘Send to Lightroom,’ and a PSD version of the image is returned to Lightroom where you’ll also find the original image you sent to Photoshop. Alternatively, you can save the PSD file as a cloud-based document without sending it back to Lightroom.

Sending a RAW image to Photoshop, which is first converted to a cloud-based PSD file.

Sending a RAW image to Photoshop, which is first converted to a cloud-based PSD file.

Finalizing the import into Photoshop, which now includes a big blue button for sending the image back to Lightroom.

Finalizing the import into Photoshop, which now includes a big blue button for sending the image back to Lightroom.

Adobe debuted several other updates to Lightroom on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac too. The company is expanding the learning experiences available in the app with more guided tutorials and interactive edits that demonstrate the steps needed to achieve certain results. Lightroom also includes a new versioning system that permits users to experiment by applying different edits to the same image as different versions and compare them without creating multiple files. All users can also add watermarks to images now, which are synced across devices.

Users who upgrade to Lightroom’s premium service get several other features as well. Hues can be adjusted locally, allowing users to change hues in one area of an image without affecting other parts of it. Premium users can also share edits in the app’s Discover section, a community for sharing images, drawing inspiration, and learning.

With every major update of Adobe’s flagship apps on the iPad, I’m impressed by the progress that has been made. Lightroom is a terrific photo editor that’s made all the more powerful by the additional option of exporting images into Photoshop for iPad, which has been advancing itself quickly. Adobe announced updates to many of its desktop apps today too, but what’s striking about the announcements is just how quickly its mobile apps have begun playing a central role in Adobe’s pro product lineup.

Lightroom and Photoshop are available as free downloads on the App Store, with certain features requiring an In-App Purchase.

Apple Highlights Swift Student Challenge Winners

One unique component of Apple’s online WWDC this year is that the company opened a Swift Student Challenge where students could submit a Swift playground creation for special recognition. Today in a press release, Apple is highlighting three of the 350 winners: Sofia Ongele, Palash Taneja, and Devin Green.

For Sofia Ongele, 19, who just finished her sophomore year at New York’s Fordham University, her focus for change lies at the intersection of tech and social justice. ReDawn, her first iOS app, is a powerful example. After one of her college friends was sexually assaulted during her freshman year, Ongele created ReDawn to help survivors access resources in a safe, easy, and sensitive way.
[…]
Palash Taneja…went on to create a web-based tool that uses machine learning to predict how mosquito-borne diseases like dengue fever would spread. And for his Swift Student Challenge submission this year, created against the backdrop of COVID-19, Taneja designed a Swift playground that teaches coding while simulating how a pandemic moves through a population, showing how precautions such as social distancing and masks can help slow infection rates. He created it to help educate young people, after he saw others not taking warnings seriously.
[…]
Devin Green…was having trouble waking up in the mornings, so he designed a program using a pressure mat under his bed. If weight is still on the mat after he’s supposed to be up, an alarm goes off and won’t stop until he uses his phone to scan a QR code.

Apple has also created, naturally, a new post on the App Store where it’s highlighting three more winners and their apps: Lars Augustin, creator of Charcoal, Maria Fernanda Azolin, creator of DressApp, and Ritesh Kanchi, creator of STEMpump. Out of these, Charcoal is an app we’ve covered in our newsletter in the past, it’s an elegant way to perform quick sketches on your iPhone or iPad.

The Swift Student Challenge is a unique way for Apple to highlight some of the best and brightest young coders working on Apple platforms today. I loved reading the details about each of the six winners featured today, and hope we’ll get to learn about more of the 350 winners in the week ahead. With so many winners to recognize, perhaps we’ll see new App Store stories each day leading up to the conference.

Apple Updates Its Developer App and Provides New Information About WWDC

Apple has updated its Developer app, which serves as a companion to developers for WWDC and a way to access past years’ session videos and other content year-round.

For the first time, there is now a Mac version of the Developer app, which appears based on Apple’s Mac Catalyst technology. The new app includes a left-hand sidebar that presents the same written and video content found in the iOS and iPadOS versions of the app. The iPhone and iPad versions of the Developer app have also been updated with a redesign of the Discover, Browse, and WWDC tabs and the option to mark Discover articles as favorites.

Apple’s developer website has new information about Labs and the Apple Design Awards too. Next week, one-on-one developer labs can be requested on Monday from 3:30 pm to 6:00 pm Pacific and Tuesday through Thursday from 6:00 am to 6:00 pm. According to Apple, “Requests will be reviewed and you’ll receive an email with your status within several hours.” Lab appointments will range from 10-55 minutes in length via a Webex audio call with an Apple engineer. Apple’s developer portal also says that the Apple Design Awards will be held on June 29th, the Monday after the online conference concludes.

It’s fantastic to have a dedicated Developer app on the Mac for the first time. The change will make it easier than ever to pick up where you left off with videos no matter what platform you’re using. The labs are about what I expected Apple would do. I’m not sure what to make of the ADAs coming the week after the conference. Perhaps Apple simply wasn’t ready in time.

Apple’s Developer app is available as a free download on the App Store.