The barrier to entry onto the App Store was already quite low, but with the launch of sticker packs in iOS 10, that barrier was substantially lowered. Now you don’t even have to type a line of code in order to launch a product on the App Store. This has been an exciting development and has enabled a whole new wave of creators to make products and launch them on the App Store.
I was one of them. I don’t know how to code, but I do have some design skills, and I wanted to see what it was like to create something for iOS and launch it on the App Store. So a few months ago I decided that I would make some sticker packs for iOS 10 – and that’s what I did. I brainstormed possible ideas, started designing some stickers and ultimately ended up publishing Birthday Celebration Stickers and an app bundle which included World Flag Stickers and a few other country-specific flag stickers.
The process of making and publishing these sticker packs was fairly straightforward, but I also encountered some unexpected hurdles. To help others who are excited about making their own sticker packs, I’ve written this guide, which I hope can make the process a little smoother.
The end of the startup chime is a small thing, but as Hackett observes:
…the startup chime is ingrained into the experience of having a Mac, I’m sad to see it go. A Mac without the chime feels broken, even if I know it isn’t. I don’t power down my machines often, but I liked hearing the chime when I power them back up.
It makes me a little sad and nostalgic to lose the Mac’s familiar chime too. It’s not a big deal, but it’s one more link to the Mac’s origins that is gone, which feels like a loss.
Developers can display pretty much whatever they want whilst their app is in the foreground; this includes swapping out views and buttons depending on the current window of their app (a compose window necessitates different Touch Bar accessory views than the inbox window). However, the Touch Bar does not allow persistent widgets, status items or similar features like always-visible news tickers. These constraints are unlikely to be lifted either; Apple is imposing the restriction so that the UI under the user’s finger isn’t constantly changing due to spurious notifications or text messages.
Apple wants the bar to display peaceful relatively-static UI based on the current task. Major changes to the Bar should only happen when the application state drastically changes, such as opening a new tab or beginning a new modal activity. To repeat: once an app’s window is not active, it loses its control to influence what is shown on the Bar. The system Control Strip sits to the right in a collapsed state by default, but can be disabled entirely in System Preferences if desired.
This makes sense to me: the Touch Bar is intended to be an extension of the keyboard that deals with input – it’s not a smaller Dashboard or a widget container. This means that apps like PCalc won’t be able to persistently display their controls in the Touch Bar unless they’re the frontmost (active) app.
The more I think about it, the more the Touch Bar feels like the natural evolution of QuickType and the Shortcut Bar from iOS – to the point where I wonder if we’ll ever get this kind of evolution on the iPad Pro as well (where the current app is always the frontmost one and system controls could use a faster way to be engaged than Control Center). Perhaps with a new external keyboard with its own embedded Touch Bar and T1 chip?
This week Fraser and Federico begin a multi-part series on the iOS automation app Workflow.
For the next several weeks on Canvas, we’re going to focus on Workflow with a series of episodes aimed at covering the basics of the app, its automation features, as well as its more advanced aspects. In the first episode, we explain what Workflow is and its key principles. We have lots more to come, so stay tuned. You can listen here.
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Eggggg, by Norwegian developer Hyper Games, bills itself appropriately enough as a platform puker. You play as Gilbert who jumps out a window and into a giant egg to escape his mean Aunt Doris who won’t let him go to a birthday party. The trouble is, Gilbert is allergic to eggs. They make him vomit – a lot. Thrown into a world of eggs and cyborg chickens, Gilbert uses what he’s got – his vomit – to propel him through each level. If Eggggg sounds odd, that’s because it is, but it’s also not as gross as you might expect, and it’s a whole lot of fun.
Eggggg draws inspiration from many sources. The levels are reminiscent of Mario platformers. Each is full of secret items to collect and hard-to-reach areas to explore. Eggggg only has 20 levels, but they are more complex and varied in their look and feel than most mobile games, which makes them a joy to replay.
When I first tried Eggggg, I immediately thought of Adventure Time. Eggggg shares a certain visual absurdity and bizarreness with the popular Cartoon Network show thanks to the fantastic artwork of Brosmind, a design studio based in Barcelona, Spain. But the visual style of Eggggg also harkens back to 90s cartoons like Rugrats. It’s an interesting mix of styles that feels fresh and works well in the game.
Eggggg’s game mechanics are simple, but a little different than you might have seen in other games – not different in a bad way, but they take some getting used to. You can tap on either side of the screen to send Gilbert in that direction. A second tap makes Gilbert jump. So, if Gilbert is running left, tapping the right side of the screen changes his direction and tapping again makes him jump. If Gilbert is already running to the right tapping just makes him jump. Fortunately, the first two levels of the game have no obstacles and are enough practice to get the hang of the controls before you start battling enemies.
Each level includes unique obstacles like chicken-spiders, buzzsaws, chickens in flying saucers, and more. You are timed as you race through each level, which gives you some incentive to go back and try levels again to see if you can beat your time and move up the Game Center leaderboards, though the game is just as fun when you take it at your own pace.
Platformers are hard to get right on mobile devices without joysticks and dedicated buttons. Eggggg’s controls took some getting used to, but I think Hyper Games made the right choice by avoiding dedicated buttons or simulated joystick controls on the screen. The blend of deep Mario-style levels, colorful artwork, and squishy sound effects come together to make Eggggg one of the best platform games I’ve seen on iOS. It’s definitely one worth trying.
Why is TV the app an app and not the Home screen on the device? It’s obviously modeled after the same ideas that go into other streaming devices that expose content rather than app icons, so why is this a siloed launcher I have to navigate into and out of? Why is this bolted on to the bizarre springboard-like interface of tvOS when it reproduces so much of it?
You could argue that people want to have access to apps that are not for movies or TV shows, but I would suggest that that probably occurs less often and would be satisfied by a button in the TV app that showed you the inane grid of application tiles if you wanted to get at something else.
As I argued yesterday on Connected, I think the new TV app should be the main interface of tvOS – the first thing you see when you turn on the Apple TV. Not a grid of app icons (a vestige of the iPhone), but a collection of content you can watch next.
It’s safe to assume that the majority of Apple TV owners turn on the device to watch something. But instead of being presented with a launch interface that highlights video content, tvOS focuses on icons. As someone who loves the simplicity of his Chromecast, and after having seen what Amazon is doing with the Fire TV’s Home screen, the tvOS Home screen looks genuinely dated and not built for a modern TV experience.
I think Apple has almost figured this out – the TV app looks like the kind of simplification and content-first approach tvOS needs. But by keeping it a separate app, and by restricting it to US-only at launch, Apple is continuing to enforce the iPhone’s Home screen model on every device they make (except the Mac).
That’s something the iPad, the Watch1, and the Apple TV all have in common – Home screen UIs lazily adapted from the iPhone. I wish Apple spent more time optimizing the Home screens of their devices for their different experiences.
The Watch is doing slightly better than the other ones thanks to watchOS 3 and its Dock, but the odd honeycomb Home screen is still around, and it doesn’t make much sense on the device’s tiny screen. ↩︎
The box was striking, with a kinetic photo of Jimi Hendrix. When you opened it, the stark white device — which I’d describe as a thermostat control in a David Hockney painting — sat like a gem in a jewel box. Apple had also provided reviewers with a stack of CDs (presumably to dispel the charge that illegally downloaded music would populate the iPod’s 5-gigabyte hard drive).
In 2001, the iPod wasn’t the first MP3 player, but it combined existing technologies in a simple and stylish way that caused people to sit up and take notice. That first iPod was expensive and only worked tethered to a Mac via FireWire, which it was criticized for by some. But Levy and others saw the promise of the fledgling device.
Fifteen years later, it’s interesting to consider Levy’s interview of Steve Jobs as he legitimately questions who the iPod is for and why Apple made it. Few products reach the heights that the iPod eventually did, but it’s the possibility that one might that makes the introduction of new gadgets and technologies exciting to all but the most jaded.
Apple, in contrast, believes that touchscreen interfaces are great and computers are great and they’re not the same thing. Apple has steadfastly resisted adding touchscreens to the Mac, and when you ask the company’s executives why, they have been remarkably consistent on this point for the past few years.
What defines a computer, they’ll say, is that it’s made up of two perpendicular surfaces. There’s a vertical display surface, more or less up and down, right in front of you. And there’s a horizontal control surface—a table or desk or the base of a laptop—that you use for input and control. If you want a Mac, that’s what you get. If you want a touch-based device, get an iPad.
Seen through this philosophy, the new MacBook Pro and its Touch Bar interface fit perfectly. The Touch Bar brings the things Apple loves about touchscreen interfaces—customizability and support for multitouch—and adds it to the control surface of the Mac, right above the keyboard. It doesn’t break Apple’s definition of a computer at all, because it’s a new sort of touchscreen, and it’s part of the keyboard area, not the display area.
I don’t use a Mac as my daily computer anymore, and I don’t plan to switch from my iPad Pro, but the Touch Bar is the first change to the Mac line to pique my curiosity in years. Probably because it borrows from what makes iOS great.
At any rate, the T1 is an interesting chip that does much more than support Touch ID and Apple Pay. Apple tells us that it has a built-in image signal processor (ISP) related to the ones Apple uses in iPhone and iPad SoCs, something which Troughton-Smith suggests could protect the camera from malware hijacking. And its Secure Enclave handles the encryption and storage of fingerprint data and protects it from the rest of the operating system and its apps, much as it does in iOS.
When you interact with the Touch Bar, Apple tells us that the majority of the processing is being done by the Intel CPU, although the T1 also appears to do some processing in specific situations for security’s sake, as when Apple Pay is used. But to keep the Touch Bar from counting toward the number of external monitors you can use (Intel’s GPUs support a total of three separate displays, AMD’s support six), the T1 is used to drive the Touch Bar’s screen. From what Apple told me, it sounds like the image you’re seeing is actually being drawn by the main system GPU but is being output to the display by T1, not unlike the way other hybrid graphics implementations work.
Between A-series chips, the W1, and the T1, Apple’s most fascinating work is happening in the custom silicon space. The whole T1-Touch Bar deal is extremely intriguing.
