Club MacStories, Year One: Celebrating with Club MacStories Anniversary Month

When I announced Club MacStories almost a year ago, I wrote:

But, at the same time, I’m also ready for more – something a bit more focused and dedicated to our biggest fans, built with care every week and delivered with the same passion that we put into MacStories every day. Club MacStories is a new challenge for us, but I know that I, Graham, and the rest of the MacStories team can pull it off consistently and with the quality you expect from MacStories.

If you love MacStories as much as we love making it, I hope you’ll consider becoming a Club MacStories member. This isn’t just about good feelings and supporting MacStories directly (although that’s pretty great): you’ll receive what I believe are useful and informative newsletters every week, plus a recap of everything MacStories and more every month.

A year later, I couldn’t be happier with the progress of Club MacStories and the response from Club members. In twelve months, we’ve delivered 60 newsletters (if you’re counting: 48 issues of MacStories Weekly out of 51 weeks). We’ve featured discounts, giveaways, and eBook downloads exclusive to members, and our team has grown thanks to John’s contributions to the Club.

I’m happy, signups to the Club keep growing on a weekly basis, and we continue to think about how to offer even more content for Club MacStories. I’m extremely thankful to everyone who’s considered the Club and signed up.

I don’t like dwelling on self-celebrations, but a year of weekly content in addition to the site is an important milestone for us. And so, as the anniversary date was approaching, I thought it’d be appropriate to give back to our readers, show our appreciation, and celebrate the first year of Club MacStories together.

What better way than discounts on great software, exclusively for Club MacStories members?

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Game Day: Nightgate

In Nightgate, by Semidome, you navigate a glowing sphere through a grid of 3D geometric shapes guided by another sphere. This is where I suspect some people might stop me and ask ‘Didn’t you review this game last week?’ No, but I wouldn’t blame you if you mistook Nightgate for Gemini at first glance. There are some superficial similarities, but the two games are very distinct.

Nightgate is a follow up to Semidome’s Last Voyage, which was among Apple’s Best of 2015. The game features 50 levels of puzzles. The goal of each puzzle is roughly the same – guide your sphere through a maze of obstacles by dragging your finger anywhere on the screen to move over specific spots identified by dots surrounded by a circle. After you have flown over each node your companion sphere takes you to the next stage of the game.

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Apple Watch Series 2: Our Complete Overview

Yesterday morning during their keynote event, Apple introduced the first ever hardware update to the Apple Watch. The Apple Watch Series 2 retains the same basic body design as predecessor. While it is thicker by 0.9mm, the internal components have received a significant refresh in power as well as capabilities. With the Series 2, Apple seems to be repositioning the Watch to be more directed toward health and fitness rather than an all purpose device, and the choices of hardware upgrades reflect this idea as much as the keynote highlighted it.

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Google Photos Updated

Google released version 2.0.0 of Google Photos today to integrate better with other Google products and to give customers greater control over their photos.

In June, Google released Motion Stills an app that can turn Live Photos into GIFs or movies and does an amazing job eliminating camera shake. Version 2.0.0 brings that same functionality to Google Photos. From the menu, choose ‘Save as video’ and Google Photos will save a video version of your Live Photo.

It is also easier to upload your videos to YouTube. Select a video, tap share, pick the ‘YouTube’ icon from the share sheet. Google Photos will prepare the file and send it to the YouTube app where you can edit it further before posting if you like.

Finally, Google added a couple of user-friendly features to Google Photos. The first is the ability to sort photos in albums either chronologically or by recently added. The second is the ability to change the thumbnail used in the ‘People’ view to a photo of your own choosing.

As we saw from the introduction of the iPhone 7 yesterday, photography and the apps surrounding it continue to be some of the most competitive areas in mobile computing. With Google Photos 2.0.0, Google continues to refine its approach to photo management and tie it more closely with its video products.

iPhone 7: Our Complete Overview

Today during Apple’s keynote event at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco, the Cupertino company announced the latest iteration on their most successful product. Despite rumors of a mostly laid back upgrade year, the iPhone 7 did not disappoint. While only minor changes have been made to the enclosure, there are significant upgrades to almost every other aspect of Apple’s flagship iPhone.

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The Man Behind Mario Explains Nintendo’s New iPhone Game→

Matt Peckham, writing for Time, spoke with Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto shortly after today’s Apple keynote where it was announced that a new game, Super Mario Run, would be coming to the iPhone this December.

Time: When I asked [late Nintendo CEO Satoru] Iwata back in early 2015 about Nintendo’s smartphone plans, he said “that being ‘unique’ or ‘unprecedented’ was appreciated far more than being ‘better’ than the others.” How are you working to differentiate Super Mario Run from existing mobile runners?

Miyamoto: That’s true. So the basic premise this time was, we started by wanting to make a Mario game that you play one-handed. And if you think about Mario games up until now, generally Mario games are very simple and anyone can play them. But as you get deeper into the mechanics it gets more challenging. For some people, they have a hard time running, using the ‘B’ button to dash, or jumping while trying to run and dash at the same time. So the approach we took was, “How can we take that essence of the simplicity of Mario and bring it to mobile devices?” And that meant thinking about a game that would run automatically, on its own, but where there’s still the challenge of jumping and things like that, that are uniquely Mario.

We’ve also prepared the battle mode, as you saw, and this is really geared toward people who just have a few minutes to play. It’s a short mode you can play very quickly. And the other thing is we’re bringing in a number of elements that add skill and technique. As you get better at those skills and techniques, you’ll have a lot of motivation to compete for high scores and things like that.

Despite the fact that this was quite a brief interview (comprised of 5 questions), Miyamoto’s answers are quite detailed and provide some real insight into Nintendo’s thinking with this new Mario game. Super Mario Run has been designed to “take advantage of the uniqueness” of the iPhone and “perfect for that sort of simple interface and broader user base”. Nintendo is hoping that new people will discover the joy of Mario and seek out other Mario games that exist on Nintendo’s own hardware.

So of course as you’ve seen with Pokémon Go, we have millions of people who may never have played a Pokémon game, or maybe just knew the name Pokémon, who are now playing that game and learning the names of each individual Pokémon. And the result of that is that we’re also seeing sales of things like our original Pokémon Red and Blue games on the rise as a result of that. We think we’ll see a similar effect with Super Mario Run, and especially as we continue to develop Mario games for our own platforms that have more robust action and those sorts of elements, we think those will be appealing to the audience playing Super Mario Run on mobile devices.

If you’re interested, be sure to read Matt Peckham’s full interview with Miyamoto on Time.

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Apple Explains Why It Eliminated the Headphone Jack→

Apple seems to get that eliminating the headphone jack will be a tough sell in some quarters. In a packed keynote, Phil Schiller spent a fair amount of time laying out Apple’s case for why switching to the lightning connector for wired headphones and moving to wireless AirPods is the right thing to do. But Apple also spoke to BuzzFeed’s John Paczkowski to add context and the detail that couldn’t fit into the keynote.

Apple’s Dan Riccio explained the challenge this way:

”We’ve got this 50-year-old connector — just a hole filled with air — and it’s just sitting there taking up space, really valuable space,” he says.

Eliminating the headphone jack helped enable the iPhone 7’s new camera, waterproofing, and better battery life. As Paczkowski explains:

The 3.5-millimeter audio jack has been headed to its inevitable fate for some time now. If it wasn’t the iPhone 7, it might have been the iPhone 8 (or, for that matter, the iPhone 6). In the end, it was simple math that did the audio jack in, a cost-benefit analysis that sorely disfavored a single-purpose Very Old Port against a wireless audio future, some slick new cameras, and the kind of water resistance that anyone who has ever dropped an iPhone in the toilet has long wished for.

Anyone who has used Bluetooth headphones knows that they promise freedom, but at the price of friction – charging, spotty connectivity, and poor audio quality. Apple’s answer to those headaches comes in the form of its new W1 chip that adds a layer of ‘secret sauce’ to its newly announced wireless AirPods that promises to eliminate the pain points.

According to John Ternus, vice president of Mac, iPad, ecosystem, and audio engineering at Apple:

“As you can imagine, by developing our own Bluetooth chip and controlling both ends of the pairing process there’s a lot of magic we can do,”

I was sold on wireless headphones a long time ago despite their limitations. That said, I hope Apple’s secret sauce is every bit as magical as claimed because the issues with Bluetooth are real and fixing them is a challenge that no other headphone manufacturer has fully conquered.

You can also follow all of the MacStories coverage of today’s Apple’s keynote through our September 7 Keynote hub, or subscribe to the dedicated September 7 Keynote RSS feed.

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Nintendo Brings Mario to iOS

Apple kicked off its media event at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium today with a big surprise. Shigeru Miyamoto of Nintendo took the stage to announce that Mario is coming to iOS in December, just in time for the holiday season.

The game, called Super Mario Run, is reminiscent of the classic Super Mario Bros. game on SNES. From Business Wire:

“We have created Super Mario Run to be perfect for playing on your iPhone,” said Mr. Miyamoto, who first devised the Mario character more than 35 years ago. “Super Mario has evolved whenever he has encountered a new platform, and for the first time ever, players will be able to enjoy a full-fledged Super Mario game with just one hand, giving them the freedom to play while riding the subway or my favorite, eating a hamburger.”

Super Mario Run has three play modes. The first is a single-player mode where Mario runs automatically to the right similar to other endless-runner, platformer games on iOS. Tapping the screen makes Mario jump to do things like reach platforms, collect coins, and avoid enemies. The longer you tap, the higher Mario jumps. The goal is to reach the flag at the end of the level before time runs out.

Second is a battle mode called Toad Rally where you play against the scores of friends or other players from around the world. Toad Rally does not have a flag at the end of each level. Instead, you race against the clock collecting coins and impressing toads to try to beat the score of the person you challenged.

The final mode is a building mode where you can create a Mushroom Kingdom. Using coins collected in the first two modes, you can decorate and customize your Mushroom Kingdom.

Miyamoto said that Super Mario Run will be paid up front, but the App Store entry for the game indicates that it offers in-app purchase. According to Business Wire:

iOS users will be able to download and enjoy a portion of Super Mario Run for free and will be able to enjoy all of the game content available in this release after paying a set purchase price.

Because Super Mario Run does not come out until December it is interesting that it has an App Store page at all. Instead of a ‘Buy’ button, the page has a ‘Notify’ button you can use to receive an alert when the game is available.

Finally, to tide over fans until December, Nintendo is releasing a Mario-themed sticker pack for Apple’s Messages app, which will be available when iOS 10 launches on September 13, 2016.

You can also follow all of the MacStories coverage of today’s Apple’s keynote through our September 7 Keynote hub, or subscribe to the dedicated September 7 Keynote RSS feed.