This Week's Sponsor:

BetterTouchTool

Now with a Powerful Launcher for Your Mac

MacStadium Offers Large-Scale Mac Private Clouds for iOS Testing [Sponsor]

MacStadium offers Mac CI infrastructure at a scale that no one else can match. Recently ranked #44 on the Inc. 5000 list of America’s fastest growing private companies, they offer Mac private clouds for iOS testing in some of the largest startups in the world.

With new versions of iOS and macOS, there will be a lot of development and testing to get apps updated and created. MacStadium can put together a Mac cloud at the size you need. They can usually do it quicker and with less expense than doing it in-house for your company. Some benefits:

  • From a few Mac Pros to hundreds, MacStadium can scale with you quickly
  • Pure flash storage provides up to 150,000 32K IOPS at <1ms average latency
  • Three global locations to offer fast access to all your developers and testers
  • 24/7 support with unlimited Internet and network usage
  • Consolidate to a completely private network for macOS, Linux and Windows in one place

Chat with an engineer or customize your Mac Cloud on the MacStadium Private Cloud page.

Our thanks to MacStadium for sponsoring MacStories this week.

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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