The video game industry, in its constant pursuit of newer, more technologically advanced hardware, has never been good at making sure future generations will be able to play the games of the past. In this awkward period, which frequently sees video games still distributed physically on discs but regularly augmented with digitally distributed add-ons, sometimes in the form of patches that are necessary to even play the game, preservation is becoming problematic.

This is a great article by John Agnello on the topic of game preservation in the digital age, but I think it extends far beyond dedicated game consoles and PC. Software preservation, generally speaking, is a challenge for the apps and games we download every day from the App Store – and not just individual titles as immutable entities but, as Agnello notes, multiple versions of the same software. Think about it: what does it mean to preserve Flappy Bird or Twitter for iPad? Do you keep the original, pre-update Flappy Bird and the amazing Twitter envisioned by Loren Brichter, or just the latest versions? All of them? Some of them? Do we even care to preserve all apps and games?

This topic is very dear to me and Agnello’s article raises interesting questions. Overall, I believe that too many apps and games are being made for preservation to be sustainable, therefore we’ll need curators – exactly what the MoMa is doing – to discern what deserves to be preserved and what, eventually, will be lost (and saved by emulation) when online services will shut down.

New service and app launched today by Disney. Kelly Hodgkins for MacRumors writes:

Powered by Disney’s Keychest video-on-demand service, the Disney Movies Anywhere app lets customers browse or search through Disney’s vast mobile library and then purchase titles for playback from within the app. The app streams the movie to an iOS device, with an option to download content for offline viewing.

Interestingly, Disney Movies Anywhere can be connected to your iTunes account to make eligible Disney movies also available on iCloud on all your devices, including the Apple TV (by connecting accounts, you get The Incredibles for free). The service appears to be quite convenient (it has Pixar and Marvel movies too, and it should allow cellular streaming ), and the iTunes integration is peculiar, though not surprising considering Apple’s history with Disney. Unfortunately, there are geographical restrictions for people outside the US.

There are plenty of apps to create Home screen shortcuts for contacts, but Tact by Marco Tabini is polished and easy to use.

If you want a more direct access to your contacts than what Launch Center Pro can provide, Tact presents a contact picker that you can scroll to pick one of your contacts that you want to turn into an icon shortcut. Each contact can be assigned one of four actions (Call, Message, Email, and Open) and icons can be tweaked: you can choose a color, title, and image – if having an iPhone Home screen with faces of your friends inside icons is your thing, Tact lets you do that. Technically speaking, Tact creates Home screen icons by generating webclips from Safari – unlike other apps, the process is well explained and, when launching Tact’s icons, you’ll get a nice preview image before being taken to the corresponding action in the Phone, Messages, or Mail app.

Tact is $1.99 on the App Store and iPhone-only.

Stephen Hackett:

While Macintosh hardware is considered some of the most reliable in the industry, the company has had some pretty epic failures in the past. We spoke about some of these a couple of weeks ago on The Prompt, but after doing some digging, I’ve tweaked and expanded the list.