Leigh Alexander’s Top 5 Video Games of 2013→

Great picks (I have to buy 868-HACK now). I particularly liked Leigh’s take on Ridiculous Fishing:

Pixelly-looking indie game with distinctive physics-oriented mechanic and chippy music goes gangbusters. Not news, anymore. But it’s hard to feel blase about Vlambeer’s success when they keep trying so hard to pay it forward. Vlambeer’s Rami Ismail is a genuine pillar of his community, sharing thoughts on competition and pitching in writing, making the Presskit() tool to help fellow devs reach the media, and showing care for colleagues in public spaces. The success of Ridiculous Fishing, at a fixed $3 price point that had no intention of experimenting with popular free-to-play models, became an important example of how the industry mustn’t leap to assume that micropayments always lead to a more valuable experience for players.

Aside from being a story with a happy ending, Ridiculous Fishing is just a good iOS game. If I had to compile a list of my must-have iOS games for 2013, Ridiculous Fishing would be my top pick.

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App Santa: Tweetbot, 1Password, Vesper, and 12 Other Great iOS Apps On Sale For Christmas

Back in 2006 and 2007, there was an initiative called MacSanta that, through a holiday sale, allowed users to buy great Mac apps at discounted prices. Today, App Santa has launched, and while the project isn’t affiliated to the old MacSanta, the core idea is the same: great, award-winning apps on sale for Christmas.

The apps included in App Santa are all for iOS devices and have been discounted up to 60% off the original price; the project is the collaboration of indie developers Tapbots, Q Branch, Contrast, Readdle, TLA Systems, Junecloud, Edovia, Realmac, and Bloom Built. These are all great apps that we’ve reviewed or mentioned in the past on MacStories, so check out the links below for the full discounts available on the App Store.

Note: If you don’t see the discounted price on the App Store yet, keep refreshing – price changes are propagating in iTunes.

  • Tweetbot 3: $4.99 > $1.99
  • 1Password 4: $17.99 > $9.99
  • Day One: $4.99 > $2.99
  • Vesper: $4.99 > $2.99
  • PCalc: $9.99 > $6.99
  • Delivery Status: $4.99 > $2.99
  • Printer Pro: $6.99 > $2.99
  • Mileage Log+: $9.99 > $4.99
  • Perfect Weather: $2.99 > $1.99
  • Launch Center Pro: $4.99 > $2.99
  • Clear+: $4.99 > $1.99
  • Screens VNC: $19.99 > $14.99
  • PDF Converter: $6.99 > $2.99
  • Calendars 5: $6.99 > $2.99
  • Scanner Pro: $6.99 > $2.99

Amount for iPad→

I first reviewed Amount back in September when the app was iPhone-only and iOS 7 wasn’t out yet. Amount was a simple unit converter that was already compatible with the new OS and that had a nice approach to unit conversions.

Since then, developer Marco Torretta has made the app Universal and added a URL scheme to launch unit conversions from other apps. On the iPad, Amount uses a split-screen layout to organize categories and units. The number pad is a floating widget in the middle of the screen that makes it easy to enter numbers, and, because of the larger screen, you don’t have to tap and swipe as much as on the iPhone. I like it.

Amount strikes a good balance between simplicity and features, and it’s only $0.99 on the App Store.

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The First iOS 7 Game Controllers Aren’t Very Good→

Sean Hollister for The Verge reviews the Logitech PowerShell and Moga Ace Power:

More importantly, the PowerShell and Ace Power aren’t very good at their job. The primary thing that these devices add to the experience is directional control over your games. There, Logitech fails miserably. With only a single D-pad to serve that purpose, Logitech’s job was to make that D-pad the very best D-pad it could possibly be, and it’s nothing of the sort. It’s annoyingly hard to press, and crunches when you roll it around. In games where you need to hold down a direction to keep your character walking, like Bastion and Limbo, it’s literally painful to keep pressing hard enough so the controller actually recognizes your input. On the Moga side, the sliding analog sticks and a lighter D-pad make directional input much easier, but the buttons are tiny and not well built. The triggers squish rather than having a satisfying pull, and the important A, B, X, and Y face buttons don’t reliably activate unless you press them firmly and carefully every time you use them. For $100, these gamepads wouldn’t be acceptable even if there were a library of iOS games that worked well with controllers.

Even if we had a controllers that are actually decent, they introduce a lot of friction with little added benefit. Companies making these things are asking customers to make compromises just to play a game. If you have a case on your iPhone, you’ll have to remove it before snapping your iPhone into what’s essentially another case. With wireless controllers, you’re asking people to carry around an extra accessory. The point of gaming on mobile devices like the iPhone is that you already have this thing in your pocket that can immediately sate your boredom. The best games don’t rely on virtual inputs, and instead make use of the touchscreen as a direct means to manipulate what’s happening on screen. These controllers are maybe beneficial for ports (publishers trying to make a quick buck on nostalgia), but the majority of games people are playing on a daily basis aren’t even asking for these controllers.

I’m also disappointed in Logitech. They have a great lineup of peripherals for PC gamers, but they really fell short rushing their PowerShell to the market.

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Listen: A Gesture Driven Music Player→

It’s not for me but I think the app looks good and the animations are gorgeous. Listen lacks traditional playback controls or buttons, relying on gestures, swipes, and taps to play, pause, and skip music. The idea is that you can drag the album artwork around to trigger various actions, but it works well for some things and not so much for others. I think developers have to keep in mind that removing buttons adds a lot of complexity — in this case something simple like playing a song over AirPlay requires a very specific drag gesture. Listen’s great for shuffle play, but not so much for rummaging through your music collection. Also, what’s up with circular artwork lately?

Check it out on the App Store — it’s free to download.

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Apple and Inter-App Sharing→

Ole Begemann writes about the dilemma Apple may be facing with adding new inter-app communication features to iOS:

I think Apple faces a real dilemma here. Any API that facilitates data sharing between apps without user interaction can easily be abused for tracking purposes, a practice Apple has opposed pretty strongly – at least in word if not in actual rejections of apps.

After Apple forced Smile to stop using the Reminders database to sync TextExpander snippets across apps, this was often mentioned as the reason behind the removal of named pasteboards (which Smile used to leverage): advertisers were abusing the system to track users.

Ole’s proposed solution is “an official sharing API that only works with user interaction”, and I agree with that idea. I have lost hope over the years and I don’t think that Apple will bring something like Automator to iOS any time soon (though I’d always accept a surprise), but adding user-controlled app sharing features would be a good start.

My idea is still the same one from May:

This is an issue that I have been pondering for years. In 2010, Chris Clark posted a prototype (powered by Briefs) of a “services menu for iPhone”, and I keep thinking that such menu could be the solution to iOS’ inter-app communication woes. I don’t see Apple moving away from the one-app-at-a-time model, but I think that allowing users to invoke a menu (either for text selection or general shortcuts) to activate actions could help in better linking apps together. The menu would be sanctioned by Apple and available with a new API, so that developers would also be able to integrate it in more classic versions of “Open In” and “Share” menus.

Furthermore, by leveraging technologies like XPC, I’d like to see Apple enabling users to do less switching back and forth between apps. Today, you can tap on “Email” buttons to bring up a Mail.app modal view that doesn’t yank you out of the current app. Imagine, with iOS 7, being able to “read this later” by tapping on a link and saving it in a Pocket popup; pasting text and links from Safari into a Pages popup of the document you are working on; or, tweeting a photo from the Camera app with a Tweetbot menu and composing a Drafts note from anywhere.

Today, Greg Pierce tweeted about a possible “OAP” (Other-App Purchase) concept, and that’s also something I’ve been thinking about. If apps could better communicate with each other, apps could become “features” to unlock. Imagine if the user could choose to save a photo to Evernote or Dropbox from any app using a Mail-like popup that doesn’t take you out of the current app. Maybe next year?

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Streaming Music and the Lack of Substance→

Khoi Vinh, writing on Medium:

[…] what I find is absent from streaming music is everything that complements the act of listening to music. It’s the very thing that digital music, more even than records and CDs, should excel at: metadata.

Who produced that debut album from Lorde? Who were the musicians who played with her on it? Where was it recorded, and when? Does Lorde thank God, her parents, and/or her cat for making the record possible? I don’t know the answer to any of these questions, because I’ve only ever experienced Lorde’s music via Spotify, where such information is absent entirely.

Remember when Apple promised richer, digital equivalents of liner notes and album artwork with iTunes LP?

What I don’t want is a PDF copy of that album’s included artwork, nor do I want glitchy Flash-like interactive experiences that sidestep my music app when I purchase music from the iTunes store. The former feels lazy and the latter feels like a cheap gimmick. I’d rather see lyric metadata in the songs I purchase from iTunes, which would show up when that album artwork is tapped on iPads, iPhones, and iPod touches. Heck, Nine Inch Nails was doing simple stuff like embedding individual pieces of artwork into their digitally downloaded songs and that was actually cool. Making digital music feel like it has more substance doesn’t need to be complicated. And if it’s just metadata we’re talking about, then there’s no reason little things like this couldn’t be done by any service to make music feel much more tangible.

 

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