Nintendo 3DS From An iOS User’s Perspective

By Federico Viticci

Last week, I bought a Nintendo 3DS with Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D. And coming back to “regular” portable console gaming after four years of multitouch iOS gaming felt strange.

As I explained in my Aquaria review yesterday, I started playing with a Super Nintendo Entertainment System when I was six. Actually, my home console gaming experience started with the SNES, but my parents had already bought me a Game Boy. I grew up with Game Boys (classic, Pocket, Color, Advance, and various iterations of the latter), Nintendo’s consoles (SNES, N64, Game Cube, Wii) and Sony’s PlayStation (PSX and PS2). I skipped SEGA’s Dreamcast and Microsoft’s original Xbox, albeit in 2008 I decided, for some reason, to buy an Xbox 360. I basically never touched it. In fact, I’m pretty sure my 360 still has the original Dashboard view – I don’t even know how to update the thing.

I’ve been a “regular” gamer from 1994 to 2007. Four years ago, something happened: as I graduated from high school and got a job, I found to have less time for gaming. Things got even worse after I started MacStories, gaming time-wise. At the same time, whilst my DS and PSP and 360 were catching the dust, I started playing the casual game for iPhone that you can get at $0.99 in the App Store and doesn’t make you fell all guilty about it. After all, it’s just a .99 game that you can play for 20 minutes, not hours. You didn’t spend $60 and 40 hours on a game – I bet a lot of people know the feeling. At least initially, casual iPhone gaming was the cure for ex-gamers that still wanted a quick bite off the digital entertainment scene.

So for nearly four years I bought nothing but iPhone and iPad games. I was quite happy with the results: I could play the latest hit for 30 minutes a day, and say that “I enjoyed it”. I clicked the Buy button on a lot of games: most of them I never finished. But they still gave me the illusion of enjoyment as they were little $0.99 gems I couldn’t feel guilty about. It’s easy to say you’ve “enjoyed” something that costs less than a dollar. So my iTunes library grew larger and full of half-finished, presumably enjoyed iOS games. Read more

Apple Confirms iTunes Connect Holiday Shutdown December 22-29

By Federico Viticci

In an email sent to developers earlier today, Apple has confirmed that iTunes Connect – the developer portal to manage applications to sell in the App Store – will be closed from December 22 to December 29.

We strongly recommend that you do not schedule pricing changes through the interval pricing system in iTunes Connect that would take effect from December 22 through December 29. Pricing changes scheduled to take effect during this date range will not be reflected in the App Store and the app will become unavailable for purchase.

We also recommend that you do not schedule any apps to go live during the shutdown. Releases scheduled with a sales start date between these dates will not go live until after the shutdown.

As with last year’s shutdown, for the end user this means App Store apps won’t receive updates or price changes for a week, quite possibly the most profitable for iOS developers alongside the Thanksgiving festivities in the US. Access to iTunes Connect, delivery of app updates and scheduled releases as well as price changes will be disabled or delayed between December 22 and December 29. If you’re a developer, plan your Christmas app releases accordingly.

Instacast 1.4: This Is What iCloud Can Do

By Cody Fink

Instacast with iCloud

If you have a day job and had just started upgrading your iOS devices when you got home yesterday evening, it’s likely haven’t even spent a few hours with iCloud yet. The premise is pretty amazing, even if the initial majority of it is between iOS devices. If you think automatically syncing spreadsheets and documents across iCloud from your iPad to iPhone is cool, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Beyond document syncing, iCloud opens up a world of added convenience that wasn’t available previously. Just think about being able to sync your Angry Birds progress between devices. But we can take that even further. What if we could sync something like RSS feeds between devices? Now you’re thinkin’.

Instacast goes beyond simply syncing your lists of podcasts. It remembers to update which episodes you’ve marked as played, it remembers to add new podcasts you’ve subscribed to across devices, and it even remembers what episode you were listening to. The last item is the magical part: it syncs track position and loads that episode you were listening to in the now playing window if you pause the podcast and want to pick up from another device later. Resuming a podcast is as simple as tapping the up arrow after a refresh. Now this? This is amazinger.

This is one of the best use cases for iCloud. Instacast syncs lots of data to keep everything in sync. While there’s not much I can add beyond Martin’s blog post on Vemedio, the wow-factor can’t be emphasized enough.

With the amount of data being synced, there are some things to remember about Instacast’s iCloud sync. Geeks will immediately try, two devices in hand, to see how instant syncing is. If you don’t allow Instacast to get its data in the cloud, you may run into conflicts where your impatience could overwrite the changes you wanted to save. I imagine this is more true for big podcast libraries. You treat it like you treat Tweet Marker — it’s all designed to be very casual. With that said, syncing shouldn’t take five minutes, but I wouldn’t expect it to be split-second instant. A pull-to-refresh will sync changes down from iCloud while uploading takes place automatically.

Instacast 1.4 has a new audio engine inside for iOS 5 compatibility, bringing back scrolling titles on the lock screen (a bigger deal if you were an early iOS 5 adopter) and adding Apple TV support for AirPlay. If you want to get caught up on what Instacast does and how great it really is, check out our previous reviews.

You can read more about the 1.4 update on Vemedio, and download the update for free from the App Store (it’s only $1.99 for new customers).

The (Big) Numbers Apple Touted At Their iPhone Event

By Graham Spencer

At yesterday’s iPhone event, Tim Cook took to the stage and as he has done at previous events, he gave the audience an overview of Apple’s business. He ran through various statistics of how the iPhone, iPad, Mac and other aspects of Apple’s business are doing. The numbers he gave were clearly chosen very carefully to shine the best possible light on Apple and were an important premise to the first Apple keynote in which he presides as CEO. But regardless of how carefully chosen, its clear that Apple is doing exceptionally well, virtually across its entire business.

We’ve reviewed the keynote and laid out all the key statistics he showed off into each of Apple’s product categories, so make sure to jump the break to view them all.