Cody Fink

1547 posts on MacStories since January 2010

Former MacStories contributor.

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You Don’t Need Buttons to Game on an iPhone→

Ben Kuchera of Polygon puts into words what I’ve been trying to say all along.

From Draw Something to Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja to Cut the Rope, the biggest names in mobile gaming got that way because they used the touchscreen in novel ways. The lack of physical buttons isn’t a hindrance to game design, it’s a feature that smart developers have been using to their benefit for years. The developer of Ridiculous Fishing, a game which won an Apple Design award for 2013, didn’t worry about not being able to use buttons; they created a game that used the hardware in fun ways.

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“Throw Enough Mud at the Wall and Some of it Will Stick”→

Brian X. Chen reporting on the state of wearable tech:

For one, most smartwatches and glasses look far less fashionable than the accessories they mimic. For another, they often have mediocre battery life, making them unsuitable for wearing all day. And in general, they can be costly, running into hundreds of dollars, even though their features are often limited or still a little buggy.

It’s telling when a CTO basically says, “We don’t really have a vision.”

“We’re still in the experimental stages of the wearable market,” said Henry Samueli, chief technical officer of Broadcom, which makes wireless chips for mobile devices. “But at some point one of them will stick and consumers are going to love them, and everyone else is going to copy it.”

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The iPad is as Simple as a Tablet Gets→

John Brownlee of Co.Design makes the case for why Apple has reached the pinnacle of tablet design with the iPad.

But what now? Where do you go when you have created a device that is as powerful as most people’s laptops, weighs less than a paperback, gets all-day battery life, features ultra high-resolution displays, costs less than $500, and is, in fact, only distinguishable from the next iPad by price and size? There are incremental refinements to look forward to, sure–some clock cycles here, some dropped ounces there–but if Apple’s goal was to create a window, they have finally gotten to the point where they have stripped nearly everything away from that window’s design besides the glass.

This why it’s very difficult to imagine that an iPad five or 10 years from now will look, feel, or even function very differently from the ones we have right now. It’s also why all the tablets of Apple’s competitors at CES feel even more irrelevant than ever. Once you perfect the design of a window down to its essence, the only thing that matters about it anymore is the vista it overlooks.

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Shoots and Leaves Uploads Photos and Sends Links to Other Apps→

Shoots and Leaves, a snap and forget it photo app akin to something like QuickShot, uploads captured photos to services like Imgur, Dropbox, or CloudApp, and then sends the public links to an app like Mail, Reminders, or Safari. Given our focus on productivity apps, an app like this is useful for generating Markdown links that can be pasted into upcoming articles. Inspired by Shoots and Leaves’ Reminders integration, I’d love if Evernote was added as a service, with the ability to send a photo’s link to an Evernote reminder. It’s laser focused, does one thing well, and is $2.99 on the App Store.

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Mophie Announces the Space Pack: An iPhone Battery Case With Local Storage→

At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, Mophie has announced the Space Pack, a backup battery case that comes with 16 or 32 GBs of local storage. Like the Juice Pack Air, the Space Pack has a 1700mAh non-removable battery that Mophie claims will recharge the iPhone to a 100% charge. Through a companion app, the Space Pack can store and retrieve videos, photos, documents, and more from its own internal storage. The 16 GB Space Pack will cost $149.95, while the 32 GB model will cost $179.95, going on sale March 14th.

Update 1/8/14: pre-orders are open.

[via Engadget, Mophie]

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WIRED & Branch Collaborate to Design a Better Connected Smartwatch and Pair of Glasses→

WIRED & Branch’s smartwatch concept blends classic design with modern technology. Image via WIRED.

For WIRED’s January 2014 issue, the publisher reached out to product-design company Branch to conceptualize wearable gadgets that sensibly brings together fashion and function. WIRED’s Cliff Kuang writes:

The watch and glasses are meant to be fashionable enough that the technology is a bonus rather than the big sell. That’s important. If we’re ever going to want to wear computers on our bodies, they’ll have to be stylish enough that we’d wear them even if they weren’t computers.

That, as my colleague Bill Wasik points out in his essay, is the key thing about fashion that tech companies fail to understand. It’s the difference between glasses so cool you want them even if you don’t have bad eyesight and, well, Google Glass, which you couldn’t pay most people to wear.

Yesterday evening, John Gruber said something similar in regards to the new Pebble Steel.

If Pebble, or any “smartwatch” maker, wants to succeed in the real world, they need to make watches that look good compared to any watch, not just “looks good compared to other even uglier smartwatches”.

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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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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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