The Powerful Code Editor for iPad and iPhone — Now Free to Try
This week Federico and Myke talk about the Oculus Rift release date, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5, the Yooka and Laylee Kickstarter, Nintendo’s annual results, and Splatoon.
A fun episode of Virtual this week, as usual filled with personal stories and memories of videogames in our lives. You can listen here.
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Laura Hudson writes about Lifeline, an ingenious text-based adventure game for iOS that uses a messaging-like interface and actionable notifications to build a story and a relationship with the main character.
As counterintuitive as it sounds, there’s something about interacting with Taylor through text messages that can feel very intimate, perhaps because we’ve grown so accustomed to communicating our most personal thoughts with our friends through bursts of text—and waiting for their responses with bated breath.
While some mobile games intentionally frustrate players with waiting periods to compel them into spending money, waiting isn’t a coercion tactic in Lifelife, but rather a crucial part of the experience. If you die several times—or win the game—you can unlock an optional “fast mode” that allows you to skip the waiting periods, although I wouldn’t recommend it. While it might offer instant gratification, it also shatters the sense of immersion you feel, flattening the urgency and anticipation of those intermediate moments.
I love mobile games that try to do something out of the ordinary, and I’m intrigued by this idea. Lifeline is $2.99 on the App Store and you can also play it on your Apple Watch.
This week, the Europeans and Stephen are joined by Christina Warren to discuss Microsoft’s move in the mobile space and how it relates to iOS. Then, they talk about third-party Apple Watch bands and what Apple could do with Beats Audio.
Christina did an excellent job at condensing news from Microsoft’s Build 2015 event in this week’s Connected. You can listen to the episode here.
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From the Instagram Engineering blog, a fascinating look at how Instagram used machine learning to understand the meaning, association, and usage of emoji by their users.
Having learned a good representation for emoji, we can begin to ask questions about similarity. Namely, for a given emoji, what English words are semantically similar? For each emoji, we compute the “angle” (equivalently the cosine similarity) between it and other words. Words with a small angle are said to be similar and provide a natural, English-language translation for that emoji.
The post contains examples of what people mean by popular emoji and a semantic map of symbols. Pretty incredible data analysis.
Apple has launched a new campaign called ‘Everything Changes with iPad’, highlighting different use cases for the device with apps and iOS features that can help people on a daily basis.
iPad can change the way you do things every day. Take on a new project, pick up a new skill, or start a new hobby. We put together some of our favorite apps and ideas to help you get started.
Shaun Musgrave’s story at TouchArcade about Accessibility in iOS games is a great one. Thanks to VoiceOver and the work of developers who implement accessible iOS technologies, blind and visually impaired users have been able to play games and be part of an active community.
In talking to the developers who have been able to make their games accessible, their feelings about the response from players are almost universally positive, in fact. In the case of King Of Dragon Pass, David Dunham actually implemented some code so that he could track how many players make use of the VoiceOver function. It varies over time, but in the last month or so, he reported that 7% of players loading up the app are doing so in VoiceOver mode, a very significant number. From a purely financial view, Dunham informed me, the investment was worth it. He went on, “But that’s not the only viewpoint. Not long after we released with VoiceOver support, we got email from a player who said he was a blind teenager from the Netherlands. He thanked us for making a game that finally let him feel like part of the world gaming community, because he could play on an equal level with everyone else.” Amir Rajan told a similar story about A Dark Room. “It’s worth it to get a thank you email from a father with a blind daughter than can enjoy a popular game that her seeing friends play too,” said Rajan.
Related: The American Foundation for the Blind awarded Apple for their work on VoiceOver and Accessibility features.
Snake, the iconic ’90s game that came pre-loaded on Nokia phones, is coming back with a new mobile version developed by its original creator. Stuart Dredge, writing at The Guardian:
Long before Candy Crush Saga, Clash of Clans and Angry Birds, Nokia’s Snake was the king of the mobile gaming world – not least because it was installed on every single mobile phone the company sold.
Now the game is returning for modern smartphones courtesy of that mobile version’s creator Taneli Armanto and developer Rumilus Design, who will release Snake Rewind on 14 May.
As you can imagine, it sounds the new Snake Rewind will implement various In-App Purchases to buy items and continue playing even after your snake crashes. I played hundreds of hours with the original Snake 15 years ago, and I’m more concerned about the control scheme. Snake could be played well with the number pad on a Nokia phone. How will this translate to touch controls?
Snake Rewind launches next week, on May 14th. You can read the official blog post here.
Ken Segall succinctly describes how Apple approaches new product categories and why waiting is often a better option than rushing to market:
Fortunately, it all becomes clear in hindsight.
Now we know there was a ton of work going on at Apple during The Period Of Great Whining. Possibly more than at any time in Apple’s history. Now we have new iPhones, Apple Pay and Apple Watch.
To me, this just says that Apple is doing a very good job of being Apple. Its mission is to create products that people can fall in love with. There is not now, nor has there ever been, a timetable for such things.
I concluded last year’s assessment of iOS 8 on a positive note:
The scope of iOS 8’s changes will truly make sense as developers keep building brand new experiences over the coming months. iOS has begun to open up, and there’s no stopping at this point.
For some Apple observers, it’d be easy – and justifiable – to argue that Apple is “done” with improving iOS given the software’s maturity and sprawling app ecosystem. With long-awaited technologies such as action extensions, widgets, custom keyboards, folders for iCloud, and external document providers finding their way to iPhones and iPads, iOS has seemingly reached a zenith of functionality, an ideal state with no low-hanging fruit left to lust for.
Except that iOS 8 wasn’t a culmination aimed at ending on a high note. As I wrote last September, the changes introduced with iOS 8 laid the foundation for a more flexible, customizable, and ultimately more powerful mobile OS that would pave the road for the next several years of iOS updates.
There’s always going to be new low-hanging fruit in iOS. And 2015 is no exception.
iOS 8 changed how I work on my iPhone and iPad. For years, I had been entertaining the idea of going all-in with iOS, but I was never able to take the leap. I couldn’t manage to leave my MacBook behind and let my workflow rely on iOS apps. My lifestyle dictates being able to write, communicate with others, and manage MacStories from anywhere, free from the constraints of a MacBook. Thanks to iOS 8 and the improved hardware of the iPad Air 2, I chose the iPad as my primary computer – and instead of being cautiously concerned about the trade-offs of iOS, I just felt relieved.
The iPad, for me, is a product of intangibles. How its portable nature blurs the line between desktop computers and mobile. How a vibrant developer community strives to craft apps that make us do better work and record memories and enjoy moments and be productive and entertained. The iPad, for me, is a screen that connects me with people and helps me with my life’s work anywhere I am. Transformative and empowering, with the iPad Air 2 being its best incarnation to date. Not for everyone, still improvable, but absolutely necessary for me. And, I believe, for others.
Liberating. The iPad is a computer that lets me work and communicate at my own pace, no matter where I am.
Beyond the conceptual implications of using a portable 10-inch screen as a computer every day1, extensions and widgets had the strongest practical effect on me. The ability to push select pieces of information to widgets and the objectification of apps through extensions have allowed me to augment the apps I use with functionalities taken from other apps. I can automate Safari with the Workflow extension; I can copy multiple bits of text in a row and trust that a clipboard manager will hold them all for me. For someone who works on iOS, version 8.0 was a massive change with far-reaching potential for the future.
As with every year, I’ve been pondering where I’d like to see iOS go next. Software is never done, but iOS 8 made a compelling argument for the maturity of the platform – if anything, from a feature checklist perspective. That’s not how I look at it, though: I suspect that the next major version of iOS – likely to be called iOS 9 – will use the visual and technical foundation of iOS 7 and iOS 8 to unlock new levels of integration and communication between apps, iCloud, gestures, and voice input.2
While it’s possible that Apple will bring some of the design expertise and taste acquired when finalizing the Watch UI back to iOS, that won’t be the focus of this article. Instead, like every year since 2012, I’ll elaborate on the software additions and corrections I would like to see on iOS, from the perspective of someone who works from an iPad and even came to appreciate the iPhone 6 Plus.
For context, you can check out my old wishes for iOS 6, iOS 7, and iOS 8 to reflect on my motivations and what Apple ended up announcing at past WWDCs.
