I’m normally not interested in jailbreak tweaks, but this one has my curiosity. It’s basically Notification Center on an app-by-app basis, directly on the Home screen, with a mix of actionable notifications and widget-like “smart folders”.
I am intrigued. I’m looking forward to Jeff Benjamin’s review.
Great article by Craig Grannell, who interviewed several game developers.
In particular, this part:
More often, though, you hear about, as Ismail puts it, games specifically designed to be “less fun unless you pay, but just addictive enough that you want to play”. Money and research is poured into analytics, metrics, monetisation and behavioural targeting. “The difficulty for me is you’re then no longer designing the most engaging experience for a player, and are instead designing mechanics around getting people to drop money as often as possible,” says Perrin, who likens this system to the gambling industry.
As a long-time gamer, I still find myself wondering whether In-App Purchases will eventually prove to be a healthy model for the quality and economic viability of games. I like to think that it’s possible to use IAPs without being evil, but that far too many companies are exploiting them. Keep in mind, though, that I’m biased.
Our previous articles on games and IAPs still hold true today: there’s a conflict between economics and goodwill, but I’d argue that, ultimately, value is what truly matters.
Good move by Apple. The page contains screenshots, links to support documents, and a clear explanation of Parental Controls. Apple knows that In-App Purchases are usually bought by children using their parents’ devices, and they also made sure to explain the differences between IAPs to “remove ads” and “buy virtual food”.
It’s strange that the, in the US, the page is only featured on the iPad App Store.
This doesn’t fix the several other problems with In-App Purchases and developers exploiting the platform. Games like this shouldn’t be approved to begin with. Hopefully a section that highlights clever, genuine implementations of In-App Purchases is next.
The whole point of the conference needs to be rethought, and the goals addressed from scratch using new approaches. As the greatest challenge for WWDC is in scaling to meet demand, I think it’s obvious that the rethought WWDC should be considered in terms of digital solutions. Call it WWDC if you like, but it needs to take place 365 days a year instead of 4. It needs to serve 300,000 developers, not 5,000. And it needs to take place online, not within the cramped confines of a small convention center in San Francisco.
Daniel Jalkut says that it’s time for something better than WWDC. The entire post is worth a read.
Personally, I think it’d be interesting to see an expansion of the Tech Talk World Tour that Apple did in late 2011. But even in that case, venues were limited, and I imagine traveling around the world put a lot of stress on Apple engineers. Having Apple staff at smaller, independent conferences could help, but those would need to be several conferences each year, otherwise the same issues would arise.
I agree with Daniel. Maybe, with hundreds of thousands of developers, the solution that makes the most sense is a digital one.
Solid update to one of my favorite Fever apps.
The new version includes an iPad version (with a very classic Mail-like layout), a URL scheme to start a refresh and go back to other apps, and local notifications to be informed when sync has completed. Good release from an integration standpoint, too: you can now open links in Chrome (with callbacks), save via Pinbook, or share on App.net via Riposte.
Sunstroke is $4.99 on the App Store. Here’s my original review.
After nearly two years, Twitter updated its official Mac client today. The app, which was presumed “dead” several times, has been updated to include Retina graphics, support for uploading photos, and 14 new languages. Twitter also says “more improvements” will come.
In a tweet, project lead Ben Sandofsky has announced he’s “taking a break” from Twitter for iOS to focus on the Mac version full-time.
One of the updated Mac App Store screenshots reads “Search in real time. Multitask. Express yourself.” – and I found the use of “multitasking” particularly interesting as many often suggested Twitter didn’t care about their Mac app because of the existence of Twitter.com.
The app doesn’t come with any additional changes, but I’m curious to know if Twitter will update it to include its latest additions to the iOS client, namely Cards, the Connect tab, and Discovery. As for OS X itself, it’d make sense for Twitter to consider Mountain Lion’s existing notifications (which currently open in the Twitter website). There’s no doubt Twitter for Mac has a quite a bit of catching up to do after two years.
In case you missed it, here’s my original review of Twitter for Mac from January 2011.
Truly great work by Russ Pitts at Polygon. Make sure to watch the video until the very last seconds.
Ridiculous Fishing is my favorite iOS game. It’s good to see Vlambeer is getting the recognition they deserve.
Delightful new Universal game by Snowman, makers of Checkmark.
It’s clear to me that this is a post-Letterpress game: the menus and navigation are reminiscent of Brichter’s word game, and the multiplayer component is based on Game Center. There is, however, a single-player mode as well where you can practice or try to beat the 120 levels. If you have an iPhone and iPad, Circles will sync using iCloud.
I love Circles’ animations, sound effects, music, and overall flow of interactions within the game.
Plus, a percentage of each sale will be donated to help fund Alzheimer’s research and support programs. Buy a great game and support a good cause.
When editing my Drafts 3.0 review last night, I removed this sentence from the Reminders section:
“Again, I don’t use this functionality, but it’ll be interesting to see something like this being tweaked to work with Drafts and Reminders”
Sid O’Neill figured it out right away:
Drafts just updated today to version 3.0. There are a whack of new features but one that I’m most interested in is the new “list in Reminders” action. It makes it easy to add multiple actions to Omnifocus without requiring Pythonista.
I forgot Daniel Jalkut had a script to monitor Reminders and add todos to OmniFocus for Mac. If you’re like me, you know you’ll try to make this work with a Mac server and modified default sync times.
