A little bit of Friday fun. Tom Dickinson of Will It Blend? takes the metaphor of Seth Godin’s book Meatball Sundae (which I’m currently reading) a bit literally. Delicious.
The release of the iPhone / iPod Touch SDK and the excitement among developers and gamers begs the question: Just what kind of games will be on the iPhone?
Comparisons can be drawn with the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP consoles. Both have revised hardware, an established library of games and a head start in sales. Both also demonstrate that the best portable games have these characteristics:
On PSP, Loco Roco displays large areas of brilliantly vivid colour. WipEout Pure shows that the wide screen aspect lends itself particularly well to racing games. On DS, Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, Nintendogs and Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training leverage the Nintendo heritage, as well as the dual screen, stylus and microphone.
Both platforms fall prey to what is often called “shovelware”. Clones. Lazy ports. Tedious licenses. The iPhone will be no different. It will be the game designers’ challenge to figure out the iPhone’s key features. At a glance, they include:
The lack of traditional control buttons and tactile feedback will present a new design challenge. Some will use the accelerometer for controls, while some may choose to draw virtual buttons and joypads for more traditional games. Some ideas I’d look forward to seeing:
If the iPhone / iPod Touch has one unique advantage, it’s that it will provide an opportunity to sell games to people who don’t buy games machines.
The Apple Store went down this morning. Nothing unusual about that; they have routinely taken the store down every Tuesday this year so far to introduce updated iPods, MacBooks, Time Capsule etc. Today was apparently just maintenance.
It isn’t common practice however to take down an online store to add new products. Imagine if Amazon did the same. It has been claimed by people on the inside that it is actually an architectural limitation of the store itself. It has to be re-published in its entirety – a requirement you could justifiably call poor design.
Apple’s relationship with the web conflicts with its image. They provide tools to write a blog but notoriously forbid their own employees from doing so. They are secretive and openly hostile to rumour sites (Think Secret the latest casualty). Bizarrely, their management of the store seems to be an exception.
A company with Apple’s resources could easily build a new store, but they choose to persevere with the old one. Why? It can only be the excitement and speculation that spreads through the mac websites like wildfire the moment that little “We’ll be back soon” post-it note appears on the page.
Call it PR, call it the Reality Distortion Field at work. Only Apple could spin a flaw in their service into a social marketing campaign. If I was a conspiracy theorist I might imagine Phil Schiller sat at his desk, leaking “rumours” to the web…
A video of yesterday’s SDK event is online at Apple’s website.
Much will be said in the coming months. In the words of Jason Fried of 37Signals:
What we saw today was the beginning of two decades of mobile domination…
Enterprise features (e.g. Exchange support). AOL Instant Messenger. Console quality games (the Super Monkey Ball demo was allegedly built in just two weeks). A comprehensive software development kit, to be released in June.
The 30% sales tax by Apple seems steep at first, but developers can set their own prices and won’t have hosting/bandwidth or credit card processing costs. They also gain a platform and delivery channel with millions of users and an installation mechanism that’s as easy as buying a song. I think most will find these terms livable.
The iPhone / iPod Touch platform just became a deadly rival to every mobile phone, PDA, media player and handheld videogame console out there.
Spurred on by an article called Google Analytics Tagging Demystified by Ian Lurie of Portent Interactive, I decided to start tagging links to help track the relative success of my promotional activities. I ran into a problem almost straight away though!
The value of adding tags to a link (for meta information such as which marketing campaign it was part of) is indisputable. As Lurie puts it:
Tags are your most powerful, flexible analytics tool. With them, your analytics software delivers statistics on every ad buy, keyword, ad version and campaign. Without them, your analytics software is stuck in 1996.
Google URL Builder provides an easy form to construct the URL for you.
The issue I had was peculiar to my situation. One approach I’ve used to create awareness and traffic for my simpleContact application has been to list it on script directories such as Hot Scripts. This has worked very well, but when I entered a suitably tagged URL it exceeded the maximum length allowed by the site.
Enter TinyURL. Popular among Twitter users, TinyURL does what it says on the tin. It takes a long URL and generates a (very) short redirect link. Problem solved.
I look forward to using tagging more extensively – it is clearly a killer feature.
I bought TextMate last night. While I use Dreamweaver at work, TextMate is now my editor of choice at home for my personal projects. It completes a trio of shareware development tools which also includes CSSEdit and Transmit.
My reasoning is simple: I don’t like Dreamweaver very much. To say that its feature set exceeds my requirements and it has performance and stability issues is probably the kindest way I can express my feelings about it. It’s also very expensive.
If you are a Mac-based web developer, these three apps are a winning combination.
As a follow up to my post about the future of Microsoft Internet Explorer, I should note the passing into history of another browser. AOL ended support for Netscape as of February 1st, effectively pulling the plug on its life support.
I started to learn web design and development at university in 1996. At that time, Netscape Navigator was a major player in the browser market. Since then its market share was eroded by Microsoft’s integration of IE with Windows, upstarts like Firefox and an apparent lack of interest and direction from AOL (who bought it in 1999).
So Netscape joins IE5 on the list of dead browsers where the difficulty of supporting them massively outweighs the benefit. The number of visits I get from Netscape users is so negligible (0.13%) that it is no longer worthwhile to test against it.
AOL’s advice to Netscape users is to upgrade to Firefox.
UPDATE: Corrected a factual inaccuracy in the original post.
Microsoft have posted on their IEBlog that they have decided to modify their stance on version targeting in Internet Explorer 8. The previous suggestion that developers would have to explicitly invoke IE8’s standards compliance mode (via a meta tag) was a well-meant but controversial move.
The rationale was that the doctype switch is no longer effective. Less educated web developers were expected to omit the doctype in ignorance of its purpose, but equally well-meaning software authors have added them into the page templates in their applications.
Microsoft, quite rightly, take their responsibilities as the dominant browser maker seriously and don’t wish to “break” millions of websites in pursuit of web standards support. The goal was to find the lesser of two evils.
Purists were not happy, even though high profile developers like Jeffrey Zeldman and Shaun Inman came out in favour of it. In Inman’s words:
The strong have always been tasked with carrying the weak. In the case of the ongoing X-UA-Compatible bluster, the strong are the savvy standardistas. The burden? A single meta tag or http header. Can we move on now?
If you were knowledgeable enough to add the tag they argued, then go ahead and add it and stop moaning. Fair enough…
Microsoft have decided though that even this is not fair enough, and have done a u-turn in favour of standards. A meta tag switch will remain, but for those that want their pages to render as under IE7. If your website looks wrong under IE8 standards mode, it is far less painful to quickly add a tag while you address the problems than to have a broken website.
I applaud this move, and Microsoft’s commitment to openness and interoperability. Apple could learn a thing or two about that. The “browser wars” will be truly over not when only one app is left standing, but when web professionals can get on with creating content without worrying about browser quirks.
Just a quick post to mark that it’s five years to the day since I joined The Foundry. I know this because I checked the scratches on the wall beneath my desk.
I kid… Five years may not seem like such a long time, but in this industry it’s not uncommon for people to leave after much less. It says something about the place that I’m still here and have no desire to move on.
I might as well also mention that a group of us are doing the Great Manchester Run again this May, which will be the third time. We are all running for the children’s charity Barnado’s this year. This is in memory of a client and friend of the company (and supporter of Barnado’s) who I’m sad to say passed away last year.
I’ll be putting together a Justgiving page very soon.
Better get training, then!
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