WARNING: THIS IS A JOKE POST. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
This Wednesday, Apple held a media event at which some expected them to announce that a previously media-centric product would become iOS-based and gain a crucial new feature: the App Store. This would have made it possible to port our game The Incident to it. We were super excited, and I made some mockups to show how this would work. Sadly, what Apple announced was a great new product which, despite its obvious similarities to the iPhone and iPad, lacks the App Store. So I’m sorry to say we won’t be able to bring you The Incident for iPod Nano.
Codenamed The Subatomic Incident, this is a wrist-sized bomb of pure multitouch microfun. As really tiny pixel-images of really big things fall, you climb your way to safety using a simple swipe-to-jump gesture.
It’s smaller, faster, leaner, and meaner than The Incident. While the levels are a bit more tamagotchi in size, all your favorite features are still there, including the Trophy Room of items which end your journey.
But, it was not meant to be. Though the iPod Nano’s touchy-jiggly screen looks it, the device is, alas, not iOS-based. Maybe next year, Apple? Call us.
REPEAT WARNING: THIS HAS BEEN A JOKE. KIND OF!
This is just super-cool: a fan of The Incident has created a tumblr of all the objects she gets killed by as she plays. Best thing ever. Huge thanks!
nevver links to a set of “Informative Prints” by Francisco Seiz. I love these - if you want to make pretty shapes using the aesthetic of data visualization, do it! Just don’t harm any actual data in the process.
Thursday, September 2 2010
Matt wrote a short breakdown of an upcoming change in our game The Incident: bubbling will now be harder to use as a weasely hiding strategy. No more weasels!
MacRumors explains that tomorrow’s keynote stream uses HTTP Live Streaming, which means you’ll need a fairly recent Apple computer to view it - a Mac running 10.6, or a newer iOS device. They describe a rough workaround for those on other platforms.
I’ve been meaning to write about this at greater length, but here it is in snack form: MacRumors does perhaps the best job of tech journalism on the Internet. Helpful, clear, timely, and remarkably professional.
Last week, Amazon sent me some free money in the mail - Amazon MP3 credit which I spent on Glenn Gould’s lovely Bach Partitas Vol. 1 and Bach Toccatas Vol. 1. I’ve been listening to these on my daily walks, and on yesterday’s walk from work this happened:
I expected that I’d hear from at least one person who’d praise the virtues of in fact being purposefully cut off from such access to information. My expectation was justified. This is once again in vogue - just ask the New York Times. My position on this, in brief: yes, you can spend too much time dicking around with your phone. Yes, I probably do it. But humans have always spent “too much” time on something, be it books or music or TV or video games or the Internet. “Too much” is how passion gets by.
About those daily walks of mine: they’re great. I don’t make it a point to stash the phone, but hey, it’s a walk, so I’ll usually pass the time by checking out the neighborhood, trying not to step on cracks (or step ONLY on cracks), and pondering. If, however, a question comes to my mind - a question with a definite answer, something that can be looked up quickly - of course I will look it up. There’s little to be gained by struggling to figure out the meaning of a technical musical term all by myself, in vacuo. “Partita… that’s some sort of… part?”
On yesterday’s walk, my phone told me (via Wikipanion Plus) that a partita was basically a single instrumental piece of music; or in Bach’s use, a suite in a single key, consisting of preludes and dances. This is great stuff. It explains the key declaration in the partitas’ titles; it makes the movements clearer; it lets me know that my focus on the “part” in the name was misplaced.
Speaking of misplaced misinformation, here’s something I used to do as a curious and hopelessly computerless teen: I’d work hard on cracking these questions. Have we gone back to the moon after Apollo 11? Who’s Philip Jose Farmer again? Do baby girls have uteruses, or does that develop later? Since there was no way for me to work out the answers to these by searching the desk drawers and sofa cushions of my head - the needed information was just not there - I would construct my own answers. Right or wrong, they’d on some level become assimilated into my beliefs. That’s an infrequently discussed negative effect of unplugging your information cord. Just ask this guy.
All I’m saying is, I don’t always have to know the answer, but I like it when the option of knowing is available.
The Incident 1.1 is out. It brings bug fixes (including a few crashers) and a tiny new featurette: Tweet Your Trophy. Update from the App Store or, heck, buy it if you haven’t!
Monday, August 30 2010
The iOS beta-testing process sucks. It sucks for developers and it sucks for testers. TestFlight is an attempt to fix that.
Here’s what usually happens when a developer wants to get a new version of their app into the hands of testers:
- The developer emails the .ipa app package and the .mobileprovision file to the tester;
- The tester drags these to iTunes;
- The tester syncs their device with iTunes.
In 1., the sucky part is that most developers have to manage the testers manually, adding them to and removing them from an Address Book group or some other mailing list. There are mailing-list apps which make this step bearable.
2. isn’t exactly backbreaking work, but you can only do it if you’re at your syncing computer. Many people - myself included - sync with their desktop Mac, not their laptop. If a new version of the app is sent out while you’re on the road, you can’t update.
3. is slow. Really slow. Depending on what you’ve done with your device (and your iTunes library) since the last sync, this could take fifteen minutes. Not a huge deal if you do it once, but if you do it frequently…
Which is an important point: the more hurdles in this process, the less likely the tester is to bother to update. I’m currently behind on two apps I’m testing; maybe I’m lazy and evil, but in that I’m probably not much different than other unpaid testers.
Back in June, I flew to WWDC just as The Incident (the app I was working on) was shaping up into a fully playable game. I was obviously excited to show it off, but the timing ended up being slightly wonky: there was a serious bug in the last version I had, and Matt was about to add significant new features. He did this a few days into the conference, and I was cursing my luck. I even pondered syncing with somebody else’s laptop just to get this important build.
My luck quickly changed: my friends at 23 Divide were just beginning to work on an app called TestFlight, which sought to make possible the impossible: you could update ad hoc app builds over the air, with one tap. Let me clarify this immediately: TestFlight does not require a jailbroken device, shady private-API voodoo, or even an installed app. Standing in a crowded bar in SoMa, I just tapped a button and saw the app begin to download and install. Holy crap!
Since then, Matt and I have been very happily using TestFlight to manage beta builds. It’s made it not only possible, but quick and easy to send super-small updates, even for debugging; this would have been wildly impractical before.
Sadly, another thing that’s happened since is that Apple has rejected the TestFlight app from the App Store. This app is not strictly required for the update system to work, but it makes it a bit sleeker - it can collect new users’ UDIDs and send out push notifications when updates are available. The rejection was vague and misleading. Officially, the app “contains insufficient functionality”; unofficially, Apple doesn’t want to see beta-assist tools. They’d rather write their own, which would be fair if Apple’s current process didn’t, well, suck.
But that’s not the end of TestFlight. They are now signing up for their beta which will most likely be web-based; the magic one-tap update is still there. Beyond that, the service should streamline what happens before and after the builds as well: signing up new testers, grouping them for A/B testing and different tiers of builds, managing tester feedback, and hopefully much more.
So far it’s been an invaluable tool. See for yourself!
A selection of photos in evidence of my wife’s resemblance to Ramona from Scott Pilgrim.
Friday, August 27 2010
A tumblr play in three acts. Let’s not feature uncredited works, k?
Friday, August 27 2010
What if that simple, inexpensive [AppleTV] controller is something like an iPhone without the screen?
Above, I’ve crudely Photoshopped this concept together. It’s the love child of an iPod touch and a Magic Trackpad. It has the same inertial and gyroscopic motion sensors as the iPhone 4, and the same multitouch surface we’re familiar with. A home button. Bluetooth. No screen.
I like this idea.
Thursday, August 26 2010
![dwineman:
What if that simple, inexpensive [AppleTV] controller is something like an iPhone without the screen?
Above, I’ve crudely Photoshopped this concept together. It’s the love child of an iPod touch and a Magic Trackpad. It has the same inertial and gyroscopic motion sensors as the iPhone 4, and the same multitouch surface we’re familiar with. A home button. Bluetooth. No screen.
I like this idea.](http://30.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l7qzynFyoM1qzvxuio1_r2_500.jpg)
Matt and I have an argument.
Tuesday, August 24 2010
Now that’s a logo.
Tuesday, August 24 2010
Tim van Damme interviewed me for his (audio) show The Box. We mostly talk about The Incident. I promise this is the last interview I do this week.
P.S. The photo used in the post is a “goofy face”. I don’t walk around looking like that.
(Do I?)
