Neven Mrgan’s Tumbl
Missing vowels since before it was cool.

Developing an iOS app means looking at it on your device… a lot. Not just the actual app; mockups of the app, proposed designs, half-finished views, partially implemented features. One thing I’m a big proponent of is the sleep-on-it test. Once you’ve drawn up a design, go to bed and take a look at it in the morning. Does it still look right? 

I do this by mocking up pixel-perfect designs in Photoshop, previewing them on my iPhone or iPad using Skala Preview, then saving screenshots to the Camera Roll to fawn or handwring over later. (You know how to do this, in any app, right? Press the home button and the lock button at the same time? Just checking.) This works, but not awesomely. My app screenshots end up mixed up with my photos. And forget zooming - Apple has long abandoned pixel-perfect closeups of graphics. Hope you like giant blurs when you’re trying to debug a stray pixel or a mismatched color.

Enter Screenshot Journal, an app dedicated to your iOS screenshots, made by UIForge. (I’m told it was a tweet of mine that inspired them to build it. The system works!)

When launched, Screenshot Journal scans your photo library for screenshots - just screenshots - and imports them. You can then zoom in on them like a decent, civilized person:

Great for auditioning designs, debugging drawing flaws, and dissecting the art of others. This last one is crucial for anyone interested in pixel art, or pixel-precise UI design in general. Every time I get a closer look at a masterful piece of pixeling I learn a new thing or three about how to say a lot with just a few colored boxes.

Screenshot Journal is an app that celebrates and respects UI design. Get it.

Millinaut is the name of a little game made by Shaun Inman, Alex Ogle, and myself for Ludum Dare’s 72-hour jam competition. I had never done a weekend project of this sort before, so when Shaun and Alex invited me to the “jam” (which is open to teams, unlike the original, lone-wolf 48-hour contest) I hesitated a bit. But I couldn’t really say no, could I?

We had three days to make a game from scratch. The theme was tiny world.  The game ended up far, far away from the story, mood, and mechanic we originally sketched out on Friday night. You should read Shaun’s postmortem for a breakdown of how it all went down.

I’m really happy with how it turned out, though - the setting and the mechanic are a bit less original than the dark, psychological drama I saw in my head at first, but the gameplay is much more fun than I thought we could manage in just three days.

I had never done platform-level design before, and my initial assessment of my abilities was quite poor. But, good old iteration - play, die, play, die, tweak one parameter, play, die, play, win! - lead to levels I’m quite proud of. Millinaut has understandably little variation in environments, characters, and abilities, but I think I could probably crank out another dozen respectable levels without any changes to the game code. If beating a tough level feels satisfying, designing one feels quite literally divine.

These are all the graphics we used in the game:

I made more, of course (with help from both Shaun and Alex) but as the game mutated, we either dropped or transformed a lot of ideas.

I’m not sure if I’ll participate in another game jam soon - I’d love to, but this weekend left me with a lot of guilt about ignoring my family for three days straight (combined with the guilt of being the least dedicated of the three developers since I kept running out for this reason and that.) Perhaps it’s just a matter of setting expectations and preparing a bit better. If I do this again, I’d like to:

• Explore other art styles. Millinaut looks cute, but it’s not a huge departure from the style of The Incident.
• Explore non-jumpy games. Jumpies will forever be what I consider prototypical computer games, but games are a rich and wide art - I should stretch out.
• Do more level/puzzle design. I didn’t expect to be doing much of it at all, but I’m hooked on it now.
• Focus on the contest 100%. Book a hotel room, stay in a mountain cabin, lock myself in the closet. Not because it’ll lead to better work, but because I’ll feel less torn between two worlds.

Shaun and Alex were wonderful collaborators: smart, sharp, nice, and built for this kind of pressure-work. I had absolute confidence in them before we started and I have even more today. Thanks, dudes!

Buzz Andersen and I made a (now retired) Twitter app called Birdfeed. Today, Buzz writes about our mock-up of the (now ubiquitous) pull-to-refresh feature, which we never ended up shipping. There are three reasons I’ve never talked much about this:

1. The idea was 100% Cabel Sasser’s, not mine or Buzz’s.
2. It was an unimplemented idea, which qualifies it as “a thing barely worth talking about at all”.
3. Mentioning would make it seem like I was bitter about Loren stealing it from us etc. Nothing could be further from the truth, in every way.

Simple ideas like this will naturally occur to many people. A small percentage of those will have the ability to execute on them. A small percentage of those will then actually do so. And an even smaller group will combine it with an otherwise interesting product, thus making it into something.

Pull-to-refresh is a good idea. Having photo pickers offer to use the Last Photo Taken is also a good idea. The world benefits the most from having these ideas available for actual use.

A monologue on the human price we are willing to pay for our government, with some dramatic license (obviously)

I look at the faces of Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Jackson in my hands for what must be the ten-millionth time when the question pops into my head: who are these people? It’s like a virus in my head - a computer virus. I obsess over it. I stare at these unflinching, small pictures printed on squares of linen and I know I have to find out where they came from.

A few days later I stand at the gates of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C. It is a place without history. It’s not really a city, and it’s not really a state - it’s something the government euphemistically calls a “federal district”. The only other place they have this is Puerto Rico, which should tell you a lot about the whole setup. Isn’t that remarkable, how our government is actually run out of Puerto Rico and no one knows it?

My plan was to walk up to the door and attempt to talk to the President himself, but the locals tell me, “That’s… different. That’s a really bad idea.” I tried getting reservations the day before, but I was told the waiting list for the tour was several months long. So I decided to follow my instincts and simply go to the main gate.

The first thing I see are the guards. And they are carrying guns. All around the vast, sprawling compound, a twelve-foot fence keeps the workers inside. You see, there has been a shooting not too long ago. Strolling in the park one night, President Garfield was shot by a disgruntled coworker.

I suppose that’s what passes for a more perfect union in Washington.

Now you may say, well, homicides happen! But did you realize that almost ten percent - ten percent! - of US presidents were assassinated? Two of those happened while I stood on the sidewalk of Pennsylvania Avenue. I saw William McKinley carried out on a stretcher, and I spent eight days by his side as he slowly and sorely parted with his immortal soul.

Later that day, I sit on a barstool facing a man with bright, droopy eyes and a weary grin. He holds a pen in his right hand - a hand that was badly damaged in defense of his country just moments before we met. I ask him what he used to do before that, and he tells me he represented the state of Kansas in the US Senate. I reach into my backpack and pull out my keychain, the one with the World’s Largest Prairie Dog on it. At the sight of this, the ex-senator’s eyes fill up with tears. “Bob Dole’s never even been to Prairie Dog Town in Oakley,” he says.

The next day, following a seemingly endless cab ride - something right out of THX 1138 or The Matrix or Tootsie - I am back at the gates. I see a group of people leaving the gray, imposing structure, dragging their sweaty and tired bodies over the enormous lawn in the sweltering 98-degree heat, their shorts crumpled and their klean kanteens nearly empty. I stop one small, shy woman and I ask her how old she is. “Thirteen,” she says. “Umm, excuse me, you’re in my way,” she adds. She then joins her parents as they study the city map on the sidewalk. 

I am telling you that I don’t speak bureucratese. I don’t live inside the Beltway. I am not a government employee. But I do know that in my first two hours of my first day at that gate, I met tourists who were fourteen years old. I met interns who were eighteen years old. I met staffers who were forty years old.

I met the White House’s pastry chef who was not allowed to leave his post for twenty-five years.
I saw the house tours completely suspended in the wake of the September 11 attacks.
I saw the building repainted after the burning of Washington.
I met a sandwich-delivery worker whose tip came out to $3.40.
I saw Aaron Burr challenge and mortally wound Alexander Hamilton.
I saw Vice President Spiro Agnew convicted of tax fraud.
I saw George Washington chop down the cherry tree.

Do you really think The President doesn’t know? In a government obsessed with the details, with your tax return being filled out just so, with the revenue being perfectly fit into the budget, do you really think it’s credible that they don’t know?

THE REST OF THE STORY IS IN YOUR HANDS.

If you think this is a truthful account, turn to page 41.
If you think this is satire, turn to page 18.

Apple’s decade of success is currently at its peak. The stock keeps hitting new all-time highs every week, the sales are tremendous, and the products are universally lauded. It would appear that this well-oiled machine of technology and business is unstoppable. But is it really so? History tells us that Apple is due for another fall similar to the one they experienced in the 1990s, and physics tells us that the universe will eventually run out of energy and become a calm, black sea of death.

Apple’s success today could be compared to their top-of-the-world position in 1984. The launch of the Macintosh - along with its unforgettable TV ad - seemed to usher in an era of invincibility. But little did Steve Jobs know that Microsoft’s strategy of licensing its Windows OS would prove victorious in the end, leading to a string of failures from Apple’s management in the 90s. This can happen again. How will Apple prevent the iPad from becoming the next Performa? And how will they prevent the second law of thermodynamics from increasing entropy in the universe to the point of lifeless thermal equilibrium?

The stress lines are already showing. The iPhone 4S sold well, but it was also greeted with lukewarm reviews from the tech press. Similarly, the earth keeps cooling off its core, leading to an eventual collapse of its magnetic field and exposure of its users to radiation (despite security experts’ constant recommendations to the contrary). The failure of MobileMe looms over iCloud; will Apple have to discontinue it as well a few years from now? Will rising temperatures, boiling oceans and, indeed, the eventual swallowing of our planet by its life-giving star affect Apple’s ability to innovate? Will Microsoft’s promising Windows 8 finally unravel the success of iOS?

Predictions like this are generally useless if they don’t include some sort of time frame. While most tech reviewers and cosmologists agree the Sun’s gradual conversion to an asymptomatic giant branch star will indeed end all life on Earth some time in the next one billion years, it’s possible that Apple’s management is already planning for this possibility. But I’m still left to wonder if at some point Apple’s sales will begin to weaken and their products will cease to delight their users. We can be assured that in the next 10¹⁰⁰ years, either Tim Cook’s leadership will falter, or the universe will enter a phase of such low energy that motion and life will become physically impossible.

iCloud is a free service that stores and syncs your data. Currently, you get 5 GB for free; this doesn’t include iTunes Match (which you pay for separately) and Photo Stream (which is free, but has a hard limit of 1,000 photos). 5 GB is a lot, but it’s not the final word on this matter of data storage. Eventually we will need more; jumping between three different iOS devices, I’ve already blown through 5 GB with backups alone.

Two imminent things will increase the pressure for more iCloud storage:

1. Retina iPads will in many cases create documents 4 times larger than today. Camera rolls and other app data may grow as well.
2. If the iPad 3 replaces many people’s PCs as the family photo hub, those photos will have to be stored somewhere outside the iPad itself. The cloud seems like where Apple wants things to reside in the future, so I don’t see them recommending instead that you jack your iPad into an external hard drive.

Ideally, photos should work the way iTunes Match does: the canonical copies are in the cloud, from which you automatically download some number of the latest ones, and also arbitrarily pull down whatever you need. This would be good not just for the specific case of photos, but also as a sign pointing to how other developers should start thinking about their apps’ document-storage behavior.  

Apple’s current solution to meeting users’ growing data needs is to charge for additional space. I’m paying $20 for an extra 10 GB of iCloud on top of the free 5. This feels fair to me, but it might not go over well with the millions of iOS users should it become necessary. Apple could choose to incrementally increase the free, baseline storage for all, upping it to a free 10 GB this year or the next. It’s what Google has done with Gmail, and it’s certainly a solution that’s popular with users.

I wouldn’t mind paying for storage. However, if Apple does this, I hope they keep it simple: just let me pay in one place to get more iCloud instead of having to maintain separate payment plans for iCloud, iTunes Match, Photo Stream, and whatever else they come up with.