May 2010 – Page 2

Mirror’s Edge for iPad: Spiritual Successor of Saboteur!

For the last few days since Apple opened up the iPad AppStore internationally, I’ve been playing Mirror’s Edge for iPad. Mirror’s Edge was a 2007 First Person ‘Runner’ (as opposed to shooter) which made a bit of a splash and was bundled with the PS3 for a while (which means it can be found very … Continue reading “Mirror’s Edge for iPad: Spiritual Successor of Saboteur!”

For the last few days since Apple opened up the iPad AppStore internationally, I’ve been playing Mirror’s Edge for iPad.

Mirror’s Edge was a 2007 First Person ‘Runner’ (as opposed to shooter) which made a bit of a splash and was bundled with the PS3 for a while (which means it can be found very cheaply in most second-user Game Stores).

Personally I found the game relied on the PS3 gamepad too much which I find difficult to use so I never got past the demo before switching it off. On the other hand, I’ve been finding Mirror’s Edge for iPad to be extremely compelling but I think this might be cause it’s a bit more linear, the controls make a lot more sense (as well as being simpler) and I think it reminds me of some other games, like Saboteur! for instance. Released in 1985 by Durell, developed by Clive Townsend, it was extremely compelling though the video may seem old and outdated by our modern standards.

The aim of the game was to fight your way through a 2D maze and retrieve a floppy disk. How totally and utterly 1985! Looking at Mirror’s Edge for iPad, it’s not hard to see how this game could be revived and made extremely compelling. The same can be said for the Tomb Raider franchise, hint hint!

What makes Mirror’s Edge beautiful? There’s the lovely screen, the great perspective, the easily learned controls but there’s also a non-violent element as well. The character, Faith, defeats enemies by slide-tackling or jump-kicking them (as well as a nifty disarm) but there’s no gunplay. The story is not strong and poorly presented by a crawling text banner when an audio or video commentary would have been so much more appropriate but I find the replay value to be high and the Speed Run (where you attempt levels trying to get the fastest times possible) adds another level of competition. Speaking of competition, the single-iPad two-player version is good fun as well – but it’s screaming out for a WiFi co-op or competitive version.

So if anyone wants to remake Saboteur! (or the sequel which involved stealing punched tape), then I’d suggest you look at Mirror’s Edge for iPad before starting. If you’re overcome by nostalgia and want to re-play Saboteur!, then you can grab it from World of Spectrum.

Google: I don’t trust them.

I’ve been very disappointed in Google recently. Google, the undisputed king of the search engine and online advertising world. The first disappointment was Google’s criticism of Apple’s ‘private’ APIs. “We use the same tools we expect our third-party developers to,” Mr. Rubin said. “We have an SDK we give to developers. and when we write … Continue reading “Google: I don’t trust them.”

I’ve been very disappointed in Google recently. Google, the undisputed king of the search engine and online advertising world.

The first disappointment was Google’s criticism of Apple’s ‘private’ APIs.

“We use the same tools we expect our third-party developers to,” Mr. Rubin said. “We have an SDK we give to developers. and when we write our Gmail app, we use the same SDK. A lot of guys have private APIs. We don’t. That’s on policy and on technology. If there’s a secret API to hook into billing system we open up that billing system to third parties. If there’s a secret API to allow application multitasking, we open it up. There are no secret APIs. That is important to highlight for Android sake. Open is open and we live by our own implementations.”

Private APIs are a list of APIs which Apple has asked developers not to use. The reason is that they are undocumented and sometimes in a state of transition.

Now Android has undocumented APIs as found on DaringFireBall

Transcript of slide 34 from the “Beginner’s Guide to Android” session at Google I/O today:

• Don’t use undocumented APIs
• Seriously. Don’t use undocumented APIs

so in essence, Google can criticise but doesn’t see the same problems in their own software. And Android isn’t really as open as they might say.

The Android governance model consists of an elaborate set of control points that allows Google to bundle its own services and control the exact software and hardware make-up on every handset. All this while touting the openness rhetoric that is founded on the Apache permissive license used in the Android SDK.

Whereas Android is completely open for the software developer ecosystem, it’s completely closed for the handset OEM (pre-load) ecosystem.

which is from Is Android Evil. They continue:

There are multiple, private codelines available to selected partners (typically the OEM working on an Android project) on a need-to-know basis only.
…
All code reviewers work for Google, meaning that Google is the only authority that can accept or reject a code submission from the community.
…
OEMs wanting to build on Android have no choice but to stay close to Google so as not to lose on new features/bug fixes released.
…
Little is known about the anti-fragmentation agreement signed by OHA members
…
The visibility offered into Android’s roadmap is pathetic. At the time of writing, the roadmap published publicly is a year out of date (Q1 2009)
…
The Open Handset Alliance is another myth; since Google managed to attract sufficient industry interest in 2008, the OHA is simply a set of signatures with membership serving only as a VIP Club badge.

and this is not to say that Google is worse than Apple or Microsoft. But Apple and Microsoft do not pretend that they are open. What you get is what you pay for. They’re not promising everything you could ever want and cake as well and all for the price of free. But the lie certainly tells me that Google is not open, they are not our friends and they certainly have a liberal interpretation of “Don’t Be Evil”.

And this, when you add to the complete hash that is the hardware revision cycle for Android phones (and subsequent platform fragmentation), is the reason I don’t have an Android phone – even though I want one.

Another classic was Matt Drance pointing out the blatant lie from Vic Gundotra, Google’s VP of Engineering. Google have said at IO that they developed Android because they did not want a future where mobile was controlled by one man, one company, one carrier. Of course this is a sly dig at Steve Jobs, Apple and AT&T (and who else could it have been aimed at?). But it’s also a complete lie.

The iPhone was not revealed to the public until January 2007 and yet Google bought Android in 2005. Now it’s entirely possible that Eric Schmidt, while still serving on Apple’s board (which he continued to do for several years), was working in 2005 to undermine Apple’s nascent and unannounced product; a product that wouldn’t even be announced for another 18 months. My opinion is that Gundotra has simply re-engineered the past to make it sound like Android is going to save everyone from evil Apple. Remember this is Apple who have been working hard on the best, most standard-compliant web browser engine on the market. They have a huge amount invested in HTML5, the open standard, and they seem to be putting a great amount of effort into it. Google, on the other hand, have embraced Flash (one of the media bastions of the last decade) in a cynical move to get Adobe’s attention (and the attention of their fans and Flash developers) to again point out the evils of Apple. What’s absolutely incredible is that people are buying their story.

Again, they have an extremely liberal definition of Evil when it obviously doesn’t include niceties such as ‘honesty’.

Again, I’m not saying any company is perfect but at least you know what you’re getting with Microsoft and Apple. Even Adobe, whose flagging fortunes really need the CS5 release to be amazing, can be excused their recent lies (Oh! Apple abandoned us!) because there is a clear and present danger to their business. But Google is not in decline. They don’t have that excuse.

This is a company that knows more about you than you do. They only rival FaceBook for their invasive methods of divining information and they do so to provide you with advertisements. Your time, your attention, pays for the Googleplex. And frankly, after their recent performance, I don’t trust them. Their ‘open’ rhetoric stinks.

It’s not whether or not Google is evil. It’s all about ‘how evil’

No pr0n

David Goldman at CNNMoney writes: Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) has either lost touch with its customer base or just has a bug lodged up its data port. Evidently David is not talking about Apple’s real customer base who have recently snapped up a million iPads in the first 28 days and who have, two weeks … Continue reading “No pr0n”

David Goldman at CNNMoney writes:

Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) has either lost touch with its customer base or just has a bug lodged up its data port.

Evidently David is not talking about Apple’s real customer base who have recently snapped up a million iPads in the first 28 days and who have, two weeks before the release of the iPad in the UK on May 28th, completely bought up all available stock pushing shipping back to June for further orders.

That sounds more like a company which is entirely in tune with what it’s customers want.

What David is complaining about is:

In late February, Apple purged 6,000 apps it deemed “too sexy.”

…and we seem the same echoed by Ryan Tate of Gawker who vociferously argued that he and his wife want porn on their iPhones and iPads.

I can’t really see the point of the argument. The lack of ‘accounts’ on iPhone and iPad means that these devices are very personal. As a parent, I think it’s perfectly laudable to exclude these kinds of apps from the App Store. It’s not as if there’s a lack of opportunity to view porn online with Safari.

I do find it curious that we have multiple journalists from very disparate sources hounding Apple for not including porn on the App Store. Frankly they’d be the first to complain if Apple permitted this sort of content on the store. I have no idea if there are extensive laws and regulations regarding the creation and distribution of porn but I imagine there are. Apple evidently doesn’t want to get involved in that sort of debate, attempting to police ‘legal’ porn on their handheld devices – the risk is simply too great.

The journalistic position just sounds so sleazy it’s hard to sympathise.

Here Be Morons

Kevin Tofel at GigaOm reports on a curious trend. U.S. owners of Symbian-based handsets click 2.7 times more mobile ads than those with iPhones, according to April data due to be released by mobile ad company Smaato on Monday. And this is in a country where, relatively speaking, Symbian phones have very little presence. You … Continue reading “Here Be Morons”

Kevin Tofel at GigaOm reports on a curious trend.

U.S. owners of Symbian-based handsets click 2.7 times more mobile ads than those with iPhones, according to April data due to be released by mobile ad company Smaato on Monday. And this is in a country where, relatively speaking, Symbian phones have very little presence.

You can interpret these results in several ways. My own recollection of using Symbian was that every aspect of it, from specially optimised mobile sites to expensive apps was that there were ads everywhere. It was an advertisers dream – companies would let you put ads on every screen, cluttering an already ugly interface and squeezing out the actual content.

The Symbian Foundation didn’t really encourage anything better and it is really confusing that a company like Nokia would bet the farm on something so primitive and evidently so unsuited to modern markets.

But I guess the reality is much simpler. When you’ve got iPhones, Android, Palm and Blackberry out there, staying on Symbian just indicates a lack of awareness. People still on Symbian in 2010 are morons.

Update: Data Roaming still a rip off.

Paul O’Flaherty writes: I was looking up the charges for WiFi access in Dublin Airport and realized that it was a complete rip-off at 3 euro ($3.78) for 30 minutes. … It turns out that 3 will give me 2 Gigs of data for 10 euro, which is very agreeable to me considering the airport … Continue reading “Update: Data Roaming still a rip off.”

Paul O’Flaherty writes:

I was looking up the charges for WiFi access in Dublin Airport and realized that it was a complete rip-off at 3 euro ($3.78) for 30 minutes.
…
It turns out that 3 will give me 2 Gigs of data for 10 euro, which is very agreeable to me considering the airport rates, but, if I decide to turn in on in the U.S. it will cost me 5 euro for 1 (one) MB of data.
…
Yes, I know there is a connection fee involved with roaming and all the carriers want to get their cut, but seriously – 1000 times more expensive?

With an upcoming week long trip to the US and a two week cruise around Europe, I tried the “recommended solution” for data roamers, MaxRoam, and found them to be €3.90 per megabyte for a “Global SIM” and €5.90 per megabyte for an “iPad SIM”.

For the european leg of my travels, I had thought a Vodafone SIM will do the trick as they charged £4.99 for 25 MB in Europe. But as is typical with carriers, they’ve fucked it up by increasing the charge by a factor of 4.

You can use up to 25MB a day (midnight to midnight UK time) for just £4.99 in Europe – and for £14.99 elsewhere in the world. 25MB is approximately 500 mobile friendly web pages.

From 15th June our new data roaming pricing will come into effect:
Europe: £1 per MB for the first 5MB and £5 for every subsequent 5MB
Rest of the world: £3 per MB for the first 5MB and £15 for every subsequent 5MB

It used to be that a fiver would buy me 25 MB, but now it’s £6 for 10 MB (and costs £21 for 25MB)

For Fuck Sake. In this case, new != better. That’s a pain in the butt but it’s still better than any other carrier. With O2, that £6 would buy me 1 MB of data in the US.

Adobe’s Nack: the iPad is the computer I’ve been waiting for my whole life

From CNET “I love making great Mac software, and after eight years product-managing Photoshop, I’ve been asked to help lead the development of new Adobe applications, written from scratch for tablet computers. In many ways, the iPad is the computer I’ve been waiting for my whole life,” Adobe’s John Nack said in a blog post … Continue reading “Adobe’s Nack: the iPad is the computer I’ve been waiting for my whole life”

From CNET

“I love making great Mac software, and after eight years product-managing Photoshop, I’ve been asked to help lead the development of new Adobe applications, written from scratch for tablet computers. In many ways, the iPad is the computer I’ve been waiting for my whole life,” Adobe’s John Nack said in a blog post Thursday. “I want to build the most amazing iPad imaging apps the world has ever seen.”

Bravo, John, bravo.

And most of us who grew up with Adobe want to see some of the most amazing imaging apps the world has ever seen. What we don’t want to see is Lee whining. Or giant passive-aggressive adverts in the newspapers. Or bluster about how open Flash is. Open up the code to Photoshop and then we’ll talk.

But I am sincere – make some amazing apps. Make them shine with touch, make them sing with a bluetooth keyboard, make them boot in a second, with support for instant save and multiple levels of undo. Make Adobe the only logical choice for imaging.

And while you’re at it, resurrect Frame and get it on iPad.

Nack also speculated that raising his concerns could hurt Adobe’s iPad effort. “Can you imagine a world where, say, constructively criticizing Microsoft could destroy your ability to ship a Windows application? It’s almost unthinkable, and yet that’s the position in which Apple’s App Store puts us,” Nack said.

Don’t go there, John, that way lies whining.

This was the case for Microsoft partners back in the day. This is part of the evidence for the toothless antitrust case because this sort of shit matters when a company has a near total monopoly. Apple doesn’t have a monopoly.

Ugh. More Flash. Do not read.

James Alliban, who recently made a name for himself with FLAR (Flash Augmented Reality) rails against the notion that Flash is shit. This ignores the facts that a lot of people were already using a Flash blocker, like Click2Flash, before Steve Jobs gave his opinions on Flash. Why? Because Flash has proven itself to be … Continue reading “Ugh. More Flash. Do not read.”

James Alliban, who recently made a name for himself with FLAR (Flash Augmented Reality) rails against the notion that Flash is shit.

This ignores the facts that a lot of people were already using a Flash blocker, like Click2Flash, before Steve Jobs gave his opinions on Flash. Why? Because Flash has proven itself to be pretty shit.

I didn’t need Steve Jobs to tell me that Flash was shit. I had personal experience of it. I’ve had Click2Flash installed for months because I finally got sick of how bad performance was.

Adobe doesn’t like this and have put a lot of marketing effort into making sure that everyone knows how unfair Apple has been. You have to ask yourself that if Apple is saying they get more bug reports and crash reports from Flash than anything else on Mac OS X, then why would they lie? You have to consider which company you trust more (assuming there’s any trust for either).

So Adobe says their Flash platform is pristine.

This ignores the fact that it’s taken Adobe 10 years to catch up to Mac OS X’s APIs and no-one has any shred of confidence that they’ll be able to keep up with the iPhone OS APIs – to put it another way, they’re already out of date now and they’ll be further out of date with the release of iPhone OS 4. That means no multitasking, no Game Center, no Core Data and probably no MapKit.

This ignores the facts that Flash is a security risk. Adobe may say that it had the second fewest security holes of all Internet technologies listed but the severity of those security holes is an important factor, as is the proliferation of outdated software (like when Adobe were shipping a compromised version of Opera within their suite).

This ignores the obvious performance burden of Flash. Adobe may say that “Flash performs as well as, if not better than, comparable multimedia technologies” but Flash makes my computer more burdened than when playing a fully immersive 3D game. The fans come on sooner, the machines heats up quicker. For tiny animations this is just not right. Adobe’s own comparisons are not even comparing like for like.

And why is Adobe so upset that Apple has restricted Flash when they say on their web page that:

we actively support technologies like HTML4, HTML5, CSS, and H.264, in addition to our own technologies.

So support these technologies and support them well and don’t get embroiled in this debate. So you’ve lost Flash on iPhone and iPad – move on. There’s no antitrust argument here, there’s no monopoly here (unless you can have a monopoly on “who makes the coolest devices”).

Local Newspapers on iPad

When I go to a newspaper web site, I’d love to see things like ‘news’. That would be the whole point, really. Evidently someone doesn’t ‘get it’. What’s doubly entertaining is that the Irish News hides all their content behind a Flash paywall which means those of us with a Flash blocker on our “Windows, … Continue reading “Local Newspapers on iPad”

When I go to a newspaper web site, I’d love to see things like ‘news’. That would be the whole point, really.

Evidently someone doesn’t ‘get it’.

What’s doubly entertaining is that the Irish News hides all their content behind a Flash paywall which means those of us with a Flash blocker on our “Windows, Mac or Linux” machines will see this:

This is what happens when you make a poor technology choice. Flash, as a content distribution platform, is dying. It was great in the day and everyone enjoyed something about it but extending it to cover video, the desktop and everything else they’ve shoehorned in there has ruined it’s simple appeal.

iPad Data Plans in the Wild

Orange has revealed their data plans ahead of the UK release of the iPad: £15 for 3GB of data? Are you kidding? to be honest, I’ve used just over 6 GB on my iPhone in two and a half years so it’s not that I think I’d use 3GB easily in a month, I just … Continue reading “iPad Data Plans in the Wild”

Orange has revealed their data plans ahead of the UK release of the iPad:

£15 for 3GB of data? Are you kidding? to be honest, I’ve used just over 6 GB on my iPhone in two and a half years so it’s not that I think I’d use 3GB easily in a month, I just wish there was some more flexibility. That said, if I was visiting the UK for a week, the weekly tariff might suit me very well rather than paying for roaming but there are other options which are better out there.

So, Orange, colour me unimpressed.

Frankly I’m more interested to see what Three will provide considering they currently offer a SIM only plan which offers unlimited internet for a fiver a month. Sure, it’s a normal SIM and not a micro-SIM, but that can be fixed.

When you consider that Three offer the best Internet deals and Vodafone offer the best European roaming deals, the future looks a little brighter for iPad users.

Nintendo vs Apple

A few years ago when we were feverishly playing PSone games on our Macs using Connectix’ Virtual Game Station, there was a rumour that not only was the Mac going to have a renaissance of games through Sony’s platform but Nintendo was also going to display their wares on the Mac considering the chip inside each GameCube was a PowerPC 750-based core. The 750 was also known, on the Mac, as the G3 and it shipped in several iBook and iMac models. Rumours were rife about a USB-based hardware dongle to provide the extra “Gecko” compatibility.

Of course it never happened. And that’s a shame as today we read this:

Satoru Iwata, the Nintendo president, is understood to have told his senior executives recently to regard the battle with Sony as a victory already won and to treat Apple, and its iPhone and iPad devices, as the “enemy of the future” . – TimesOnline

How many copies of Super Mario World for iPhone would sell? How many copies of Mario Kart for iPad would sell? Do you think Nintendo could make money on Pokémon for iPhone? How about the rest of their game library?

In my opinion, Nintendo need to get away from selling little pieces of plastic in large plastic boxes. My kids have a great deal of difficulty managing the safety and care of these chips and I’m sure some of them have found their way into the bag of a vacuum cleaner. Get out that scam of selling plastic! There’s no need for it considering every DS Lite and DSi has had WiFi for years. So, yes, in three years Nintendo has been made to look like a dinosaur but declaring war is not the right thing to do.

Apple has proved to be a formidable company with 100 million iPhone OS devices out there in consumers hands in just under three years. The DS range (including the DSi, DSi XL) has sold 129 million devices since 2004.

Nintendo and Apple are not necessarily enemies and I find it simplistic for them to consider themselves to be enemies. Look at SEGA – which has brought Sonic, Golden Axe and Football Manager to the iPhone among others. These aren’t going to create the same revenues as selling Wii and DSi units – but it doesn’t have to be an either/or. However, burning your bridges is unwise.

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