Yesterday, we posted about developer Dong Nguyen’s intent to take the wildly successful app Flappy Bird down from the App Store, tweeting:
I am sorry ‘Flappy Bird’ users, 22 hours from now, I will take ‘Flappy Bird’ down. I cannot take this anymore.
Seems Nguyen followed through on his promise. Flappy Bird is gone.
The overwhelming success of Flappy Bird has caused its developer to threaten to take down the app. Is that the right move?
If you are a fan of app design, spend a few minutes going through this dissection of the interface niceties of Facebook Paper. Some beautiful design going on here. Yum. [Via iosdevweekly]
As the video in the post shows, there’s a bug in iOS 7.0.4 that allows anyone with access to your iPhone to disable Find My iPhone. Obviously, this disables the ability to track your iPhone if it is stolen.
Point your phone’s camera at a product and the Amazon app will find it in its store.
Patent lawsuit based on branch prediction might force Apple to reveal A7 trade secrets.
Cycloramic takes a 360 degree panoramic photo, hands-free, using vibration to rotate the phone. The panorama is stitched together using software and Cycloramic is protected via a utility patent. It’s been around for a while and, before the appearance had 660,000 downloads, made about $175K.
Umoove Experience: The 3D Face & Eye Tracking Flying Game starts off by registering your eye and head position, then lets you use very subtle movements to fly around a virtual world.
Last Friday, we posted a link to a graphic that detailed the process HTC goes through to vet new versions of Android. The multi-company hoops that need leaping, as well as the incredible number of devices that need to be tested, are both barriers to adoption of new Android revs and contributors to fragmentation.
Apple has announced their latest adoption rates for iOS 7. 78% is a huge number.
Great infographic on the HTC web site details the number of hoops an individual device manufacturer needs to jump through in order to clear an update for release.
Boston Dynamics was founded in 1992 by former MIT professor Marc Raibert. They’ve got deep expertise, especially in walking and running robots.
Now Qualcomm is shipping their version of the Apple iBeacon.
Gimbal is a comprehensive context aware, proximity platform for brands to engage their customers’ mobile devices with highly relevant communications using a powerful combination of physical location, activity, time and personal interests.
New capacitive sensing technique brings the concept of gesture detection into the real world.
Want to learn how to program? Code.org is organizing a world-wide campaign to get people started with programming. Apple Stores are offering a free one hour Introduction to Computer Science course as their part of the campaign.
When you are in a face-to-face conversation, the person on the other side is constantly reading and interpreting your facial expressions, looking for feedback. If you offer a puzzled look, they might rephrase their words, without you having to ask.
License specifically barring Richard Stallman
Fascinating review offers insight into the design tradeoffs involved in being first to market with a new technology.
Jason Biheller, the director of gaming innovations at PowerA, admitted that some of the issues with the controller’s feel may have been due to a number of restrictions. “It wasn’t an easy project,” he said in a phone interview. “I’m not blaming this on timing, but we did have a limited amount of time to get this done, and because the phone had to sit in the middle, it was very difficult. I guess you lose a little stability by having the phone in the center of the controller, because you’ve got moving parts and some mechanical designs moving back and forth. So you lose some of that solid feel you get with the Vita.”
I see three obvious alternatives to game controller design. First is the sandwich, the approach taken by Moga and Logitech (with their PowerShell controller), with the controller built to sandwich the iOS device between the two sides of the controller. This seems to be the most efficient approach if you want to take the controller with you, but has the mechanical disadvantage of having two points of wiggle weakness or flex, where the controller connects to the iOS device.
The second alternative is the top-heavy approach used for most Android controllers, where the device is held in place on top of the controller. This approach is unwieldy but necessary, due to the large number of Android form factors.
The third approach, is the satellite design used by consoles, where the controller is a single, solid, piece and plugs into the device via a cable. The upsides are solid controller feel and compatibility with multiple form factors (iPad and iPhone, for example), while the down side is the clumsiness of play while on the move.
It’s early days and I’m sure there’ll be lots of design innovation to come.
This is where it all started for me, my first exposure to Apple. The first bit of money I ever made was writing a game called Library Adventure for the Apple II. Much of the code was written with peeks (to access hidden bits of the OS) and pokes (to hide our own stuff for later retrieval) in memory. We used packages from PenguinSoft and Beagle Brothers. Pulled many all nighters and had a grand old time.
Now the Computer History Museum and Digibarn Museum have released the Apple II DOS code into the wild (non-commercial use only). Here’s the link if you want to grab a copy for yourself. As of this writing, the server returned an internal error. I suspect the servers have been overwhelmed with requests.
Kyle Richter paints a picture here, projecting Apple’s path to a seat at the console table.
Apple has sold roughly 700 Million iOS devices since the introduction of the original iPhone, in addition they have sold in excess of 13 Million Apple TVs. Compare that to the 78 Million (as of March 2013) PlayStation 3′s sold since it was released in 2006, and 78.2 Million Xbox 360′s sold from its release in 2005 through June 2013. It is no wonder that the iPod touch (and iPhone) is considered one of the world’s leading gaming platform, with roughly 9x the sales of traditional consoles. When looking at the number of available titles, Xbox 360 comes in with 958 games, PS3 with 793 available games, and iOS with an almost unbelievable 166,510 games. Yes, the average quality of an Xbox or Playstation game is higher than that of the average iOS game, but that is a trend that we as developers can change. The average Xbox game sells for $24.60, while the average Playstation 3 game sells for $28.92, once again the almost unbelievable number for average iOS game price is 76¢. So, Apple has significantly more devices, with an exponentially larger game selection, at a fraction of the cost. This is a good position to be starting from.
This is just the starting point. Read the whole thing. Agree or disagree, this is excellent food for thought.
A fascinating bit of history, nice read for a Sunday morning.
Blender is an open source 3D modeling program that runs on Mac OS X as well as on Linux and Windows. Blender is free to download. You can support the Blender project by making a donation on the Blender site, or by buying books and DVDs via the site.
The headline links to an excellent, free tutorial created by Vicki Wenderlich. If you’ve ever thought about designing in 3D, this is a terrific place to start.
The headline says it all. Businesses are investing in the Apple ecosystem, building far more custom apps for iOS than Android.
As a developer, I think no small part of this trend is due to the ease of developing for iOS as compared to Android, as well as the lack of fragmentation device-wise.
Design tips worth reading before you start your next app project. These aren’t perfect, they aren’t exhaustive, but good food for thought.
Won’t be long now until we see the actual release. My hope is that this signifies the release of a new retina MacBook Pro alongside the already pre-announced Mac Pro.
Click on the link and a web page with a piece of cloth (looks like a piece of graph paper) will appear. Click and drag across the cloth and you’ll rip it. The simulation is very realistic, complete with gravitational physics.
Even better, if you right click (hold down the control key), your mouse turns into a cutting tool.
And as a pièce de résistance, all the code is there to play with and learn from, including the HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Absolutely brilliant.
I’ve always been fascinated by Natural Language Processing (parsing language into a computer understandable form) and speech synthesis (turning raw text into an human sounding spoken voice). Siri is an example of both of these technologies at work.
This article and the video below does a terrific job filling in some of the blanks on how tech like Siri evolved over time and how it works.
John Gruber talks about future plans for Vesper with incredibly refreshing honesty. Devs and product marketing managers, this is worth a read (and worth emulating). So great.
Oh, sweet justice!
Have you ever wanted to learn web development or just refine your webdev skills? Dungeons and Developers gives your quest for knowledge a role playing twist. When you get to the page, click the Open the talent tree button to get started.