The End of the Used Game Market is Good for Developers

Interesting take on this from Penny Arcade's Ben Kuchera, prompted by the brewing storm over Xbox One's game licensing system. In short, when you buy a game on disk from Microsoft, you're really buying a license to play it on your machine that's tied to your account. You can move that license around to play it at a friend's house, or you can give up the license (likely for some credit against new games) and never play it again. You can also give the disk to anyone you like and they can install it, but they can only play it if they buy a license. It seems like a solid idea, but it's complex for users to wrap their heads around, and it'll likely kill second-hand sales stone dead. Ben makes a good argument for this being a good thing, and it'll be interesting to see what developers do with the price flexibility that this affords them.

i'll be talking about this with Kyle on Doom Ray this weekend, so let me know your thoughts in the usual places.​

The "Android Is Winning" meme and the Myth of Market Share

First, market share without context assumes that each percentage of market share is equal to another – that every Android activation is equal to an iOS sale. Nothing could be further from the truth. You can’t simply total up market share and determine a winner any more than you could count up coins or poker chips without knowing the underlying value of those coins or chips. A penny does not have the same value as a quarter and only a small child would rather have more coins than fewer coins but more money.

​Seems like not a week goes by without someone telling me that Google has a bigger share of the smartphone market than iPhone. I'd love to split a restaurant bill with some of these folks.

Is Xbox the Last Traditional Console?

Implementation issues aside, Microsoft's focus on the living room versus Sony's cloud emphasis seems both more traditional, and more of a sure thing in the short to medium term.

Assuming that neither Sony nor Microsoft manage an outright coup with a better price, a better release date, or sufficiently compelling exclusive games, this is the choice you'll make: do you bet on the company who wants to let you take a traditional gaming experience anywhere you'd care to be, or the one that demands you stand still in exchange for increased immersion and functionality?

This is not the TV Experience You're Looking For

Microsoft's Xbox One launch emphasised its ambition to sit at the centre of your living room, but if you were hoping it could free you from the existing cable/satellite prison then you'll be sadly disappointed:

The problem is that the Xbox One's TV integration is the same familiar nightmare we've known for nearly 20 years now. Instead of actually integrating with your TV service, the One sits on top of it: you plug your cable box's HDMI cable into the Xbox, which overlays the signal with its own interface. If you're lucky enough to own a newer cable box, you'll get to change channels directly through the HDMI connection, but most people will find themselves using the One's included IR blaster to control their cable or satellite boxes — a failure-prone one-way communication system that stubbornly refuses to die.

Yahoo! is on a Roll

Yesterday was a big day for Marissa Mayer's Yahoo, with the announcement that they'd purchased Tumblr, followed by the launch of a revamped Flickr. Long term the Tumblr acquisition is big, and tells us a lot about how Yahoo sees its future. It's also a clear indication of how Yahoo is changed under Mayer's leadership; the announcement was honest and straightforward, and acknowledged the concerns of Tumblr fans that they might "screw this up" in the way many think they screwed up Flickr.

Fitting then that yesterday should be the day that Yahoo shows its hand on Flickr, and what they're doing to 'fix' it. As a long-time (pre-Yahoo) Flickr subscriber I'm cheered that the new design and subscription model doesn't throw out everything I've loved about the service. The features I've relied on all seem to be intact. Rather this is about demonstrating commitment and renewed relevance, and the big bold moves that show it means business. 1TB free photo storage is an order of magnitude greater than most existing offers—make no mistake, this is as much a shot across Dropbox's bows as Google's (and I love that slider that lets you see how many photos you can store).

​Initial communication over what it means for existing users was less than crystal-clear, but it's pretty straightforward. Existing Pro accounts carry on as before with the same rolling subscription (for the time being at least). Free users all get a terabyte of storage, ads, and lose image stats. I think that's a pretty good trade-off for most regular people. $49.95 a year buys you statistics and strips out the ads. The curve-ball option they're calling "Doublr" gets you 2TB for a few cents short of $500. That's an interesting option, though the price/capacity would need to change before I'd consider it good value. Hard to see yet what they're planning for that.

​All in all these changes are positive, and give me renewed hope in Flickr's future, and for Yahoo too. I'm hoping more than ever that one of Mayer's first calls on joining Yahoo was to Tim Cook, and that we'll see deeper and better integration of Flickr in iOS and Mac OS X over the coming months and years.

​UPDATE: Right on cue, 9to5mac reports that deeper Flickr integration is on the cards for iOS 7.

Turn Graph Paper Sketches into iPad Platform Games

Nice idea. Wile I'm sure this has pretty heavy constraints it could be a great way of prototyping ideas, and of getting into games design.

Players simply design their level by hand, creating any traps or obstacles they want the avatar to surmount while climbing five stories and reaching the goal. Pixel Press uses proprietary character recognition to allow the iPad's camera to pick up the sketches and convert them to graphic elements in the level. Then the creator has to test the level, refine it and add skins to make it look like a polished game

Robin's Kickstarter is already a quarter of the way toward its goal, so here's hoping it'll be funded.

The App Industry Needs its Auteurs

From last week, TNW has an interesting take on the emerging new role of Director within the App production world:

As Apple’s App Store nears its five year anniversary, a new kind of storyteller is rising in importance: The App Director. This isn’t an official title, but it’s definitely a state of mind and an important trend to take note of as we enter the app ecosystem’s pupae stage.

I was reminded of this by both last week's Doom Ray interview with Steve Stopps of Blitz Games, and by some of the Masters student work I've been looking at this week. There's definitely an emerging new category of the app 'author' who may not be coding directly, but needs to have a complete view of e whole experience and how it's delivered. This may emerge from more traditional design education, but there'll need to be significant adjustments in how we recruit, assess, and how we prepare students for the deep digital literacy this requires.

The Terrifying Reality of a Glass Future

At one point as I climbed the stairs and approached the second floor, I saw a group of five people wearing Google Glass, all silently staring off into space. I couldn’t tell if they were wirelessly having a conversation through their eyeballs, or just bored by the presence of real humans in front of them.

We are going to disallow these in our classrooms aren't we?

Flat Earthers

There's no doubt that Microsoft tapped into some kind of a trend with its ultra-flat 'Metro' UI design for Windows, but I for one think that it goes way too far, jettisoning the subtle visual cues that makes the best app designs feel like more than pixels behind a smooth glass screen. Tim Green over at Medium thinks so too, and provides a well-considered narrative on just how flat is flat enough for iOS.

Google Wants Everything

​Gruber is spot-on here:

Google is a hyper-competitive company, and they repeatedly enter markets that already exist and crush competitors. Nothing wrong with that. That’s how capitalism is supposed to work, and Google’s successes are admirable. But there’s nothing stupid about seeing Google being pitted “versus” other companies. They want everything; their ambition is boundless.

I've wondered before if Google is becoming what Microsoft was in the late 90s and early 2000s: A barrier to innovation elsewhere. Time was, if it was a market Microsoft might enter then smaller businesses were afraid to touch it. This isn't "open"; this is wanting perfect data on everything you do and needing to own all of the entry points to get that.

iPhones Become Microscopes for Cheap Disease Identification

DIY iPhone Microscope Costs $8 to Make

Internal medicine and infectious disease specialist Isaac Bogoch and his colleagues turned an iPhone 4S into a fairly accurate microscope by attaching an eight dollar, three-millimeter ball lens to the smartphone's camera lens using double sided tape.

​Things like this are inspiring. Just think of the potential for affordable distributed diagnosis.

This could be a nice competitor to Eventbrite

I love Eventbrite, but I'm sure it could use a little competition. If Tito works as good as it looks, it might just give the whole event ticketing market a kick in the pants. Also: We need more apps supporting the amazing Passbook on iOS.

Love some of these features too:

With Tito you have a huge amount of flexibility in setting up your tickets. Custom discount codes, private links to secret tickets, and you can even run your event as a lottery.

BBM Comes to iOS, Android, and Nobody Notices.

We’ve known BlackBerry has been planning to offer BBM on rival platforms for quite some time. Now that services like WhatsApp, iMessage and Kik are dominating the messaging world, BBM will finally expand beyond the BlackBerry platform.

​Anyone still interested?

Different and Yet the Same.

Unlike Apple's Game Center application, what Google's offering is backend support for developers rather than a standalone application. Think of it more like OpenFeint than Game Center -- you can sign in using your Google+ login in-game, and that login will track your identity (including leaderboard scores, achievements and saves) across various games and devices.

Forgive me if I'm being dense, but what part of that is "unlike Apple's Game Center"?

Design's "Holy Shit" moments

Mitch Goldstein eloquently captures the essence of design education:

Design is so big that it really is not possible to provide a comprehensive, complete education in 4 years—it takes a lifetime to even learn a small part of it. These moments of enlightenment are what make design education truly useful, because in these small moments a world opens up to a student. These insights and lateral connections propel students to spend time on their own to find out more, especially after a class or school ends.

 This is very close to how some of the best teachers I know work. It's hard to build classroom structures that turn these rare moments into reliable events, akin to engineering happy accidents. We need to take care not to fill the curriculum, flipped or otherwise, with so many structures that we crowd out the opportunity for these discoveries.

iPhone Camera Evolution

The makers of Camera+ gathered all six versions of the iPhone — from the first-generation model on through the iPhone 5 — and took pictures in similar conditions with each. The resulting photographs (viaTUAW) demonstrate the evolution of photo quality in Apple's bestselling handset.

Not just a demonstration of the specific improvements in Apple's iPhone camera, but a reminder of how far tiny imaging modules have come in the last six years. Camera phones have travelled a long way from this.​

The Facebook Phone Isn't Liked

All this adds up to some worrisome news for the behoodied one: if Facebook can't enthuse mobile users, the company is in serious trouble. Mobile users are going to be key to ensuring growth for the social network, and it needs to gather large numbers of smartphone users to build revenue and keep the shareholders happy

Not great news for Facebook for sure. Too much, too soon, or is the brand just not as extensible as many thought? Me? I'd Poke out my eyes sooner than have Facebook on my lock screen.​

Inventing Bowie

I could pick any part of Ian Baruma's The Invention of David Bowie in this month's edition of The New York Review of Books, but I think Bowie's role as a ​performer and actor–in the broadest sense possible–is particularly relevant:

Kemp taught Bowie how to use his body, how to dance, pose, mime. And it was Kemp who introduced Bowie to Kabuki. Kemp was fascinated by the onnagata tradition of male actors playing female roles. Kabuki is oddly fitting to Bowie, a theater of extravagant, stylized gestures. At climactic moments the actors freeze, as though in a photograph, while striking a particularly dramatic pose. Bowie never became a great actor, but he did become a great poseur, in the best sense of the word; he always moves with peculiar grace. Without the influence of Kemp, he might not have made the next step in his career, merging rock music with theater, film, and dance. They put on a show together called Pierrot in Turquoise. Bowie learned how to use costumes and lighting to the best effect. Sets would become ever more elaborate, featuring images from Buñuel movies or Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

David Bowie Is Making An Exhibition of Himself

I spent Saturday morning finally getting a look at the much-publicised David Bowie Is exhibition at London's V&A Museum, and to be honest I could have spent all weekend there. I ended up having about two hours there, and having to rush a little bit through the final sections as my friends were on a tighter schedule, but there was much more to spend time with, and I'll be making another trip before it ends in August.​

​It's a truly lovely experience for anyone who's spent most of their life staring at Bowie's LP sleeves, watching his promo videos and acting performances, and soaking up the visual aspects of his public personae. It's also an exemplar of what an exhibition might be. Whilst individual items might impress (oh to stand so close to that pierrot costume or to gaze upon Edward Bell's enormous artwork for Scary Monsters!) it's the cumulative effect that persists the longest. Was any living man's artistic life ever so thoroughly examined? Has anyone ever worn so many clothes that are so recognisable to so many people?

I could fill multiple posts with my thoughts on the various artefacts on display, but I'll wait until the next Re:Sleeves show to talk about them with Ben Waddington, and I urge anyone who's even curious about Bowie's work and life to see the show for themselves. Advance tickets are sold out, but 450+ tickets are available from the V&A daily. I'd get there early if I were you, and budget extra for what you'll spend in the shop while you wait for your entry slot.​

The Next Apple TV Remote Control

Some smart thoughts from Gruber on a putative iOS redesign, and this aside:

I’ve long thought we won’t see apps and an App Store for Apple TV until some future hardware revision of the product with a much-better remote control

I agree, but I think we've seen the future of the Apple TV remote, and it looks like this.