Well, we're really sorry for the downtime earlier today, which was due to a Distributed-Denial-Of-Service attack on our lovely hosts Squarespace. The attack was thwarted pretty quickly by all accounts, but Squarespace had to change some IP addresses, and that left us unavailable via the regular web address. We're very sorry, and hope you didn't miss us too much.
While we're on the subject of hugely creative individuals making legendary games, Kotaku has a great piece on Sid Meier, creator of Civilization :
Sid Meier doesn’t like thinking about business, and he clammed up a bit when I asked him about MicroProse’s new ownership. “Sid didn't want to be involved in that at all,” Stealey told me later. “No business—not at all.”
“Sid is happiest in his office writing code,” Solomon said.
Amazing guy.
We'll have another Doom Ray follow-up with Lars Simkins tomorrow, in a post-Kickstarter target-smashing update., but if you've still not listened to the second part of Kyle's wide-ranging chat with the creator of the Frontiers RPG it's well-worth a catch-up. If you're not a games fan there's some very interesting discussion of what drives creatives in all fields, and more on Kyle's forthcoming comic-book collaboration with Luke Edwards, The Green Men.
There goes another tablet that was going to end the iPad's dominance of the post-PC market.
BlackBerry's chief recently bemoaned the lack of a good business model for tablets and even went so far as to suggest that they'll be gone from the market within the next five years. It's therefore quite consistent with his outlook to consider the PlayBook a peripheral product that isn't core to BlackBerry's future prosperity. All the same, there'll be quite a few PlayBook owners who'll feel their trust has been betrayed by this reversal.Are there "quite a few PlayBook owners"? I've never met one.
Ever since the iPhone ushered in the era of ubiquitous mobile computing — and especially since the release of the first iPad began a shift away from traditional personal computers — the question has been whether and how Microsoft Office would adapt.Here's the answer: Grudgingly, and not very well. Office Mobile, which slipped into Apple's App Store with little fanfare, turns out to be a stripped-down add-on that will leave both Office and Apple users wondering, "Is that all there is?"
“In the broad scheme of things, video games have recently transformed the way we play, but also the way we learn and relate to each other,” Dyson says. “So we began studying and collecting games in 2006.”
With fewer than 100 games in the collection in 2006, the archive was nothing to marvel at. It was comprised of an Atari 2600, related cartridges and a few other stray objects.
Times have changed.
“By 2009, we got a much better handle on the industry and the history of the industry,” Dyson says with a smile. “We had over 10,000 artifacts. Now, the collection is over 40,000 games and related artifacts, as well as significant archival collections.”
Pi have the beginnings of a similar thing in my bedroom. Seriously, the ICHEG is a very special place, run by very special people, and this is important work. It's a super article, that I can't recommend highly enough.
I've had my original Ricoh GR Digital for a good few years now (it was released in 2005, though I got mine at a reduced price a couple of years later) and I've always had a soft spot for it. Despite unbearably sluggish RAW performance and a display that looks more than a little antiquated nowadays it handles very well. I also love the discipline that a fixed prime lens imposes. It's a little too close in quality though to a modern iPhone to make it worth carrying around everyday, and it's always just a bit too tempting to reach for my DSLR if I need something with better light-gathering or more focus control.
Im really interested then in the new Ricoh GR, which is just a centimetre taller and wider, and only a few millimetres thicker, yet gets a full APS-C sensor. I'm very keen to give this a spin.
Limbo developer Playdead is bringing the macabre platformer to iOS July 3, and the game's lifetime sales for the platforms it's currently available on have eclipsed 3 million copies, the studio announced today.
The iOS version — which will support iPad 2 and up, iPhone 4S and up, iPad mini and the latest-generation iPod touch — will cost $4.99. According to Playdead, development of the iOS port involved "rethinking the controls and performing extensive optimizations to ensure an amazing touch-based experience."
There's been a lot of focus from traditional gaming sources on how touch screen devices just don't work well for real games, because they don't have the multiple dedicated buttons that hardcore gamers demand. Nevertheless there are multiple classes of games that don't need hair-trigger responses and that–with some smart rethinking–can find a huge new audience on devices like the iPad. Limbo is just such a game, and I'll be eagerly downloading it.
This screen-as-object paradigm is easiest to understand in the multitasking interface, where each application is laid out in a row. At first glance this looks like the old app-switcher UI with the added bonus of a preview of each app. But notice that when one app triggers the opening of another app, the new app now actually slides in from the left. If you need to switch back, double tapping home zooms back out to show the original app to the right. This creates a new consistency of interaction that was not there previously. Switching apps is now a much more coherent experience that can take advantage of your spatial memory.
David Cole, Product Designer at Quora makes some very interesting and insightful comments about the way that iOS 7 makes better use of our spatial memory to help us navigate. I particularly enjoyed his reference to Jef Raskin's Zoomworld UI, which I've long admired.
"Our Electronic Flight Bag program has a significant positive environmental and cost-savings impact," said David Campbell, American's Vice President – Safety and Operations Performance. "In fact, removing the kitbag from all of our planes saves a minimum of 400,000 gallons and $1.2 million of fuel annually based on current fuel prices. Additionally, each of the more than 8,000 iPads we have deployed to date replaces more than 3,000 pages of paper previously carried by every active pilot and instructor. Altogether, 24 million pages of paper documents have been eliminated."
I've been pitching the convenience benefits of e-books to students for a while, but they generally don't have 35 pounds of paper books to haul around. These are staggering savings in fuel terms.
Thanks to The Loop for pointing to the latest enhancements that iOS is getting to make it even more useful in the classroom. Lots of these features will make a big difference to educators, and will simplify some of the things I've been trying to work out how to do with presentations. Volume purchases for Books will cheer a few of my colleagues, and the Apple TV management solves a few headaches for me personally. All good stuff.
The company said it plans to debut the device with 100 apps populating the Airspace store, with an almost even split in software built for the Mac and Windows operating systems. These apps are separated into two categories; apps which provide core functionality to the OS, such as switching between tabs and screens in OS X, and software that augments other apps with gesture control. A handful of these apps are now available to developers through Airspace.
When it was first announced in 2012, the Leap Motion Controller was shown working with an iMac to manipulate the on-screen UI via several "3D gestures," such as the familiar pinch and pull used on Apple's touchscreen devices. The small USB Controller captures up to ten points of input, turning a wave of the hand or a mid-air pinch of the fingers into actionable gesture data.
For desktop and large-screen set-ups this could be way better than touch. I've been on the pre-order list since they first announced it, and I'm really looking forward to playing with it when it ships.
The interesting thing about this is that I think it’s not about everything moving more photoreal. I think what everyone was amazed at about this short, what John Lasseter and Ed Catmull were excited about was to break open what animation could look like. It could look way more photoreal, but it could also look way more painterly. Just to get rid of this conception we have, of how CG animated features look. Breaking new ground in that territory.
Ultimately, it’s always about what fits the story. That was what I mentioned earlier. First there was the story, and then it, was, “Okay. What is the style? What is the look we can best tell it with?” Because there are no technical limitations anymore. You can make it look however you want it to look.
So this is more evidence of the return they're getting on the Global Illumination System, and it looks beautiful. I'm even more excited though by how they're freeing themselves from the limitations of the technology, and from the hegemony of style. The Blue Umbrella looks like nothing Pixar's attempted before, but the importance of emotion and narrative is undiminished. This is a company determined to reassert its core values, and to remain relevant for decades to come.
This is linked from everywhere, but it's such a great message I couldn't resist.
Fast forward to today and I hear similar comments from other developers. They see app stores with hundreds of thousands of apps and toss up their hands. It can be hard to look past the numbers. It’s also easy for an app to drown in the growing flood that is the Apple App Store.
Ignore all that. Ignore fear. Ignore the odds. Ignore the naysayers. Find your passion.I'm totally with this "scratch your own itch" approach too, and the Kickstarter approach to funding is just one means of validating that you're not the only person in the world who wants what you have in mind. It's also important to remember that there's nothing wrong in failing, or in finding out that your vision doesn't align with other people's. That's the kind of data that you just can't get from thinking something through: You have to actually test it.
I tend not to concern myself with rumours and leaked parts, but I couldn't help notice in these photos that the dual LEDs in what's purported to be the next iPhone revision have slightly different colours. It's a tiny change, but it could allow for more intelligent colour balancing in different situations. This is precisely the kind of small iteration with a combination hardware-software feature that Apple excels at, so I wouldn't be surprised to see it in the next iPhone.
I've been meaning to post a link to this article on Polygon for the last few days, but the more I read it, the more I didn't know where to start.
Most people who use iOS devices aren't privy to Apple's curation process for its App Store, and very few are aware of the rejections that have taken place. The developers Polygon spoke to believe that the removal of serious games from the App Store is an unfair act of censorship, of sanitizing the App Store and denying video games their cultural status as a medium that can tackle serious issues. They believe it needs to change. And they're not alone.
It's undeniable that Apple curates the apps that it allows into the App Store, for some very good reasons. It's also undeniable that they sometimes get it wrong, both letting things through that they later see fit to remove, and blocking apps for confused or spurious reasons and sometimes reversing those decisions. It's also clear that no single individual will agree with all of the decisions that Apple takes.
What bothers me about this article is the sense of developer entitlement that comes over, unchallenged by the writer. I'd take issue also with the blanket use of the term 'serious', seemingly used to elevate the games that Apple's blocked from run-of-the-mill entertainment games. It's highly subjective and implies a moral right not just to exist, but to be carried in Apple's store (primarily because it's hard to make any money from jail breakers, or from Android users). I know educational developers who'd contest whether these games qualify as Serious Gaming at all.
The implication is also that only games with a contentious political/social point to make are worthy of being deemed "culture". Should we ask whether Nintendo takes gaming seriously, since none of the Mario games were–to my knowledge–about low paid immigrants working in the plumbing trade?
Bullish, but still credible overall:
Apple TV will accidentally (though less accidentally than in the case of the iPod touch) dominate the console gaming market. The OS update that brings the App Store to the TV will bring Game Center as well. Games will be the top the store’s charts4. More advanced, console-quality games will follow, but the beauty of the situation is that those aren’t even necessary.
Austin Sweeney's assessment isn't far off my own, though I'd be hesitant to go out on a limb and suggest an explicit Apple TV gaming refresh + API as soon as iOS 7 arrives. The APIs for writing sprite-based games just got a massive push, and the Made-For-iPhone controllers will likely take a little while to appear. I'd put my money on seeing a bunch of SpriteKit-based iPod-to-Airplay games with controller support appear first. Add a third-party controller, or just use the iPod/iPhone's touch screen, and you've got a de-facto home console. From there it's a relatively small step to open up iCloud so you can download eligible "TV-playable" games to run right on the (upgraded?) Apple TV.
The usual suspects will whine that this isn't a serious console, and that Apple's curated store policies are anathema to "serious gaming", but most people won't care one jot. As Austin points out, the lack of serious games didn't hurt the Wii one bit, and Nintendo opened up gaming to a whole new audience. Imagine what happens when consoles cost $99, get annual upgrades, and run the games you already bought for your phone.
Instead of building reflections and shadows manually, why not do it automatically every time an artist placed a light source? "It was as if every time you took a photograph, you built a new camera," Kalache says. "It takes away from the art of taking a picture. We wanted to stop being engineers and be artists."
Each frame requires 20GB of RAM just to do the ray-tracing, and from what I've seen it's worth all the effort. The Pixar team includes some of the finest artists working anywhere.
Monsters University is proof that the company still has that intangible magic, and is able to make movies for children, adults — and the adults of tomorrow.
If JJ Abrams announced that he was releasing a Star Wars film every month until December, there still wouldn't be a movie that I'd be looking forward to more this year than Monsters University.
"We at Microsoft have no one to blame other than ourselves for failing to convince those hesitant to believe in our new system,"
He's right about that.