The Wii U Gamepad is an Anchor

In a balanced and largely optimistic (long term) Wired piece on Nintendo's fortunes, Chris Kohler raises the question of a Wii U without the second-screen-cum-gamepad: 

Purely based on where Nintendo is going with its software lineup, GamePad is becoming an optional accessory. All that’s left is to make it an optional purchase. If selling GamePad separately might allow Nintendo to reduce the price of Wii U to just under $200 (with a game pre-installed on the console for extra value, of course) it would look much more appealing next to the $400 PS4 and $500 Xbox One.

If it seems unlikely that a game console would climb down so dramatically and remove the one thing that it pitched as its defining feature, think again. It’s already happened twice this year: Microsoft’s preemptive reversal of all of its Xbox One DRM policies (and making Kinect optional) and Nintendo’s release of the 2DS, which removes the 3-D screen that gave 3DS its name in an effort to knock the price down even further.

Totally with this. As a casual-gamer that doesn't own any consoles I was looking at the cheaper Wii mini with interest until I saw just how much they'd crippled the display output quality. I've looked at the Wii U but was completely turned off by the complexity of the two-screen set up and the huge controller. If you'd offered me the option of having the Wii U with the Classic Wii controller I'd have gone for it.

Missing the Fax Machine

Richard Baguley over at Medium is has a fondness for the pre-email document transmission technology that many of us came to despise. 

Every technology has a dark side, and the dark side of the fax was junk faxes. In the 1980s and early 1990s, it wasn’t uncommon to come into the office on monday morning to find your fax machine had received piles of junk faxes advertising dodgy goods, from cheap t-shirts to medical insurance. Companies were set up that would scan every possible phone number, calling and looking for the bippy noise of a fax machine at the other end. For a fee, they would then send your advert to thousands of these devices, whoever they were used by.

On one occasion my office needed a dedicated fax line for a new Mac we'd bought with a built-in Fax/Modem. The phone company still had an adjacent number that we'd used for the fax machine at a company a year or two earlier, so we grabbed that. No sooner had we plugged it in than we started getting junk faxes. They'd been sending them for the whole time that the number had been inactive. Nightmare.

Saidoka iPhone Dock

I've been looking for something like this for ages, but from reading the actual user reviews it seems like a case of "almost there". The Saidoka puts the iPhone at the perfect angle—lying almost flat but sloping slightly upwards for ease of use—and doesn't partially obscure the Home button in the way that Apple's own dock does (which makes unlocking with Touch ID difficult). It lacks an audio through port (Apple's own carries audio-out but doesn't support the headset mic, which pretty much makes it useless in these days of Airplay for speakers), and reviewers seem to have taken issue with the "loose-fitting" micro-USB port for charging. Personally, I'd be happy to never see another micro-USB port ever again. I'd take a bigger dock with a full-size USB—or ideally a Lightning port—over this any day. 

Gender, Marketing & The Video Games Industry

This is a fantastic article, which I urge you to read in its entirety. I could pull any number of quotes from it, but this one stands out for me: 

But Romero points out that if we go back to fall 1993, two significant things happened in gaming. One is the release of Doom, which heralded the start of the male-dominated first-person shooter genre. The other, in the same year, is the launch of Myst, which had an overwhelmingly female player base. "Myst dominated the charts, and we don't say games are dominated by women," Romero says. "So I've never felt that way. The Sims has more female players than it has male players, but I don't use those statistics to paint all of games."

A complex and fascinating area. We can all agree that we need more young women in the industry, but it's not as clearly male-dominated as it might first appear.

This, Bogost says, is one of the fundamental problems with the way people view video games today. The most popular titles — stuff like Candy Crush, Draw Something, Bejeweled — are excluded from being 'real games,' both by those within and outside of video game culture. What that leaves is what he describes as infantile adolescent power fantasy games, which are possibly a minority game experience, but they're the "loudest." So even if video games as a whole aren't a gendered medium, even if there's diversity in content and players, the stereotype persists outside of video game culture.

Nailed it.

Finding the Next Billion Smartphone Users

To say the Moto G has been highly anticipated is probably an understatement. The Verge does a pretty good job here of deconstructing what Motorola has had to let go of to meet its low-to-mid price point. This is a shot against the bows of Samsung's older offerings for sure, but I'm still not sure it's enough on its own to move data-light phone users over to expensive data plans.

The Moto G doesn’t have to contend with the type of premium devices that meet my standards, though, and compared to the (admittedly fun) clear plastic shelled Asha phones like the 503, uninspiring Firefox OS phones like the ZTE Open, and Nokia’s low-end Windows Phones, the Moto G looks truly premium, even if it doesn’t quite live up to expectations.

Motorola has taken a leap in the right direction here, bringing aspirational qualities to a new price range, but it hasn't performed a miracle. Instead, it’s boiled down the elements of great design to sell it to the masses. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Within the growing tablet format, Apple’s iPad gaining share.

What are all these other tablets being used for? Not for viewing ads, that's for sure.

Tablets grow, while the iPad grows even more. Tablets accounted for 28% of all mobile ad impressions over Q3 2013, which was double their share in Q4 2012. Within the growing tablet format, Apple’s iPad, already the dominant device, further established its position by gaining share.

Apple pulls away from the pack. Apple remained the strongest manufacturer by volume, with 63% of all global ad impressions. Furthermore, Apple also increased its share of global impressions against the ‘long tail’ of manufacturers
- that is, all mobile device manufacturers other than Apple and Samsung. 

From the Q3 2013 Adfonic Global AdMetrics Report. Full PDF report linked here:

Life Size Artificial Gaga

If anyone was going to do this, Gaga was. 

Gaga teamed up with manufacturers in Japan to create GAGADOLL, a humanoid silicon doll that looks just like the singer. In a video showing the making of the doll, a user places his head on the doll's chest while it plays "Applause."

Fabian Oefner's Exploding Cars

You have to see these images. 

The Disintegrating series – representing a staggering amount of work- has been created from hundreds not to say thousands of shots. Each car has been dismantled completely, from the body shell to the smallest screws, then photographed piece by piece in a specific position to obtain the illusion of an exploding car.

I remember piecing together composite digital images from separate shots of models in the early 90's, when digital cameras were low-resolution, and our Macs were incredibly slow compared to today, but we never attempted anything as intricate or as beautiful as this.

Walking New York

To write The New York Nobody Knows, Helmreich walked 6,048 miles, covering almost every block in the city's five boroughs: Queens, Manhattan, Staten Island, Brooklyn and the Bronx. It took him four years, walking an average of 1,512 miles a year. He wore out nine pairs of shoes.

 As a passionate pedestrian, I can attest to the virtues of walking cities. Heck, I've nearly killed myself doing it in the heat of Bangkok, and I've worn out good boots on trips to Paris and Hong Kong.

(Thanks to  MyAppleMenu for the link)

UPDATE: The book is here on Amazon, and looks well worth a read. The cover alone is gorgeous.

Cédric Delsaux's amazing Star Wars photographs

Delsaux's Dark Lens collection has been around since last year, but they're still worthy of your attention. 

“Depuis longtemps de nombreux artistes ont interprété l’univers de Star Wars bien au-delà de tout ce qui fut représenté dans les films. Une des interprétations les plus unique et intriguante que j’ai pu voir est celle du photographe Cedric Delsaux qui a brillamment integré des personnages de Star Wars dans des paysages urbains et industriels indiscutablement terrestres. Aussi novateur et dérangeant que puisse être son travail, il n’en est pas moins plausible."

George Lucas

If you like the work, you can still buy the book on Amazon.

iPads generate "vast majority" of US holiday mobile sales

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(EON: Enhanced Online News)--Adobe (Nasdaq:ADBE) today released its Adobe® Digital Index 2013 online shopping data. Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday saw record online sales with 1.062 billion and 1.93 billion, respectively. For the first time more than 24 percent of online sales occurred on smartphones and tablets, a record increase of 118 percent year-over-year (YoY). iOS-based devices drove more than $543 million dollars in online sales, with iPad taking a 77 percent share. Android-based devices were responsible for $148 million in online sales, a 4.9 percent share of mobile driven online sales.

 $417 Million sales through iPad-transaction alone. Android phones still doing more business than Android tablets. I wonder how that'll change going forward? It's easy to see why the massive numbers of Android-based phones aren't reflected in transactions, since so many of those handsets are generic smartphones-sold-as-feature phones, probably sold with zero-to-low data plans and sold to people who primarily use them for calls and texting. Can that pattern hold for Android tablets? I imagine Amazon expects online sales generated by Kindles to overwhelmingly go to its own stores, and they're probably right.

When Did Microsoft's Marketing Get So Clueless?

Matt Lees of popular UK game site, Videogamer is. He produced a video criticising KSI's inclusion in the event. An influential games critic, his scathing attack has been viewed almost 100,000 times on YouTube, and caused a spike of controversy within the games industry.

He told the Guardian: "Microsoft's marketing angle this year more than ever has been all about the all-in-one 'entertainment hub'. It's a very family-oriented angle, and KSI's unresolved history of making light of sexual objectification and rape didn't feel like a good fit for a family brand."

What with this and all the Chromebook 'Scroogled' stuff, I'd say Microsoft needs a new marketing team.

Shenzhen's Amazing Terminal 3 Building

Designed by the Italian Studio Fuksas, Terminal 3 has been shaped to look like a manta ray, "a fish that breathes and changes its own shape, undergoes variations, [and] turns into a bird to celebrate the emotion and fantasy of a flight." That theme of breathing and openness is carried on by a honeycomb of skylights perforating the new terminal's steel skin and a set of stylized "trees" that disguise the air conditioning apparatus. The hexagonal shapes and honeycomb theme are then subtly reiterated throughout the three-floor, 500,000-square-meter facility.

Incredible. I want to fly to there the next time I visit China or Hong Kong.

How the iPad Changes Writing in Education

In the progression from Writing 1.0 to 2.0, we digitally enhanced an existing process. If we examined it through the lens of Dr. Ruben Puentedura's SAMR model, we might have stepped from "substitution" to "augmentation," allowing the technology to provide "functional improvement." With iPads, the goal should not be to apply the paper or digital processes in the same way, but to consider how we can leverage the capabilities of the device in order to "modify" and "redefine" what's possible.

Great article with a lot of practical ideas for how iPad can change how writing happens for students and teachers.

A Chair for the Post-Desk Office

What the company concluded from its observations is that we no longer relate to the work desk the way we once did: “You’re on your iPad, you’re on your computer, you’re not really engaged with the desk anymore.” Whereas for older generations the desk and chair remain an inseparable whole, the modern worker is far more flexible and mobile. "Working out of the bag is a growing phenomenon," continues Small, noting that Steelcase's internal project for addressing the needs of mobile workers is dubbed "follow the bag."

That's all very well, but I still need somewhere to put my coffee.

2D Face Make-Up

This is a fascinating experiment in manipulating depth perception through make up and portrait photography. Like projection mapping for make-up artists.

A Rollerball Pen that lets Makers draw Circuits

The Circuit Scribe aims to make building circuits as easy as doodling, and while a single pen will only set you back $20, an extra $10 will net you a pile of other resistors, capacitors, batteries, and switches so that you can start building stuff right away. There’s even a $100 package with dozens of extra components like sound buzzers, photo sensors, and a motor. To be sure, the Circuit Scribe's silver-water-cellulose mixture isn’t the first conductive ink product on the market, but judging from the video above, it looks a lot nicer to work with than some of the alternatives out there.

Android support for RAW coming

This is perhaps the real point:

The most important possible improvement that wouldn't be visible in the source code: image quality. Android cameras arguably lag behind the iPhone in quality, so this new API may be Google's solution to that problem. Android's subpar image quality seems to be an across-the-board problem, so maybe the issue really is as low-level as the camera API. There's no way to be sure, though, until we get finished software and devices in our hands. With documentation using phrases like "substantially improved capabilities" and "fine-grain control" it certainly sounds like Google is out to fix Android's digital-imaging woes.

RAW file support in iOS would be great for sure, but Android needs it more, since companies like Samsung are building cameras around it.

Jony & Marc's (RED) Auction

$12,883,000 raised in total. Some amazing items. 

Improvements Coming to Leap Motion Software

Buckwald says that the new software has been a work in progress for over a year and that it’s needed to further improve latency and the overall experience. As he explains it, the existing tracking software on the market lacks the necessary logic to know how to determine what action to take when a hand is positioned in a certain way where fingers overlay each other. Soon, it will have the necessary “smarts” to observe and follow all the joints in your hands to make the required movements.

Specifically, Leap Motion will soon be able to better understand finger-to-finger (pinch) movements, when a user is grasping an object or interacting with it.

Leap Motion is a really exciting technology, and I've enjoyed playing with it. The software for detecting finger motion really needs some work though, so it's good to hear that they're hard at work on it. The potential for integrating gestures into existing desktop software is definitely there, and worth watching.