06.14.12 |
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Tim Stevens likes it, but there’s a problem:
The primary Apple apps — Safari, Mail, the address book, etc. — have all been tweaked to make use of all these wonderful pixels. Sadly, little else has. While we got assurances that third-party apps like Adobe Photoshop and AutoCAD are in the process of being refined, right now, seemingly every third-party app on the Mac looks terrible.
Yes, terrible. Unlike a PC, where getting a higher-res display just means tinier buttons to click on, here OS X is actively scaling things up so that they maintain their size. This means that non-optimized apps, which would otherwise be displayed as tiny things, instead are displayed in their normal physical dimensions with blurry, muddy edges.
This is a serious issue, one I hope Apple makes easily correctable for Mac developers. A even bigger issue is web imagery; i’m seeing many designers on my Twitter feed complain about the sharpness of web images up against well defined text.
06.14.12 |
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Tech news moves fast but some discussion topics are timeless. Copyright and digital ownership is one of them and the Vergecast podcast covered it in depth on their episode two weeks ago. I really enjoyed listening to hosts Josh Topolsky and Nilay Patel break down where the movie, TV and music industry have to move to stay competitive. It’s all clustered at the beginning of the episode through roughly the first half hour.
06.14.12 |
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Great creative commons licensed icon font. I can see this really coming in handy on some future side projects.
While on the subject, if you’re in the market for web page icons (with flat colors and no fancy treatments) bundling them in a single font is often the best way to go. Fonts are vector based, making them infinitely scaleable for multi-resolution displays and you get a single http request to pull in the full icon list. This really played out well with the Climacons Font on my Blue Drop web app.
06.13.12 |
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Famed game designer Peter Molyneux:
You’re presented with this white room. In the middle of the white room is a black cube. If you touch on that black cube, you’ll zoom into it. This black cube is made up of millions of tiny little cubes. You can tap away at that cube.
As you’re doing that, these words will come up: ‘Curiosity, what is inside the black cube?’ That’s when you realize it’s not just you tapping away at that black cube, it’s the whole world. The whole world is tapping away is revealing layers of this cube.
So so Molyneux to run a project like this. Here’s hoping it translates into a kick ass game.
06.13.12 |
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Pay what you want and get four highly regarded games – Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery, Limbo, Amnesia and Psychonauts – for Mac, PC and Linux. Pay a bit more (about $9 at the time of this writing) to unlock four more games, including Bastion and Super Meat Boy. If you’re at all vaguely interested in PC or Mac gaming you’ve probably heard about this. It deserves the hype. I’m generally not much of a Mac gamer, but the chance to catch up with Limbo, Braid and Super Meat Boy for bit more than $10, much of which goes to charity, is a no brainer.
Act soon – there’s only one day left in this offer.
06.12.12 |
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The Verge’s Paul Miller wrote a solid article on how the big three console companies will evolve:
In the game world, where the topic of “casual” vs “hardcore” gaming is still a hot-button issue, Microsoft has side-stepped and pulled its chips off the table: it’s just mainstream. When Microsoft and Sony built Kinect and Move, respectively, to compete with the then-dominant Wii, they were both making a casual play. When the backlash came a year later, as hardcore gamers felt like they were being abandoned, Sony was quick to shore up that fanbase, but Microsoft kept it casual.
I wouldn’t quite go so far as saying Microsoft is “just” mainstream but Paul is on the right track. You can substitute ‘mainstream’ here with ‘evolving’; Sony is steadfast on 3D and the hard core market while Nintendo has a multiplayer network out of the 90s and regurgitating IPs from the 80s. Only Microsoft acknowledges the mobile elephant in the room.
06.12.12 |
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Looks like a very slick, compact plugin to generate CSS3 transitions with jQuery calls. Part of me naturally questions why to not just write the CSS3 transitions directly, but this could work well with some sort of Modernizr-esque graceful browser degradation. Browsers that have CSS3 animations rely on jQuery Transit while legacy browsers get more traditional jQuery-based animation methods.
06.12.12 |
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There are many (too many) tech articles that summarize this year’s WWDC keynote news. If you read only one, check out The Wirecutter roundup first. All killer, no filler.
06.12.12 |
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John Gruber on the new “next-generation” MacBook Pro:
The catch is that it’s expensive. That’s why it debuted alongside a brand-new update to the 15-inch non-retina MacBook Pro, rather than replacing it…surely we’re going to see displays of this caliber roll out across the MacBook line, one by one, as soon as it becomes economically feasible.
Best to compare it to the original MacBook Air from 2008. The first Air was expensive and not for everyone, but it showed the future of Apple’s (and, really, the industry’s) portables. That’s what the new 15-inch MacBook Pro is: the future of portable Macs.
I have decidedly mixed feelings on Gruber’s usual opinions but he really hits it dead on regarding the new high-end Macbook Pro. I’d predict by next year’s WWDC retina display tech will reach the Macbook Airs.
06.11.12 |
Gaming |
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As most gaming analysts predicted, this was a pretty quiet year for E3 news. Companies made very conservative moves and announcements given we’re at the end of this generation’s consoles. Several console manufacturers are also wary of making a costly misstep as mobile gaming devices (e.g. iPhone, iPad) eat up an increasing amount of their market share.
However, there were a few major trends worth noting.
Nintendo has lost its way
The 3DS wasn’t a strong seller out of the gate. Wii sales have crumbled. Nintendo is gambling a lot on its Wii U, and from what I’ve seen from E3, it looks like a non starter console. I’m aware that’s a strong prediction, but let’s break down what we’ve seen. First of all there’s the price, rumored to launch at $300. That’s almost surely cheaper than the next generation of consoles that Sony and Microsoft will offer. But then factor in the cost of those bulky controllers that I’d predict are far north of $100 each. That’s not exactly family friendly territory. There are other hardware problems as well: a controller only lasts for 3-5 hours per charge. It likely has a processor only marginally more powerful than a current gen Xbox 360 or PS3.
Finally, there’s a lack of compelling software. Nintendo’s E3 presser was depressingly conservative, even by Nintendo standards – few new IPs, no new Zelda or extra details on Paper Mario. Their flagship launch title NintendoLand doesn’t appear to have the crossover success of Wii Sports. And has Nintendo secured third party support? The company’s failure in that aspect really tanked long term sales of the Wii. The trend threatens to repeat itself with the Wii U.
Note that there are plenty of dissenters with my outlook. Josh Topolsky over at the Washington Post praised Nintendo’s “heads-down, single-minded mentality.” Time also defends Nintendo well, making some especially strong points regarding its hardware. Also Pimkin 3 looks great, but it doesn’t change my feeling that Nintendo could be out of the hardware business within a few years if it isn’t more careful.
Microsoft’s SmartGlass could be big
Microsoft had the best of the pre-E3 press conferences this year. It was yes, conservative, but it balanced the hardcore gaming and “casual” multimedia camps well. Most importantly, don’t underestimate SmartGlass. SmartGlass is a companion app for mobile devices (Windows phones, iOS, Android) that gives users the ability to control and interact with games and other XBox content. For instance, on the latest Madden you can preview and select plays before the huddle. For a TV show or movie extra bonus content is synced and displayed in SmartGlass as you watch. The Verge put together a nice preview.
Granted, Microsoft has pushed the multimedia convergence angle on every recent E3 and ended up bombing most of the time. Last year the Kinect got the hard sell. This year saw Internet Explorer for XBox, a total head scratcher. But SmartGlass is different because it’s not about selling a service or device that you have to run out and buy. A huge percentage of Microsoft’s target audience already has an iOS or Android phone, and as long as developers have incentive to make SmartGlass functionality, it could be a huge incentive to stick with the XBox over an Apple TV or Roku (there’s a nice Hacker News thread discussing this topic.)
An awkward transition period between current and next gen tech
There were a few new IPs announced that look incredible like Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs and Star Wars 1313 from LucasArts. However, their developers are cagey with regard to launch platforms. Watch Dogs may someday come to PS3 and XBox 360 but these E3 demos were clearly running on high-end PCs. I bet those demo PCs closely mirror the specs of Sony’s and Microsoft’s next gen consoles.
I’d expect any game without an early 2013 release date will debut on both current gen and next gen platforms. I’d also predict that next year is going to look very dry for console gaming as platforms shore up support for their big next gen console launches. That’s going to be a very interesting tech period. Mobile gaming will have matured by a full year, and the iOS ecosystem will be likely far more comprehensive, revolving around a completely revamped and relaunched Apple TV. Will console gaming thrive or weaken? It’s hard to say but we’ll know a lot more a year from now.