"In my next life I want to live my life backwards. You start out dead and get that out of the way. Then you wake up in an old people’s home feeling better every day. You get kicked out for being too healthy, go collect your pension, and then when you start work, you get a gold watch and a party on your first day. You work for 40 years until you’re young enough to enjoy your retirement. You party, drink alcohol, and are generally promiscuous, then you are ready for high school. You then go to primary school, you become a kid, you play. You have no responsibilities, you become a baby until you are born. And then you spend your last 9 months floating in luxurious spa-like conditions with central heating and room service on tap, larger quarters every day and then Voila! You finish off as an orgasm!"
— Woody Allen
(Source: boagworld)
Congrats Sony, you are full of marketing win.
The worlds are colliding
Epic knowledge dropped by stevenf tonight:
In the New World, computers are task-centric. We are reading email, browsing the web, playing a game, but not all at once. Applications are sandboxed, then moats dug around the sandboxes, and then barbed wire placed around the moats. As a direct result, New World computers do not need virus scanners, their batteries last longer, and they rarely crash, but their users have lost a degree of freedom. New World computers have unprecedented ease of use, and benefit from decades of research into human-computer interaction. They are immediately understandable, fast, stable, and laser-focused on the 80% of the famous 80/20 rule.
Is the New World better than the Old World? Nothing’s ever simply black or white.
(Read the whole thing, please. Done? Cool.)
Here’s one metric I’ve been using: think of the person for whom the iPad will be the first computer they use. They will come to it with no expectation of cameras, multitasking, Flash, or storage size. Now wait a few years (months?) and give them a desktop computer. They have to interact with it using these weird things on the desk which aren’t even where the content is. Like, you look here but you click here - crazy! You have to move “windows” around. And check out all those buttons. What, nothing happens when I tap and hold on this?
Now you tell me if that person, the person the future is made of, will leave their iPad because the PC has more gigahertz.
TaskPaper for iPhone preview
Go Jesse! I can’t wait for this. You had me at the screencast
My goal was to port TaskPaper for Mac’s “paper” design to the iPhone. This turned out to be a lot harder then I expected. It’s easy to display lists on the iPhone. But when it’s time to edit something the normal iPhone design is to show a new view, or enter a specific editing mode. That works well for many apps, but it’s not how TaskPaper is supposed to work.
Delays Story…
And so what I thought would be a quick project has turned into a much longer one. It’s taken me many different iterations to finally come up with a design and set of interactions that keep TaskPaper’s “paper” feel. There has also been a rather large number of technical problems.
Originally my plan was to use WebKit, that would allow to share almost all code between TaskPaper for iPhone and a future version of TaskPaper for Mac. But for some reason WebKit is a private API on the iPhone, Apple started getting strict with private API’s, and I chickened out.
Next I decided to use UITableView instead, the general list view that most iPhone apps use. But that turned out to not be flexible enough… or quite possibly I was too dumb to make it do what I want. Wish I could have seen source code, then I know I could have made it work!.
And so after that roadblock I started writing my own UITableView replacement, and finally that seems to be working. The current beta still has many bugs, but I think most of them are just programmer error type bugs, instead of “Impossible to do” bugs.
What I have now, a Screencast
I think I’m finally on the right track. I’ve just posted a screencast demo of what it looks like today. I think I’ve figured out the basic interaction model, and most technical problems are solved.
Not done yet, it’s buggy
The current release is read only. You can sync and view documents from SimpleText.ws. You can also edit them with the new TaskPaper document view, but you can’t save those edits… to many bugs right now and I don’t want to destroy anyone’s data.
A few more testers…
Existing beta testers, I’ll send out the new beta download a bit later today. If you are not a beta tester, but want to be one, please email me your device ID. I don’t have many slots, so please only email me if you really have time and interest in trying it, looking for bugs, reporting bugs, etc.
Pie Guy - a free web game for your iPhone
(This post uses formatting and features not visible in the Tumblr Dashboard. If anything below doesn’t make sense or looks plain ugly, consider viewing the post on my website. I love the Dashboard, I hate the Dashboard.)
The Bits
There’s no better home for a fast-paced, goofy arcade game than your pocket. Remember the original joy of gaming - you know, before the distraction of drawn-out story lines, tutorials, endless dialog, and complicated rules? You want to just fire up a game and go, cucumber-cool 8-bit graphics blazing under your fingers. Swipe left, swipe right, eat all the berries, avoid the angry chefs chasing you around their pie kitchen. Then repeat at a higher speed.
The Sweet Solution
And there’s no easier way to get an app than by installing it right from its website - that’s right, easier than the App Store. One tap and you’re set. Because it’s a web app, see. Not one of those where you need to be online either - once you add Pie Guy to your home screen, it’ll run even when you’re not connected to the Internet. And of course, your game will be saved to a local database. Read on.
History
I made pie guy in a fit of WebKit excitement combined with App Store frustration. I wanted a Javascript game that didn’t feel… texty.
Needful Things
Pie Guy will run on iPhone 3GS with OS 3.0 or higher installed. Swipe anywhere on the screen (no need to point at Guy himself) and feel free to queue up your turns as in classic arcade games (meaning, once you swipe, Guy will turn that way next time this is possible.) With each level, the chefs get angrier. Godspeed.
Fringe Benefits
If you find Pie Guy a fun game to play, well that’s grand.
But, I hope Pie Guy will also be an opportunity for the code-savvy among you to learn a trick or two about making serious web apps for the iPhone. Just grab my source code and tweak it. I’m not talking about just a fancied-up webpage here; this is a fullscreen game, with fast gameplay and responsive touch controls. I can’t wait to see what a better programmer does with this stuff (it’s not hard to program better than me!)
Go go go
Pie Guy is available for totally free from http://mrgan.com/pieguy. Hit that on your iPhone, install once, and play forever. By the way, if there are updates to the game and you’re online when you launch it, the updates will be automatically installed. Web apps, dudes.
P.S. If you’d like to tip your developer, why not buy a shirt. Or, heck, buy anything else on my Amazon Store
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Awesome, inspirational read. Time to spend some money on a ‘commuter’ setup.
(via Instapaper)
Birds on the Wires (via Vimeo)
“Reading a newspaper, I saw a picture of birds on the electric wires. I cut out the photo and decided to make a song, using the exact location of the birds as notes (no Photoshop edit). I knew it wasn’t the most original idea in the universe. I was just curious to hear what melody the birds were creating.”
