Deep Green 1.2

post from Daring Fireball on 25 April 2011 11:04:58 PM. © Daring Fireball

Speaking of putting the “magic” in iOS apps, Joachim Bondo has released a new version of his beautiful Deep Green chess game. Don’t let the 1.2 version number fool you: it’s a major update, including both Retina Display graphics for the iPhone and full support for the iPad. Deep Green was my favorite iOS chess app when it was released in 2008, and it remains my favorite today. (The best part: Deep Green was also my favorite Newton chess game, back in 1998.) $7.99 on the App Store — and existing Deep Green owners get the update for free. Bondo, on his weblog, announcing the update:

From the day the iPad was announced, more than a year ago, Iwanted Deep Green to be a universal binary. You should?t have tomanage several versions, and you certainly shouldn?t have to payfor it twice.

So great.

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Read The Full Article:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/deep-green-chess/id299471086?mt=8

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A New Version of myRMX Goes Live With New
Features

post from prMac on 25 April 2011 07:52:00 PM. © prMac

myRMX announced today that a new version of its popular remixing app, myRMX, is now available for iOS. myRMX is an entirely new mobile music phenomenon allowing users to remix music on their mobile phone for a unique, experience. Using the original stems from the band's studio session, the fans can re-imagine a portion of the band's song. This unique mobile app represents the next generation of how users can interact musically. Targeting an audience of 250 million handsets worldwide.

Read The Full Article:
http://prmac.com/release-id-24661.htm

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DistinctDev, Creators of The Moron Test Head West

post from prMac on 25 April 2011 05:25:00 PM. © prMac

DistinctDev, Inc., the Florida-based developers behind one of the top selling mobile games of all time, The Moron Test, today announced they are relocating their studio headquarters to Seattle, Washington. The announcement comes days after the two-year anniversary of the game's launch. DistinctDev's relocation is the first step in a plan to grow the three-person shop and explore new play and monetization mechanics for The Moron Test.

Read The Full Article:
http://prmac.com/release-id-24756.htm

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Best Selling Author David Pogue Talks To
i.Business Magazine

post from prMac on 25 April 2011 04:24:00 PM. © prMac

iBusiness Magazine is thrilled to present an exclusive interview with world's bestselling how-to author, New York Times columnist and media's go to guy on cutting edge technology, David Pogue. In the July/August issue #4 of i.Business Magazine, David gives his thoughts on where the iPad 2. Including where it will make the most impact, the legitimate threats to the iPad, how the iPad and iPhone will grow in the SMB market, who is Apple's biggest threat in the tablet market.

Read The Full Article:
http://prmac.com/release-id-24755.htm

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Magic

post from Daring Fireball on 25 April 2011 04:05:25 PM. © Daring Fireball

As a nearly utter digression from the main thrust of Dave Wiskus’s aforelinked piece regarding Tweetbot and how UI designers are, in a sense, like stage magicians, I want to comment on this bit where Wiskus describes his distaste for the app:

While my friends were all heaping praise on the interface andinteraction design of this new app, I couldn?t help but cock myhead a little at some of the decisions. Tap and hold for popuptab-bar things? Triple-tap? Non-standard table cell behavior? Thisfelt like something alien. Like an Android app.

After I praised Tweetbot, a slew of DF readers tried the app, and reaction was — unsurprisingly — mixed. The Tapbots aesthetic — and all of their apps share the same strongly branded, very-consistent-but-only-consistent-with-their-sibling-Tapbots-apps aesthetic — is inherently divisive. I don’t love it, and I find it tiresome in an app I use as frequently as I do my iPhone Twitter client. But I do appreciate it, both for its quality and attention to detail, and for its depth.

Many DF readers clearly love it. Those readers who emailed me to complain about it, though, often echoed Wiskus’s remark: that it feels “like an Android app”.

I’m pretty sure none of the people saying this have used an Android device extensively.

What Wiskus meant wasn’t that the Tapbots aesthetic feels like Android actually feels, but rather that it feels foreign to iOS — more like an app for some other platform. The Tapbots aesthetic might be what iOS users imagine Android feeling like — helped, in no small part, by their “bot” gimmickry, the elaborate conceit that each of the Tapbots apps is a robot designed for a certain task. But in fact there’s nothing android-like about the actual Android UI. Unlike the bot-ness of the Tapbots oeuvre, which is taken as the literal muse for the entire UI, there is no such element in the Android UI.

So on the one (hypothetical) hand, the Tapbots aesthetic could, in theory, serve as a very apt and well-designed aesthetic for an entire mobile platform named “Android”. But, on the other (reality-based) hand, Tweetbot might well bear the least resemblance to actual Android software by any iOS app I’ve ever used.

There’s no denying that Tweetbot has a distinctive feel to it. The Tapbots aesthetic isn’t so much UI-designed as art-directed. They take things so far with regard to how everything on screen looks, sounds, and moves that their apps feel as much like games as they do actual tools. Using Tweetbot is like playing a game of Twitter. That’s exactly what some love, and others don’t.

The real Android has a system-wide UI aesthetic with little personality, and no soul. I’ve twice spent a month using Android full-time (or nearly so) — with the Nexus One a year ago, and with the Nexus S this past December. I tried every Android Twitter client I could find. My favorite, or at least one of them, was Plume (née Touiteur). In addition to being a serviceable, useful Twitter client, I believe it fair to describe Plume’s UI as being among the best Android has to offer. That this is so exemplifies the gaping chasm between iOS and Android in terms of aesthetic design. It’s hard to imagine Plume garnering any attention whatsoever on iOS. You’d have to be both blind and deaf to find any similarities between Plume (or other leading Android Twitter clients) and Tweetbot. Plume’s appeal is almost entirely functional, for better or worse (and let’s be honest and admit that there exist many people who find anything other than a purely-functional interface and emphasis to be distasteful, i.e. people who truly do prefer the Android experience and mindset, and who, I suspect, would hold up Tweetbot as the epitome of everything wrong with both iOS and with iOS users).

In a sense, then, perhaps there is something droid-like about the Android user experience. Not in the artistic, warm, humanist way that the Tapbots aesthetic is bot-like, but in the cool, rational, science-not-art, thinking-as-opposed-to-feeling sense of artificial intelligence. The difference between iOS and Android, design-wise, can be summed in a single word: magic. iOS aims for it. Android doesn’t want it.

Read The Full Article:
http://daringfireball.net/2011/04/magic

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UI Designers as Magicians

post from Daring Fireball on 25 April 2011 04:05:25 PM. © Daring Fireball

Interesting, introspective piece by UI designer Dave Wiskus on his, and other UI designers’, reactions to Tweetbot. His analogy to stage magicians is quite apt — when you know how the tricks are done, you can lose your sense of perspective when considering how regular people perceive the work of your peers.

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Read The Full Article:
http://betterelevation.com/2011/04/23/cheap-magic/

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RealNetworks Releases Rinse for iTunes

post from Daring Fireball on 25 April 2011 03:05:00 PM. © Daring Fireball

Peter Kafka:

RealNetworks used to try to compete with Apple. Now it?s in theApple accessories business. The software company is rolling outRinse, a $39 program that promises to ?seamlessly organize andrepair your iTunes music library?.

Remember how fun it was to find the download link for the free version of the RealPlayer plugin? Remember when Real had their own music store? Even better, remember back in 2003, when, regarding the iPod, Real founder and then-CEO Rob Glaser told The New York Times:

?It?s absolutely clear now why five years from now, Apple willhave 3 (percent) to 5 percent of the player market. ? Thehistory of the world is that hybridization yields betterresults.?

Good times.

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Read The Full Article:
http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20110425/realnetworks-rinse-offers-a-tune-up-for-
itunes/

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Earn Tickets, Buy Prizes - Go Back to the Arcade
with Bowl Em Hoops

Hairy Monster Studios today announces Bowl Em Hoops, their latest game made for the iPhone and iPod touch. Bowl Em Hoops combines Skee-Ball like play with the classic basketball shooting games. Go head to head against your friends with Game Center multiplayer support including voice chat. Flick your finger to roll the ball up the alley into one of five hoops racking up points and unlocking unique and challenging bonus levels such Double Bonus, Spell Shot, Moving Target and Rainbow Jumpers.

Read The Full Article:
http://prmac.com/release-id-24754.htm

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