Spot the difference: Puzz Loop, Luxor and Stoneloops! of Jurassica
Are you seated comfortably? Then we’ll begin.
Once upon a time (1998), there was a company called Mitchell Corporation, and it created a game called Puzz Loop, and there was much happiness and rejoicing. The fun-filled game enabled you to shoot coloured marbles at a relentless stream of incoming ones, aiming to create chain collisions of like-coloured marbles, which subsequently vanished.
Like all good action puzzlers, lots of companies were upset because they hadn’t thought of the idea first, and so they went ahead and created their own versions. For example, in 2003, there was PopCap Games with Zuma, and then in 2005, Luxor by MumboJumbo.
For a time, all the Puzz Loops of the world lived happily in Videogameland, until the day they all decided to move to iPodWorld. There, they met Stoneloops! of Jurassica, and MumboJumbo decided to become a great big jerk and have Stoneloops! of Jurassica booted out of iPodWorld.
Stoneloops! of Jurassica might have had a a stupid name, but MumboJumbo’s real problem was that Stoneloops! of Jurassica was wearing a really similar T-short to Luxor, and therefore asked the Big Bad Apple to stamp on its rival’s head until it was dead and buried. And no-one lived happily ever after.
The end.
Clearly, rights infringement is a big concern on the App Store. However, Apple should not be placed in the position of having to nuke a product on the basis that it’s like another one, when the rival making the complaint rips off existing and older IP. If Mitchell Corporation had thrown a hissy fit, it might have had a point, but it didn’t. This incident, however, is the equivalent of TAITO getting the likes of Reflexion pulled from the App Store due to it being somewhat like Arkanoid, while Breakout owner Atari looks on, puzzled. However, TAITO hasn’t done this, because, unlike MumboJumbo, it hasn’t lost its marbles. [You're fired—Ed.]
We’vereportedbefore about the legal spat between Mobigame, makers of fine indie game Edge, and Tim Langdell, who appears to make his money by suing anyone daring to use the name Edge in a videogame, and makes rather spurious claims regarding how he ‘spawned’ almost any major property with the word ‘Edge’ in its title, including Edge magazine by Future Publishing, Marvel comic Edge, and, er, 1997 Anthony Hopkins movie turkey The Edge. (He’s also laughably stated in the past how he has come to an ‘understanding’ with a guitarist of a very popular rock band.) TIGSource has a great overview of the madness.
Edge returned to the App Store recently, and Langdell will next year be battling EA, a company that’s had enough. Rather than just dealing with issues relating to EA game Mirror’s Edge—Langdell started advertising a game called Mirrors (a game by) Edge, which still doesn’t exist, and yet was in no way an effort to promote mark confusion—EA’s aiming to have Langdell stripped of all his Edge-related marks.
EA’s documentation cites numerous examples of Langdell filing out-of-date and falsified specimens, and the fact Edge Games isn’t a viable commercial concern. (ChaosEdge offers running commentary regarding Langdell’s so-called commercial concerns—a Mythora ‘reissue’ they bought from Edge Games was a home-made burned disc; and despite Langdell claiming its game Racers had sold out, the second purchase ChaosEdge made days later had an order number only one higher than their pre-Racers order.) Last month, company spokesman Jeff Brown said: “While this seems like a small issue for EA, we think that filing the complaint is the right thing to do for the developer community.”
Sadly, Langdell still won’t back down. We today heard Mobigame’s Edge is again under threat, with Apple giving the company five days to respond to yet another threat from Langdell. If you’ve an iPhone or iPod touch, get in there fast, because chances are that Edge is about to vanish yet again, and it may take an EA battering in court next year for Langdell to finally stop harassing indie developers.
Philip Dow, the developer behind Journler, has announced that work on the app is at an end. While he will continue to provide support for users, there will be no new releases.
In a brutally honest and open blog post, Philip spells out precisely what brought an end to Journler – its own success.
Apple does an excellent job of making all its products look beautiful, and these latest new products are no exception. Even the inside of the new MacBook is lovely.
Photo by geishaboy500 on Flickr, used under CC licence
I’d like to add my congratulations to those of the many TidBITS readers who’ve wished Adam Engst and his team all good wishes on reaching their 1000th issue this week.
I’ve been reading TidBITS for as long as I’ve used Macs, and consider it one of the finest, best-written, and most useful Mac publications around.
What separates it from the crowd is the way each and every article is carefully and lovingly assembled. Much thought is given to every detail, and there’s plenty of detail to think about because TidBITS articles never skimp on covering a news item or a software review from every possible perspective.
You know, when you start a TidBITS software review, that it will be balanced and well researched. You know that when you’ve finished reading it, you’ll have a good idea of that product’s potential value for you or your business.
There’s also a feeling of genuine warmth from the TidBITS writers and readers alike; discussion there is reasoned, sensible debate. Forum users will go out of their way to help one another. It’s a breath of fresh air.
So congratulations to all at TidBITS on 1000 issues of your superb email newsletter; here’s looking forward to the next 1000. And 1000 more after that.
When iTunes 9 came out, a lot of people (myself included) were delighted to see a new feature that allowed you to re-arrange the apps on your iPhone’s screens using your desktop computer.
Hooray, we cheered. No more tedious dragging of little wriggling icons from one screen to another. Now we can put our apps where we want them to be, and never have to worry about them again.
Wrong.
It turns out that using this feature in iTunes 9 is a complete waste of time, thanks to the way the iPhone OS works. Here’s why.
One of these things is not like the other. I’ll give you one guess which one I’m talking about.
Since its inception, Apple TV has been little more than a half-baked idea that appeals only to a niche market. Even Steve Jobs says Apple TV is only “a hobby.”
For a company known for pumping out game-changing products, this is very out of character. Apple TV is great at what it does, but it could be so much more.
A list of all installed apps, which can be filtered, like in Finder on Mac OS X. C'mon, Apple - how about it?
Since getting my iPhone, I’ve become a certified app junkie, justified somewhat by the fact I review apps for various publications on- and offline, and for my own website, iPhoneTiny.com. Despite regular clearouts, my home screens often end up full, not least because many games remain on the device, to avoid my losing my progress. (Apple, in its infinite wisdom, still doesn’t provide any means of backing-up progress and optionally reinstating it when you reinstall an app. It’s like Apple saw the cheapskate end of the DS market—carts without battery back-up—and went “we’d like a piece of that pie!”)
Having been commissioned to write some group reviews recently, I’m now at the stage where I have eleven full home screens and dozens of apps in ‘the void’—that place apps go when they aren’t allowed to sit on a home screen. Apple’s suggestion: use Spotlight, and that’s fine if you can remember every app you have installed. If not, tough. (And rearranging them in iTunes to get the most ‘important’ ones on the 11 visible home screens isn’t a great tip, given that iTunes appears prone to crashing in a nasty fashion when rearranging apps—usually after you’ve spent an irritating 15 minutes doing so.)
Various people have tried designing an improved springboard for non-jailbroken devices, most recently including Bruce Tognazzini, but these tend to lack the elegance of Apple’s existing solution. Tognazzini offers labels and vertical scrolling in pages, but Lukas Mathis argues that this is too complex, and I agree. (Hat tip for these links: Daring Fireball.) The springboard Exposé concept also appears awkward and fiddly.
I wonder whether a simpler solution would assist anyone with lots of apps installed. Along with upping the number of home screens to 14—the most that could be displayed using the current UI before things start looking iffy—Spotlight could have a separate apps list page. This could be accessed by a swipe on entering Spotlight (as in, it would spatially live to the left of the standard Spotlight screen). By default, this screen would display an alphabetised list of your apps, and typing in the Spotlight field would filter them, just like the Applications folder in Mac OS X’s Finder in combination with a Finder window Spotlight-driven search field.
For one weekend only - buy Alchemize at 13 times its usual price! Barg!
On my blog a couple of weeks back, I wrote the article More proof the iPhone App Store destroys people’s understanding of good value, highlighting rampant idiotic reactions to Loren Brichter having the audacity to charge three whole dollars for a complete rewrite of his stunning Twitter app Tweetie. Patrick Jordan referred to Tweetie 2’s price-point as a “very,very,very Bad Call,” (his emphasis), suggesting it was “spitting in the face of existing Tweetie users”. My thinking: You’d pay more than three bucks for a crappy sandwich or a luke-warm beer in the pub. But, apparently, three bucks is too much of a ‘reward’ for the hard work a dedicated indie dev has put into a leading and brilliant product.
The dev of Alchemize has clearly had enough of this kind of attitude. On the TouchArcade forum, he reveals that his company has received an astonishing 3400 emails in one month moaning about the price of his three-dollar game. Although its Puyo Puyo-style mechanics won’t win too many awards for originality, Alchemize is a fairly good game, and one that would set you back considerably more on competing platforms. To that end, the dev’s now upped his app’s price to an eye-watering $39.99 in protest at people constantly complaining about paying a few bucks for a videogame.
It’s pretty clear that something needs to be done regarding App Store pricing and value perception, because the race to the bottom is hurting many developers. Apple’s recent ‘top grossing’ chart doesn’t really help. Personally, I like Eucalyptus dev Jamie Montgomerie’s suggestion that the App Store should split its chart in two, along the lines of British 8-bit videogames during the 1980s and early 1990s, offering separate ‘budget’ and ‘full price’ charts.
There are no big announcements from Apple today. No new products, nothing special happening. But it’s a special day nonetheless.
Because today, the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg has finally declared Windows a match for OS X.
Many of you will know that Walt’s opinions are widely read, and are likely to sway a lot of people in their computer-purchasing decisions.
In recent years, he has consistently said that Mac OS X is a better choice than Windows, either XP or Vista. But with the imminent release of Windows 7 (on October 22nd), that comes to an end.
When I was a kid, digital calculators were roughly the size of a brick, and had satisfyingly chunky displays. They also, in those pre-internet days, provided a means of minor technical mischief. Type in 5318008, flip your calculator upside down, and it appeared to say ‘boobies’. If you were five, this was the most hilarious and original gag in the history of the world.
In this modern and rather less innocent age, the media would have you believe that personal technology devices in the hands of children merely teach them how to joyride while murdering innocent puppies and simultaneously fashioning bombs out of string, jelly babies and bits of twig. It’s presumably for this reason that Apple considers it a good idea to warn you (Every. Single. Time.) when you download an eReader from the App Store that it—shock!—potentially enables you to view content that some people might deem objectionable.
Enter, stage right, James Thomson, creator of iPhone/iPod touch calculator PCalc. In a minor slice of design genius, he combined the two issues mentioned above and PCalc now slaps a huge ‘Censored!’ sign across ‘naughty’ words when your device is flipped, thereby ensuring fragile little minds aren’t warped beyond all recognition.
This is a smart, funny, satirical swipe at the recent trend towards over-zealous censorship. Unless you’re, say, Sajid Farooq of NBC, who, inexplicably takes Thomson’s joke seriously (and, sadly, he’s not alone) and states PCalc’s change would “make even George Orwell shudder in his grave”. I’m thinking Orwell would be more likely to laugh his CENSORED off.
If Apple has learned anything from the iPod, it’s that a modern consumer electronic device is a three-legged stool: hardware, software, and media that fills it.
Apple doesn’t want to launch a tablet without media to consume on it. This is the mistake Apple made with the Apple TV: It’s a great piece of hardware and software, but the content isn’t there yet (especially the paucity of Hollywood movies).
So Steve has set out to persuade publishing houses, magazine companies and textbook publishers to make interactive books and magazines that make sense on an interactive, multitouch device. Here’s the key paragraph from Lam’s story:
“Some I’ve talked to believe the initial content will be mere translations of text to tablet form. But while the idea of print on the Tablet is enticing, it’s nothing the Kindle or any E-Ink device couldn’t do. The eventual goal is to have publishers create hybridized content that draws from audio, video and interactive graphics in books, magazines and newspapers, where paper layouts would be static. And with release dates for Microsoft’s Courier set to be quite far away and Kindle stuck with relatively static E-Ink, it appears that Apple is moving towards a pole position in distribution of this next-generation print content. First, it’ll get its feet wet with more basic repurposing of the stuff found on dead trees today.”
But what might this “hybrid content” look like?
One clue comes from Enhanced Editions, a U.K. startup founded by former-book industry executives that seeks to marry technology with traditional print publishing. “We have long-since seen the destiny of the latter bound to its embrace of the former,” the company says.
Can Microsoft ever do anything right? The company has some produced some pretty good advertising for Windows 7, but for some inexplicable reason, the ads will not be shown on TV. Microsoft’s best advertising in years is restricted to a dusty corner of YouTube, where no one will see them.
“… you’ll never own a Microsoft Courier device,” he writes in his latest column. “It’s not real now. It’s not going to be real in the future. And even Microsoft does eventually make it real, it will fail in the market and you won’t buy one.”
As Elgan points out, the “leaked” photos and video of the device are pure CGI; Hollywood-style special effects that look great as mockup photos and demo videos, but may not be possible to build.
“Everything is awesome when it doesn’t have to actually be manufactured, sourced or developed at an affordable cost,” he writes. “It’s special effects wizardry, not software or hardware design.”
In edition, Elgan notes that a pen-based tablet is doomed to failure. He calls Microsoft’s repeated attempts to force pen-based devices on the market “crazy,” citing Windows for Pens in the 1990s, pen-based Tablet PC and Ultra Mobile PC, and Windows Mobile devices with pens. “I don’t think pens have any role in mass-market devices of the future — certainly nothing that could compete with an iPhone-like Apple Tablet,” he says. We agree – pens are a throwback. The future of multitouch tablets and PCs are finger-controlled.
If you haven’t encountered Reevoo before, go and take a poke around it now. It’s a UK-oriented customer reviews site that’s managed to aggregate an impressively large database of real comments from real people about real products.
And the iPhone version of the site is incredibly useful when you’re out at the shops trying to track down the best product at the best price.
