Apple Quietly Reverses Developer Tool Ban

Apple did not specifically mention Adobe — though investors drove up shares of the company up 12 percent on the news — but the changes seem to mean that you can use Flash to develop your apps, and then compile them to work on the iPhone and iPad with a tool called Adobe Packager. This could be boon to publishers, including Condé Nast, owner of Wired, which use Adobe’s Creative Suite to make print magazines and would now be able to easily convert them into digital version instead of re-creating them from scratch in the only handful of coding languages Apple had allowed.

To be clear, that doesn’t mean Flash is coming to iOS as a plugin: You still won’t be able to view Flash content on your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. This change in Apple’s policy just means developers can use third-party tools such as Flash to create apps sold through the App Store

-- Apple Eases App Development Rules, Adobe Surges[Wired]

For all the bluster that roared from Apple on banning the use of tools like Adobe's Packager, including a strongly worded essay from Jobs which essentially ignited the debate on HTML5 versus Flash/RIA/the world, it has now softly backed away from the stance that such tools would lower the quality of the App Store and let developer use them.

Why? Well, possibly because Apple's reasoning was mostly PR nonsense designed to look like a strong technical argument ... but I have to somewhat doubt that really factored much into the equation. This is Apple we're talking about here and the company has been able to use PR to defy gravity countless times before.

The more prominent, and probably more likely, theory, is that Apple decided it wanted to trot out that amazing Epic Citadel demo (which is, by the way, truly amazing - at least on the iPhone4) they realized that there would be no way to unleash it onto the world without subsequently backing off on the whole third party development tool.

Epic's bread and butter, after all, is the third party development toolset which allows for other companies to license their technology for games ... and a huge feature of that is UnrealScript - a specific language the engine uses and how the majority of Unreal games are coded. To have shown the demo and then not change their policy would have just been an enormous tease.

And to change the policy to only let Epic in would likely have brought anti-trust champions bearing down on Steve Job's office door.

So it's true - you can probably thank video games that Apple has come to its senses.

Land of Me And The Wilderness Downtown: AIR and HTML5 Demos

I love mornings where new things land in my lap. First was an email asking to go try The Land Of Me, an interactive children's story/game developed in Adobe's AIR. Designed for preschoolers and with Prof. John Siraj-Blatchford from the The University of Swansea - The Land Of Me looks to be a delightful artistic romp ... well, if you're around two years old. There is a free chapter to download and try and since it runs on AIR - the game runs on most PC's and Mac's.

A few twitters also pointed to The Wilderness Downtown, probably best described as an experimental HTML5 video mashup with Google Maps. It's an interesting concept which mostly works - currently best serving as an example of what using the HTML5 video tag might mean down the road. It is, however, specifically designed for Chrome - though it appears to work in Safari, those certain devices using Mobile Safari need not apply.

Enjoy, peeps.

Game Play: Blur (and a little Mod Nation Racers too)

A twist on an old joke: multiplayer would be a lot of fun, if not for all the people. Bringing a bunch of random people from the intertubes repeatedly to game together has had a pretty uneven history - with the addition of VOIP to online gaming resulting in a thunderous din of people singing, cursing and warbling.

That said, Blur manages it pretty well. I played the hell out of the online only demo and now haven't even bothered touching the single player of the full version. It's very pick up game oriented and since the action is pretty intense even when you're trying to catch up to the pack - uneven skill levels across player don't feel quite so bad because you can still wreck the hell out of other cars.

And it doesn't hurt that as kart racers go, Blur is very good. Driving feels tight and controlled, there isn't a dramatic emphasis on drifting and the power-ups, while mostly classic renditions of favorites from the genre, do the game justice to helping even the score. The graphics are great and the presentation is geared to getting you in a game, out, and back in again as swiftly as possible.

I'm light on complaint - I wish there were more powerups, and that the mods were more varied and arrived a little sooner. But it's hard to complain about a game I'm enjoying this much and yet haven't even played it's "other half". Definitely recommend.

A quick side note: Blur was actually a trade in for Mod Nation Racers, which I was somewhat looking forward to and yet found the racing itself, well, really frustrating. Seems to place a heavy, heavy emphasis on drifting and drafting and not so much on just pure driving. I get the modding aspects are pretty powerful, but if LittleBigPlanet was any indication, I won't have time to really get into it.

For Sunday: Brink Gameplay Video

This looks fairly cool, I haven't really played much online shootery since MAG (which I may dive back into with the beta). Anything with a Quake Wars pedigree is worth checking out in my book.

OMG THE WEB IS DEAD

Yeah, people - this is what it takes to get me blogging again. Not one - but TWO stories that have mostly caps in the titles and begin with OMG. Because apparently this is such a slow news month that people really need to get the attention grabbing headlines.

Wired has declared the web is dead (though, to be fair, they've branched this out to multiple articles to offer a rather interesting and broad discussion).

First, never trust an article that starts with a graph - which I've now stolen and duped here:



It's an interesting graph ... but the important bit is to note that it spans 1990, when even the Net was barely a mote in someone's eye, to 2010 ... when high school kids have smartphones with more sophisticated browsers than most corporate networks. Since the graph is depicting total net traffic, and it is safe to assume that total net traffic has increased dramatically in two decades ... lines sliding down may actually indicate portions which have stayed even while the larger pie gets bigger. Note for instance that video doesn't even appear on the scene until the late 90's, and it wasn't until about 2005 when technology and bandwidth allowed creations like YouTube to flourish that it even begins explode.

So yeah, it's an interesting graph. But in relation to the argument at hand ... it's kinda bullshit.

The argument in short, and it's hard to put this in short terms with it several pages and oddly being split into two distinct articles running side by side (which is probably the kind of design decision which could kill the web) is that applications are sprouting everywhere to digest specific points of data as opposed to an army of browsers trolling for everything on the planet.

And I'm not really about to deny that argument, for in doing so I'd have to pretty much ignore the fact that the iPhone and the iPad exist at all.

For the sake of brevity, I'm going to encapsulate the argument around this table (also blatantly stolen):



Because it seems pretty core to their concept and is wildly misleading.

Browsers Versus Apps
This is a cyclical argument as old as DARPA and is slowly spiraling into oblivion. Firstly, it (and much of the article) ignores the fact that apps have made a resurgence because of concepts like REST which allows the web to be a generic source of data. Is it honest to say that a web server which is returning JSONP or XML based on a simple set of incoming variables is ... no longer a web server? The trend, even since the referenced (and failed) push revolution of the late 90's, has been for the formatting of data which allows nearly any client - native or web - to consume data. That Facebook is both a very successful website and iPhone app is indicative of this, and Facebook's recent Graph API allows for others to create clients of nearly any variety as well.

Also, I'm always surprised by the number of articles proposing this trend as fact while overlooking the fact that many major web publishers are foregoing native iPad apps in lieu of HTML5 ones. The real transformation of the web is into more than just a content center, but a data center as well, data which can be accessed by a wide variety of clients.

Syndication Versus Subscription
I'm actually not even sure why this is a line on the table. Syndication is the act of formatting to data so that it can be subscribed. This isn't an either or - it's a cause/effect. Moving on.

Update: It occurs to me the models at conflict here are subscribe versus follow, which are actually different metaphors. Insert question mark.

Free Versus Freemium
While catchy, this is also an apples to advertising based models comparison. Take Pandora for example, which embraces freemium but also pushes ads for the free version. As the name assumes, freemium is an extension of a free (usually ad based) model ... not a replacement - and can apply equally to native, RIA or browsers based apps.

JavaScript versus Objective-C
This just seems like a silly comparison, but I think the real versus here is AJAX/HTML5 against Objective-C. Which seems to unfairly leave out the 3,000 other options for building web apps.

HTML versus XML
See above about the web turning into a data center. Like the Freemium comparison, XML isn't a replacement for HTML (though some developers would argue that XHTML is...) - it's another format for storing data without storing UI. Want UI? Get HTML. Want to create your own UI? Get XML.

Basically, let's return to the graph and consider what's really going on - the web isn't disappearing into oblivion, it's just that there has never been the all consuming webtop to eliminate the rest of an ever growing list of neighbors. It also seems premature to put nails into the web's coffin before Google has managed to release the Chrome OS, the first serious webtop concept to be produced in something like 15 years (I know, I developed one 15 years ago).

Maybe I'm biased though. I'm reading my email in a native app which actually just creates WebKit instances, while debugging my work in the cloud and listening to music in AIR. Does the use of AIR apps, which is closely associated with Flash, which is a plugin for web browsers ... mean that the web is dead or very much an undeniable part of our daily lives now?

My old boss and I had an ongoing argument we both knew was relatively ridiculous ... PDA's versus phones. Ridiculous because each debate resolved to the same conclusion ... that they'd converge to the point where you couldn't hold the distinction. That seems to be the real story of the web - that eventually you won't know where your native desktop and web technologies divide.

OMG STEVE JOBS WUZ RIGHT! (WAIT ... what?)

This is insane:

How bad is mobile Flash? When I went to ABC.com and tried to play a clip, I waited five minutes while the player said “loading.” During that time, it was nearly impossible to scroll around the page or tap objects on it. Eventually, I scrolled up to see a message that was previously obstructed and said ”Sorry. An error occurred while attempting to load the video. Please try again later.” It gets worse…

When I visited Fox.com and tried to start an episode of House, the program actually played but, even over Wi-Fi, the playback was slideshow-like. Worse still, the player became unresponsive as it ignored my attempts to tap the pause, volume, and slider buttons.

-- Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right [LaptopMag]

OMG! FAIL! STEVE JOBS WAS SO RIGHT! Wow, thank god I have an iPhone. I'll just go right over to ABC.com and watch me up some shows.

Um, ok ... here we go:



Oh, uh. Oh, right. Steve Jobs said plugins are bad and that we should be using native apps for anything cool. Apparently HTML5 video wasn't, um ... I dunno. Around or something. So I'll go download that app now and...



Well, that's embarrassing. I guess before you go pronouncing the Steve Jobs was right and that Flash has failed - maybe ... just maybe, you should actually compare it to something in reality.

Ground Control to Major Tom

Yeah, as Cathode regulars have noticed, the intermittent blogging has now turned into a full scale stop. Sorry, true believers, there's just a lot of bat guano flying around the old CathodeCave, so to speak. Life's complicated and when it's this complicated, it's hard to make an informed opinion about situations like the Penny Arcade Rape Joke - which is kinda what you people don't pay me for.

I don't really have a time frame for when this is will not be the case, in the meantime we'll still be twittering away (and to think I once mocked it so), so keep in touch there.

For Monday: 500 Fireworks At Once

Because sometimes it is just that kind of Tuesday.



Via Kottke.

3 Things Apple Could Do (If They Really Supported HTML5 iPhone Apps)

Apple's made a big push against Flash/Flex, which is what many would call traditional Rich Internet Application (RIA) development, in favor of HTML5. One can argue the merits of their points, but one part that is somewhat confusing is rather significant gaps which makes it difficult to make HTML5 behave in way that would really allow it to compete with native apps on the iPhone (and iPad).

While you can certainly argue that none of the following are "pure" HTML5 - let's not pretend that the iPhone in particular is a pure HTML5 platform to begin with. Mobile Safari is a great browser, but has some very specific quirks to it. Whether it's the way pages are rendered in their entirety outside of the viewport (which makes, say, creating fixed bottom elements difficult) or that there are unique touch events outside of the normal mouse event structure, developing for Mobile Safari forces the developer to go a little outside the web standards. Apple does provide some useful features, though, like sending numbers over to the phone or linking to the Google Maps app - but they could do a lot more for both the user and the developer.

1. Camera Access
This is really the big one. There is no way to access the camera via pure HTML5. Cocoa based frameworks like PhoneGap attempt to bridge the two, though I've been told that getting PhoneGap based apps onto the normal App Store has been difficult. Being able to utilize the camera is an oft requested feature for business and productivity apps. The first app our company submitted to Apple used it to store images of receipts, for instance. Scanning bar codes is another common request. Apple provides zero interactivity between the browser and the camera - not even giving users the ability to browse into their photo albums.

2. User defined database limits
There is a hard 5 MB limit for offline database storage via HTML5. In most desktop implementations, this is something the user can easily override. While five megs is sufficient for many tasks - there are many where it simply won't work, like storing offline media assets within the database or even attempting to store a complete product directory in some instances. While having standard limits makes plenty of sense, if a user wants to up that limit to 50 or even 500 megs, they should be allowed to do so. I've got 32GB on this phone, and if I want to shove 1GB of product data into it via a web app, I see no reason why Apple shouldn't let me.

3. User friendly controls
Currently working with iPhone web apps is a somewhat hacky affair. Most users don't associate "adding to the home page" with the same notion as "install this app" (hence the reason many web apps are now adding a big arrow pointing to the plus sign for the iPhone) - nor is there any indication if that app is available offline, etc. Apple still maintains its web apps directory, but that's a poor offering compared to the App Store, Apple Store and iTunes Store apps. I could forego a web app store app (sorry for the redundancy there), but users should at least be able to go to one place and see which web apps are installed, what data is stored offline, and check for new versions. Google is moving in all of these directions with Chrome - and to a certain extent shows how serious they are compared to Apple in truly getting people to adopt web apps as a serious platform.

That third one is a luxury - the first two, however, I can report is somewhat crippling the iPhone and iPad as a robust platform for web application development. Apple can produce fancy CSS demos until the day is long, but if they really see HTML5 as the future, then they should give developers the tools to make it so.

For Sunday: Sonic 2006 Bug Reel

Via Wired and @kobunheat.

Ebert Folded

This may be the best evidence to date that film critic Roger Ebert's very public stance that games can never be art was, at best, fodder for flame wars. Ebert recently retreated, saying:

I was a fool for mentioning video games in the first place. I would never express an opinion on a movie I hadn't seen. Yet I declared as an axiom that video games can never be Art. I still believe this, but I should never have said so. Some opinions are best kept to yourself.

At this moment, 4,547 comments have rained down upon me for that blog entry. I'm informed by Wayne Hepner, who turned them into a text file: "It's more than Anna Karenina, David Copperfield and The Brothers Karamazov." I would rather have reread all three than vet that thread. Still, they were a good set of comments for the most part. Perhaps 300 supported my position. The rest were united in opposition.
If you assume I received a lot of cretinous comments from gamers, you would be wrong. I probably killed no more than a dozen. What you see now posted are almost all of the comments sent in. They are mostly intelligent, well-written, and right about one thing in particular:

I should not have written that entry without being more familiar with the actual experience of video games.

-- Okay, kids, play on my lawn[Chicago Sun-Times]

Emphasis is Ebert's, not mine. He continues to ramble on, sometimes his original stodgy stance reappearing but in general giving gamers the due they rightfully deserve. Yet the response now has been largely silent - Ebert is just reassuring us what we already knew, that he was clinging on to a position he didn't have any real reason to have except because it was generating controversy.

Kudos to him for reversing that, of course, and hopefully in doing so it will serve as a guidepost to others in similar fields to do a little research on modern gaming before trolling for posts, but it still feels like the opportunity to have a decent conversation on the subject was tossed away.

Stick to movies, Roger - Transformers 3 is coming out soon and probably won't be art either.

Gameplay: DeathSpank

Having recently joined the rest of the world in enjoying the incredibly well designed Torchlight - I was overjoyed to see that DeathSpank was hitting the PlayStation Network last week. DeathSpank is essentially Diablo for Monkey Island. Which is to say - it's pretty awesome.

There's more of the former than the latter in the game in terms of mechanics - so if you don't like hack and slash action RPG's, you probably won't suffer through enough to enjoy Gilbert's immense sense of humor - though it might be close. The character DeathSpank is essentially The Tick with a broadest sword and no Arthur to keep him in check. The graphics are a slick combination of 2D cartoon and 3D effects, the overall production from voice work to sound effects is pretty top notch and the RPG mechanics have been simplified to make the game extremely accessible.

Actually, if I had any complaint it would be that the game is a little too accessible. My inventory is cluttered with potions I really don't need (except for healing). There is offline 2 player co-op with the second player as DeathSpank's trusty friend Crackles ... but Crackles is essentially just a walking turret without any upgrade paths or inventory of his own. The "justice meter" mechanic is slightly flawed since the uber-attack uses the same button mashing as any other attack, leading to several unintended overkill blows. DeathSpank's inventory management is simple, but also so shallow that you eventually feel more like you're just doing spring cleaning than actually configuring.

These are minor aspects to what is otherwise a brilliant game, though - and aspects which are really just victims of a design which is trying to streamline fun and remove frustration. The goal is to have enough action RPG to get to the adventure game concepts - heavily displayed in the character conversations but also apparent in the slightly less successful puzzles which suffer from some of the same interface problems as every other adventure game puzzles, i.e. letting the user know that a random noun or verb is really what they require. This is, again, a rather small nuisance and rather easily corrected with the ingame hint system.

It's a great game, with a beautiful style and possibly the best sense of humor available for digital download right now ... highly recommend.

For Sunday: iDosing - Digital Drugs Are After Your Children!

An astonishing combination of biology, psychology and technology being completely misunderstood all for the cause of moral panic. Via @ShawnElliott.

Antennagate, as a new iPhone 4 user

Look, I've clearly haven't been a proper Apple fanboy for a while, and even briefly considered the same defections some of my geek comrades are making towards the recent crop of Android phones - but the argument that the iPhone 4 is such a massive refinement to the product line as to nearly perfect was something I had to try for myself.

And the office was giving out a discount, so...

I just got my hands on the phone last Friday when I returned to the office after a business trip to California. I had hoped to get it before the trip, but considering I procrastinated ordering until late last week - I was lucky to get it when I did. Before ordering I interrogated the early adopters I knew - the ones who grabbed it day one, and compared their notes to what was coming out from respected portions of the industry - like Consumer Reports.

So I'm right-handed - though I would probably describe my phone usage as 'polydextrous', I kind of fiddle and fumble with the phone unless I'm just talking one on one: which is probably my rarest activity, I email and text far more frequently. Still, I actually had more phone conversations than the norm this weekend, and except for a local pizzeria hanging up on me (which at best I could blame on AT&T) ... I haven't had any problems at all. In fact the reception, especially the WiFi reception - is better than ever. And the WiFi is certainly noticeable better.

I think Apple's recently press events and especially the offer of free bumpers will defuse the situation somewhat. The general consensus from iPhone4 users is that you'll probably want a case with this one, though I'm holding off for a while as I'd prefer to get the slimmest one possible - I really like the feel and form factor of this model.

Once again, I don't think Steve Jobs should be allowed to answer emails anymore - he just can't respond directly to problems customers are having without sounding a bit like an ass. If anything, this fiasco is a case scenario of what happens when a beloved brand comes under fire with a bit of evidence behind it. Did the press exaggerate the magnitude of the situation? I think, but if you don't want to be shark bait ... don't flail around in the water. Apple could have saved themselves a lot of headaches by getting to this point sooner in the game. Or even finding a bumper-like case they aren't wildly overcharging in the first place.

So bottom line? If you're a southpaw and a have phone user - go borrow a friend's iPhone4 for a couple calls. Worst case scenario? Get a case. It's not armageddon, nor is it a killer flaw in an otherwise well designed product.

Notes From Management: See Ya'll Next Week (Probably)

I've got a relatively intensive travel week starting in about a half hour, so probably little in the way of updates unless I actually find myself bored around WiFi (unlikely).

I am trying to start a crop of posts which for a better three-four posts a week cycle, but remains to be seen if that's overly optimistic or not.