Tag Archives: ipad

Animoog

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Animoog is a really cool synthesizer emulator for the iPad that simulates the electronics of the old analogue synths that ruled the 70s before digital came along and ruined everything. The interface is a little daunting but it comes will a bunch of useful presets, and the UI encourages exploration with lots of knobs to twiddle and hidden panels to discover.

The awful secret I have discovered is that if you make an interesting enough sound (which isn’t hard to do) then any collection of notes sounds good. At the moment I am sitting on my pouch in the shade recreating the Blade Runner soundtrack by pressing random keys. That Vangelis was a terrible hack!

Apple iBook Store Open in NZ

Apple announced a whole bunch of stuff today; an iPad for little people, an iMac so thin you can shave with it, and some kind of hard drive technology that actually looks pretty cool. But buried amongst the big announcements was the fact that you can now buy new books through iBooks in New Zealand.

Screenshot of iBooks showing the New Zealand store

The iBook store has been open in New Zealand from the beginning, but up until today only offered free, out-of-copyright works to NZ accounts. These are all very well but sometimes you just want to read the latest paperback and buying an ebook is certainly convenient. I don’t mind paying for a good book and up until now I have been forced to go through Amazon’s (pretty good) Kindle service. But it is nice to have another choice.

Let us look at some prices, taken from random titles in the various new and featured sections:

Title iBooks Kindle
Graham Henry:Final Word $24:99 n/a (coming soon)
The Vampire Diaries: The Hunters: Destiny Rising $13:99 $9:85
The Casual Vacancy $28:99 $18:46
Fifty Shades of Grey $13:99 $12:30
A Dance with Dragons (Complete Edition) $13:99 $18:46

(All prices are in NZ dollars. iBooks lists things in NZ dollars and presumably charges GST. Amazon prices are in US dollars but I have converted them using the current exchange rate)

In this random selection of titles from recent “featured” titles, it seems that Amazon is mostly cheaper but not always so it pays to compare. Also, Amazon still has a better selection (Graham Henry’s book being a rare example of something on iBooks but not yet on Kindle), often with multiple editions of the same book available. As always, it pays to shop around.

Now all Apple has to do is hurry up and open the New Zealand TV store. We have waited long enough.

Game Review – GoatUp

Jeff Minter, with his alter-ego/software company, Llamasoft, has been creating ungulate related games for as long as I can remember. On the Amiga games like Llamatron and Attack of the Mutant Camels were ridiculously over the top arcade perfection, with retro (even then) graphics, lofi sound, and pixel perfect controls. GoatUp is a fine addition to Minter’s metaphorical stable (as opposed to the real stable he probably owns.)

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In GoatUp, you control an incredibly nimble and fertile nanny goat who must jump from platform to platform to climb an impossibly tall tower into the sky, picking up bonus items and powerups along the way. Every so often you will meet a billy goat, kissing billy goats gives you more points and also causes you to get pregnant. After a while you instantaneously give birth to a kid that follows you around, if you survive long enough you can get a long chain of offspring trailing behind you. This is useful for defeating enemies, but disturbing if you stop to think about it. Luckily, there is no time to think – you must always be climbing and the game is hard, hard, hard.

The old games lived by their control schemes and GoatUp provides several. The only one that really works well is moving via tilting left or right, and jumping with a touch. You can tell that some thought has been put into the controls, and they work much better than the tilt controls in other games. Speaking of old games, GoatUp’s graphics are deliberately designed to look like various games from the 80′s, some pretty obscure. Part of the fun is trying to remember the particular game that is being invoked.

Recommended if you like this sort of thing.

TrapIt

My friend Aaron has been working on an iPhone game for ages, and now it has finally been released. It is well worth the NZ$1.29 being charged (there is no demo version available).

TrapIt Title Page

You can see more about the game at the TrapIt official site, or jump straight to the App Store page.

I must say I am a little envious. I have been an Apple Registered iPhone developer for 3 years and haven’t managed to produce anything.

Mobile Safari Does Not Support Flash (and Never Will)

Listening to some people, the lack of Flash on the iPhone/iPad is some sort of crime against nature. There are numerous complaints about it online – all bemoaning the inability to play their favourite Flash games or view video. These complaints miss the point entirely – there are two simple reasons why Flash will never be supported in Mobile Safari.

The first reason is simple – Steve Jobs is a jealous God and thou shall have no other Gods besides Him. Apple created the App store so they would control the single way of getting software onto the device, being able to load a flash file from a browser completely circumvents this control. Simple.

Now we have that out of the way, we can move onto the second, more interesting, reason.

Flash would suck on the iPhone.

Lets talk about Flash video first. Most video sites use a custom Flash wrapper to display video in a sub-frame of the browser, with controls to zoom the video to full screen. The sub-frame is usually of a fixed size (640*360, etc) and surrounded by additional HTML (ads, links to other videos, etc). Straight away you should see the problem – the video is already bigger than the iPhones screen. Mobile Safari does an excellent job of resizing web pages, but that is going to leave you with a postage stamp sized video with even smaller controls. Going fullscreen may be a solution, if you can mange to tap the tiny button, but then you are not really using Flash as part of a web page anymore.

Back in the day (about 5 years ago), Flash video was a step above anything else on the web due to its widely deployed and not-too-bad codec. These days Flash is just a none-too-convenient way of displaying standard h264 files which the iPhone can play natively. Most of the big video sites have realized this and just serve the raw file to iPhones instead of trying to wrap it in a custom player, to the benefit of everyone.

(Drifting slightly off-topic for a moment, I imagine the use of Flash as a video player will start to decline even of desktops now that HTML5 is here with its useful <video> tag.)

Now lets talk about Flash games – Tower Defense, Crayon Physics, room escape puzzles, etc. I love them, you love them, everyone loves them. There is just one problem – none of the thousands of existing games would work on the iPhone even if Mobile Safari supported Flash perfectly!

The iPhone doesn’t have a keyboard, so most arcade-type games are right out. Even games that exclusively use the mouse would have problems since tapping your finger on the screen is much, much less precise than using a pointer. In addition, on the iPhone you effectively have multiple pointing devices – how would current Flash apps handle that?

For a quick demo of why sites like newsgrounds will never work on the iPhone, resize your browser window to 480*320 (or 320*480 since that is more usual) and visit your favourite gaming site. Now set your mouse pointer to a big white blob instead of an arrow to simulate tapping with a large figertip. Remember to stop playing after 45 minutes to replicate the battery drain. See how much fun you have.