If there’s one thing Metro does right, it’s how it handles two-apps at one time. Basically, it shows one app at phone width and the other app at full width minus phone width. This is more elegant than Android versions that simply show two apps in arbitrarily smaller than intended viewports because it’s something the developer can (has to, actually) account and test for ahead of time. Let’s try to apply this to iOS…

Most apps that don’t do specific things based on orientation are actually designed (whether the designer actually does this or not) to run in a 768×768 square – then expands whichever dimension gets the 1024 based on orientation. So, in theory, when the iPad is in landscape, it could tell the “big” app that it’s really in portrait but only has 768-20 (for the systemwide menubar) for height. Assuming the app has no code that checks its orientation based on its own height/width ratio, this shouldn’t be a problem.

iPhone apps have a portrait width of 320pt and thanks to incall status and iPhone 5 vs 4S sizing, can take up as much vertical space as possible. 320 is a fairly non-negotiable minimum, however, as that’s barely enough room for a titled Navigation bar and back/forward buttons. Since 768+320=1088>1024 (and that doesn’t even include a graphical border), it’s the iPad app that will have to lose some width – which means developers have to support this new size.

So, not only will iPad apps need to support a new size, but iPhone/Universal apps need to as well, and it’s very confusing to people when apps aren’t universal. Netbot/Tweetbot for example, has iPhone and iPad versions, so you would need to download (and buy) the iPhone version for your iPad if you wanted to use it in the small viewport. But the backlash to that would be against Tapbots not Apple so that’s not something Apple has to worry about. Apps would just get two new values in their .plists – canfullscreensmall and canfullscreenbig (or something).

A caveat with universal apps would be that if you were using it in iPad/Big mode and wanted it small, it might have to relaunch if Apple doesn’t change some device specific rules. The built in photo picker for example only runs in iPhone portrait and inside a popover an iPads (and SEGFAULTs if you try to vice versa). Apple would need to allow popovers on iPhone sized apps (iWork’s new document dialogs do something graphically similar). It would also have to change the result of its device idiom and orientation functions.

I think as a prerequisite, Apple needs to completely change the way apps work and get rid of function calls to device orientation and type. Currently, if you have a universal app, the first thing it does is ask if it’s an iPhone app or not and then chose which interface assets to start loading. THIS IS PART OF THE XCODE TEMPLATE. This launch-time decision isn’t something it can easily go back on. If you launched an app as an iPad app, then wanted to shrink it down to 320pt wide, it’s not going to work. Instead, apps need to be responsive. Provide a callback function to viewchangedsize (which rotating the device would call as well as side-by-side operations) and require – absolutely require under penalty of rejection – that all apps submitted for that version of iOS support all devices and orientations through responsive design and not calls to then-deprecated functions that assume fixed layouts. (I suppose games would have the exclusive ability to op out of this).

Apple would also have to change how windows work under the hood with respect to the keyboard. Right now, when you run an iPhone app, it shows the iPhone keyboard in its viewport. That would need to change to see this two-up stuff as “one app” and show the regular full sized keyboard obstructing both apps. Both apps would receive the keyboard visible delegate callback, and would need to be smart enough to do things based on the returned keyboard’s height (and its own height) rather than static integers.

Not that I think it’s a good idea, but this would also open the door to a 1280×800 logically sized “iPad Pro” (2560x1600px), or more realistically, UIKit for OS X with touch (not that that’s particularly likely either). I don’t think any of this is ever going to happen, but that’s how it would have to be done. It’s very non Apple. The idea of doing this in portrait is a joke I’m not going to even attempt to address. I would have a rotate into portrait slide-off the small app the way using mail in portrait hides the message list. Metro’s off-the-screen gestures for doing this are also very un-Apple and I can’t think of an elegant UI for this.

The only way to pull this off smoothly would be to introduce responsive design in iOS 7 (and deprecated the old methods), require it in iOS 8 (completely remove the old methods), and by the time split screen is introduced in iOS 9, apps are already ready for it and Apple doesn’t have to wait for developers.

Well, it finally happened. Apple released their first iOS device with 128GB of storage – exclusively on the big iPad and for a $100 premium over the 64GB model. Some might dismiss this as chasing the spec with the Surface Pro – and the new higher price point instead of replacing/moving the models around would seem to support that. I offer a different opinion.

With rumors of Apple’s low cost iPhone more credible than ever before, Apple may be gearing up to add some differentiating across the lines. For now, 128GB is available exclusively on the big iPad with retina display. It gives it something to help set itself apart from the iPad mini with retina display we know will be here at some point which will continue to top out at 64GB.

For now, a few questions remain. Does Apple remove the 16GB option? Do they remove it and shift prices down or do they just remove it completely like the iPod touch? I’m not sure Apple would raise prices. They could also retain the 16GB option, but omit either the 32 or 64GB option (but still have $100 intervals on whatever is left). I think the best way to answer this is to examine the fate of the iPad 2. We “know” the retina iPad is getting a IGZO slimming and black and slate treatment sometime this year. Maybe the non-retina iPad will receive the same treatment, acquire a decent camera and lightning, but stick with the A5.

$399 – 16GB iPad 2 / “new” iPad 2 like device
$499 – 32GB iPad with Retina Display
$599 – 64GB ”’
$699 – 128GB ”’

Basically what I’m saying is that if you buy a 128GB iPad “4” today you’re a sucker. It’ll probably be $100 cheaper in 3 months.

***

There’s one other “Big One” to talk about. I theorized this a while back but the Internet Famous have finally started talking about it. Since the iPad mini is an iPad with an iPhone screen, why not an iPhone Jumbo that’s an iPhone with an iPad screen? Same pixel count, a familiar pixel density, easy on the eyes.

Easy On The Eyes

When my iPhone using Aunt and Uncle (and my dumbphone using Mother and Father) heard that the iPhone 5 was 4″ instead of 3.5″, they thought everything was going to be bigger and were disappointed when I explained it was just vertical space so you got more lines of text. Owners of big iPads, they were all similarly unimpressed when I showed them the iPad mini (or my 11″ MacBook Air for that matter). I may be blessed/cursed with 20/10 vision, but the tech generation is getting older and I think a “bigger” (read: more readable) iPhone would be welcome to anyone who isn’t too stubborn to buy it.

I wonder if this device and the “low cost” (as I theorized: off-contract device) are one in the same. A $399 A5 based phone with “better” but not “best” cameras and specs but available without a subsidy. Nothing stops carriers from offering this as a free phone either. Perhaps analysts had it all backwards. Instead of making something smaller to make it cheaper (remember, an iPhone 5 really costs $649), exploit the whole miniaturization as a premium thing and make a big inexpensive thing.

One thing to consider is that this device might have a different outer shape despite having the “same” 16:9 screen. The Home Button and speaker don’t need to scale up so the outer shell might be less tall compared to wide and despite having the 16:9 display, looking more like a giant iPhone 4 from the back rather than a giant iPhone 5.

Since I believe the non retina original iPad mini at a new lower price point (once we have a retina iPad mini, that is) replaces the iPod Touch as the gateway device for those who are iCurious, the Touch can focus more on the highschool and younger crowd and retain its existing child friendly size.

I’m slowly investigating the plausibility of an iOS game and don’t want to write a lot of code – any of it, actually. Games are complex beasts and I’m one man. If I start modifying something I risk being unable to patch for iOS 7 related bugs or new screen sizes etc. I want to spend my resources making good content rather than a good engine.

Anyway, as I was looking into paid source for Commander Cool, I was horrified to find
that the .plist used to define the list of levels is also the .plist used to record scores and completeness of the level – which means the .plist is stored in user space rather than the app bundle and can’t be overwritten with an app update. This means that the levels you ship with are all the levels users are ever going to get – unless they’re willing to uninstall the app and thus delete their progress. That’s one hell of a frustrating limitation. I’ve reported it as an enhancement request so hopefully I don’t have to do it myself.

This got me thinking about the seeming ubiquity of another quirk with iOS games: none of them save progress on iCloud. The only reason I restore my big iPad from backups is because it contains a lot of saved game data – data which there is no humane way to backup other than a full device backup. At least if it was a Mac game I could backup whatever it puts in my library, but on iOS this is unrealistic. (Also, the Mac version of the Commander Cool engine stores this .plist in your home folder, so an Xcode clean doesn’t remove it, you have to manually remove it).

Since so much game development is done by heavily using entire engines, APIs, or libraries you dare not alter, the saved game problem isn’t likely to get fixed across the board any time soon. Games that use Unreal don’t even touch Xcode at any point and have no hope of gaining this feature. Games that use Cocos2d, however, are done primarily in Xcode and engines built off of it ought to have more support for iOS features beyond gamecenter and iOS 6 share sheets.

Discussions of using App.net, DropBox, or your own synching service are moot if game developers are writing so little of their own code – and I don’t blame them. But someone needs to make a first step.

I was listening to some Hypercritical backlog today (“The Wrong Guy” through “Star Wars is not a Blog Post) and John Siracusa talked briefly about how everyone was wrong about how successful the iPod Mini would be. I’d like to follow up on that with two things: first, my 10 years later hindsight report on why it succeeded as well as it did, then what we can learn from it.

When the third generation iPod with 15GB minimum storage, my home 500MHz Indigo iMac had a 20GB HDD. The also-from-2001 Pentium 4 based PC I was doing post production on at school had two 40GB drives. The PowerBook G4 I bought in May 2004 (which was actually last generation when I bought it because I was poor) had a 40GB. So, my just purchased 20GB 4th generation iPod (I was waiting for the click wheel to come back – I’m glad the buttons died) was literally half of my HDD. Yes I had a 120GB external LaCie (which also still works, btw) but that thing was huge. Hard Drive space was exploding back then, but PCs were still thousands of dollars (our at-home Dell was over $2000 when configured to be an actual machine, and that didn’t include a display or optical mouse). So even though it was 2004, your machine could realistically be from 2001.

Of course, I already had over 20GB of music. And no, it wasn’t taking up half of my PowerBook’s HDD, it was on the LaCie on my desk at home. Of course, I’m not typical. Maybe I sound exactly like you, but you’re not typical either. We’re geeks. Real people saw the iPod mini as smaller, colorful (having something in pink was a huge deal, and I personally lusted after the grey/black/graphite one because I hated the Classic’s pearl white), and “5000 songs” sounded big enough for “15000” songs on the “real” iPod to be meaningless.

The mini succeeded beyond all reason and logic because the important metric wasn’t capacity, it was pocketable size/weight, and possibly even color. When they killed it with the Nano, it got even less space (early Nano’s were 1, 2, 4 and 8GB) but could fit in your change pocket, and were effectively weightless. Apple was also smart enough to start offering things in black.

SSDs prove spec guys can see the light

If you just look at numbers like storage size or clock speed it sure looks like we’re repeating history doesn’t it? My original iPad has the same clockspeed and RAM my 12″ PowerBook shipped with and way less storage. My retina MacBook Pro “only” has 256GB of storage. I had my first 250GB external in 2006 or so. What the hell is going on? You’d never stick a 4TB 3.5″ desktop drive in a laptop just for the space. It wouldn’t be a worthwhile tradeoff. Similarly, I’m never going back to spinning disks now that I’m used to the speed of a solid state drive, even if I could get several times the storage. Once storage hits certain minimums (which I think 256GB is. This Air with only 128GB is only usable as a satellite machine) its better to improve other areas instead of making the number you’re already proud of bigger.

That’s the lesson we can learn from the iPod mini today. You only need to chase the spec so far, then you need to recognize the finish line and start chasing other ones. The iPad 2 is now three generations old but its guts are still deemed powerful enough for “new” products. The iPad mini, iPod Touch and 1080p AppleTV are all die shrunk improvements on the original A5 system on a chip debuted with the iPad 2. The iPad 4 is basically too powerful for developers to exploit. We’ve hit our magical spec goal. Wasting time boasting quad core chips and 2GHz CPUs are pointless if they come at the cost of size/weight, heat, or battery life. The new finish line is thinner, lighter, battery life.

The new finish line doesn’t just apply to iOS devices. The 11″ Air is probably already at an ideal size (you want to be careful reducing a physical keyboard further) so it only has to chase performance per watt (i.e., battery life). The retina MacBook Pros could use a little slimming though.

I would like to say though, that on the desktop, Apple ought to be chasing the spec or price. I think the new crop of iMacs are unnecessary eye candy and wouldn’t be surprised if they have audible fan noise problems due to insufficient cooling while rendering or playing a game at 2560×1440. I also think the Mac mini ought to be chasing a $499 price point, even if that’s the Core i3 5400rpm 250GB HDD model with 4GB of RAM and no dGPU.

My lesson remains though. Competitors: you will always beat Apple on performance per dollar, but the more mobile the device needs to be, the less this matters. People understand that miniaturization is a premium. Stick to non ultra books and non all-in-one desktops.

It’s nice to have a small rumor during the dreaded off-season. From Macrumors, “analysts” are predicting colored iPhones (like the Touch) and “multiple sizes” to address different markets.

The kneejerk reaction from most of us is probably that Apple saves money by producing last years models more efficiently and introduces one model at a time. Normally, I’d’ve said this. But other rumors also indicate we’re on the cusp of new display technology that could really change things up. If the promises of IGZO are to be believed, we could have retina iPad minis without an increase in bulk and the big iPad can return to its iPad 2 size with retina in tact.

Apple also started stepping away from stainless steel to colored aluminum. Perhaps it would want to wipe the slate clean and only offer a range of colored aluminum products. But if Apple is to make an all new phone with aluminum back, what else could they do to keep the price down? Without the expensive cellular components, the A5 powered touch still starts at $299 and has the slimmest margine of iOS devices. But maybe, just maybe, they could make a $399 unlocked no contract iPhone with modern enough hardware. Currently, the GSM iPhone 4 is sold at $449 unlocked but it’s the two models ago phone. Cost improvements with IGZO displays and the ubiquity of the 32nm A5 SOC could make an iPod Touch like unlocked iPhone more probable.

As carriers would likely fight this thing tooth and nail, it may get some artificial crippling. Maybe not as bad as the Nexus 4 lacking LTE, but maybe a short list of LTE bands not including one of the big two in the US (and no multiple models to make up for it). The goal here would be to capture the european market, where phone subsidies do not exist and a more palatable introductory price on iPhones is very necessary for consumer adoption (low end Android phones do much better there).

Regarding the multiple sizes though… no. just no. Multiple colored backs and carrier models are essentially interchangeable parts (at least at the fab level) but different sizes just to create artificial price tiers isn’t necessary at the 3.5″ vs 4″ level. The new size is standard, 3.5″ will slowly disappear, but like non-retina 3.5″ resources, will always be supported by developers (sometimes I test on the 3.5 non-retina simulator just to save real estate). Apple has traditionally kept fragmentation as low as possible by transitioning rather than permanently forking (see: death of Rossetta and Universal Binaries).

Let’s talk about ROMs and Emulators. This is one of those “I stole it because HBO doesn’t have it on iTunes” topics people don’t like to have on the record.

Let’s talk about why these emulators exist. For some, it’s simply to play games without paying for them. But for most people, it’s probably about retro gaming that content owners haven’t made possible (or easy) in modern times. Sonic Adventure 1 and Banjo Kazooie are two games available for purchase on Xbox live arcade. Sonic 1, 2, and CD are available on iOS. Ocarina of Time is available on Nintendo VirtualConsole. But what about the tons of games who’s studios may not even exist anymore? What about games that were Japan-only?

Unfortunately, the correct answer here is the same as HBO not putting episodes of Game of Thrones online until the season ends. If the studio doesn’t offer what you want, you’re not entitled to anything else.

For due diligence, here’s Nintendo’s official stance.

This is why we need new laws that demand software/content/data licensing to users rather than hardware.

The most unfortunate part for the gamer is that today’s emulators can be better than the official blessed ports to modern consoles. Banjo Kazooie on Xbox is an actual port, and runs at the Xbox’s native resolution with text and dialog updated to say L instead of Z and everything else that’s appropriate. Sonic Adventure by contrast is stuck in a 4:3 box and has all the awkward slow loading menus as the original complete with pictures of dreamcast controllers. When you rebuy a game like Sonic Adventure for Xbox it’s not hard to be at least a little disappointed.

Nintendo claims that ROMS of games you physically own are not covered by the backup media clause but as far as I know this has only been declared by courts and DMCA Million dollar lawsuits against 14 year olds have not happend, so, I decided to try out SNES9X and SixtyForce anyway.

Before anyone accuses keyboard gaming of being impossible for games that need a stick – you’re right. It’s very frustrating, so I used my Xbox 360 USB controller, and the emulator almost immediately starts pulling ahead of official ports on real consoles.

For one, the Xbox 360 controller is completely configurable by you, the user, and you can have as many presets as you want. I’m tempted to see how far I can take that to create Halo style dual stick controls for Goldeneye or at least Turok (a game that had a primitive precursor to dual sticks). One of the reasons I had so much trouble with Aliens vs Predator for Xbox was that its controls weren’t as good as Halo’s for things like weapon swapping.

In terms of graphics, emulators have the disadvantage of only having the original assets to work with, but the advantage of having a full powered computer to work with. The Super 2XSAI 2D interpolator basically makes vectors out of identically colored pixels in sprites and looks amazing in most situations. You can also enable the 3D graphics to run at arbitrarily large sizes (without changing the viewport shape) with 4X antialiasing, producing less jaggies than the true Xbox 360 ports of these games. And, unlike Nintendo virtual console, force feedback (the rumble feature) actually works.

With HDMI ports, AirPlay, and the relative ease at which one can get their Mac on their TV today, it’s unfortunate that the blessed methods are inferior to the questionably legal ones. IP owners like Nintendo are like record companies pre-iTunes store. Pretending the problem is just a bunch of scumbag pirates when it’s actually your most diehard fans is the wrong way to go about it. If I could pay $4.99 or even $9.99 per ROM to use as I saw fit I’d happily spend several hundred dollars right now, not just and games I know and love, but games I never even tried. Instead, apparently, I’m supposed to cobble together a working Nintendo 64 (which nets Nintendo $0), buy a used copy of a game (which nets Nintendo $0), and pray my current TV still has a composite cable input on it.

There comes a time every year when Apple has already released all of their cool stuff and we don’t expect anything for three months and tech bloggers have the “burden” of filling the gap left by not being able to write reactionary pieces. There are the few options one can take during this time, some I respond to better than others.

Simply Posting Less

This option is probably the safest. If there’s less to write about, don’t try to write filler. There will be stuff to write about when rumors heat up for spring products. Don’t try to make a story out of Instagram’s TOS.

Productivity Porn

Inbox Zero, Getting Things Done, Keyboard Maestro, Quicksilver… I don’t care about your workflow.

Non-Tech Talk (or at least Non-Apple talk)

What’s webOS up to? Here’s my favorite LED lightbulb. These are hit or miss depending on the topic (I named two I like) but I always appreciate the effort. Please do this more often, everyone. And with that being said, I’m off to see if openWebOS got anywhere this year…

If there’s a blog you really like, see if there’s a membership option.

If there’s a webcomic you like, buy the artist’s book.

If there’s a free app you like, buy the full version.

And for all of these, tell your friends to do the same. (App Store gifting has returned, by the way. ’tis the season)

This isn’t about piracy so much as it is about making sure the things you like are around tomorrow (and aren’t corrupted by competing interests between you and advertisers).

Technology is Imperfect and People are Idiots

WHY oh WHY would you navigate by using a town name (or zip code) for destination to a new place and then follow those directions literally? Even if they’re as correct as possible, you’re going to end up on a random residential street in the geographical center of that town. Back in 2004 or so I took a trip with my then-girlfriend’s family to Belmar beach, NJ. The only problem: They mapquest’d directions to “Belmar, NJ”, which brought us to some random residential street quite far from the shore. Ignoring my advice to drive due east and figure it out from there (isn’t it all beach?) they eventually figured it out from a paper map. Mapquest took the blame for this though.

To be fair, back then I believe Mapquest only had a single overview graphic (maybe) but that’s no reason to not verify that your destination looks like how a beach should look on a map. Even in dialup days you should always wait for a satellite image of your destination to load. (incidentally, latency issues on satellite tiles make it feel like dialup sometimes). Debates of vectors vs tiles or cartography in general has always been something I stayed out of because I use all my mapping apps in hybrid (satellite + street names) mode.

When I’m planning a trip to the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania, I make sure it looks like a museum from space. Here’s the Bing “Bird’s Eye” view (why YES, you ARE allowed to use different mapping services for different reasons)

If I were to do something like just type in the town name, I’d get this (where the A is the town and off to the right you can see the museum)

“But, I want to do it eyes free, so I told Siri to-” Let me stop you right there by reminding you that TRIPS SHOULD BE PLANNED and if you’re already in your car and need directions to PULL OVER!

Now, in the spirit if getting lost, here’s one of the area’s countless corn fields
you’ll be sure to end up in if you set out to write a sensationalized piece on Apple Maps

Using an adapter and slowly buying new cables always sucks, but you can’t look me in the eye and say we’re worse off with HDMI than we were with component and VGA. So, why do our otherwise digital lives still have one analog piece? Right there, on the bottom of your iPhone 5, the biggest port is the headphone jack (with some extra pin hacks to also be analog audio in and receive headset events). For now, lets throw arguments about existing standards out the window and look at the non-audiophile benefits to a miniaturized digital audio output via the lightning port.

Have you ever tried using the auxiliary input cable and a power inverter in your car at the same time? I haven’t tried with a giant shielded cable but standard ones pick up a nice square wave from the inverter. Bluetooth isn’t a solution for multiple devices wanting control of the car audio. What would be better would be a an all digital solution, or at least a cable that has the D/A on the very end. Technically this is possible with lightning now as it supports line out but sadly cables tend to run the line out over the length of the cable.

I realize that digital headphones of any kind will need to get some power from somewhere. Remembering to charge my noise canceling headphones is a pain so the solution might be to pass some power out of the device to the headphones. An interesting implementation discussion here is how volume data should be passed. Should the device pass an altered waveform or should is pass a volume value that the headphones know what to do with? Probably the latter.

Apple would obviously supple in-box a lightning to 1/8th” adapter. A decision they can make is whether or not to put the D/A in the cable or in the iPhone. I guess that depends on bulkiness of the resultant cable – because that’s clearly where it belongs to make the smallest iPhone possible.

None of this is going to work if Lightning remains an Apple exclusive, so maybe this discussion is moot.