There are 3 types of controllers. Wrap-around simple, wrap-around advanced, and external advanced. The advanced controller is a dual-stick + dpad controller with face buttons, triggers, and shoulders (pretty much an Xbox 360 controller), complete with PLAYER ID LED INDICATORS.

Apple actually intends for people to have multiple standalone controllers to use for 1-4 player games on a single device.

That seems like a stretch even on a 10 inch iPad, but there it is in the docs, complete with a Sample project.

Maybe Apple expects people to gather around 27″ iMacs.

Airplay wouldn’t be comfortable with the window-boxing and lag.

No one other than myself and panic actually bought the HDMI adapter.

iOS 7 has a minimum requirement of an iPhone 4. Basically: single Core A4 with 512MB of RAM (which is why the iPod Touch 4 at 256MB is out). Controllers require Lightning or Bluetooth. Can we think of another device that meets these requirements AND has an HDMI port on it? hmmm Oh that’s right, the 3rd generation Apple TV with it’s single core A5, 512MB of RAM, and basically unused bluetooth capability.

This fall, when Apple releases iOS 7 into the wild alongside a new iPhone(s?) at its annual event, they will likely show off an MFI controller or two they like – paired with an AppleTV 3 running a flagship game either made by them or with a big name publisher who they got to agree to an iOS exclusive. The SDK will be opened that day and the app store will open around the holidays.

If you’re a developer, go watch the session videos.

I’m willing to give Apple a pass on the single-socket design but only until I see the price.

What really breaks this for me however is the choice of GPU. It doesn’t matter how great of an AMD card it is because it’s an AMD card. No this isn’t a religious devotion to nVidia, it’s more about app support. Like it or not, Apple, Pro products outside of your own don’t Support OpenCL completely (or at all) but many of them have incredible nVidia CUDA support. Especially the Adobe suite, but there are others.

If we’ve learned anything about Adobe, it’s that they take a very long time to get these types of compatibility updates out and only put them in the most recent products (see: OS X transition, Intel transition, retina display support). Don’t expect miracles out of them.

When the Mac Pro launches (probably around Halloween) pro software will be running entirely on the admittedly beefy CPUs instead of the GPU (like it does just fine on a 15″ retina MacBook Pro with nVidia 650M).

So while AMD (and even the Intel 5000HD) cards may selectively beat out nVidia’s offerings on specific OpenGL benchmarks, none of them will ever have nVidia’s proprietary CUDA support. (I’m also not sure if the Intel 5000HD even has full OpenCL support.)

Of course OpenCL is the way of the future and apps should’ve started using it instead of CUDA back in the days of Snow Leopard, but they don’t yet. Maybe this is the only way to get The Foundry and Adobe to fully support it. For me, a Mac Pro is a machine you keep for 5 years though so I’m happy to wait until either an nVida version or OpenCL support from Adobe.

Both HDMI 1.4 and DisplayPort 1.2 have been around for quite some time and both support 3840×2160@30Hz.

In the case of HDMI, Apple could continue to include a native HDMI. This would have to be right off of the video card and not off of the Thunderbolt controller.

In the case of DisplayPort, all the pins are available in a miniDisplayPort/Thunderbolt port, but in the same way mDP displays have to end a Thunderbolt chain, a DP 1.2 4K display would have to be the only device, plugged straight into TB port, with no Data signal, just video.

DisplayPort 1.2 on Wikipedia
HDMI 1.4 on Wikipedia

This begs a bigger question, however. Is 30fps enough? 24 is the bare minimum for movies to look right, games need a little more depending on the type of action, but your OS X UI is usually running at 60.

You might also be interested in what is/isn’t retina when we’re talking about desktop monitors vs laptops.
http://isthisretina.com

Large white backgrounds with black text look best in a well lit area. While that accurately most corporate stooge jobs (including my own) it does not describe the situation while I take my walks at night or use my iPad in bed. I actually write most of my good code after 10:00pm and the lights aren’t necessarily on for that.

Having dealt with all their sets “features” like pulling teeth to turn overscan compensation off or noticeable video processing delay I’ve been using Dell projectors instead. Why Dell? because their projectors are still expecting to be hooked up to laptops rather than TV signals. Minimal (if any) processing. Overscanning isn’t even offered as a feature. The good kind of feature-less I love. But projectors have bulbs, and they decay noticeably halfway before their death. Basically you have to buy one every year if you want a decent picture. (At my job we managed to wear one down until the projector started complaining that the bulb had “Passed its useful life”)

That’s why when late last night as I was shopping for a replacement bulb for my Dell 4310WX 1280×800 projector and seeing the $1600 price tag for a new unit altogether I decided to put 4K into the Amazon search and noticed a set for a suspicious $1300 – the Seiki SE50UY04. 50inch, 4K, LED. Sounds good, right?

Since my experiments with Windows 8 have ended, the 22-inch LED lit 1080p HDMI accepting touch enabled display I had been using gained new purpose sitting on my coffee table mirroring the projector. I actually hooked them up to a monoprice 4×2 HDMI matrix so I could either mirror or use one for Xbox and the other for AppleTV or something. My projection area is about 100 inches so 50 isn’t going to compete with that. But 50 is only a little over 2×22, which means 50 inches of 4K has basically the same size pixels (and same viewing distance) as 25 inches of 1080p. I’m also cursed with 20/10 vision.

I found a CNET review of the SE50UY04 and was elated to find the reviewer was annoyed by a lack of “image processing features”. The reviewer was also too inept to get his PC’s video card to deliver 4K over HDMI saying it was only supported over display port “and the TV doesn’t have that” and leaving it there rather than seeing out an adapter. The short viewing distance to appreciate the small sampling of 4K content he could find was also complained about.

I’ve ordered the set and a few HDMI 1.4 cables (and mini displayport adapters). I imagine that if the MacBook Pro is willing to drive 3840×2400 on its internal display for More Space mode then there should be at least one way to get it to do 3840×2160 externally – hopefully both with and without HiDPI mode via some display menu bar apps.

I (unfortunately?) decided to save $200 on a seller that wasn’t Amazon Prime but also offered free shipping so instead of the set taking 2 days to arrive it’ll probably arrive during WWDC. I’ll write and post a photo-heavy review once I receive it.

Even if Apple doesn’t also prematurely discontinue the iPhone 4, at this point all devices Apple sells (and presumably all devices to get iOS 7) have 512MB of RAM, with the iPhone 5 and iPad 4 having 1GB. This is great news for developers because iOS 6 on the iPod Touch 4 and the 3GS was a painful experience. Although app switching was “Supported”, there was a very slim chance that the device hadn’t cleared the other app out of RAM and that it would be restarting when you switched back to it. The lack of camera and lower price point is great for developers like me who like to buy “too many” devices so I’m not running Betas on primary iPhone or testing exclusively on year old hardware.

The only “loss” for consumers here is the removal of the rear-facing camera, but let’s face it. Teens (the demographic for this thing) only take “selfies” for Instagram, Snapchat, and FaceTime. The rear camera on the 32GB model has the LED flash for flashlight purposes, but the fourth gen didn’t so that’s not really a “loss”.

The biggest win on this is the color scheme. The elusive aluminum back with black front face originally confined to the first iPhone and iPads 1-4 (no Mini) is now available on the iPod Touch.
Don’t get me wrong. I love the black of my iPhone 5 and iPad mini, but it really does noticeably scratch. But I’d have to look at the dreaded white face more than a scratched black back so that’s my current compromise.

Performance wise, the retina 15 is an unstoppable machine, but I’m tired of its size and weight. All the games I play work just as well on my 2010 11″ Air with the nVidia 320m so I won’t miss the dGPU if the Intel HD 5000 hype is to be believed. Assuming the retina 13 or 11 retains all the ports (I literally use all of them) I’ll be fine. I’ll miss the quad i7 for renders but I only have a 2.3 GHz so the new minimum should be faster, making the performance decrease not as bad as 50%.

I will miss 16GB of RAM, especially if I have to share some with the iGPU. That coupled with the decreased number of cores will severely limit me during the awful occasions I need a Windows 7 virtual machine for.

I understand WWDC would be soon for an update for the retina 13 so if it doesn’t happen I’ll ride out the difference on my work provided retina 15. I have a feeling Apple would try to unite the cycles of the 13 and 15 (and 11?) since none of the hardware in the 13 was newer than the 15 when it was released.

I’m actually not worried about the decrease in screen real estate because my eyes are good enough to operate this thing in “1X” 2880×1800 mode (using the Eye-Friendly app). Using a 13 in 2560×1200 mode to write code doesn’t worry me.

If there’s a retina 11″ Pro I’ll happily swallow almost any spec limitation. Also, if there’s a retina iPad mini I won’t be purchasing an iPad 5.

***

Random additional thought: As I mentioned in my hurricane post, the 85 Watts of the 15 is a lot on the 100 watt maximum of my car inverter and my backup battery, causing fans to come on and heat warnings and all that good stuff.

My number 1 feature request for Xcode 5 is full screen mode for the iOS Simulator with console output available on the same screen. Yes, this would make the simulator viewport off-center. A full screen simulator could potentially lose some chrome too. Testing iPad apps on the 11″ MacBook Air is particularly difficult. Even though the air is 1366×768, big enough to fit a non-retina iPad’s 1024×768 landscape, the border of the iOS Simulator and the systemwide menubar make this impossible without scaling down the simulator.

The simulator could do a better job of being a fake iPhone. It would be great if it could show up in iTunes and Image capture so I could more easily dump image libraries on there for testing.

Currently, the simulator needs to reboot when you turn a simulated TV Out window on or off or change its size. This makes it impossible to test connection notifications. At this point, the iOS simulator needs to simulate a full AirPlay receiver (basically an AppleTV simulator with just the settings app), complete with the ability to simulate low bandwidth situations.

***

Xcode itself needs to stop changing my viewport on me and instead use better notifications for when things go wrong, like when I hit a SEGFAULT and it highlights return UIApplicationMain(argc, argv, nil, NSStringFromClass([AppDelegate class])); in main.m for me and I have to go back to whatever line the cursor was currently on manually, by clicking back and then re-scrolling to it because it doesn’t remember.

Another way Xcode gets in the way is that every time you build with an error or warning, the left pane reopens. Unless I have all the luxury of a 1920 logically wide display, I need to close the left pane to have room to work, especially if I’m in interface builder.

***

Development in general would be greatly improved if Apple put enough RAM in iOS devices to be a little less hasty about purging RAM. I don’t necessarily mean closing background apps, I mean when ARC releases something if I don’t use it literally the next line after creating it. The only way around this is to create a lot of globals, which uses more RAM because I’m not allowed to release them manually. Don’t get me wrong, ARC is the way of the future and obviates that nonsense we used to call garbage collection, but it’s not perfect yet.

Storyboards are great. Keep them optional.

Auto Layout is not. Please don’t kill springs and struts.

The documentation of appearance and its autocomplete / what counts as a syntax error needs a lot of work. The crashing [[UISwitch appearance] setTrackTintColor:green]; doesn’t even send up a warning. (UISwitch cannot setTrackTintColor, that’s for UIProgressviews, and not for UISliders either. UISwith has setTintColor and setOnTintColor). This, btw, is one of those errors that highlights main.m because it has no idea wtf just happened.

Unless using the Navigation bar and toolbar that are built into a UINavigation Controller, the ones you create manually don’t auto shrink in height on iPhones in landscape, and the way to do it in code is weird and messy. A checkbox in interface builder (accessible by code too, of course) is necessary.

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Back to the Mac

UIKit is so far ahead of OS X. UIImageView, a class I use in literally every app, doesn’t have an equivalent on OS X. By equivalent, I mean an image viewer with the ability to set scale its contents to fit, fill, stretch, or 1:1. If I want to do that in OS X I have to start writing code in drawRect methods.

UIKit widgets also have a lot more events to take advantage of touch as thumb down, touch up, , drags, enters and exits, and value changed. These make iOS programming more similar to the ease of .net and Basic OS X falls far short of.

UIKit could benefit from vertical and circular sliders though, even if the circular slider does have a large minimum size.

The code-heavy way both iOS and OS X handle radio buttons and select-one elements is annoying.

***

Probably the two biggest requests for iOS are the opening of development for share sheets and the notifications area. I would immediately write a display brightness thing for the notification area and a “fix with Auto Adjust” share sheet.

I’m sitting out on my apartment’s lawn with the 11″ Air, quite far from my room (though I suppose without so much interference the 5GHz would reach). As you can see, there are tons of WiFi networks. So many that being in my bedroom I have a measurable (but endurable) speed drops. You’d think that they could make some sort of building-wide FiOS agreement and make it part of the rent instead of each unit paying for unique connectivity but whatever that’s not the problem I’m going to complain about.

The problem I’m having would occur even without those 400 other networks. Where I’m sitting, my computer “picks up” my JM-n home network, but not very well. A speed test is under 1Mbps down and it drops completely every now and again. I didn’t expect to use my WiFi so I brought out my Verizon iPad with me and turned on hot spot. But since it can still see JM-n, it takes a lot of coaxing to get the Air onto the iPad’s network. The ordering in system preferences doesn’t seem to always “stick”.

The iPhone did even worse. Because it can see JM-n, it tries to use that instead of its LTE connection. This problem happens more often than 1st world hipsters writing on their lawns. AT&T iPhones get to hop onto “AT&T WiFI” at Starbucks and McDonalds (and other places). But you’re not always in the Starbucks when this tries to happen. When I’m in the Chipotle next door, for example, the phone tries to get on the WiFi, and has effectively 0 downstream. Some other times it happens:

• I’m walking out the door and trying to check mail or something, everything stops until the WiFI vanishes and LTE takes over
• I’m in a corner conference room in the hospital, far but not far enough from the base stations
• In a parked car outside my apartment
• My grandparents house where it tries to get on my parents (next door neighbors) WiFi.
  • I should point out that my grandparents baseline DSL / modem are way slower than the HSPA+ AT&T I get at their address so I don’t use their network.
• In good range of a WiFi with simply too many users on it

I’m not saying it should be on by default, but iOS needs a way to use cellular data in the presence of crappy WiFi. I swear a beta of iOS 4 or 5 had this but I guess it never saw the light of day.

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I wish they would let me sit in one of these trees…

Giganotosaurus and Mapusaurus eating an Argentinosaurus while Tyrannosaurus, Spinosaurus, and Suchomimus look on.
That image is a 10000×2500 png with transparency. If you do something cool with it let me know – @joemmac on twitter and app.net

What I would like to see is Giganotosaurus and/or Mapusaurus in a very large quantity – like 10 of them on screen at once. They were not feathered. They were Tyrannosaur sized. They have been found in groups. Unlike the Rex and Spino which went after things smaller than them, the Carcharodontosaurs all over the world preyed upon giant sauropods. A bonebed of Mapusaurus contains seven individuals of various size. While it’s not known whether this is pack or family behavior or just a mob (or even just a mere predator trap) but JP has made much greater leaps with its artistic license *cough* spitter.

Imagine the game-trail scene from the lost world that instead ends with the main characters watching 2 Giganotosaurs challenging an Argentinosaurus, then 2 more appear, then 6 more including juveniles. During prior movies, there simply wasn’t enough territory to worry about running into more than one male Tyrannosaurus or Spinosaurus. But after 20 years of Giganotosaurs not killing each other for dominance on Isla Sorna their numbers have gotten ridiculous and horrifying.

My hopes are not high. I imagine something boring like just one Carcharodontosaurus acting indistinguishably from the Spinosaurus and Tyrannosaurus “but guys it’s totally different!”

We’ll probably have to deal with “super smart” inexplicably giant (people sized) naked Troodons that resulted from that weird lab in JP3 that might act just a little too similarly to Xenomorphs.

I’ll get back to tech topics soon. Think of Dinosaurs as my coffee