iPhone OS 4.0 Features: Part 4 of 7

#4: iAd
Apple's iAd platform may be getting scrutinized by the FTC, but let's just talk as if everything goes as planned for Apple. Which it probably will anyway.

Ads were never something I imagined I'd be discussing in an iPhone feature post. Fact is, if you've downloaded even a few free apps on your iPhone, you've probably had some exposure to inline ads - I mean, a developer has to make a profit somehow, right? The problem, much like web-based ads, is that they're often obnoxious, if not obtrusive enough, that you won't be compelled to click on them. Or tap, in this case. Many users install browser plug-ins to disable ads, especially Flash-based ads. (Though the vocal masses that once lauded ClicktoFlash seem to have been silenced by people who insist we need more Flash online. Suspicious! But that's a whole 'nother ugly topic.)

But why disable ads? You don't hear people complaining about ads in magazines or newspapers. It's how many of us first learn of products or services we might not have otherwise known about. The only magazine I even read any more is Photoshop User, and it has ads like every other magazine. But I've learned about some cool things because of that fact. Television ads fall somewhere between the web and magazines: they're viewed by millions, cause hey, what ELSE are you going to do for two minutes until your show comes back on? Bake a pie? TiVo and other DVRs let us skip past commercials, but so did the old-school VCR, if we so desired.

So why watch ads at all? Because sometimes we want to be informed. We may have a need for Product X, but didn't know it existed prior to the commercial. Or maybe we just didn't know that our favorite cleaning product has an improved formula and now works even BETTER at fighting tough stains and pet odors. And you may not have known you were looking for a new car, but that 2011 Mustang looks pretty good on TV, and… wait, 31 MPG? Really? Well maybe I should go check it out...

So that's the educational and informational side. There's also the entertainment angle. There are truly some great minds in the ad business, crafting anything from sensational and artistic ads often used for cars (See Lincoln's ads for some of my favorites - the MKZ ad in particular is simply stunning), to downright hilarious ones. The Super Bowl alone is enough to convince anyone the value of ads. They get people talking, and the most effective will get you interested in whatever is being advertised.

Why is it then, that advertising online and inside apps fails to have that effect? It's one word, and simple to point out, but hard to achieve: Quality. As TV advertising proves (I say, based on no actual knowledge of industry numbers), quality ads see results. How many times have you been speeding past commercials on your DVR only to rewind because you want to see your favorite one?

Is achieving quality ads online so hard because of the low entrance barrier? After all, anyone at a computer can get some simple image editor and create an ad, even those that have no business doing so. Is a solution to this to simply let a company with immensely high aesthetic standards control what ads are displayed through it's service? Apple seems to think so. And you know what?

They might be on to something.

The mock ads that Apple created and showed off for Toy Story 3 and Nike were fantastic, and could completely change what we think of when we think of online advertising. Offering simple games or other interactive experiences, wallpaper downloads, and even links to other apps WITHIN the ad are potential game-changers. Perhaps one of the most important aspects are that you never leave the app when viewing the ad. Knowing you won't have to switch apps and get back to where you were before viewing the ad is a huge plus for users.

Anyway, I understand Apple's examples weren't real ads, but they highlight the possibilities beautifully. From offering a better user experience, and applying some actual design standards to ads, I think they're going to be more enticing to people, and overall a good decision by Steve Jobs and company.

To be clear though, don't misunderstand me: If Apple pitched iAd as the one and only option to advertise within apps moving forward, I wouldn't exactly applaud the move, and I'm pretty sure it would be a bigger PR disaster than any rejected app story thus far. Thankfully, much like Game Center, iAd is an opt-in service. If a developer wants to use the platform, they can, and Apple controls & sells the ads, each side gets their cut, and everyone is happy. If not, hey, just keep doing what you're doing. Hard to argue the concept, especially if you're a developer looking to get your name out there with a free app or two, but still need to, you know, eat.

In the end, with or without iAd (iAds?), we're going to be seeing ads in some apps, so if we can be looking at something of higher quality than the norm, that even offers us some functionality and a pleasant experience, instead of, say…

...I really think I'd be okay with that.

iPhone OS 4.0 Features: Part 3 of 7

The idea behind making this series into seven parts was to highlight the seven "tentpole" features of iPhone OS 4.0 that Steve Jobs and company highlighted. Then I refreshed my memory on the list and realized a few things:

An improved Mail is welcome, and a nice addition, but the key changes are simply threaded message views and a unified inbox. The latter of course being a feature users have been begging for. All nice stuff, but nothing worth devoting a whole post to. Do you look forward to a unified inbox for all of your e-mail accounts like most of us do? Well good, you're getting it. Next!

iBooks on iPhone and iPod touch devices is cool, and should relieve many people who worried it was an iPad-only feature. I don't really know how popular it will be, as the reason it's such a big deal on the iPad is the bigger screen that's better suited to reading for long periods. The syncing between all your devices is a nice touch though, and clearly a "yeah, we can do that too" message to Amazon.

The new Enterprise features seem nice, but are completely meaningless to me personally.

What this means is that I could turn this into a four part series and appear a liar for promising seven. Instead, I've decided to stick to seven, but I'll branch out into some of those 100 minor features, instead of stopping at the major ones.

Long preface aside, let's continue with the next tentpole feature I am going to discuss, Game Center, and what it means for both users and developers.

#3: Game Center
As soon as the App Store launched, it was clear that gaming was going to be a large portion of its catalog. The iPhone as a platform was so far beyond everything else on the market (and still is, though the margin has gotten smaller in the last year or so), there was an amazing amount of potential as a mobile gaming device. Games that weren't quite on par with grade-A DS or PSP titles, but were light years ahead of the sub-sub-par "games" one usually associated with a mobile phone.

It wasn't long before we had the kinds of games that would benefit from a platform similar to Microsoft's Xbox Live or Sony's PlayStation Network. Or Nintendo's... Oh right, still waiting on that. Xbox Live in particular has proven itself to be a fantastic model for a social gaming network. For whatever it's worth, I think it's the most well-designed product ever to come out of Microsoft. For online gaming, comparing scores with friends and the world, and so much more, these services play a huge part in how people interact with each other and their games.

Back to the iPhone. While Apple didn't build such a structure into the iPhone OS, several developers saw fit to collaborate on a few of these systems themselves, the most notable being OpenFeint, Plus+, and Crystal. OpenFeint is the one I have the most experience with myself, and is generally a pretty consistent experience from game to game. It's a great system offering leaderboards, achievements, social features and so on. I'm sure all of the others are just as good as well, but the simple fact that there are multiple systems/networks on he platform underlines is a potential hinderance to the platform.

The Case for One Social Gaming Network

Users have wanted one official, built-in social gaming network for a long time, even if you don't hear about it as much as in the pre-OpenFeint days. One problem is that there's no telling which games will use which network, since devs are free to use any of several options. It fragments the market, and potentially confuses users. You can, for example, see what other games your friends are playing, but only if said games happen to be on that network. Not to mention the need to sign up and manage friend lists on each. What if I want to see ALL the games my friends play? Or see when they're online and send them an invite?

One of my favorite little puzzle games for the iPhone is Piyo Blocks by Big Pixel Studios. As a match-3 puzzler, it's perfect for integrating a social gaming network, most notably for scoring purposes. The game uses OpenFeint, which was nice since I was already using it. I don't know the details behind it, but when Piyo Blocks 2 came to the iPad, Chillingo took up the publishing reigns, and the game therefore uses their own Crystal network. So now I have two games in the same series using two different networks. I don't actually feel like setting up a Crystal profile/account just for one game, and really found myself wanting this mythical "One Network" solution. While this is just one example, I'm sure I'm not alone.

I was both surprised and relieved when Apple revealed Game Center. It was them embracing gaming like never before, even more than when they shifted their entire marketing program behind the iPod touch to focus on games. It promises to be a big win for gamers, finally offering one official network backed by a company with endless resources. For end users, there's really no drawback here: The other networks should still be around, as developers aren't required to use Apple's system, so there will be plenty of choices. Right?

Obsolete?

Game Center's announcement was a big shock to all developers, and certainly those behind OpenFeint and other existing services. Did Apple just make all of these obsolete? That's the question on a lot of people's minds, though I'd say that's not the case. There's already talk of methods that will help people migrate their stuff to Game Center - by choice, of course. Does this mean that developers will be able to support both Apple and third-party services in a single app? If that's the case, it's going to make things interesting, and not as dire as some fear.

Besides that, having a new service out there is already inspiring devs to plan new features that will go beyond what Game Center will provide, to give both other developers and users incentive to continue using a third-party solution. Competition is good, right?

All in all, I think Game Center is a win for everyone. It gives the platform the dedicated, integrated social gaming network it so desperately needs, but without obliterating the existing ones. We won't see Game Center in full until later this year - I'm guessing the fall, but it's going to be interesting to see what happens.

iPhone OS 4.0 Tentpole Features: Part 2 of 7

Part two of my series on the upcoming iPhone OS 4.0 focuses on the feature I'm most excited about so far: Folders.

#2: Folders
Once upon a time, the iPhone had a single home screen, and life was simple. Eventually we were able to add websites as icons to our home screen, which meant we needed more space, so Apple added multiple home screens. Then a little thing called the App Store debuted in the summer of 2008 and everything changed. People suddenly found themselves with 3, 4, 7 pages of apps, and at 16 per page, it became quite daunting to both move about and find the app they wanted. There simply had to be a better way to do this. Over time - specifically in mid- to late 2009, Apple introduced two features that helped alleviate - but not solve - the clutter. One was a feature of the iPhone OS itself, and the other a feature of iTunes.

Interim Solutions
The iPhone-based solution was Spotlight search, introduced in summer 2009 with iPhone OS 3.0. Like its counterpart introduced in Mac OS X Tiger (10.4), Spotlight is easily accessible and fast as can be, and makes for an excellent app launcher, much like on the Mac. You can simply swipe left from your main home screen, type the first couple letters of your app, and tap the search result to launch it. Boom. Simple. It works fine, though for me it still feels more natural to browse by swiping back and forth between screens, so I don't find myself using Spotlight on the iPhone anywhere near as often as on my Mac (which is constantly).

The next, and even better attempt to fix the "too many apps" syndrome was bundled with the release of iTunes 9.0 in September 2009. Now, when your iPhone is plugged in to your computer, you get not only a full list of synced apps, but images depicting each home screen and their layouts, enabling you to quickly drag and drop apps between screens, even several at once. It's a great addition to the software, and one I use frequently, but there's one thing it can't fix: 7 full pages of apps is still 112 individual icons, no matter how logical your organization is. Many people were hoping for folders to consolidate similar apps and cut down on the amount of home screens they had to swipe through without having to just remove things from their iPhones. Of course, very few people - if any - seemed to have a realistic and usable approach to do so.

The Real Solution
It should be a shock to nobody that Apple found a great method. Let us feign surprise.

Feign!

Okay. Clearly, a desktop-like interface for creating and working with folders wasn't going to work here. The solution had to be something that felt natural within the OS, that fit with the way we already interact with our devices. Apple had already introduced what is essentially an "Edit" mode with firmware 1.1.3 that made it simple to move apps around and from screen to screen, so I suppose it was natural that folder creation and modification would be handled in Edit Mode. Or Wiggle Mode, if you prefer.

So to make a folder we just drag one app onto another? That's it? The OS even automatically names the folder based on the type and genre of the apps you put in the folder, which is great, simple and will probably suffice for a lot of people. For the rest of us, we can still name the folders to whatever we want as well. The UI for them is superb too: folder contents are revealed by the home screen background splitting and sliding apart, as if the apps live "behind" the home screen. The icons outside of the active folder then dim, making it clear that while in the folder, you're only interacting with the apps inside.

I probably don't need to explain at all why this is useful. I've spent a good deal of time moving apps around and organizing them in a certain fashion. I discovered a newfound love for word games after the App Store launched, and currently have ten of them on my iPhone, so I always want to keep those together on one screen. I have certain areas devoted to different things - brand new stuff and Lite versions I'm trying out live on screen #2, social-based apps are clustered together, as are utilities, photo-related apps, and my favorite of all my faux categories: "Games with round icons," seen here:

Needless to say, I live to organize and categorize, which is all well and good until I get new apps and it throws off my careful planning. Being able to move all of my "categorized areas" into folders is the one feature of iPhone OS 4 that's going to change the way I use my iPhone more than any other. Never again will downloading a new app or three mess with my organized app ecosystem, forcing a reshuffling of 7 or 8 screens of apps. In fact, I won't even have 7-8 screens of apps to scroll through anymore, so I'll be able to get to everything that much faster.

Needless to say, I'm very excited about Folders, so June/July can't get here soon enough.

iPhone OS App Spotlight: Pastebot

Pastebot
by Tapbots

There are upwards of 180,000 apps in the App Store today, but there are very few that can claim to be nearly as well-designed as Tapbots' three "bots" apps: Weightbot, Convertbot and Pastebot. All three are worthwhile apps, each designed to serve only one function, but to do it exceedingly well. The most useful in my eyes is the third and newest 'bot, Pastebot.

Pastebot is, essentially, a clipboard manager. You simply copy something from any app that supports it - text or image - and launch Pastebot. Whatever you copied is automatically imported and stored in the app's clipboard. From here, you can organize your clippings into whatever folders you'd like, and have at your disposal many options for using said clippings. A single tap on anything in the list will copy that item for you to paste elsewhere. The cool blue LED-style light you see next to the clipping isn't just eye candy: it's a helpful indicator of what's sitting on your clipboard, ready to be pasted.

For text clippings, you get useful info like character and word counts, and a variety of filters you can run on the text. If you want to convert all text to upper or lowercase, run a find & replace, or even something as specific as converting to and from "smart quotes," you can do all of that with ease.

Image clippings are even more interesting to work with. A single tap brings up an info panel with the date it was captured and pixel dimensions. Quick and easy cropping and rotating is a button away. The image filters are simple, but useful if you just want to quickly adjust brightness, or make a black & white or sepia image.

All of this so far sounds good, right? Functionally, there's little you could be left wanting here. I'd even say it goes well above what you'd expect from something that's just meant to manage your clippings. Even so, there's still two killer features of Pastebot that put it further over the top:

Sync

Tapbots offers a free Mac OS X app that runs as a preference pane called Pastebot Sync. After installing it and pairing your iPhone or iPod touch with it, you've opened up a whole new way of connecting your mobile and desktop lives. The Mac app will run at all times in the background, aware of any "copy" command you make. If you have Pastebot running on your iPhone, whatever text or image you copy on your Mac is instantly pushed to Pastebot. In addition, you can tap and hold on something on your iPhone and it will paste into whatever Mac app you're in (logically speaking - you of course can't paste a JPEG into Safari's address bar, for example). This is especially useful for URLs you may come across online that you'd rather read or access on a computer later.

All of this amounts to an incredibly useful addition and extension of an already impressive app. But there's one last thing that truly takes Pastebot to a higher place.

The UI
A functional user interface - and this should go without saying - is a must, and a beautiful user interface can sometimes be hard to find. They're out there, and sometimes even from a company besides Apple or Adobe (yes, I actually do love the CS4 UI). The trick, of course, is finding a UI that's both of these things. The interface of Pastebot is gorgeous on a level that would make Steve Jobs proud. Everything about it is clearly custom-made, but it still feels and behaves like a native iPhone app. An elegant dark theme is complemented by slick animation, thoughtful layout, and even cool (not annoying!) sound effects. The only app I've used that has anywhere near this level of polish is Convertbot - another Tapbots app.

If any of these features seem useful to you, give Pastebot a try: there's a lot of functionality here for $2.99. Heck, there's a lot of functionality here for it to justify a $9.99 price tag, but that's just me.

iPad Compatibility
As of now, Pastebot runs and works just fine on the iPad, though it still runs as an iPhone app. Tapbots recently made a blog post regarding the iPad that's worth a read. In short, provided they create iPad-specific versions of their three apps so far, Pastebot will be first on the list, but nothing is set in stone. If nothing else, they're working on an update to the Sync prefpane, which currently is only designed to work with one device: Something that was really never an issue before people were wanting to sync both an iPhone and iPad to one computer.

In any case, Pastebot itself runs perfectly fine on the iPad, and once the sync situation is resolved, is perfectly usable until the theoretical iPad-optimized version comes along.

Links
Tapbots website
Pastebot (iTunes Link)

iPhone App Spotlight: Glyder & Glyder 2

One of the recurring features I'll be running here are what I'm calling iPhone App Spotlight. The name is partially derived from the Spotlight search technology in both Mac OS X and the iPhone OS (remember when the iPhone OS was still considered OS X? What happened?). It's also because I couldn't come up with anything catchier. But anyway! These "Spotlights" can and will feature any kind of app, game, utility or other that I've found is a shining example of the iPhone & iPod touch as a platform. I'm opening the series with a look at one of my favorite games and its more recent sequel.

Glyder
by Glu

To properly explain my feelings about Glyder, we first have to go back to the fall of 1996, and the release of Nintendo's Pilotwings 64. A cartoony flight simulator, Pilotwings 64 had players piloting a variety of crafts such as a hang glider and jet pack, and presented them with missions to clear in order to advance to more difficult areas. All of these modes and methods of transportation had some form of rule: You either had to fly through a series of rings or land on a target (among others), often within a set time limit or number of attempts. The final mode players could unlock was "Birdman" mode, which instead of placing the game's characters inside a craft of any kind strapped wings to their arms and allowed one to freely roam various areas at your leisure. Once I got access to Birdman, I rarely played any other aspect of the game, because the idea of free flight without limits or the opportunity of failure (there were no goals to the mode) greatly appealed to the adventure and exploration junkie inside of me.

Imagine then my feeling, well over 12 years later, to see a game coming out for the iPhone that feels very much inspired by this free flight mode I adore so much. I followed news of Glyder intently, and couldn't download it fast enough upon its release. I proceeded to finish the game in two sittings.

Glyder places gamers in control of Eryn, in a story that is basically just laid out on the game's title/loading screen: Eryn has managed to get herself sucked into some sort of dimensional rift, and armed only with her glider, must find a way back home. There's not a lot to the story, but there doesn't need to be. It's enough of a premise that you're motivated to go forth and explore this strange new world.

The game is completely controlled by the iPhone's accelerometer, so tilting the device will let you steer left and right along with diving forward to gain momentum. Glyder is one of the best examples of a game that's perfectly suited to this platform, and truly takes advantage of the hardware, instead of just using the accelerometer for simple "shake" gestures. In addition, the simplicity of the controls means two other things: First, anyone could easily pick up the game and play, as the controls are intuitive enough for a beginner. There's a slight learning curve in adjusting to the motion control, but there's no need to memorize a series of buttons or what does what. Second, your view is never obscured while playing, since the only reason to touch the screen is to navigate the menus.

The land is divided into six islands that you can freely explore. Unlike Pilotwings' flying mode, there are things to do and collect, in the form of floating crystals and achievements. Collecting all of the game's crystals is required to access every area and subsequently finish the game, but like with other platforms, achievements are simply little awards for accomplishing various goals. These range from reaching a certain altitude, discovering little nooks and crannies and so on. These add quite a bit to the game's replay value if you've managed to collect all of the crystals. Even better, after some time on the market, the game was updated to include a second set of crystals once you've completed the main game, in a sorta Zelda "second quest" way.

There's a lot to love about the simplistic charm of Glyder. From the game's music - which yes, is a single song, but the mood of which perfectly suits the game - to the varied locales and otherworldly atmosphere, the list just goes on. Last summer I had an issue with my then-new iPhone 3GS and lost all my game data and scores. For the most part it was a big downer, but I actually was a bit excited that in the face of that, it meant I had a reason to start the game anew and experience it again, which I did.

As of this writing, Glyder is $2.99 in the iTunes Store (US). Several times since it's release it's been on sale for as low as $0.99. Three bucks is certainly a paltry sum for such a lovely experience if you ask me, but if you manage to catch it at 99 cents, it's pretty much a required purchase. Also, for those on-the-fencers, a free version of the game is available as well.

Glyder 2
by Glu

With how much fun I had playing Glyder, I was overjoyed when I first heard mention of a sequel. Released late in 2009 was the aptly-named Glyder 2, which managed to add to and improve to varying degrees everything about the original game. That said, Glyder 2 is, if you boil it down, more of the same. Personally, with how big a fan I became of the original, all I wanted was more of the same with minor tweaks, so this suited me just fine.

The major additions to Glyder 2 are the various outfits and wing styles you can collect on your journey. While the outfits are purely cosmetic, each of the wing sets have their own set of stats, each handling differently. This adds a slight layer of strategy to the adventure, as certain wings are better suited to any given task at hand. Some of the tighter passageways or timed challenges can in fact only be accomplished with specific wings, either based on their speed or handling.

There isn't a great deal else to speak of in regards to changes. The core gameplay remains here, though some of the returning aspects of the gameplay have been improved provides a more fluid experience. There's a greater number of achievements to earn, and a decent amount of little 'side quests', that, like collecting crystals, prove integral to finishing the game, and serve to break up the gameplay a bit from being a pure crystal hunt. Because of all these little things, Glyder 2 manages to be just that much better than the original.

Like Glyder, its sequel is also currently priced at $2.99 (US).

While Glyder 2 is essentially a more polished version of the original, each game presents its own unique locations and challenges, meaning the first game can still hold its own next to its newer cousin. Personally, I'd recommend both if the gameplay interests players enough. Again, there's a free version of Glyder available to get a taste for it. Though of course, if you decide to only pick up one of the games, go for Glyder 2. It's an experience that shouldn't be missed.

Fin
So there's my not-so-brief look at Glyder & Glyder 2. Feel free to share your thoughts below, and if you have a suggestion for an app I should look into, let's hear it!


Links
(Will open in iTunes)

Glyder
Glyder Free
Glyder 2