For the first time, BBC Three will be offering live coverage of the League of Legends World Championships live from Wembley. Beginning on Thursday 15 October, action from all four days of the quarter finals will be available online.
Coverage will be hosted by Radio 1 DJ and avid gamer Dev Griffin. Julia Hardy will be interviewing players and fans in the arena with gaming casters Leigh ‘Deman’ Smith and James ‘Stress’ O’Leary offering their expert commentary.
Great to see esports get mainstream media support, especially when its regarding my personal favourite game. Smith used to cast the official Riot streams and is generally loved by the community, so it seems like BBC knows what it is doing.
Just a short while after the Pixar development team got their hands on the iPad Pro and praised the device’s palm rejection, Disney’s design team spent the day testing Apple’s latest tablet. Disney’s team of designers used the iPad Pro to sketch a variety of different characters from Disney classics, including Olaf from Frozen and Mickey Mouse.
The testing seemingly went well for Disney. “Let’s order a bunch,” product manager Paul Hildebrandt said at the end of a Periscope stream showcasing the device. In a separate Periscope stream, Disney animators Jeff Ranjo and Jeremy Spears used the iPad Pro to draw caricatures of each other.
The Periscope focused on the drawing but I think what sets the iPad Pro apart is that its not just a drawing tablet, with stylus support rivalling dedicated graphics hardware. The beauty of iPad Pro is that it can still do everything else an iPad can do — it’s a computer. I think the iPad Pro would be a pretty good product (cue the it’s just a big iPad jokes) even if it didn’t have any of the drawing or stylus features. For companies like Disney, they can justify buying them solely as creative tools. For others, it’s a multipurpose marvel.
The lack of a holster or magnetic attachment for the Pencil is an annoying omission, though. The new Microsoft Surface got this bit right: the pen snaps onto the side of the tablet. Apple has left a gaping hole in the accessories market for an iPad Pro case with integrated stylus holder.
Understanding why people stop wearing Apple Watches should be critical for Apple. I can say that several things interrupted the bond that was developing between me and my Watch: a lack of Sport Band comfort (remedied by replacing it with a Milanese Loop), buggy/laggy watchOS software, and too few things to actually do with the Watch. Although those were all contributors, %(emphasis-hover)daily recharges and a lack of guaranteed waterproofing% have been bigger issues for me. I would like to wear the Watch when I shower and sleep, but as it is, I don’t feel comfortable doing either of those things.
I do not agree with Horwitz that the Sport band is uncomfortable, I use this band every day. I do want the Watch to be more waterproof. A big part of the Watch is fitness. Most fitness activities include water, whether that be showering or full-on swimming, so having the Watch be guaranteed to sustain these conditions would be fantastic. However, it’s difficult to do this across the board as the tolerances of waterproof products require different priorities in the design process.
Here’s what I think Apple should do. In future Apple Watch revisions, Apple should make even clearer distinctions between the Sport, Watch and Edition collections. As it stands today, they are basically the same product with different casing and default band choices. What I think they should do is give each collection distinguished identities. %(emphasis-hover)Give the Apple Watch Sport truly sporty features (like real waterproofing or using materials that are super-durable)% that would otherwise upset the beauty of the standard ‘Apple Watch’ model. Make the Apple Watch Sport the primary choice for fitness, even if that means sacrificing some of the fashion appeal of this collection. The other models can look the best.
I don’t think the Sport collection should be thought of as the cheap option. Obviously, it is for 2015 but adding such identity-defining features may make it more expensive. That’s fine as long as Apple keeps the $349 price point somehow, may be by making a cheaper Watch collection or adding a new collection entirely to fill that pricing gap.
Amazon.com Inc. is flexing its e-commerce muscles to gain an edge on competitors in the video-streaming market by ending the sale of devices from Google Inc. and Apple Inc. that aren’t easily compatible with Amazon’s video service.
The Seattle-based Web retailer sent an e-mail to its marketplace sellers that it will stop selling Apple TV and Google’s Chromecast. No new listings for the products will be allowed and posting of existing inventory will be removed Oct. 29, Amazon said. Amazon’s streaming service, called Prime Video, doesn’t run easily on its rival’s hardware.
Amazon has monopolistic power over this because set-top boxes aren’t a primary component of Amazon’s sales; it can turn away buyers of Apple TV and Chromecast without materially affecting its overall business sales numbers.
It’s perfectly logical for Amazon to only feature TV products that work with its services. This policy is clear-cut for the current-gen Apple TV — no Prime support, no sales. However, this reasoning does not really apply to the Chromecast. The Chromecast SDK is offered to anyone to implement and arguably is ‘easily compatible’ with Amazon Prime Video if Amazon developed the integration. This nuance doesn’t seem to have been addressed in the announcement email.
It’s also not clear whether this policy applies to the new Apple TV, where Amazon could make an app and get its content on the box. On this front, I suppose we’ll find out in October when the product launches.
Today I faced a long list of alarms on my iPhone, and decided that I wanted to clean them out. The typical iOS “Edit” interface puts a red “delete” button next to each item, and upon tapping it you must then confirm it by tapping the explicit word “delete” at the other end of the item. Suffice to say: for a list of any significant size, this is very tedious.
On a whim, I decided to give Siri a shot at simplifying the process. I long-pressed the home button, and uttered: “delete all my alarms.”
It works and is faster than repeatedly tapping Delete buttons on table view cells. It’s cool Siri does the job but its a bit of a hack. Most users don’t have the cognitive mental model to switch contexts from an app UI to a voice interface for the same task. This batch delete should be available in the visual app interface, probably represented by a Clear All button that only shows in Edit mode.
At a deeper level, the problem is rooted within the Clock app alarms. The app isn’t really built to support tens of alarms. And yet, the ultra-common real world use of the Clock app is to have a gazillion different alarms, most just minutes apart from each other.
There is a fear of missing an alarm — rather than use a Repeat, most people feel more comfortable in adding additional alarms as a safety blanket. The alarms have no semantic meaning in their own right, they don’t really deserve primary treatment and their own item in the list, they are just fallbacks for the first one in the chain. I think everyone knows someone who does this, or does it themselves. This is the underlying issue, how to design an Alarms app that doesn’t induce the repetitiveness. My mind ticks over on this problem every time I spot the symptoms in the wild. I haven’t figured it out and I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.
Sometimes hiding behind a bad photo is a beautiful moment. These moments are elusive. They happen too fast to catch on video. You can’t catch them intentionally. The only possible way to catch them is… accidentally.
You can mock Live Photos for many reasons (it particularly sucks the video part is only 12 fps) but they do have value, sometimes. Most of the time, the accompanying motion will be nonsense, redundant or just uninteresting preshow. But sometimes, it will capture moments that don’t exist in the static image and you’ll love it. It is truly ‘hit and miss’. The downside is you have to leave Live Photos enabled constantly, sacrificing storage space on every snap that’s a miss, to make sure you save those hits when they happen.
While the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus aren’t supposed to start arriving to pre-order customers until this Friday, at least one lucky AT&T customer got a surprise today. A Twitter user by the name of @MoonshineDesign based in San Diego today received her iPhone 6s in the new Rose Gold color variant. According to her tweets, she ordered the device through AT&T.
The user shared a variety of images of the device as she unboxed it and set it up. The device shipped in the same packaging that we’ve seen leaked several times already. In addition to images of the device itself, Geekbench results from the device were shared, as well. In a single-core Geekbench test, the iPhone 6s scored a 2413, beating out the Retina iPad mini, iPad mini 3, and even the iPad Air 2. The multi-core score of the device was 4293. The Geekbench results also confirmed that the device features 2GB of RAM.
For once, it’s nice to find that person who gets their Apple product early and knows how to do benchmarks and take non-blurry photos. Seriously, that Geekbench score is insane. That’s a 33% improvement over an iPad Air 2 on the single-core test and very close to how the 13-inch MacBook Air scores. I can’t wait to see how the iPad Pro does with its A9X internals.
Apple has created specific requirements you must follow for any game that supports game controllers. These requirements are designed to make sure that games are always playable.
Your game must support the Apple TV remote. Your game may not require the use of a controller.
Despite full Game Controller support in the SDK and originally claiming that controller-only games were okay, Apple now says that all Apple TV games must be playable with the Siri Remote.
The policy yields a natural lowest-common denominator scenario where game designers are required to limit their creativity to games with control schemes that are compatible with the Siri Remote. Although the Apple TV technically supports console-style controllers (with dedicated D-Pad and dual analog sticks) the unique advantages of those input methods will never be considered by game developers if this rule goes through.
They’ll have to base the game design around the features offered by the Siri Remote, as that’s the requirement. Any game that can’t be played with a touchpad and some buttons will not be made. Traditional console titles like first-person shooters, which rely on dual analog sticks, are suddenly out of bounds. Moreover, games that are made will only support MFI controllers half-heartedly — it will just be a port of the Siri Remote control scheme.
Apple should definitely stand down here and backtrack. As long as games clearly marked in the App Store that they need additional accessories, I see no reason why Apple shouldn’t let devs make games that need other hardware to function. iPhone apps are allowed to do exactly that … you don’t see any negative complaints about it. On iOS, apps are allowed to be tied to specific hardware given that they are clear about the prerequisite hardware in their App Store listing. The Apple TV should have similar rules.
But the biggest problem is the platform. Apps on iOS sell for unsustainably low prices due to the lack of trials. We cannot port Sketch to the iPad if we have no reasonable expectation of earning back on our investment. Maintaining an application on two different platforms and provide one of them for a 10th of it’s value won’t work, and iPad volumes are low enough to disqualify the “make it up in volume” argument.
I believe Sketch would do well on the iPad. Their success would be driven by their reputation and loyal user base from the Mac, not because the iOS App Store is a platform conducive to professional apps. Pixelmator took their Mac app to iPad and iPhone and now do really well on iOS. Vendors like Microsoft Office and Adobe can comfortably bring their apps to the iPad because they know their user base will carry them. The root problems of the App Store affect new apps made by new developers, not the incumbents.
Sketch may face longer term revenue growth from iOS due to the (lack of) upgrade model but I think a decent 1.0 iPad Sketch app would recoup its investments costs easily, making it a low risk bet.
This post is not about the protracted existence of 16 GB phones. Myself and others have voiced the problems with this many times. It doesn’t need repeating again. The point of this post is something more general I’ve noticed that potentially affects all of Apple’s products going forward. That being said, let’s start with an anecdote about 16 GB phones.
My mum has finally decided she is due for a new phone. Her current 16 GB iPhone 4s is always full, even with iCloud Photo Library optimising photos, the OS is constantly complaining that its out of space. She wants an iPhone 6s Plus, easy decision. She has the money to buy any of the variants but what does she pick? The base 16 GB model.
She knows her current phone is always out of space, she has the money to buy a higher end model, but she doesn’t. I ask her why: ‘64 GB is way more than I need’. The product SKUs are forcing her to make bad decisions. It isn’t just about the base model. If Apple offered more choice, for instance a midway 32 GB model between 16 and 64, she would buy that and be happier.
In the iPhone case, it’s a problem of granularity. Another example is the new iPad Pro. If you want cellular, you have to get the 128 GB model. You have to pay for storage you don’t need just to get the feature that you do want, mobile data. With an example budget of $900, I believe prospective customers wanting a new cellular iPad now face an unwinnable compromise: take a cellular 9.7 inch iPad or take a 32 GB WiFi iPad Pro. Both cases the customer loses. They either get a desirable iPad (forgoing cellular) or resort to buying an iPad model they don’t really want but are essentially forced into picking because Apple doesn’t offer uniform SKUs of the different features.
In the lineup of the Retina MacBook Pro, there are several SKUs with varying hardware specs but only one configuration, the most expensive with the highest margins no doubt, includes a dedicated GPU. A build-to-order option for that GPU is ‘conveniently’ not available.
There are logistics problems obviously by adding more SKUs, like in the iPhone example. A better solution for that case is probably to just remove 16 GB model entirely. What really triggered this post was the newly announced iPad Pro offerings.
Every previous iPad has offered cellular at every size. The lack of cellular on the 32 GB was immediately conspicuous. It just seems like Apple is trying to artificially inflate (upsell) the average selling price of the product by requiring people to pay a lot more for cellular service. The iPad Pro also lacks a 64 GB SKU, a natural fit between the $799 and $949. It’s hard for me to not see this as a quick trick to bump the ASP higher than if they sold a 64 GB model for $899.
Perhaps there are ulterior reasons for this that I simply can’t see. I guess what I’m getting at is I don’t want Apple to purposefully exclude combinations of product features for profit maximisation. It feels icky and exclusionary. In raw shot term profits, this kind of strategic pricing will improve the bottom line but it has to be detrimental to buyer happiness (customer satisfaction).
There are obviously limits to what Apple can and should offer as customisation. I’m not asking for anything crazy — just the normal expected set of options. Crucially, I don’t want product SKUs that should be available not be because of business objectives. Make the products, then price accordingly. Even if you can discount my other examples, the newly announced iPad Pro lineup clearly signifies a decision dominated by business motives. Personally, I don’t want to see this become a trend.
Apple shared today that the upcoming iOS 9 software update for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch will be released to everyone in one week on September 16th. Alongside the official iOS 9 release date, Apple also introduced new price tiers for iCloud storage upgrades.
Currently in the United States, upgrading from the free 5GB iCloud adds 20GB to 1TB depending on the tiers which range from 99¢ to $20:
With the upgraded iCloud storage prices, Apple is offering 50GB of data for 99¢, 200GB for $2.99, and 1TB for $9.99.
What I read from this: Apple realises its devices rely on iCloud more than ever and its current iCloud storage pricing was very high. Unfortunately, the free tier remains the same at 5 GB. This is the tier that the vast majority of users have, so most users will see no change and continue to be unhappy. Thanks Apple.
People don’t want to sign up to subscription plans and I don’t think they should be expected to do so. Even if the base iCloud Storage tier was 1 terabyte for $0.99, most iOS users would not budge and would continue hurting themselves. It isn’t the price that is a barrier, it’s the principle of paying a non-zero amount for something non tangible. Subscription have a stigma attached that they are ‘bad’.
The best way for Apple to improve the quality of service of iCloud would be to raise the amount of storage given to users on the free tier. Whether that be 20 GB, 50 GB or 10 GB per iOS device, I don’t really care. It just needs to go up.
The state of play is not going to change when these new prices come into effect because the free tier is the same. Hence, people will continue to run out of space and continue to be upset.
Reading your Timeline should be a great experience on any iOS device, no matter the screen size or orientation. For this reason, we must consider different devices and their characteristics. So we built our own responsive system, starting with the typographic elements that make a great reading experience, and built from there.
The post sounds quite encouraging when you read it. It’s when you check out the “redesigned” app in the flesh that you just to start to reconsider the meaning of every word. Was it all just satire? I’d love to find a designer at Twitter who can call this a responsive UI with a straight face.
This is basic, basic stuff. Landscape timeline iPad apps are naturally suited to two-column static layouts. You don’t even have to do design work. Just copy the appearance of Twitter.com, an already established first-party client with a two-column layout. To rub more salt in the wound, it’s also responsive. Dragging the page width adds and removes columns. If Twitter was blind to external design themes, at least draw on your own website for inspiration on the native apps.
They are at least a year late to making their app adaptive. The blog post says they have now done so but from a user perspective you can’t really tell. Although the internal coding may be better now, they haven’t improved anything for the customer experience. The app still looks like the iPhone design linearly scaled on every device that isn’t an iPhone.
The best version of Twitter for iPad is still the first version, made by Brichter. It came out about three months into the life of the iPad and took advantage of the weird iPad screen dimensions more than most apps do today. All I can visualise when I look at this pitiful attempt is how good three-column slideable UI’s are. Brichter’s interpretation got so much so right so early on. With such a good base, they had an easier path than most to be a flagship app of the iPad. That’s not what happened. I don’t know if Twitter for iPad will ever be as good as version 1.0 again.
The current Apple TV design, first released in late 2010, has 8GB of internal storage for caching media, and the fourth-generation boxes in testing surprisingly range from 8GB to 16GB of storage. We are told that Apple has considered two pricing strategies: the simultaneous release of a $149 base model with 8GB of storage alongside a $199 16GB model, or the release of the 16GB Apple TV alone at $149. In either case, Apple will offer a $149 Apple TV.
I hate to sound like a broken record but what I am supposed to do when Apple repeats the same stupid decisions. Rather than iPhone, its Apple TV. My vision of a good TV experience does not include weighing up the relative advantages of 8 and 16 GB of storage.
Post-PC is about getting rid of legacy, thereby getting rid of the problems which inherently plague traditional laptops and desktops. iOS devices are in many ways magical, they do just work, but needing to manage storage space is one of those things thats zaps you firmly back into the painful reality of what these devices actually are. Computers. I am so disappointed that Apple is opening this can of worms with the TV too.
Gurman’s post says Apple is considering two strategies, one with storage tiers and one without, so it’s possible Apple makes the right choice when it launches the new box. The fact they are even considering the former option is pretty stupid. There should be no debate about this. The constraints of 16 GB of space is bad enough: it is laughable that an 8 GB option is even under consideration.
The “iPad Pro” (which is actually the planned name of the device) is currently scheduled to hit retail outlets in November, following a pre-order campaign that will launch toward the end of October, sources indicate. While whispers within Apple point to the MacBook-sized tablet making its debut on next week’s stage, it is possible that Apple could still hold back the larger iPad for an early October event given the currently planned November ship date. Following recent announcements of Apple iOS enterprise collaborations with Cisco and IBM, sufficient component availability to meet anticipated year-end demand appears to be the only question mark at this point.
Announcing early in September for a November launch sounds weird the first time you read it, but does make a lot of sense. It gives developers time to adapt to the new features of the iPad Pro such as adoption of pressure-sensitive drawing. At the most basic level, apps will need reworking to take advantage of a larger ~12 inch canvas.
As the iPad Pro is the first in its line, there’s no Osbourne effect at play. Announcing the iPad Pro early is unlikely to affect Apple sales in the interim period. It also gives Apple a window to start promoting the iPad Pro to businesses before they go on general sale. Enterprise purchase have lead times: it’s not like the consumer market where there will be people ready to buy the new iPhone as soon as its available.
I can see why they want to announce now but it comes at a cost. Its another thing they have to talk about in their presentation, something that was already expected to be jam-packed. Gurman says his sources describe at as an “unprecedented blitz of product announcements”. The way I read that, its a kinder way of saying that there will be rushed announcements.
I really wish Apple would spread out their announcements more. They have an entire year to play with but shove eighty percent of their new products into two months of the year. I’m not suggesting they should host an event every month. Even just adding one more regular event to the schedule in say, January, would help relieve the pressures of the fall lineup.
“Our project is the next generation of retail store that we’re rolling out, and that’s the design concept that we have – and we’re really excited because this is going to be one of the first, if it’s approved, that we build,” Millitello told the commission. “So we’re really excited to expand in Germantown and we’re excited to see the result of all the work that we’ve put in to develop this design.”
Other aspects of the design, according to Millitello, include a matte granite reinforced panel on the exterior as well as natural oak tables inside. The store will also feature a changeable display that will include living plants at times, TV displays that change and artwork, among other things.
Funny that these details were spilled in an innocuous planning application to Memphis. Granite walls will be an interesting change.
Worth noting that the Regent Street Apple Store in London is currently undergoing renovation works, so I assume it will also be getting a ‘next-gen’ makeover soon. Maybe Apple will talk about this new initiative at its event next week — we are overdue for an update on Apple Retail.
I asked Doktor Lucifer if it would also be possible to do some sort of spell that could make Apple reveal the products I wanted them to reveal (self-driving car? A real full TV?). “If they already have plans that they’ve been working on for years, a spell can’t change that,” Docktor Lucifer explained. “Real spellcasting works in the realm of reality. It can’t change natural laws. It’s not hocus-pocus.”
But he promised to look into things, and the next morning he sent me a cryptic email: “I see now. I can tell u.”
“???” I replied, being on my phone, and in a hurry.
“Smart Tv,” he replied simply. It’s actually not such a bad prediction. I also asked him to make Eddy Cue dance. We’ll see, but if things work out I’m definitely converting to voodoo. Hail Satan.
Funny, but stupid, piece from Buzzfeed where they ask professional psychics to read into the Apple invite image. By the sounds of his prediction, Doctor Lucifer is Gene Munster in disguise.