iPad By Davis: “Review — The Silent Age: Episode One for iPad” plus 8 more

Review — The Silent Age: Episode One for iPad
Game of Thrones season 3 starts tonight, watch previous seasons, read the books, and more now!
No iMore show tonight, check back tomorrow!
Facebook's new home on Android
The importance of minimum viable products and user focus
Weekend iPad Wallpaper: Birth of a Star
YouTube to shut down, announce winner on April Fool's Day
Celebrate Easter and springtime with your kids with Pat the Bunny for iPhone and iPad
Cool Things: iPad Insight on a Surface Tablet

Review — The Silent Age: Episode One for iPad

Posted: 31 Mar 2013 07:08 PM PDT

Most modern games can no longer afford to think one-dimensionly. It's not enough to have a princess trapped in a castle with a giant lizard king; nowadays it's about creating something complex, meaningful and different. That's why indie games like Braid, Limbo and even Amnesia: The Dark Descent (as horror-inducing as that game is) have been growing in popularity, because they challenge how we think and how we play.

The Silent Age: Episode One is one of these games.

The Silent Age is the first game from Denmark-based indie gaming company House On Fire. It's an episodic series that's being funded directly by user donations, and so far only the first episode has been released.

The first episode introduces the main character, Joe, a literal Joe Average who served in the Vietnam War and now works as a janitor in a secret government building during 1972. When...

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Game of Thrones Season 1 & 2

The HBO production of Games of Thrones is simply gorgeous, especially on an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad Retina display, or in 1080p on the Apple TV. The full first and second season is available on iTunes and includes not only the 10 episodes each, but a bunch of special features as well.

$38.99 - Season 1 - Buy now
$38.99 - Season 2 - Buy now

Game of Thrones apps

The free A Song of Fire and Ice companion app includes 8 characters from the first book of the series, A Game of Thrones, and maps for the north and south. You can buy information packs via in-app purchase for $0.99 a pop, or $4.99 for the entire series to date. You can also set a "spoiler" level, so if you haven't read all the books, you can lock out characters and events you haven't gotten to get.

Free - Download now

A Song of Fire and Ice books and audio books

The entire A Song of Fire and Ice series so far, including A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, A Feast for Crows, and A Dance with Dragons are widely available as both eBooks and Audio books for you to load up and enjoy on your iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.

Variable - iBooks - Buy now
Variable - Amazon - Buy now

Lastly, if you've watched it, jump into our Movies & TV Forum and give us your Games of Thrones season 3 thoughts. Who slept with whom, who killed whom, who spied on, betrayed, and avenged, whom? Get in there and share!

No iMore show tonight, check back tomorrow!

Posted: 31 Mar 2013 04:46 PM PDT

No iMore show tonight because I just got back from GDC, and it's easter, and we couldn't get it together. So we'll be recording tomorrow sometime. I'll let you know precisely when as soon as we figure out precisely when.

Sorry for the delay, but we'll make it up to you!

Previous episodes

Facebook's new home on Android

Posted: 31 Mar 2013 04:30 PM PDT

Next Thursday our own Phil Nickinson will be heading over to Facebook's third event of 2013, and their first that promises to be focused on mobile. Perhaps even disruptive to mobile. Phil has questions about the Facebook Android event, important ones, and rightly so. I have no answers, but I do have this:

Come See Our New Home on Android

Facebook is one of the few companies not already in the mobile platform game that's talented and wealthy enough to do something really interesting. Apple, Microsoft, BlackBerry, Google, even Amazon have all already taken their shots. Each has tackled it according to their own unique corporate cultures and business needs. We've seen bits and pieces from Facebook before, from their mobile apps to their messengers to their social cameras. But what would really express their corporate culture and service their business needs?

Facebook has hired tremendous mobile talent over the last few years. Eric Tseng, who helped run Android at Google, and Mike Matas who helped create the modern era of textured design at Delicious Monster, are but two of the most prominent. Mark Zuckerberg has reportedly taken prominent iOS designers and developers for "Steve Jobs walks", and claimed Facebook was now the best place for them to dent the mobile universe.

What's all that talent been up to for the last couple years? Not making new iterations of the News Feed, and certainly not knocking out Poke apps, that's for sure. Yet Zuckerberg has also said, resolutely and on several occasions, that Facebook's mobile future doesn't lie in their own mobile hardware.

Given that Facebook so prominently name-dropped the mobile operating system of their biggest competitor, in arguably their biggest announcement of the year, might just indicate that Zuckerberg should be taken at his word. Perhaps the entire invitation should be.

Android has a concept of home screens, like iOS, but much more expansive and customizable than iOS. They can be skinned and they can be replaced. For good or for ill, Samsung with TouchWiz, HTC with Sense, and other device manufacturers often completely remake Android's stock interface with their own layers. It's not as extensive as Amazon's Kindle Fire fork, where Android is treated as little more than an embedded OS, but its enough to differentiate and provide some level of ownership.

Unlike Amazon, who wants to be in the hardware game and own their own content distribution platform -- who wants a shiny, proprietary box that will act as a dedicated front-end to the Amazon store -- Facebook wants to be ubiquitous across all platforms. Facebook currently enjoys system level integration in iOS, which is probably as deep as they'll be allowed to go. They'll never take over the experience there, or on Windows Phone or BlackBerry.

Android, however, could let Facebook own the system experience without having to own the system. Home could let Facebook provide deeper integration without turning partners into competitors. HTC could let Facebook show off an inspirational device other manufacturers and end users can immediately see and touch, while also letting them offer the same experience to other manufacturers and users down the road. Facebook for your contacts. Facebook for your photos. Facebook for your messaging. Facebook for your everything Facebook does, and Android for your everything they don't care to do, at least yet. And you feeding back all your identity, information, and transactions -- the data Facebook thrives on -- in exchange. They get to do to Google what Google does to others, they get to disintermediate Google using Google's own platform.

That's my best guess for what we'll see on Thursday -- a brilliantly engineered, gorgeously designed way to inject Facebook into the Android experience and remake it in the social giants image. If so, it's a strategy that gives Facebook a lot of benefit for very little risk, and disproportionate ownership compared to investment. Just as they overwhelmed browsers and walled the web to build their desktop platform, Facebook could be getting ready to face-hugger Android phones and remake them, Facebook-formed.

We'll find out for sure in less than a week.

The importance of minimum viable products and user focus

Posted: 31 Mar 2013 03:08 PM PDT

The importance of minimum viable products and user focus

Michael Jurewitz, former developer tools evangelist at Apple, has been blogging up a storm this week, with two great pieces on two important subjects for developers. First is the idea of minimal viable products, or how much you need to build in order to be able to start selling your current work, and supporting your future work. Jury says:

You need to get your product out the door and into your user's hands. The very act of someone touching and using your product will inherently change what you think you know about it and how you envision people using it. You will change your mind, you will change your plans, and things you used to think were important will melt away and be replaced by other needs and priorities. Having real users is a formative event for a product and one you shouldn't artificially delay.

The second, not unrelated topic is user focus, or understanding how your product will provide a delightful user experience before you type character one on code. Jury again:

Focus on the user. Focus on their life, their problems, and how you are helping them. Put down that database, put down that web server, put down that Core Data model and think. No, this step doesn't involve code. Yes, for many of you this will feel foreign and scary, but focusing on the user is liberating. It frees you from your technical shackles and puts the world in real perspective. Your focus becomes the things that matter, the things that change people's lives. Technology is a hindrance when it doesn't get out of the way. Technology is a hindrance when it becomes the point, as opposed to the human experiences we are trying to improve.

Back in a past life, when I was working in product marketing, I used to think of roadmaps like season arcs of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I'd seen how Joss Whedon would graph out major character moments and beats on a white board, and I wanted that same sense of story, of major plot points, and of epic final releases that he brought to television.

In entertainment, you have to grab the audience. In software, you have to grab the user. Each major point release has to have something interesting in it, and it all has to build to the next major version number.

You can't and shouldn't blow the whole story in the first episode, and you can't and shouldn't blow all your features in a 1.0 release. You should create interest and get the job done, absolutely, but you should also leave people wanting more. And you should know how your next act, your 2.0 is going to premiere, and build towards it. (That's also how you attract and maintain press attention for your products, of course, because we're simply an extension of audience.)

Go read Jury's articles, then go make some more great stuff.

Sources: Jury, Jury

Weekend iPad Wallpaper: Birth of a Star

Posted: 31 Mar 2013 09:02 AM PDT

This weekend's iPad wallpaper pick is Birth of a Star, shown above. I'm not usually a big fan of reddish or orange iPad wallpapers, but this one is so striking that it's won me over.

I found it in the excellent iWalls – wallpapers for iPad app, it's featured in the Newest section this week.

And of course it looks great on the iPad home screen:

Hope you're all having a great long weekend.

The good

14 interactive scenes for kids to explore
An Easter egg hunt in every scene
A magical paint mode transforms every page into a colorable activity
Immersive music and playful sound effects
Optimized for Retina Display and iPhone 5
Watch and listen as words are highlighted while the text is read aloud, turn off the narration and read at your own pace, or record your own voice to play on each page
Support for iPhone 5

The bad

No complaints

The bottom line

Pat the Bunny is a really cute kids book. Since it's interactive, Pat the Bunny is a fun app to use with your child and discover the scenes together. The Easter eggs hunts are particularly fun with little ones because they light up and get excited every time they find an egg -- my 2-year-old daughter does, anyway!

Happy Easter!

$2.99 - Download now

Cool Things: iPad Insight on a Surface Tablet

Posted: 31 Mar 2013 08:02 AM PDT

Sleeping with the enemy. iPad Insight on Internet Explorer on a Surface RT tablet in a Microsoft store.

Yesterday I visited a Microsoft for the first time, and spent a lot of time playing around with the Surface Pro and Surface RT tablets. Once I'd had my fill of trying them out I couldn't resist firing up iPad Insight in the IE browser. I would have done this sooner, but I never knew we had a Microsoft store in Austin.

I was really considering buying a Surface to really get to know it, and I still am – but with perhaps even greater reservations than I had before spending some time with them. The Surface Pro is just way too much like a laptop or ultrabook for my liking. It really just doesn't feel much like a tablet at all. Two of the Microsoft product advisors even agreed with me on that sentiment.

So I spent more of my time with the Surface RT. I explored switching...

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iPad by Davis

lunes, 1 de abril de 2013