Category: app store

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iPhone: sweet solution, evolution and disruption

When the iPhone was announced in 2007 Steve Jobs introduced it by saying that Apple was introducing three revolutionary products:

  1. Widescreen iPod with touch controls
  2. Revolutionary mobile phone
  3. Breakthrough internet communications device

At the time this seemed to cover the main functions that people would find useful on mobile phones, applications or “apps” were not yet a thing that most people cared about as most mobile phones of the preceding era had pretty clunky interfaces and getting hold of apps was controlled pretty firmly by the mobile networks.

The iPhone didn’t initially support a way for developers to make native apps, instead offering only the “sweet solution”1 of web apps in Safari. Before too long a native SDK was released in 2008, the App Store opened for business in July of that year and allowed developers to release native apps, and the beginnings of the initial app boom era started.

So those “three revolutionary products” were joined by a fourth one: a “handheld game console“. In December 2008 Apple announced the top 10 paid apps in the App Store, of those 10 the top 7 of them were games:

  1. Koi Pond2
  2. Texas Hold’em
  3. Moto Chaser
  4. Crash Bandicoot: Nitro Kart 3d
  5. Super Monkey Ball
  6. Cro-Mag Rally
  7. Enigmo
  8. Pocket Guitar
  9. Recorder
  10. iBeer
This image shows app icons from these 10 iPhone apps: Koi Pond, Texas Hold’em, Moto Chaser, Crash Bandicoot: Nitro Kart 3d, Super Monkey Ball, Cro-Mag Rally, Enigmo, Pocket Guitar, Recorder, iBeer.
These are a blast from the past!

One notable thing about the first iPhone that may seem odd now was that the camera was only a stills camera, no video support, no flash, no exposure compensation; not only that but the camera used a tiny 2 megapixel sensor. Prior to the iPhone release phones such as the 2006 Nokia N95 came with a 5MP camera, supported video and had a flash. So this aspect of the iPhone was really only providing the bare-bones, minimal requirements for taking photos. You definitely couldn’t add “Digital SLR quality camera” to that initial trifecta of devices that Steve introduced the iPhone with.

Fast-forward to 2024, the iPhone cameras have improved amazingly, the front-facing “selfie” camera alone on the iPhone 16 (first added with the iPhone 4) now takes 12MP photos and can shoot 4K video. Depending on which version of the phone you get two or three main cameras, with the iPhone 16 Pro sporting 48MP sensors with regular, ultra-wide and telephoto lenses. The iPhone is now one of the most popular cameras in the world, not just “phone cameras” but cameras in general. The iPhone, along with other smartphones, disrupted the camera industry3, even with the much poorer quality cameras in the earlier phones.

Whilst the camera(s) on the iPhone have been incrementally improving, year-over-year with each new model, this year sees an interesting new addition to both the regular and pro versions of the phone; the new “Camera Control” button. The Camera Control button is found on the side of the phone and is specifically for controlling the camera functions and provides a way to quickly access camera tools like exposure, depth of field and zoom4. The button is both a physical button and touch-sensitive control so you can press and slide sideways to navigate, adjust and select settings.

Apple has been touting their new “Apple Intelligence” AI-based features along with the release of these new phones, but I think the Camera Control is the most interesting feature on these new iPhones5. The camera has been an important feature of the iPhone for some time now and has become many people’s only camera that they use for taking photos and shooting video (even being used for making actual movies). But the addition of the Camera Control seems significant to me, in that Apple increasingly views part of its core functionality to be an actual camera, not just a phone with a camera on it.

So it seems that alongside the earlier addition of “handheld game console” to the initial three products that comprised the first iPhone we can now definitely add “High resolution mirrorless camera” to that list of “products” that makes up the iPhone.

Steve Jobs had a clear idea of the three core products that the iPhone was going to disrupt when he introduced the original iPhone, but I think the introductory slide would be something more like this had he envisaged gaming and photography becoming such a core function of the device6:

This image shows Steve Jobs on stage introducing the original iPhone with a slide saying "iPod", "Phone", "Internet" and the additions of "Gaming" and "Camera".
  1. MacStories wrote a good article looking back at the “sweet solution” back in 2018. ↩︎
  2. Ok, some might nit-pick that Koi Pond isn’t a game, but it’s definitely not a productivity app :) ↩︎
  3. Estimated to be an 87% drop in digital camera sales since 2010! ↩︎
  4. At the time of writing Apple has said additional functionality is coming in a future software update: “Camera Control will introduce a two-stage shutter that lets you automatically lock focus and exposure with a light press“. ↩︎
  5. Also, Apple Intelligence technically isn’t out at the time of writing, only with iOS 18.1 and subsequent point updates will it incrementally become available. ↩︎
  6. Is a “phone” still a core part of a smartphone device now? Arguably “internet communication” has replaced much of the traditional phone usage now. ↩︎
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How to fix – “LSLaunchProhibited Info.plist key is unsupported on Mac”

I don’t do a lot of iOS development but I do have a sticker pack and an app in the app store. I recently got an email from Apple developer support with the following message about my sticker pack:

Compatible iOS and iPadOS apps will automatically appear on the Mac App Store when the first Apple silicon Macs become available this year. However, we noticed the following issues with one or more of your apps that are opted in to appear.

The following apps will not be made available on Mac until a new version addressing these issues is submitted.

These apps contain the LSLaunchProhibited Info.plist key, which is unsupported on Mac:

I wasn’t quite sure what that meant and the email didn’t really give any indication as to how to fix it. A quick google search only came up with one single result, a forum post on Apple developer forums by someone trying to find an answer to the same question! :)

After having a quick look around in Xcode I *think* I’ve found the answer to the issue. Basically with the new Apple silicon Macs that have been announced it will be possible to run iOS apps on Mac and by default all iOS apps will be included in the Mac App Store. It is possible to specifically opt-out of having your app in the store but by default it will be included, so in this case the message relates to the fact that my sticker pack isn’t currently set to be available on Mac, only iPhone and iPad.

To resolve this you need to go to the sticker pack extension file of your Xcode project, under the “General” tab there should be a “Deployment Info” section. In there you can set whether it will work on iPhone and iPad, and if you’re running the latest version of Xcode there should also be a “Mac” checkbox. Checking that box will make the sticker pack available for Mac. Once that is done and a new build submitted to the app store this should then resolve this issue.

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Skate City – Apple Arcade

I seem to be one of the lucky ones who got access to Apple Arcade (Apple’s new subscription gaming service) a few days early (although I’m guessing that everyone on the developer betas got access??).

I’m enjoying the new Skate City game which is made by Snowman who previously made the great Alto’s Adventure and Alto’s Odyssey games. Apple Arcade opens to all on September 19th so go check it out.

A wee bit of gameplay! :)

Check out more about Skate City on the Instagram page: @skatecitygame

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Touchgrind (A short history of skateboarding games)

Anyone who is into skateboarding and owns a games console has no doubt played at least one of the many games in the Tony Hawk Pro Skater series. This game defined the genre for several years and had no equal. In recent years EA’s Skate presented the first game to seriously challenge its place at the top. One of the things that set Skate apart from the Tony Hawk games was that there was a learning curve more closely resembling the real skate experience. Skate was also helped by the capabilities of next generation consoles like the Playstation 3 and the XBox 360 which offered amazing graphics.

In the area of hand-held consoles however, the Tony Hawk franchise offered the only skateboarding games for Sony’s PSP and Nintendo’s DS. Skate was never released for either of these hand-held devices perhaps largely due to the selling point of their high-end graphics. The sequel, Skate 2, will also only be available for the PS3 and XBox 360.

Nintendo’s DS and Wii consoles represented a new approach to gaming. Instead of focusing on photo-realistic graphics like the PS3 and XBox 360 these consoles used a combination of unusual interfaces and input devices to create a unique and new gaming experience. The release of these consoles brought a slew of games making use of the DS’s two screen / stylus input and the Wii’s highly-physical Wiimote / accelerometer based controls. A follow-up title ‘Skate It’ brings the gameplay of Skate to these consoles, although it’s not so much a sequel to Skate but more of a game in its own right. ‘Skate It’ for the DS and Wii makes use of the unique controls of these consoles to offer something even more akin to the real skating. The Wii in particular offers something new with gameplay being controlled with the Wiimote, nunchuk and also the Wii Balance Board enabling game control with hands and feet.

In regards to hand-held consoles the DS is the only platform offering the mixture of unusual interface / input and the unique game play of the Skate It games, although the Tony Hawk franchise is currently regrouping and planning a new wave of games to make use of these types of unique interface so presumably this will include the DS.

However there is also one other unique gaming platform on the scene, one which has kind of slowly crept in under the radar without, intially at least, any kind of fanfare or hyped launch as a gaming platform:

Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch: a gaming platform

The iPhone and iPod touch platform offers an awesome touch screen interface allowing input such as an onscreen keyboard and finger gestures for scrolling and resizing. Since the launch of Apple’s App Store third party developers have been launching games by the thousands making the iPhone platform a hugely popular and financially successful platform for many game developers both small and large.

As I said before Apple really seemed to kind of just sneak in with the iPhone as a gaming platform, although many saw the potential of the iPhone as a platform for mobile applications I don’t think many realised just how capable the platform was especially in the area of graphics performance on such a small device.

Interestingly this isn’t the first time Apple has considered developing a gaming platform, the Pippin console had limited release back in the 90’s but was eventually shelved. Since then many people, including myself, have pondered as to whether Apple, like Microsoft, might make a new attempt to enter the gaming market.

The iPhone and iPod touch are the proof that Apple have indeed entered the gaming market, but like they have done before it is on Apple’s own terms by creating a unique platform unlike anything else on the market.

iPhone + skateboarding = Touchgrind

Ok, we’re up to date with the history lesson. As you might expect such a powerful hand-held gaming platform as the iPhone / iPod touch has some great games available for it, Super Monkey Ball, Crash Cart Bandicoot, Cro-Mag Rally to name a few. But, what about skateboarding games?

There have actually been two skateboarding games to date, the first to launch was called iSkate (iTunes Store Link) but wasn’t really much more than a proof of concept, it lacked any real game play and was poorly received (especially as people paid for it).

Touchgrind (iTunes Store link) by illusionlabs however is a different story. Built on the same basic principle of iSkate, the idea is that you see the skateboard from a top-down view and you control the board with two fingers. A combination of finger gestures allows you to flip the board in various ways. It’s a bit like playing with a virtual fingerboard, and if you’ve ever messed around with one of those you’ll know it’s hard to do tricks with your fingers!

The interface for Touchgrind is nice, you spin a skateboard wheel and choose from one of six sections on the wheel: Options, About, How To, Warm Up, Jam Session and Competition. Options lets you switch off sound effects and About gives you a link to the developer’s website. The next option gets you into the nitty gritty, How To is the first thing you need to check out when you first try out Touchgrind as it explains the concepts of how to maneuver the board and do tricks.

Warning: Learning curve ahead

I have to admit that when I first tried it I found it pretty hard, like the Skate and Skate It games I mentioned before there’s actually a fair bit of a learning curve in getting the techniques down. At first it was a bit frustrating and I ended up coming back to it a few times before it really clicked with me. That element of frustration is actually quite cool though as it’s a pretty realistic skateboarding learning curve, it’s not uncommon to experience frustration learning tricks for real!

After working your way through the How To section and you’ve managed to get to grips with the basic controls then the next section to check out is the Warm Up. This section lets you just go and cruise around, there’s a few ramps and a rail that you can try and grind. There’s not that much to skate but the point is just to get familiar with skating around, trying out the various tricks on some real obstacles as well as in the large amount of empty space around the obstacles.

It soon becomes apparent that with the top-down view that Touchgrind uses it’s quite hard to see where you’re going. Because of this there are icons that indicate what type of obstacles you are near and which direction they are in. This at least gives you some indication of what’s near you and allows you to steer in the right direction. However, it’s still a little tricky knowing exactly when you’re going to be near enough to an obstacle to jump on to it.

To help you know how near you are to obstacles there is also the ability to zoom out by clicking on the magnifying glass in the lower-right hand corner. The view then zooms out and you can see a larger area of the park, not the entire park but a larger section so you can get a better idea of what you’re trying to skate towards.

You can drag around with your finger to see all available obstacles (or in the case of the Warm Up park lots of empty space!). This certainly helps when you’re trying to line up for an obstacle, and is especially useful when trying to gauge how far away from an obstacle you are.

Warmed up? Let’s jam…

After the Warm Up section you can then move onto the Jam Session where you get to use the full skatepark with a lot more obstacles. The main object of the Jam Session is to see how high a score you can get with a single trick or combination of tricks on an obstacle, there’s no time limit so you can just skate around for as long as you want trying to get that flip-to-grind flip-out combo down perfectly!

Competition is the final section and this gives you a 100 second time limit in which to skate around and build up as many points as possible. As you get higher scores new boards are unlocked which can be selected when starting the Competition or Warm Up sections. I’ve managed to get to over 400,000 points so far but still have a way to go to get over 1,500,000 points to get the highest board! I’ll need to practice a bit more :)

Finishing off… Last run…

So, that’s my quick-ish overview of how Touchgrind works, the best thing to do though is go ahead and buy Touchgrind yourself and check it out. It’s only £2.99 from the App store but the quality of the gameplay in Touchgrind, like many of the apps in the app store, is worth more than its price tag. The developers of the game, Illusion Labs are keen to get feedback from users so try it out and tell them how you think it could be improved. I’m sure some kind of multi-player mode is likely to be added in future, playing over wifi could be an interesting experience although I’m not quite sure how that will work due to the challenges already present with the top-down UI that Touchgrind uses.

I think Touchgrind is a great example of how powerful a platform the iPhone / iPod touch is, the touch screen interface offers a completely new control interface for a skateboarding game. As yet Touchgrind doesn’t make use of the accelerometer in the iPhone / iPod touch, perhaps this could be made use of in a future version? Or perhaps in some other skateboarding game?

I’ve included a few more screenshots from the game just to give a bit more of a taste of how it looks, go ahead and check it out.


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An idea for improving iPhone App management in iTunes

The iPhone App Store is a huge success with thousands of applications available. However, it doesn’t take long after downloading a whole load of apps before you’ve got pages and pages of apps on your iPhone. With just two, three or maybe even four pages of apps it’s not too difficult to remember where specific applications are but beyond that it gets harder.

One solution to helping find the apps installed is to create pages with specific types of apps on each page, perhaps Social networking apps on one page, games on another and so on. However, you can soon end up with a lot of pages using this method. Currently on my iPhone I have about seven pages of apps and it’s getting increasingly difficult and time consuming to manage this as I add more applications.

Screenshot of my iPhone screen layouts
The current app screens on my iPhone

The problem is that you can only move applications around one at a time so trying to move apps from one page to another is a pretty slow and laborious process. It’s made worse because there is no way to adjust the order of the pages of apps or to insert a new page, so if you wanted to insert a whole new page in between your second and third pages the only way to do it is move all of the apps from the last page onto a new page. You can then move all the apps from the the third page etc one page forward, not a simple or quick process! Obviously this method of management is pretty useless with an increasing amount of apps.

Tuning up iTunes App management

So, what can be done to fix this? Well, I’m sure something could be done to make app management on the iPhone itself better but the solution I’ve got in mind is to improve the Applications management inside the desktop iTunes application.

When your iPhone is mounted you can currently configure which Apps are synced across to your device, What’s needed is an additional panel within this section that shows the layout of all the pages of apps on the iPhone. This panel would allow you to easily drag and drop applications between pages using your mouse or trackpad, you would also be able to re-order the pages and insert new pages in between the existing pages. It would also allow you to delete pages including all of the apps on them, unless of course it contains any of the core apps that cannot be deleted. In that circumstance a warning message would appear indicating that fact but the page would be left alone.

Mockup of iTunes app management screen
Mockup of iTunes app management screen

It seems like a simple and user friendly way to manage all your apps. If you think of how you manage music in iTunes, you can create playlists and drag and drop files in and out of them. This method of management would give that same kind of control for applications.

So, how long until we see this method of app management in iTunes? ;)

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iPod Touch 2.2 firmware update breaks BBC iPlayer (Fixed!)

The recent 2.2 firmware update for iPhone and iPod Touch brought some great new features but also an annoying glitch, it breaks the ability to play content on the BBC’s iPod / iPhone version of the iPlayer site!!!

If you try to playback something on the iPlayer site you get a message saying "Sorry, programmes can only be accessed over a wifi connection". For some reason the BBC site thinks that I’m accessing it via a 3G connection, which isn’t allowed for the iPlayer site!

As it turns out this problem only affects iPod Touch users and not iPhone users, and the problem seems to be down to the detection script that the iPlayer site uses so it will require the BBC to make a fix to their code to resolve the issue, so hopefully it won’t take them long!

UPDATE
The problem has been fixed! Access to the iPlayer on the iPod Touch has been restored :)

New features in the iPod Touch / iPhone update

Update All in App Store iPhone firmware 2.2The update did bring some cool new features though, you can now download podcasts directly within the iTunes store application and there’s also an ‘Update All’ button in the App Store application, very useful when you’ve got a bunch of apps with updates. Safari has also had a revamp to its interface which makes better use of space by placing the search and address bars on the same line, each one expands to fill the whole line when you click into it. However, not all features are available on the iPod Touch.

No Street View in Maps for iPod Touch users

Typo in the iTunes Podcast section in iPhone Firmware 2.2One new feature that I was looking forward to checking out was Street View in the Google Maps application, but alas it turns out this is only available in the iPhone update and not the iPod Touch update. I’m not sure if this is intentional, perhaps due to the accounting differences between the iPod Touch and iPhone.

Usually when there are features added that require an additional fee for the upgrade it’s for completely new apps, not just for upgrades. Applying the same logic you’d expect to pay for the ability to download podcasts too. So I’m left wondering why Street View is missing in the iPod Touch update, maybe it’s just a mistake? There were a few other issues that got in there, such as a typo in the iTunes app Podcast section and a photo-resizing bug.

~Rick

Update:

Users with jailbroken iPod Touches have been able to turn on Street View on the iPod Touch, so I’m wondering more if this was an accidental omission in the 2.2 update.