Linked List: September 15, 2015

Tuesday, 15 September 2015

Apple TV and On-Demand Resources (Or: Why Games Are Not Limited to 200 MB on Apple TV) 

Serenity Caldwell, writing at iMore:

Based on a screenshot from Apple’s developer guidelines, there are some folks up in arms about the new Apple TV’s 200 MB limit for app bundles (the app you download from the Apple TV’s App Store).

200 MB isn’t a whole lot of storage for game levels, offline content services, or anything really of the sort. The good news is, 200 MB is just the size limit for your initial App Store download. Once you open the app, you can download up to 2 GB more per app, with up to 20 GB of other resources available in the cloud. Apple lets developers do this by using On-Demand Resources, and here’s how it works.

Great explanation.

Everything but the Web 

Daniel Jalkut:

As Pasco acknowledges, we don’t know Apple’s real motivation for omitting web views from Apple TV. There may be technical challenges or performance shortcomings that contributed to the decision. But let’s assume for the sake of reasoning that it is purely political, that they want to discourage “web wrappers” and to promote a more native look and feel in TV apps. I propose that Apple could strike a compromise that would serve those ambitions while also supporting the tasteful handling of web content in apps. How? By forbidding network access to web content. Apps themselves could still access the network, but not from within their web views.

I don’t think that’s going to happen. Either WebKit isn’t there in tvOS 1.0 because (a) Apple doesn’t think it belongs on this platform, or (b) it just isn’t ready yet.

I think the answer is (a), and we’ll never see web content rendered on this platform. If the answer is (b), I think we’ll see a “full” WebKit eventually. I don’t think we’ll ever see Safari for Apple TV, but I could imagine WebKit for the “views and controls that are really just HTML/CSS” type stuff.

Apple TV: A World Without Webviews 

Daniel Pasco:

Webkit is the framework that Apple uses to allow developers to include webviews in their apps. UIWebview, a UIKit class, provides a simple way to do so. Both of these are missing from tvOS.

Even though the classes exist to fetch a page from a remote site, nothing else is really there — the content has to be parsed, the DOM has to be built, the actual HTML has to be rendered and styled, and any embedded Javascript has to be run. There’s no mechanism for doing any of these things or presenting the Web page to the users. […]

No matter what the motivation, there’s going to be a lot of work for people to do, particularly for companies that lean heavily on embedded Web content for their apps. Obviously this is going to be great for users, in terms of a consistent experience.

But the industry is going to be very, very busy for a while making the changes needed to support this new platform.

Apple Pencil vs. Wacom Cintiq 

Former Apple designer Linda Dong:

Quite plainly, the Cintiq sucks in comparison. And I’ve been using them for years for industrial design sketching, UI, and art. Let’s compare the experience.

Tim Cook Visits the Fifth Avenue Apple Store 

Nice piece by John Paczkowski for Buzzfeed:

Tim Cook is twisted sideways in the deep passenger-side backseat of a black Cadillac Escalade, rolling through Manhattan from the Flatiron district up to the company’s flagship Fifth Avenue Apple Store — where a great glass cube sits atop Apple’s subterranean retail center. Nobody at the store knows he’s coming. Not the manager. Not security. There’s no timetable for him to appear. And so for the 20 minutes or so it takes the car to wind through the late afternoon Manhattan traffic, I have him largely to myself.

Cook likes the secrecy. He does these store drop-ins periodically and has found that surprise visits are far better for everyone involved, himself included. The CEO of Apple visiting one of Apple’s many retail stores is de facto a big deal, particularly for store employees who’d likely agonize over preparations if they knew he was coming. So Cook keeps it quiet. “I almost always go in unannounced,” he says. “It’s rare that I tell anyone that I’m going. But I do try to go to stores every time I’m traveling to a new city. It’s important.”

Interesting, but not surprising, that Cook just pops in unannounced.

Cook will appear on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert tonight.

GameStop Stops Selling Digital Game Bundles for Xbox One and PlayStation 4 

Sam Mattera, writing for The Motley Fool:

The video game specialty retailer will no longer carry console bundles that offer digital copies of games. Buyers may still get their games, but only in the form of physical discs.

Since the Xbox One and PlayStation debuted nearly two years ago, Microsoft and Sony have periodically offered free games to entice console buyers. Most of these games have come in the form of digital download codes rather than discs. GameStop has sold many of these bundles, but will no longer do so going forward.

The desperation of a business based on obsolete technology. GameStop is where Blockbuster and mass-market record stores were a decade ago.

Status Board 2 

Saw this in action at Panic HQ over the weekend, while in Portland for XOXO (which was amazing, once again). Just beautiful.

Gee, I wonder if they’ll do a version for Apple TV.

‘Stop Pushing the Web Forward’ 

Peter-Paul Koch, back on July 28 (this one has been sitting in my to-link-to queue for a while):

I don’t think this is a particularly good place to push the web forward to. Native apps will always be much better at native than a browser. Instead, we should focus on the web’s strengths: simplicity, URLs and reach.

The innovation machine is running at full speed in the wrong direction. We need a break. We need an opportunity to learn to the features we already have responsibly — without tools! Also, we need the time for a fundamental conversation about where we want to push the web forward to. A year-long moratorium on new features would buy us that time.

I agree with Koch’s argument here, strongly, but I don’t think the solution is a one-year moratorium on new browser features. The solution is for the entire browser/web development community to get it through their heads that the web will never out-native actual native apps. The reason the web “won” in the late ’90s — where by “won” I mean became the dominant platform for software development — wasn’t because web apps were native-like. Quite the opposite: the web became dominant despite the fact that the apps were rather crude from a UI perspective.

“Simplicity, URLs, and reach” — those are exactly the things the web community should focus on. Native apps can’t out-web the web, and web apps should embrace that.

As a side note, I think this is more or less what is happening, whether the web community likes it or not, because this largely seems to describe Safari/WebKit’s approach to moving forward — and Safari, because of iOS in particular — effectively gives Apple veto power over new web technologies. Apple can’t stop Google from adding new features to Chrome/Blink, but Apple can keep any such features from being something web developers can rely upon as being widely available. That implicit veto power is what drove this summer’s “Safari is the New IE” drama.

Marco Arment’s Podcasting Microphones Mega-Review 

Marco Arment:

It’s hard to find useful microphone recommendations for podcasters: most people have only tried one or two, except pro audio engineers, who have very different needs and record in very different environments. And almost no reviews include audio samples to compare.

So I set out to change that. Some commonly recommended mics were disappointing, some were right on, and I’ve found some real gems that were previously unknown in my podcasting circles.

I bought his top-rated microphone, the Shure Beta 87A, a few weeks ago, and I’ve been very happy with the results.