Linked List: May 17, 2019

Friday, 17 May 2019

GB Studio 

GB Studio is “A free and easy to use retro adventure game creator for your favourite handheld video game system”, by which they mean, but don’t want to name specifically, Nintendo’s Game Boy:

Simple visual scripting means you don’t need to have made a game already. GB Studio also hides much of the complexity in building GB games so you can concentrate on telling a great story.

What a fun idea from developer Chris Maltby. You can output ROMs for emulators, play them on actual Game Boy hardware with a flash cartridge, or even export them for the web (which will even work on phones). It’s a remarkably polished IDE.

There’s something about 1-bit (and few-bit) displays that makes me so nostalgic — the original Mac, Game Boy, Newton, PalmPilot, iPod. Those devices all inspired such deep affection. In our current world of ever-cheaper, ever-better color displays, I’d love to see 1-bit displays make a comeback somehow. That doesn’t make any sense, but nostalgia isn’t about sense. “A pain in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone”; “it takes us to a place where we ache to go again” and all.

The Pivot 

Excellent piece from Horace Dediu:

Moving as it does between computers, devices, software, services, retail, logistics and manufacturing means that it’s not classifiable as an “x” company where “x” is an industry sector. Rather, the company should be classified by the set of problems it seeks to solve (e.g. communications, community, productivity, creativity, wellbeing).

This disconnect between what people think Apple sells and what Apple builds is as perplexing as the cognitive disconnect between what companies sell and what customers buy.

This is why so many people, particularly investment analysts, have always missed the point about Apple. They saw Apple as a computer company outside the Wintel world in a Wintel-dominated industry. Now they see Apple as a phone maker in a world where the market is saturated and people are holding onto the phones they already own longer and longer.

“Where’s the next iPhone?” they ask. That’s such a dumb question. As Dediu argues at the start of his piece, the iPhone is the most successful product of all time. What sense does it make to expect the same company to make two of the most successful products of all time within the span of 15 years? It doesn’t really make much sense to expect any other company to make a product as successful as the iPhone soon. I think there’s a good chance the iPhone is a once in a lifetime product.

How AirPlay 2 and the Apple TV App Work on a Samsung TV 

I’m not surprised, but this looks and works almost exactly like the new TV app on an Apple TV set top box. If you have one of these TVs with the Apple TV app built-in, I can’t see many reasons why you’d want an Apple TV device. The new TV app on an actual Apple TV does integrate with apps like Prime Video and Hulu that are not available as “channels”, and of course Apple TV has that wildly popular library of games and its celebrated remote control, but if you mostly use Apple TV for iTunes movie and TV show content, you’re probably better off using the built-in Apple TV app on these TVs.

Update: A couple of readers point to one obvious advantage of Apple TV: privacy. Smart TVs do all sorts of nasty things like tracking what you watch and phoning home that Apple TV does not and never will do. There’s a very strong case to be made never to hook a “smart TV” up to the internet at all.

Gmail Tracks Your Purchase History (Shocker) 

Todd Haselton and Megan Graham, writing for CNBC:

Google says it doesn’t use your Gmail to show you ads and promises it “does not sell your personal information, which includes your Gmail and Google Account information,” and does “not share your personal information with advertisers, unless you have asked us to.”

But, for reasons that still aren’t clear, it’s pulling that information out of your Gmail and dumping it into a “Purchases” page most people don’t seem to know exists. Even if it’s not being used for ads, there’s no clear reason why Google would need to track years of purchases and make it hard to delete that information. Google says it’s looking into simplifying its settings to make them easier to control, however.

I’m sure they’ll get right on that.

Remember this saga from a year ago? Long story short, Steam is like an app store for PC games. Steam Link is like a LAN-based remote desktop that lets you stream your Steam games to another device, like an iPhone or Apple TV. Apple initially approved it on May 7 last year, Steam announced it, and then Apple un-approved it, “citing business conflicts with app guidelines that had allegedly not been realized by the original review team”.

It seems bizarre to me that it took a year to resolve this, but I’m glad Apple decided it correctly. And I’m interested to see how well it works — my son is an avid player of games from Steam.