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Thoughts regarding iPhone default loading screens
Following on from some of the thoughts discussed here:
- A screen that looks like your application but that you can’t interact with, sucks
- A screen that is displayed whilst your application is loading, but that just shows some company splash loading image, sucks
One possible solution: show both. A screen which both allows the user to realise the application is loading whilst also showing the UI that will eventually become interactive to them would accomplish both goals; setting the stage for what they’ll be able to do, and also letting them know it’s not quite ready yet. How? Just fade out the background with a semi-transparent layer on top of the default UI, with text saying ‘Loading…’
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RjDj
After reading Rev. Dan Catt’s enthusiastic review (and watching his example video clips) of RjDj, I rushed straight to the iPhone App Store to download it, and I have to say it’s an absolutely fascinating plaything. For the insultingly cheap price of one pound and seventy nine pence, this is exactly the sort of application which would quite possibly have only existed in the laboratory of some tech hardware/synth music geek if there were no iPhone. Genius.
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typeface.js: The Catch(es)
At first glance, this looks excellent. However it does suffer from a few major problems:
- You can’t manually select part of the text
- The text won’t use sub-pixel anti-aliasing (assuming you had it available in the first place, although most modern computers do)
- Text zoom doesn’t increase the size of the text
- Full page zoom doesn’t re-render the text, so it looks blurry and pixellated once zoomed; in the case of text that was initially too small to read on an iPhone, this means it stays unreadable even once zoomed
It’s a nice effort and an interesting experiment, but because of the above problems it’s really not suitable for use as anything that you wouldn’t already use techniques such as sIFR or FIR image replacement. Also, if this technique becomes widespread, it’ll actually make web pages worse on the iPhone, and any other device that uses WebKit (Google Android, for example).
Update: after viewing the examples, my instance of Safari’s memory footprint expanded dramatically. It’s quite possible this technique is also very resource hungry; I’ll need to conduct some thorough tests to be sure.
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Zombies!
With only 3 weeks remaining until the launch of Wrath of the Lich King, Blizzard has introduced a fun minigame to World of Warcraft, which appears to have been inspired by the Zul’Gurub plague that spread (unintentionally) a few years back. The basic premise of the game is thus: there are some crates sat on the dockside in Booty Bay (a neutral town), which when examined will infect your character with the plague. At this point you have ten minutes to reach one of the newly-added ‘Argent Healers’, who are dotted around in the capital cities, who can cure you of your plague.
However, that’s assuming you want to be cured. If you allow the ten minute timer to run down, you are eventually transformed into a zombie, whereupon you are given a new small set of abilities in place of your own. You’ll also be flagged as hostile to everyone except other zombies. As a zombie, you can infect others (both NPCs and other players) with the same plague, and if killed whilst infected, these characters will then likewise become zombies and the undead army’s numbers swell. However! As a zombie, your health continually runs down until you die (properly, and can resurrect normally, as a non-zombie); the only way to replenish this health is to attack others and ‘eat’ them (by killing them first).
The really fun part of this is the way that people interact once infected. In my first encounter with other players as a zombie, they instantly began to attack me, but being only low-level players I killed them relatively easily. At this point the first player I killed became a zombie, and immediately turned on his former comrade. The sudden realisation that his erstwhile friend was now hostile and would attack him, led him to attack first. I’m looking forward to seeing whole armies of undead marching on the cities en masse, with the playerbase divided between defending and attacking their former allies. Even more encouraging is that this may just be the start…
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Bad ideas
Regarding Pixish’s imminent closure, John Gruber writes:
Sometimes good ideas don’t work out.
Very true. But Pixish was not one of these. Good design cannot be commoditised, and that’s precisely what Pixish set out to do. You’d have thought an admirer of Apple’s principle of quality over quantity would understand such a concept.
