AFTERPAD

Amazon Prime Day

For those who haven't heard, Amazon.com is doing a big sales promotion tomorrow: Prime Day. They're promising bigger sales than Black Friday.

I've long been a fan of buying things on Amazon. They aren't perfect, but they're a heck of a lot better than the big-box retail stores.

I'll be following this sale closely, and if any cool iOS / gaming accessories go on sale, you can expect to see news of it on this site and on the AfterPad Twitter.

The only catch for this sale is that it's for Amazon Prime members only. If you aren't yet a member of Prime, sign up for a free trial today.

Link: ‘On Negative App Store Reviews During Betas of iOS and OS X’

Good editorial from Federico Viticci at MacStories regarding an unfortunate side effect of Apple's public beta program: people leaving negative reviews of apps that don't work properly with iOS and Mac OS betas.

If you're one of these people, please stop. Developers are not allowed to submit iOS 9 updates to their apps yet. Even if they wanted to take advantage of every new feature, Apple doesn't permit iOS 9 updates until about a week before the system is finalized.

If one of your apps doesn't work with iOS 9, let the developer know via email or Twitter. Test it with each new iOS beta. But for the love of god, don't ruin their App Store rating!

Link: ‘News Sites Are Fatter and Slower Than Ever’

Frédéric Filloux over at Monday Note dives into some of the ways major news sites are completely out-of-touch with what readers actually want: fast, clean pages.

Today, a news site web page of a consists of a pile of scripts, of requests to multiple hosts in which relevant content only makes up an insignificant proportion of the freight. (On the same subject, see this post by John Gruber, and Dean Murphy’s account of An hour with Safari Content Blocker in iOS9)

Consider the following observations: When I click on a New York Times article page, it takes about 4 minutes to download 2 megabytes of data through… 192 requests, some to Times’ hosts, most to a flurry of others servers hosting scores of scripts. Granted: the most useful part — 1700 words / 10,300 characters article + pictures — will load in less that five seconds.

But when I go to Wikipedia, a 1900 words story will load in 983 milliseconds, requiring only 168 kilobytes of data through 28 requests.

Ridiculous. There is no excuse for a news site to take this long. Gigabyte apps can download from the App Store in under 4 minutes.

I stopped visiting most web pages a long time ago. I use an RSS reader and Instapaper to save the articles I want to read while simultaneously stripping out all the crap.

I try my best to make AfterPad a clean, fast, easy-to-read site. I think I'm beating the New York Tomes in that regard. And that's pathetic.

New Release: ‘Turtle Tumble’

Turtle Tumble, a minigolf-bowling-style game featuring cell-shaded turtles, was just released with full controller support!

Turtle Tumble is the first original iOS game by War Drum Studios. You may not know these guys by name, but they’re responsible for porting the Grand Theft Auto series to iOS. It’s safe to say they know their way around the platform.

Turtle Tumble is free, so there’s no harm in giving it a download. The only catch is that it’s portrait-mode-only, meaning form-fitting iPhone and iPad controllers don’t work particularly well.

‘Rayman Jungle Run’ Updated for MFi Controller Support

Great news for fans of platforming games: Rayman Jungle Run was recently updated for full MFi controller support!

Jungle Run takes the classic Rayman gameplay and meshes it into a mobile-friendly autorunner. The results combine the focused, hand-made levels of a traditional platformer with the twitch reaction gameplay of an endless runner. It’s an odd mix, but it works.

The sequel to this game, Rayman Fiesta Run, has supported MFi controllers for some time. In the past, it was marred by ads and aggressive social network spamming, ruining an otherwise excellent game. Thankfully Ubisoft appears to have lightened up on that sort of thing, and it’s now an easy recommendation.

If you’re a fan of Rayman Fiesta Run, side-scrolling platformers, or endless runners, you definitely owe it to yourself to give Jungle Run a look. It’s one of the best of its kind available on the App Store.

iOS 9 Public Beta Now Available

Its here, it’s awesome. Head over to Apple’s beta site and give it a look. For an early beta, it’s remarkably stable.

My only big issue: the ‘>’ symbol cannot be entered on external keyboards. Kind of throwing a monkey wrench in my HTML work.

Link: TouchArcade’s MFi Controller Recommendation

You just knew I was going to link this one: Carter Dotson at TouchArcade runs through his suggestions of which MFi controllers to get and which to avoid.

TouchArcade’s go-to recommendation is the Mad Catz C.T.R.L.i; I’ve long recommended that one as absolutely being the best option for most people. It’s d-pad isn’t great, but the controller is well-built, fairly priced, features an iPhone grip, and works great with all iOS devices. No other MFi controller hits all those checkboxes. As a general purpose recommendation, its the one to beat.

Best of all, it’s 20% off on Amazon right now! So if you’ve been looking for a great controller, and didn’t believe me all the other times I recommended this one, well now you have corroboration from at least one other iOS reviewer.

The Samsung Galaxy S6 is NOT Faster Than the iPhone

It’s a crazy world we live in, when Appleinsider has to correct stupidity reported by other sites.

Basically, Samsung’s Galaxy S6 can perform great in artificial benchmarks, in the real world, framerates are lower than the iPhone 5S.

Samsung’s poor engineering choice of pairing an ultra high resolution screen with an underpowered CPU and GPU resulted in great specs on paper but poor real-world performance.

[…] in its native resolution (where the device typically runs, apart from entering a lower resolution video game), Samsung’s engineering choices mean that the Galaxy S6 delivers noticeably worse performance. GFX Bench shows that Samsung’s “Exynos 7” powered Galaxy S6 drops down to 15 fps—just 78 percent of the frame rate of iPhone 6 Plus—in the same native resolution test.

This is what you get when you target benchmarks instead of real world use.

Resolution matters. It’s why the iPhone 6 outperforms the more expensive iPhone 6 Plus. Samsung’s inferior GPU design and ultra-high-resolution displays (often with incomplete pixels) make it a poor choice for gamers.

TouchArcade Needs Our Help

TouchArcade is crowdfunding donations to keep the site going in its current form. If you haven't read their piece yet, do so now – I'm not going to summarize it here, but suffice it to say ads aren't paying what they used to, and this is the best way to keep their site going without making it crappier.

Many developers and gamers have added their own stories to the litany of reasons why TouchArcade is worth supporting. Here's mine.

My first opportunity to do anything as a game journalist came because of my membership in the TouchArcade Forums. The now-defunct game developer ngmoco saw my posts on the TouchArcade forums, and invited me to visit their headquarters in San Francisco to preview their FPS game Eliminate as part of a "community day" event with other, actual games journalists.

This was a different era in iOS gaming – ngmoco was trying to be the EA of iPhone gaming (their words), and they spared no expense. I was a Bay Area local, but everyone else was flown out to San Francisco for this event and given accommodations at a luxury hotel in the city. We were invited to ngmoco's expensive waterfront headquarters, given brand new iPod Touches engraved with our names, and played their upcoming game Eliminate – one of the best iOS shooters ever made to this day – for hours.

The fact is, I didn't belong there. I wasn't a writer – honestly I'm not much of a writer today, but I'm trying to improve. I was lucky enough to be invited because of my membership on TouchArcade, because they wanted an impartial gamer from the forums to write about their game.

Everyone else who attended was a real game journalist. They'd been given this treatment before – they'd had the goodie bags full of swag, to exclusive interviews, the hotels… It was a sort of club, a community, and I got my first look at it thanks to TouchArcade.

This era in iOS gaming would rapidly come to an end. It didn't take long for ngmoco to realize that iOS didn't generate "fly people to SF and give them iPods" money, and they sold to a Japanese freemium gaming company.

Today's iOS gaming landscape is very different. The swag bags are smaller. There are no free iPods. There are no luxury hotels. When I decided to start AfterPad and return to the world of iOS game writing, I saw a very different ecosystem than the one I left 5 years ago. I have no idea what happened to the other iOS game journalists who attended the event – I haven't seen their names or publications in years. But one things remans the same: TouchArcade is here.

TouchArcade covers iOS gaming because they love iOS gaming. The problem is, what it means to cover iOS gaming has changed dramatically. Forget luxury hotels – sites like TouchArcade are fighting to keep the lights on with the limited revenue they get from ads.

Mobile gaming may be bigger than ever, but the financials for writing about the industry are grim. Most iOS gaming sites have been reduced to aggregating content from other sites, posting "native content" articles that are actually written by the companies the site is supposed to be covering, or writing 4-sentence articles and calling them "reviews" of games (this actually happens on a certain UK site). Or they're niche sites, like AfterPad itself, that cover only a subsection of iOS gaming and don't have a stable of paid writers with actual talent.

Without TouchArcade, AfterPad wouldn’t exist. But more importantly, without TouchArcade, actual iOS game journalism wouldn’t exist.

I don't think TouchArcade is perfect. They go a bit heavy on the freemium coverage for my tastes, there is an off-putting combative tone some writers have with the readers, and I find their advertising unpleasant. But they are far and away – without contest – the best site for mobile gaming.

TouchArcade is the only site that writes frequent, long-form, in-depth articles about iOS gaming. They're the only site that lives and breathes this market. Forget about everything else, and ask yourself: is that worth supporting? And if so, support it.

Support TouchArcade

Link: ‘Introduction to Webkit Content Blockers’

The official Webkit and Safari blog breaks down the details of content blockers, a new addition to iOS 9.

Notably absent: “ad”, “adblock”, “advertisement” – any mention whatsoever of blocking banners or ads. Instead, Apple entirely plays up the privacy and performance angle.

They aren’t wrong. Tracking javascript files, in addition to being morally questionable, do slow down the performance of websites. But I don’t think for a second that blocking ads isn’t a factor here. Contrary to what some think, the type of hosts blocking used by iOS 9 is more than capable of blocking advertisements. Not to the level of a dedicated extension, but enough to block the vast majority of ads – without the performance hit of an extension.

If you hate ads, value your privacy, and like it when pages load quickly, iOS 9 is going to be a big deal for you.