I was nodding my head in agreement the entire time I was reading this Jonathan Poritsky article. If you want to own your destiny as a writer, you need to own the platform you write on.
Fears of platforms changing out from under me aren’t unfounded. I hosted this site on Tumblr up until a few months ago. Tumblr was constantly breaking existing behavior, modifying code, outright ignoring settings. When things went wrong, I had zero recourse – support emails went unanswered as often as not. Whatever benefit they provided as a platform, it wasn’t worth it anymore.
I was lucky that tools exist to transition from Tumblr to other platforms. I won’t tie my content to another monolithic company and count on being lucky again.
Interesting observations by Inertial Lemon about the potential hidden meaning behind one of Apple’s new policies in iOS 9.
To (over)simplify, apps are partially compiled and optimized for your device before you download them. This allows a degree of future-proofing, as apps can be optimized by newer versions of iOS and OS X for hardware that didn’t even exist when those apps were written.
This could mean a transition from Intel to ARM on the Mac is more possible, which is the angle Inertial Lemon’s article goes with. However, it could also simply mean better backwards-compatibility, as old software can be automatically updated for newer OS and hardware. Either way, it’s a bigger deal than Apple represented at WWDC.
Great news for fans of premium games: a pretty substantial selection of them are undergoing major sales right now!
I’m not sure what the reason is; Father’s Day, E3, late WWDC celebration… whatever it is, it makes this one of the best opportunities yet to pick up some classic games you might have missed.
One of the most interesting things about this sale: most of these are games you can sink a ton of time into. Most of the MFi-Controller-compatible Final Fantasy series is here, Monster Hunter, Terraria, The Bard’s Tale, Radiation Island… there is literally months of gameplay here.
E3 is in session right now, and TouchArcade managed to go hands-on with Mad Catz’ new $300 L.Y.N.X.9 controller.
The L.Y.N.X.9 was previously announced as Android and Windows only, but TouchArcade is reporting that an iOS version will ship later this year. I’ve reached out to Mad Catz for confirmation, but I’m hoping it’s true!
A cheaper version of this design, the L.Y.N.X.3, will be available for $69. No word on an iOS version of this one.
SteelSeries announced today, during E3, that the Stratus XL will be coming to Windows and Android. SteelSeries must like this controller more than I do.
I hope SteelSeries fixed some of the design problems with the Stratus XL for this latest release. If so, it will be a compelling option for Android gamers looking for something to use with their micro-consoles. I’m not sure it’ll be as interesting an option for Windows gamers, who have access to the Xbox One controller, which is one of the best controllers ever made.
Great hands-on impressions, hints, and pictures of Transistor over at MFi4Gamerz.
All controllers tested, everything seems to work great. No surprise, considering how amazing the developerâs last game, Bastion, is.
The forums are one step closer to coming out of beta: I've officially codified and laid out some of the rules and policies associated with being a part of the community.
I'd like to make one thing clear: every single member of the forum has been completely awesome so far. These rules aren't a response to anything that anyone has done wrong. Rather, they exist to help new members understand what the community they're joining is about. The forums are a safe, inviting place for everyone who wants to participate, and I felt it appropriate to make that clear in the rules.
These forums have only been here a short time, but the quality and quantity of the discussions here has greatly exceeded my expectations. Before launching, I was worried people wouldn't be interested in joining. Instead, you helped turn this forum into the place I was hoping it would be. I'd like to thank each and every one of you! And if you haven’t yet joined, I hope these rules make it even more clear that you’re welcome here.
If you’re a regular reader of AfterPad, you might have noticed some big changes. The MFi Game Database was redesigned to be faster, cleaner, and automatically updated. The controller catalog was rebuilt, updated, and replaced with a new interface. Disqus comments are gone. We even have a new forum.
There is one more change, perhaps biggest of all, and you probably didn’t even notice it: AfterPad.com is now built on WordPress.
Why transition away from Tumblr? A few reasons:
Speed
Tumblr isn’t slow. They have highly optimized code, great back-end servers, and a global distribution network. AfterPad pages on Tumblr loaded in under 3 seconds at their worst, almost always under 2 seconds.
I started with one requirement: I had to beat that number. I didn’t think WordPress could manage it. In my limited experience, I considered WordPress to be a bloated mess (I still do, but that’s a story for another day).
The good news: people have spent a lot of time and effort fixing WordPress’ shortcomings. Thanks to an aggressive cacheing plugin – and the fact that I had no intention of including any of the feature bloat most people litter their WordPress installs with – I was able to bring the speed of the WordPress site to consistently less than the Tumblr version.
But I took it a step further. Thanks to a killer service called Cloudflare, I was able to replicate Tumblr’s CDN advantage by distributing my site across Cloudflare’s massive world-wide server infrastructure.
The results: self-hosted AfterPad handily beats the Tumblr version. It often loads a second faster, maybe more. That’s reason enough to switch. And the next reasons are even more important.
Writing
The fact of the matter is, Tumblr just wasn’t designed for long-form writing. And it’s getting worse.
Without getting too much into the nitty gritty, Tumblr has a tendency to push out random updates to their web interface, and these updates have a tendency to break things. Big things – HTML that randomly stops working, copy-paste that’s still broken in Safari, coding that insist on wrapping figure elements with p tags.
I can’t trust Tumblr to accurately and consistently put my writing online. I have no recourse when things break. All of this was fine when I was just starting out; I know a lot more now, and I don’t need Tumblr holding my hand, and doing a bad job of it.
Security
I don’t track you at AfterPad. I don’t want to track you. The information you choose to share in the forum is the extent of the information I want to know about you.
Companies that track your browsing history, build profiles of the pages you visit and products you buy, sell that information to advertisers… I believe these companies are morally wrong. I want nothing to do with this sort of thing.
When Disqus transitioned into an unethical business model, I pulled Disqus. I built my own forum to replace it. When I couldn’t find a host to serve that forum, I bought my own server space and hosted it myself.
With Tumblr, I didn’t have that option. In addition to inserting unwanted and bloated Javascript libraries, Tumblr inserts tracking files. Various .JS files from Tumblr, Yahoo, and something called Scorecard research – ugh. There was no way for me to opt out of these. Tumblr made me serve them to you, and Tumblr made you download them. I don’t like that.
But here’s the best part: you don’t have to take my word for it. Thanks to self-hosting and Cloudflare, AfterPad is now SSL secured. The URL starts with HTTPS. The site even gets that little lock icon.
This is possible because I don’t track you. I don’t sell you to advertisers that insist on tracking your clicks and eyeballs. I can’t think of a single other gaming site that can claim this.
The Future
Tumblr is a great network for a lot of people. It enabled me to get AfterPad off the ground and in front of a almost a million people over the course of 1 year. I paid nothing for this service. But it’s time to move on. We’re in Year Two of AfterPad. I’m not slowing down, and I’m not going to be satisfied selling out my beliefs about what it means to be a good internet citizen, and what it means to build a good website and a good community. Switching to WordPress is the next step in this journey.
There’s nothing worse than when I read a website I love, but come away with the feeling that the people writing it don’t really give a damn about the me as a reader. We’ve all read sites like this. I never, ever want to be this type of writer. I couldn’t have made it this far without all of you who read this site. I don’t sell ads here – all money comes from commissions and affiliate links.
You used AfterPad to find apps and controllers, you shared those links with your friends, you publicized this site on the internet. When you did those things, you kept AfterPad alive and allowed me to make it what it is today. Thank you. 100 times, thank you.
So what’s next? I have some ideas. If Apple finally launches a game console, I have some pretty big ideas. But as always, I want to hear from you. What do you want to see? What don’t you want to see? I’m open to feedback, I’m open to help, I’m open to conversations about what comes next. If you have any ideas you’d like me to know about, head to the forums and let me know. If you’d rather share anonymously, send me an email.
We’re at a very interesting time in the history of iOS gaming. I can’t wait to see what the future holds, and I can’t wait to cover it all here on AfterPad.
In case you missed this morning’s big event, Apple just published the complete WWDC keynote on their website – no developer account required.
The last 45 minutes gets a little painful, but this was still a great event.
Perhaps the most important part: multiple female executives on stage. First time ever at an Apple keynote, I believe.
Great news, content consumers! Also, in a related note: Terrible news, content aggregation sites!
iOS 9 is apparently set to bring “content blockers” to Safari. This Content Blocker mechanic prevents certain user-specified content from loading in Safari, and will be customizable.
This is a potentially huge deal for privacy advocates. It should now be possible to prevent Safari from ever loading the tracking cookies used by most ad networks, thus preventing them from building profiles of your personal information and browser history.
For sites that rely on revenue from selling visitors’ information to advertisers… well, that ship has sailed. We’re way passed the point where ads were fair. Ads today are an all-out assault on the user experience of browsing the internet. Apple’s move to employ ad blocking in iOS should be yet another sign that it’s time to find a new business model.