Category: Apps

Mobile Gaming Whitepaper (and Event)

On 15/08/2013

In Apps, Events, Games, Social, Thoughts

So I had recently the honour (and joy) to participate in a whitepaper on mobile gaming that the good folks of Video Games Intelligence commissioned as a backdrop for their Mobile Gaming Europe conference.

It is freely available here (though you need to register your details) and it is – needless to say – eminently worthwhile your attention… 😉

The conference itself will be on 20/21 November in London and is looking promising (even if you want to ignore my very own wisdoms). They assembled a speaker line-up that is the top of the crop in mobile games these days, including the head honchos from:

Super Cell (yup, the folks with the money)
King (the folks with the other bit of money)
Eidos (Ian Livingstone himself!)
Boss Alien (who did CSR Racing, one of the trailblazers in the F2P world)
Digital Legends
Fishlabs (the ones with the most awesome Galaxy on Fire)
DeNA
Facebook (the ones with the many users)
Digital Chocolate (the ones with the many years in the industry)
Bossa Studios (the ones with a BAFTA)
etc. etc. etc.

You get the gist: come along, join us, have fun and, perhaps, learn a little…

Leap Motion: First Impressions

By Volker

On 13/08/2013

In Apps, OEM, Thoughts

I signed up for the pre-order of the Leap Motion controller ages ago. And, of course, it must arrive whilst I was on vacation… But, hey, it’s here now and since I was asked by a couple of friends to provide them with my thoughts, this is my first ever product review. A few words of caution though: I am not providing a fully-fledged review, just a few bits and bobs and my thoughts on the overall thing. For more traditional things, see e.g. here or here (consumer-focussed simple overview) or here (more in-depth technical).

Installation Environment

I installed it on my MacBook Pro (13” Retina, 3 GHz i7, 8GB RAM, 512GB SSD) running on the latest OS (at the time of writing, that’s 10.8.4). It comes with two cables, a long and a short one, which is a neat idea. Alas, I would actually have wanted a cordless one but the, I guess, it might be a wee bit early for some BlueTooth 4.0 magic, so I’ll let this pass. It does not come with a manual and whilst that is oh-so-valley-style, a “cheat sheet” for the various gestures might be a good idea: as it is such a completely novel interaction method, it would make peoples’ lives a lot easier if they could check back quickly in the old-fashioned style. I mean, you could do it hipster-infographic-style as a hat-tip to the Valley, could you not?

You plug in, are asked to go to a website and install the software. Simple.

The Start

The first thing you do is go through an “orientation” programme, which is sheer beauty and gives you the first, well, orientation on what to do (and what not). This is the first bit where it shows you what it sees (in rough but pretty terms):

Then it shows you what it really sees (in more accurate and mechanical terms):

The rest is play. Here’s my son practicing his signature:

Using Leap Motion…

Then I started off. There are quite a few pretty cool apps available already (the company announced 1m downloads today, a mere 4 weeks after starting to ship to consumers). The New York Times app is nice (if practical). There are some sweet ones exploring molecules, etc. There are, alas, also some that don’t really work (yet). The usual shenanigans every new platform goes through. Anyway, I then downloaded the “Touchless for Mac” app, which turns the Leap controller into a navigation tool for your computer. And it works: It took me the best part of 20 minutes to actually get going nicely. I could open web pages, scroll through my Facebook feed, open links, play (and pause) video, etc. without too much struggle or stress. Latency is basically absent.

Mind you, this is not Minority Report if you are in the early stages of use (there is a “basic” and an “advanced” setting; I haven’t ventured beyond “basic” yet). But what would you expect? It is new, you have never used gesture controls in space (unless you’re Tom Cruise of course), so you will have to learn. I have little times for nay-sayers that already point out that it’ll fail because it is not perfect. It is a very impressive start!

My son (18, slightly geeky [and designy] aspiring Physicist and skateboard apparel entrepreneur) was, unsurprisingly, a lot faster than I in picking this up. It took him the best part of 5 minutes to successfully navigate around the parts that caused me some trial and error (small buttons, e.g. the “close window” one). BTW: Even my wife thinks is cool, and she hasn’t even seen Minority Report!

Apps, Apps, Apps…

In the year of the Lord (if you are so inclined) 2013, we all know that any device is only ever as useful as the applications that exist for it. And this is where the whole Leap experience delights and, erm, shows potential for growth at the same time: there are some apps out there already (and bear in mind that it’s a mere 4-5 weeks they are in the market only) that show you what can be done with this. And I would say it shows great promise! There are, however, also some absolute dogs (I won’t name and shame as I have no inclination of rubbishing brave developers that took an early leap [sic!] of faith to get behind a new platform).

User Interface

The biggest challenge is the bridge between today’s computer interfaces (I have yet to play around with it on Windows 8; need to “borrow” my daughter’s computer for that) are either mouse- or touch-centric. This is to say that they do not take into account the intrinsic constraints of gesture-based UX systems. That is to say: there is a natural constraint in how the Leap Motion can work with today’s computer systems. That, however, is (arguably) not the Leap Motion’s fault. The promises are huge as it removes artificial middlemen between the content and the user’s natural input mechanism (of which gesture is one). However, the full power of it will only come to fruition if paired with an OS interface that is designed for it, and this might – at least in the short term – be the snag: Leap doesn’t have that.

They have done a lot of things right though (the developer uptake is testament to that for a start) and it would be thrilling to see it being married to an interface that is actually built for it. It is not that hard, I think: Leap Motion’s own store shows (in a webpage) how to adapt a few things that make it very usable indeed.

Big buttons, clear borders between items, etc. make it a whole lot easier to navigate fluently and quickly using the gesture input. This is running in a present-day browser, so can’t be rocket science. There are already some convincing implementations of the Leap’s controls into live services: Google Earth as well as Nokia’s Here Maps already allow you to use the Leap Motion controller as an input device and that works really well!

One downside is the “jump” if you scroll: it sometimes just drops when you move your finger forward (a “click”), essentially misinterpreting what you want to do. This then can open another app (because it got “hooked” in the app tray below) or do some other stuff you didn’t really want it to do. Because of the above-mentioned challenge with small “close window” buttons, this is not a welcome distraction.

Another challenging piece is to use the Leap Motion in concert with keyboard and touchpad: because your fingers move in and/or near the “vision” of the controller, it sometimes interferes by e.g. re-setting your pointer to somewhere else on the screen, which is somewhat annoying. For everyday use, this is even fatal: if you always have to activate/de-activate and/or connect/dis-connect, you will probably not be using it at all once the early excitement has worn off. But let this not deter you from the concept: this last challenge could very easily be abolished would OEM incorporate the controller into an actual computer: the moment you use the keyboard, the Leap controller would simply be “muted” (or something a whole lot smarter than that). None of the constraints are flaws of the technology but merely on how it interacts with today’s commercially available hardware. If you allow a crude comparison: a Lamborghini Aventador would not have been much fun on cart tracks in the 19th century: the device would simply not interact that well with its incumbent environment. Alas, we are not 150 years apart here: all components exist and could work hand in glove (I know, tacky pun) with each other with only very few tweaks.

And Onwards!

And this is where it gets exciting: imagine a controller like this for navigation tasks, voice, etc for things like text input and couple this with anything from Google Glass to Pico Projectors (fairly sure Wikipedia needs an update here) to proximity-aware screens in your environment (you walk into your home, it all comes alive on a 50” screen whereas it would happily play on your Google Glass-type screen whilst you are on your way from work in the metro/tube/bus/subway). You have the freedom to choose and use natural inputs (voice, gestures) depending on what makes most sense for the task at hand. Doable? Absolutely. Close? I suspect so!

Conclusion?

So what do I think? After the above, you’d appreciate this is only an interim conclusion. In principle: I love it! How often will I use it in the next six months or so? Not very much, I guess, as it still doesn’t have the critical bits I particularly need (I am one of the boring MS Office/Keynote/Chrome types). But what can it (and/or competitors, successors, subsequent evolutions of it) do? Enormous things!

Amazing Alex? Really amazing?

By Volker

On 14/07/2012

In Apps, Games

Now, to get this out of the way: I am a Rovio fan, and I have been for much, much, much longer than most. I have published their very first game – Darkest Fear – and I have published a few of their pre-Angry Birds titles after that. So do not accuse me of Rovio-phobia; there is none…

So, I hope you will understand that I was pretty excited when they announced their first post-Angry Birds title, Amazing Alex. Alas, am I excited? No, not really. Now, don’t get me wrong: it is a beautifully balanced, nicely polished game. Nothing wrong with that. But is it really something über-special? As in Angry-birds-we-will-show-them-special? Erm, I think not.

You say though that they are on #1 in 30+ countries and on #2 in 30+ more (or so the Mighty Eagle tells me over Facebook and Twitter). You say that this amounts to an astonishing success, an impeccable launch. And, yes, I agree. But, aside of the impressive launch power and impeccable marketing and all, is it great? I think not. And, yes, I am disappointed. Rovio has been one of my favourite studios, long before Angry Birds. It is why I have been behind them with previous games, why I tried to push them when their talent had not been amplified by their awesome and unprecedented success of Angry Birds. But… Someone who wants to replicate Walt Disney needs to do better. Folks, you have to follow Mickey with Donald. Is Alex Donald? I think not…

I do hope – sincerely – that they will pull it of. Not because my day job at RIM requires me to stay in their good books, but because I believe that the birth of a new creative powerhouse outside of old-school Hollywood is a seriously good sign for the world, and last but not least because Michael, Peter, Andrew et al are really good people! But I do not think Alex is nearly as amazing as Donald Duck is (or Bugs Bunny for that matter) and I am hoping they will bring it with future iterations!

Come on, my Mighty Eagle and other birds: we really could do with a new Disney; it’s been way too long…

A quick note on second-hand software

By Volker

On 04/07/2012

In Apps, Deals, Games, Thoughts

This is not strictly speaking a mobile topic but, as we all deal more and more in digital goods, I reckon it has its place (and, then, I cannot deny my legalease origins, I suppose), so here we go:

In case you haven’t heard, the European Court of Justice recently ruled against Oracle with respect to the question if a licensee was allowed to sell this license to someone else. The case at hand was against Usedsoft, a company that has made exactly that its business. Now, often software licenses prohibit the onward sale to third parties (the vendors would rather like to sell a new license to a new customer). And, of course, if there was a market opening up for second-hand licenses (mobile games anyone?), this could impact the commercial opportunities of the originators of the software quite significantly. And lots of people came out quickly complaining.

However, what would you say if you could not sell your car once you would want to buy a new one? Or that Ikea table that looked so radically modern only 3 years ago? Unthinkable, huh? That would be a world without car-boot sales, flea markets or eBay or GameStop (who make tons of money with pre-owned games). And, no, no one would understand why that should be prohibited: you bought that car/table/whatever after all, so it’s clearly yours, right?

And, yes, it is. And this principle (well, following the rough outlines here at least) was also applied by the European Court of Justice. And I, for one, would agree with that. What the court also said (and this is where the nitty gritty might come in) is that the seller of a used piece of software would – of course – be prevented from continuing to use it after the sale. I mean: you cannot use your car anymore after you sold it either… However, this is of course not just as trivial for digital goods that can much more easily duplicated than physical ones.

When it comes to the commercial implications, I would posit that this is “merely” a question of business models: if you are “selling” (and Oracle’s lawyers will of course say it wasn’t a sale but a mere license) something, that would be it. However, if you provide an ongoing service (“SaaS”), your continued benefit is in the service, not the piece of software that carries or facilitates that service. So hard to do? No.

So, can we all get back to earth and crack on with it then? Thank you!

Oh, and happy July, 4th to my US friends! 🙂

Carnival of the Mobilists # 270

By Volker

On 09/05/2012

In Apps, Carnival of the Mobilists, Carriers, OEM

Greetings, friends. Due to the English inability to have bank holidays on days other than a Monday, this week’s Carnival of the Mobilists is a day late but it is here nonetheless, and with verve! I have spent reading through a plethora of good stuff from the trenches of mobile:

Our friends from All About Symbian (yes, that name is still around!) have a bit of a prolific blogging streak and brings us two contributions this week looking at aspects of device and OS design respectively. Since both are intriguing, they get a double mention.

First, the function of home screens (note the plural) is queried and the question is as simple as it is compelling: if you have seven (or nine or eleven) “home” screens, do you then actually still have a home screen? Do you also have nine homes? Steve posits that simplicity should arguably win it, which of course is the opposite of what the iPhone’s all-app grid or Andoid’s army of home screens do today. Interesting!

Secondly, Steve looks at the burgeoning size of smartphones. He points out that the Nokia N95 screen size of a whopping 2.6” was huge by the standards then. It is dwarfed by the Samsung Galaxy S III’s 4.8” screen though. And the question is raised when is big too big. The answer is suggested to be at the end of people’s arms: Steve points out that hands are not growing as quickly as the screensizes (if indeed at all) and that therefore there should indeed be a perfect size for a phone – which 4.7” or bigger is, alas, not.

Moving on to even bigger things, and it doesn’t get any bigger than the Chinese market. Andy from Mobithinking has looked at recently released figures from some of the bigger analysists in the space and compacted this in a post that gives us numbers that make the mind of even the hardened mobilista boggle. China has now more smartphones than the US (22% vs 16% of the overall market). China has 3x more mobile subscribers than the US (1bn vs 330m). The country’s largest operator, China Mobile, alone has more than 2x as many mobile subscribers than the population of the US (which is itself the 3rd-largest mobile market in the world – India is a long way ahead of it on #2 though). China has more than 430m mobile Internet users, which is more than the population of either Europe or North America. For more, make sure to read thoroughly!

MobileGroove has a post from guest author Jeff Hasen on something that piqued my interest significantly when I heard about it, namely the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) attempt to regulate the disemination of content via social media (and mobile). Jeff’s background as a reporter and marketer of previous Olympic Games adds further insight. The long and short is that the IOC has set up a “hub” that will post content for more than 1,000 current and former athletes directly from their Facebook and Twitter accounts (which I would suggest is the antithesis of social media). Restrictions as to what you can share apply, however, also to ticket holders (so don’t you dare tweeting that photo of Usain Bolt using a Mac; Acer is a sponsor!). The predictable result? Uproar, mayhem and another big old body having to bow to the anarchic power of social (and mobile) media!

Lastly, something more (seemingly) mundane but (evidently) more practical: MobyAffiliates has a post on AppStore optimization, namely a guide what you need to do in order to make sure that your app doesn’t sink in between those other apps upon launch. This takes everything from app title, keywords, description, icons, imagery, etc, etc. An eminently useful post if I may say so!

As is good tradition on this blog, I will not choose a winner – I think all of them are good and important reads! So go ahead, get a coffee (or glass of wine) and do yourself some good! 🙂

Next week, the Carnival will be hosted by MobiThinking. If you want to submit something worthy, please e-mail us at mobilists [at] gmail [dot] com by the end of the week. And if you need more information on the Carnival (or to catch up on a wealth of information from all the previous Carnivals), make sure to visit the Carnival’s own site.

UPDATE: we have had a late bloomer to this week’s edition but I wouldn’t want to omit this, so here we go: The Mobile Payments Today blog brings a report on the jungle that mobile payments still are (using the example of Google Wallet) and highlighting the apparent complexities in connecting the various ecosystems (different POS systems, card providers, loyalty programs etc).

In reply to @scottjenson: Web or Apps?

By Volker

On 11/10/2011

In Apps, Thoughts

There seems to be a new round of buzz around the good old HTML5 vs native debate or, in other words of web vs apps. We had a Mobile Monday session in Manchester (@momomcr) on this, debate on ForumOxford is flaring up again, and more… So I thought let’s do this again and see – if anything – changed since I posted about this (for the record: here’s the first post from 2009 and the second one from 2010). Where has the battlefield moved to in the interim?

Mobile apps must die

There has been (as you may have sharply derived from this post’s title) a post from Scott Jenson, the Creative Director of Frog Design (they of much Apple fame – you know, they designed the Apple IIc and such), which he entitled – somewhat combattively – “mobile apps must die”. His argument is, in short, that the mobile desktop cannot cope with the plethora of native apps (or app icons?) and that it would be much better to use dynamic “use it and lose it” approaches for which the web is perfectly suited. He starts of on the value vs pain paradigm: if the balance is less than 0 (i.e. value exceeds pain), the solution wins. And he posits, that native apps don’t do that.

I am not doing the intellectual argument Scott poses any justice here (and I will pick up on some more points further below), so please make sure to read his post!

One size does not fit all

The challenge is to find a universal solution, I suppose. Jenson focuses merely on apps that – arguably – make a user’s life better if and when he/she is out and about and is looking for utilities to help mundane tasks/etc. There are tons of fairly one-dimensional apps for that: a retailer app for their catalogue, London tube map, some couponing app, a mobile banking app, apps using NFC, Bluetooth, camera (QR readers) and more. There will also be more complex ones: fancy AR-powered things, things like Foursquare (anyone near?), etc, etc. So, is this painful? Yes, it is. Would it be better if there was a seamless universal (cloud-based) solution that would make it “just so”? Oh, by all means.

BUT… it would not solve all use cases for smartphones (or mobile computing in general). There are tons of applications and use cases that are not the out and about equivalent of a Google search (and, yes, I am fully aware that 40% of Google mobile searches relate to locations), and I would posit that one has to judge each one on its own merits.

The starting point should always be the user experience. Jenson points out correctly that this is not only about the perceived value of the product or service in isolation but it is more of a function: if the perceived value exceeds the pain to use it, it works. If pain exceeds the perceived value, it doesn’t.

But it is this very statement where things with Jenson go horribly astray. There is a reason why Apple has not yet moved Keynote to a cloud-based SaaS solution but keeps selling it as a stand-alone app: because it works better. The perceived value of using the product far exceeds the pain of having to download and install the application.

Tackling the shortfalls

When looking at the UX chain (from product to discovery, maintenance, management and use), there is more than one answer to shortfalls of some of these elements. Rather than moaning about distribution and app management, one can also improve those processes. The OS-based app store model all but replaced the carrier stores for smartphones now, and why? Because the end-to-end solution is less painful (not only for users of the apps but also for its producers!).

It is possible to draw a map of this (and I would if I possessed more artistic skill) where you could derive on what is right for you: if you need access to hardware APIs (camera, 3D acceleration, Open GL ES, etc), native might be your way (one of the reasons why you are not seeing higher-end HTML5 games in large numbers yet). If you capture light-weight information-heavy content that relies on dynamic updates, a web “app” might be good for you, in other cases, a native app with some functionality coupled with a container for web functionality might be the right way.

So there we have it: it still is the old “it depends” answer. Having said that, with webkit and HTML5 adding functionality all the time, ever (?) improving bandwidth and better compliance on the browser side, the usecases for native apps will likely get less over time. Will it happen in full swing in the next 18 months or so? I doubt that very much.