I just installed iOS 6 and made a beeline for the Maps app. Um. That was pretty much my first thought: um. The reason being, I went for my house and found a pixelated mess in place of what was once a slightly dated satellite map of my garden. Naturally, this is presumably because the UK is in fact ‘London’, but I don’t live in that bit. (Comically, photos of where I live are so bad in the new Maps that you can’t even make out major roads when you zoom out quite a lot.) Of course, on visiting a few random US postcodes, overhead shots at the same zoom level were spiffy. In the UK, things went from OK to London to black and white to London. In addition, the lack of Street View renders Maps less useful for working at countering my astonishing ability to get lost absolutely anywhere by checking out what a street or building looks like before I set off.

I don’t doubt Maps will improve, but it’ll be interesting to see what comes next. Has Google got its own app in the works, ready for release at a time when lots of iOS users are grumbling? I suspect Google Maps for iOS would go down brilliantly right about now, in part because most people think CHANGE IS BAD, but also because quite a few of the changes in Maps actually are bad. (Depending on your location, the app is either a minor feature downgrade or a massive shift to a relatively tiny amount of information.) Another option would be to leave Apple users in the lurch, not bother with Maps for iOS for months, and point to Android as being the best for that kind of thing.

A sensible Google would take the first option, given that Apple’s app will improve, and also that few people will ditch a platform just because Maps became a bit crap. But whether Google’s got its sensible hat on today is something only Google itself knows.

Marco Arment responds to an article on TUAW by Richard Gaywood. Gaywood asks:

How many of you cruise AppShopper’s price drops page for bargains when looking for a new game to while away a boring commute? Or how many of you, when someone recommends an iOS app to you, find the first thing you do is load the AppShopper app to check the “price history” section… and if the app routinely goes on sale for less than it costs now, add it to your wishlist to buy the next time it’s cheap?

And Arment wonders whether:

a nontrivial number of people really go through all of this trouble to save an occasional dollar on apps for their hundreds-of-dollars iOS devices?

I’d assume that most people who are that price-sensitive wouldn’t be in the market for paid apps at all. But I think the numbers prove that theory wrong.

Part of the problem with the race to the bottom in apps isn’t that people won’t buy them, but that they have an odd idea about value for money. I’ve lost count of the number of game devs who say people have a go at them when they’ve the audacity to price their apps above tier-one. After all, games should cost 69p/$0.99, for some reason. And often I’ll be rummaging around the App Store and see some dolt slam a fantastic game because it costs £1.49. Don’t get them wrong—they enjoyed the game. But it should have been 69p, just because.

That said, I’ll admit now to doing one of the things Gaywood mentioned. I have an AppShopper wish-list, which is full of apps that I’d be keen on buying if they were cheaper, even if they’re already cheap. For me, though, this isn’t so much about being a skinflint, more about creating a storage repository for games and apps I’m mildly sort-of interested in. Apps I care about or that look really interesting are ones I buy immediately, regardless of price. After all, with a few exceptions, iOS apps still usually cost a fraction of the price I was paying for games in 1986, or shareware apps I was buying in the late 1990s.

Apple’s issued an invitation regarding its September 12 announcement.

Although it’s possible Apple could throw a curveball and not call its next iPhone the iPhone 5, that would be curious when taking this invite into account. There had been speculation with the iPad dropping a number (simply being dubbed ‘the new iPad’), the iPhone would follow suit. This doesn’t appear to be the case, which suggests two things.

First, the iPhone still requires clear sales differentiation in terms of device naming, meaning at least two other numbered models will remain on sale. Given that iOS 6 works (in a feature-limited fashion) on the iPhone 3GS, it’s possible Apple’s line-up next week will include the iPhone 5, iPhone 4S, iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS. Fast forward a couple of years and dropping the number would leave you with the iPhone, the iPhone and the iPhone, and all kinds of sales problems.

Secondly, the iPad road-map apparently does not need sales differentiation in terms of device naming. This suggests the iPad 2 remaining on sale is short-term plugging of a low(ish)-end price-point hole. Although I still struggle to see the point of a 7-inch iPad, I now reckon there’s a good chance we’ll see such a model this year or early next year, and older models of the iPad will be removed from the channel as new ones appear, rather more like the iPod touch or Apple’s laptops/desktops than the iPhone.

Update: Well, that was fast. The ‘double update’ thing is now gone, and I’m no longer given the OS X Mountain Lion download ‘option’. Looks like a glitch has been squished and an engineer cuffed around the ear.

Despite a half-hour swearing at Mail for refusing to update my email database until it randomly had a change of heart, my Mountain Lion upgrade appears to have gone smoothly (although I did of course make two clones prior to doing so), somehow avoiding what Mr Matt Gemmell has referred to as the Grannell Tech Halo of Doom, given my usual upgrades from hell. The reason I upgraded, truth be told, is I had to, because one of the magazines I regularly contribute to, MacFormat, is switching all its grabs to Mountain Lion next issue.

Generally, I don’t like to upgrade OS X prior to a point upgrade being made, but Mountain Lion’s so far been reasonable. GarageBand seems to have continued its gradual decline, now running even slower than under Lion (if that’s possible) and with more playback glitches. Elsewhere, though, I’ve witnessed few app crashes, but also witnessed few reasons why I’d have upgraded given the chance. I think about the only new feature I’ve used so far is Calendar’s mini-calendars (back after vanishing in Lion), and I’ve had to do some minor surgery to remove the Calendar page rip and also stop iCloud-enabled apps defaulting to iCloud every single time they access a Save dialog. (I could hug Mac OS X Hints for the Terminal command for achieving this.)

Today, though, OS X 10.8.1 arrived, and so I dutifully went to the Mac App Store, which has now taken over from Software Update and saw this:

Without thinking, I clicked Download on OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.1 and noted it had started to download the full installer. Given that the aforementioned Mr Gemmell had earlier today noted the svelte nature of the update, I was a little taken aback by this. On further investigation, I discovered the updater was hidden inside the collapsible Software Update entry at the top (although the OS X 10.8.1 listing only appeared after I restarted the Mac App Store app—prior to that, it was just voice updates).

This strikes me as an odd piece of user experience design. One option is right in your face and the other can be hidden. How many relatively novice OS X users are going to by mistake download the full installer rather than the updater? (And, for that matter, how many pro users? Judging by my Twitter feed, it appears I’m not the only one who nearly did this.) For some people, that will also eat into bandwidth caps, due to what’s primarily an interface issue—not putting the most important thing (the update) front and centre over the thing of lesser importance (downloading the entire OS X installer again).

I hope this is teething problems and will be addressed, because to my mind it’s a really poor piece of design. Oh, and if you made the same mistake I did, you can cancel—rather than pause—a Mac App Store download by holding Option and clicking the Cancel button (which is what Pause then turns into—another piece of hidden but essential UI).

Kotaku editor Stephen Totilo has published an interview with Satoru Iwata, president of Nintendo. I’ve written quite a bit about Nintendo on this blog, and prior to the iPhone’s appearance, most of my gaming was on Nintendo handhelds. I particularly loved the DS, but I also own various Game Boys, and they all sit sadly unloved in a chest of drawers in my office.

Despite this, I’m not of the opinion Nintendo should throw in its lot with Apple and other third parties, effectively becoming another Sega—yet. This is because Nintendo still has the potential to out-Apple Apple in the gaming space, through making games and hardware. This, note, is what Apple proponents rightly say sets Apple apart from much of the competition—it makes devices and operating systems, and so can mesh those things together far better than other companies. But Apple doesn’t do this in gaming.

What Apple does do in gaming, however, is provide a number of lessons that I still believe Nintendo must learn from:

• More of an emphasis on digital downloads, with the immediacy and better value  those things can provide.
• A better way of dealing with indies—perhaps not quite a iOS-style free-for-all, but there must be a happy medium where bedroom coders are encouraged to bring further innovation to the platform.
• More linkage with the wider world, through the use of non-gaming apps. Again, Nintendo shouldn’t follow Apple in this regard—a Nintendo device doesn’t need a half-million apps. But it does need to keep the device in someone’s hands, so they don’t stray. So: stronger social, browsing and video apps are a must, for a start.

The main focus of a Nintendo device must remain games, but that shouldn’t be the only focus, otherwise Nintendo runs the risk of its devices becoming increasingly niche, which in itself is a danger in that such things will appeal to people with very specific demands. The success of Nintendo handhelds has often hinged on their accessible and widespread nature, not them only finding favour with the select few.

The Kotaku interview is interesting in that instead of being bullish—Nintendo’s tactic of the past—Iwata is seemingly very aware of the changes in the market and yet has a belief Nintendo can continue to succeed. Again, there’s evidence here from Apple’s history—when the products are good enough, the company has been massively profitable with a minority share. Nintendo therefore must ensure its products are good enough—’magical’, to use Apple’s rather naff terminology—and not merely OK.

One way of doing this is in creating unique experiences, argues Iwata:

I think that if we are able to provide experiences on handheld devices that consumers cannot get on another device, then we will continue creating software and hardware going forward…

Strong first-party games married with intuitive and preferably innovative control mechanisms are the way to do this. But Nintendo has of late too often wavered and retreated to its default position of “release the same hardware in different colours and at different sizes”, which leads to Iwata’s flip-side of the coin:

… and if it comes to a point when we’re not able to do that, I think, yeah, you will see portable handheld gaming devices go the way of the Dodo

Curiously, though, Iwata also isn’t blind to its rivals, nor seemingly scared by them, as the Kotaku piece notes:

The entirety of what you might need to know about how Satoru Iwata feels about the supposed threat of Apple and iOS gaming is that, during our interview last week, Iwata read 3DS sales figures to me off of a MacBook Air, which was plugged into a white iPhone, presumably his. When a gaming reporter goes to a showcase for, say, a Wii game or an Xbox game, Nintendo and Microsoft show their games on non-Sony TVs. They don’t let you see hardware from supposed rivals. But there was Iwata, sitting around the corner of a table from me, laptop flipped open, Apple icon presented toward me.

This to my mind shows a confidence in Nintendo’s products, and also an admission that other companies exist, and that their products are also worth using. Additionally, Totilo also got an interesting response from Iwata about the thorny issue of convergence:

[In] the day of the GBA our challenge was to provide experiences you could not have on a cellphone at that time. In the same way, we have to look at the Nintendo 3DS and other platforms in our future as being able to do the same thing in terms of what smartphones can provide as well.

However, Totilo makes a statement that’s almost a counterpoint and that rings very true:

[The interview] was eye-opening, because it did not conform with the critique from some quarters that Nintendo’s head is in the sand and that it does not appreciate the threat of cheap, downloadable iOS and Android games. But it was also short on specifics of how Nintendo would set itself apart in a world that seems more gaga over the next iPhone than over, say, the 3DS’ glass-free 3D.

This appears to be the challenge for Nintendo now: not in realising the market has changed, but responding to that. I’m going to be very interested to see what’s next from the company. Another DS with a gimmick is clearly not going to be enough. I wouldn’t be shocked to see the Game Boy brand back, but as a much stronger device in terms of being multifunctional, but also with innovations for gaming that no-one else had thought of. If not and we just get the 3DSMax-o-tron II, I think Nintendo could find itself in a much worse situation.

Still, even if the worst comes to the worst and Nintendo did have to do a Sega, imagine if its games ended up officially on iOS: Angry Birds would be ousted from the top of the charts by Mario and chums, probably forever. As a worse-case scenario, that’s not too bad a prospect, and you could bet even a gaming-ambivalent Apple would sit up and take notice if it got an email from Iwata mentioning that Nintendo’s games were soon coming to the iPhone and iPad.