In the current issue of MacUser magazine is a two-page spread of developer feedback to the new iPhone/iPod touch screen size, which shifted from the original’s 3:2 to a 16:9 ratio. Within, veteran developer John Pickford said something particularly interesting:

We’ll certainly take the new shape into account on future games, and the fact there are now three shapes to support means we’ll most likely go for an approach that doesn’t depend too heavily on screen shape.

One of the big things about iOS when it first arrived was that the device became the app. Because of the single screen size, you had developers, for better or worse, crafting experiences finely honed for the iPhone’s screen size. As the iPad arrived, developers split into those who continued to craft specifically for both screen ratios and those who took a more flexible approach, akin to responsive web design. In the case of the Pickfords and their game Magnetic Billiards:

We support two screen shapes (iPhone up to 4S and iPad).  The entire backdrop is a single bitmap and we even have different levels on iPad to make good use of the extra resolution and different screen shape. Properly supporting to the new long screen would be a lot of work if we were to take the same approach and redesign all the levels to account for the new shape. We haven’t decided what to do yet, but it’s probably not going to be cost effective to make that change.

Today, PC Advisor and other publications are showcasing the iPad mini. Despite my protestations in the past, even I have to admit this device is almost certainly on the way (although this photo could easily enough be yet another clever fake). What’s not known is what screen such a device would have: 4:3, like the iPad; 16:9, like the new iPhone and iPod touch; something entirely different. Even scaling from an existing ratio would make some apps work better or worse, because interface components would be bigger or smaller, depending on whether the app scaled up from the iPhone or down from the iPad, respectively.

All this is a very long way of saying that we’re going to see a big change in a certain type of iOS app—the one designed for the device. Pickford summed it up by stating his approach would no longer depend heavily on screen shape, and I’ve heard similar from other developers, both of apps and games (although especially the latter). In a sense, this could be a good thing—freeing up iOS from the constraints of specific screen shapes opens up developers to whatever Apple throws at them next and should also make apps simpler to port to competing platforms. But it also impacts heavily on those tightly crafted experiences that were designed just for your iPad or just for your iPhone. Having all the action take place only in the very centre of a screen, because a developer cannot guarantee what device you’re using, or, worse, carving out a viewport and surrounding it with a border, could cheapen iOS games and apps in a big way.

Perhaps I’m being pessimistic, but pre-iPhone 5, indies were already feeling the pinch. With that device and perhaps a new, smaller iPad to contend with, the shift towards more fluid and less device-specific apps seems inevitable.

Further reading: Standards guru and web designer Jeffrey Zeldman responds in Will the last digital canvas please turn out the lights?

TechCrunch’s Jordan Crook asks: In A Keyboard-Free Future, What Happens To All The Writers?

I wrote this post with my voice. I made no changes, save for a few typo corrections, and used no keyboard. That’s probably why it’s so bad.

It’s an experiment of mine. The hypothesis is whether or not a keyboardless world will change writing. And make no mistake, at some point we will live in a keyboardless world.

His concern: writing “gets rid of the voice entirely”, and speaking has a lack of editing. There’s also a quote from Paul Graham that more or less says speaking doesn’t generate ideas as well as writing does, because there’s less consideration.

Crook continues:

In short, good ideas don’t come from saying them, they come from writing them. They come from quiet thought transferred silently over to print.

This isn’t the case for many people. A future entirely lacking some kind of editing mechanism would, of course, be hellish from a publishing standpoint. However, I know—and I’m not going to name names—a number of fairly prominent writers who primarily use speech input to get their initial ideas down. Some feel more comfortable speaking, whereas others simply aren’t fast enough to type their thoughts into a software package. Although I myself don’t often use speech software (bar for subbing, having the iMac read back my work), I nonetheless sometimes find myself firing a kind of stream-of-thought into whatever writing package I’m using (not least when writing for this blog). This isn’t terribly filtered, and, as Graham puts it, I spend “no more time thinking about each sentence than it takes to say it”. But that doesn’t matter when the person crafting a piece of written output then spends subsequent time honing and editing it. Like with every other creative medium, it’s the edit that’s so often important with the written (or spoken) word.

Crook ends with a thought that makes sense, and then another that perhaps lacks vision:

Or more likely, will software be built for our constant writing, deleting, and rewriting?

Only time can tell for certain, but I know one thing without a doubt. Speaking this post, even without any corrections, took far longer than writing it would have.

Without doubt, we will continue to see interfaces improve beyond someone having to be tied to a keyboard, in precisely the same way that DTP apps in the 1980s moved us on from having to laboriously manually correct typewritten documents. There’s so much scope in gestural interfaces twinned with a kind of artificial intelligence—being able to select a chunk of your voice-input text and tell the application to move it, delete it, or change it in some way. On that basis, while I agree with Crook’s concluding line, I suspect it’ll be sooner rather than later before we have more intuitive and natural means of creating text than restricting people to how fast their fingers move over a QWERTY keyboard.

I’ve twice written about iOS 6 Maps. Many people are finding them substandard, something Apple must now be very aware of; perhaps some people at the company even regret essentially saying on stage they were the best maps ever, versus showing a little humility, like the company did with Siri. (Jean-Louis Gassée has a great take on this in his most recent Monday Note.)

My thinking to date on all this has been to cut Apple a little slack, but only in the sense of Apple getting its shit together within the next few months. Maps are hard and they take time to improve, but certain things should be possible to update very quickly, if Apple throws enough people and money at the problem. For example, the UK’s regularly dreadful satellite photography surely isn’t an insurmountable problem that would take years to fix; similarly, cleaning up databases when it comes to POIs; also, sorting out whatever idiot algorithm determines priorities when your directions include a single name. (An oft-used example in the UK: directions to Luton helpfully sending you to Luton in Devon, a town that’s so prominent and important that it gets a two-line write-up in Wikipedia. For reasons unknown, Apple’s new Maps app doesn’t default to Luton in Bedforshire, a town with a population of 255,000, and and also home to an international airport that just a few people might need directions to.)

Shortly after Maps was released, I said we should maybe give it time, but Ian Betteridge argued that would be akin to the grading on a curve that Android often gets away with. He elaborated on his blog:

I’ve seen a few comments out there to the effect that actually people should remember this is the first release, that mapping is hard, that it’s not their fault Google wouldn’t give them maps, and therefore Apple should be cut some slack. To my mind, this is nonsense. It’s effectively grading Apple on a curve, giving them a pass to create something sub-standard because doing good maps is really tough.

His point was the customer doesn’t care about behind-the-scenes problems and Apple ultimately has no excuse for making the experience worse. At the time, I somewhat disagreed with the no-slack argument, but I’m now coming round to it, largely because some pundits and writers appear to have a level of cognitive dissonance that boggles the mind. The latest thing I’m seeing is that, hey, we don’t need Street View in iOS anyway. Why? Because we’ve got Flyover, which is much better.

This is clearly a ‘better’ I’m not familiar with. Flyover is without doubt fun. You can scoot about major cities, spin the map in 3D, and laugh when it all goes a bit wrong. Thing is, Street View wasn’t a gimmick—it was practical. You could use it to plan routes and check landmarks, making walking to or driving to a location easier. Maps are all about planning and directions, and Google Maps succeeds at both.

I decided to pluck a location at random, Forbidden Planet‘s Shaftesbury Avenue store in London. This, I figured, would be a fair test of the two systems, given that I already knew iOS 6 Maps had Flyover data for London. (Had I chosen my own home town, the test would have been a tad one-sided. There’s not—nor I imagine will there ever be—Flyover here. But at the time of writing, there also aren’t any remotely usable satellite maps—it appears to zoom in from a shot that’s not even detailed enough to show a nearby motorway.)

So, first up: Google Maps. My iPod’s still on iOS 5, and so I typed ‘179 Shaftesbury Avenue’ into the Maps app and fired up Street View. Helpfully, Google Maps immediately put me on the wrong street—Compton Street runs parallel to Shaftesbury Avenue. Oops. Google Maps isn’t perfect either.

I could have used the arrows to navigate around the corner, but I figured it’d be quicker to go back to the map and drop a pin on the road outside of the place I wanted to see. I could then fire up Street View from that location.

And here’s the view along Shaftesbury Avenue from where the pin was dropped. There’s plenty of detail just from this one shot that would enable me to figure out where I’m going. (Not standing right there in reality would be a good decision, however, unless the plan was to get run over by a taxi.)

Spin round and there it is: a little slice of geek heaven, with a handy crossing right next to it. When walking or driving, these visuals are hugely useful.

So, iOS 6. To the app’s credit, it at least got the location right, with more or less the same precision as Google Maps. I tapped Flyover and zoomed in as far as possible. The resulting view would be fine for planning some kind of invasion from the air of a comic-book store, but at this point I’d question its general usefulness.

Worse, the following image shows what Shaftesbury Avenue looks like. Clearly, the trees confuse Apple’s software, and the result is a street that has buildings with slowly melting roofs that’s infested with Triffids. And unless you own a helicopter and regularly parachute from it to locations in London when shopping, there’s no practicality to be had even if the trees weren’t there. The lack of detail means you simply cannot see landmarks from the point of view you have in a car or when walking.

To my mind, Flyover isn’t anywhere near a straight switch for Street View, and the worrying thing is that Apple probably won’t create something like Google’s solution. Right now, Flyover is merely an amusing toy for armchair tourism of select cities. It’s of little or no practical benefit, and it’s of no use whatsoever in finding your way to anywhere remotely obscure (unlike Google Maps, where you can see what a junction to a road in the middle of nowhere looks like, along with any helpfully odd-looking trees in the vicinity). Any pundits somehow suggesting otherwise either don’t use Maps that often for this kind of navigation or really need to share their helicopters with the rest of us.

The Next Web reports for Instagram that times are a-changing. There are essentially two kinds of app in Instagram’s ‘add a pretty filter’ space:

• Highly entertaining apps that evoke old-school instant camera charm by live-applying a filter, so you can see what you’re going to get. This is Instagram today.
• Hum-drum apps where you take a photo in a normal, boring way and then spend several days arsing about with countless filters, before more or less choosing one at random, because the alternative is starving to death with a smartphone in your hand, which would be really dumb. This is Instagram tomorrow.

The m0st astonishing aspect of this story comes from Instagram itself, via the known issues site.

As of the current release (v3.1), Instagram does not support live filters on the iPhone 5. Going forward, live filters will be phased out as we work to improve the Instagram experience for all users.

That last sentence is very important and warrants breaking up into chunks:

as we work to improve the Instagram experience

What? How are you improving the Instagram experience by removing something that is core to the Instagram experience?

for all users.

Oh. So Instagram’s boarded the lowest-common denominator train. Next stop: Shitappsville.

UPDATE: Ha! So, on Twitter the response has been split between “Instagram are idiots” and “I never even knew live filters existed”, so perhaps this is also a case of Instagram stamping on a tricky engineering problem related to a feature not used by enough people for them to think it matters. (That said, Android users have responded, grumbling that they’d really like live filters.) Regardless, it’s still a pity to see an app that’s like a ton of point-and-clicks in your pocket get downgraded to one of a billion apply-a-filter-later apps welded to a social network.

Sometimes, there are cringeworthy adverts and video spots, but then there’s something that doesn’t so much make your toes curl up as flee for another country.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlsahuZ_4oM&feature=youtu.be

So there we have it. RIM’s band plays on as the ship goes down (baby). Still, I’m sure this will convince developers that everything’s OK. And even if it doesn’t, there’s the rousing speech from CEO Thorsten Heins that RIM has a real honest-to-goodness shot at being number three. However, at the time of writing, I could not confirm whether he meant number three in the mobile computing space or in the soft-rock charts.