I always like it when a writer or publication subverts things that annoy the entire world, and the latest issue of Tap! magazine (which is half-price until the 14th) does this wonderfully. Amusingly deciding the iPhone 5 is old hat, the magazine looks ahead to the iPhone 6. And the iPhone 7. And all the way to the iPhone 24. But rather than becoming an analyst (and therefore screaming IT SHOULD BE LIKE ANDROID at the top of his lungs), writer Matthew Bolton’s refreshingly no-bullshit approach instead bases predictions and ideas on existing and in-development technology. Here’s what he came up with:

And Tap! head honcho Christopher Phin explains more in the video below.

So, what about that iPhone 25, eh?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tz2MYKXE7vQ

Every day, the world edges closer to becoming an episode of The Day Today, with a news cycle that is beyond satire. Today, The Register reports:

Russian Orthodox Christians have defaced the logos on Apple products because they consider the bitten Apple to be anti-Christian, says Russian news agency Interfax.

The radical Christians have replaced the Apple logo with a cross, claiming that the current Apple logo – well-known around the world and often voted one of the world’s most popular logos – symbolises the original sin of Adam and Eve and is generally insulting to the Christian faith.

The Register adds a new law is currently barrelling its way through the Russian Parliament to clamp down on religious insults, and there is speculation that

there could be commercial impact, even a sales ban, if Apple fell on the wrong side of the law.

But how would Apple fall on the wrong side of the law? In a sane world, this would be an argument about intent and not speculation, and as Apple logo designer Rob Janoff once told me in an interview:

The religious myths are just that […] there’s no ‘Eve and Garden of Eden’ and ‘bite from the fruit of knowledge’ symbolism!

Unfortunately, this no longer appears to be a sane world (if it ever was).

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.

Wired’s Ryan Rigney on Rovio. This is a very strange article, pretty much suggesting that Rovio has spent the last few years essentially iterating on its own version of Crush the Castle (which is fair enough), but seemingly ignoring the dozens of games the company made prior to Angry Birds. (What, you don’t fondly remember Sumea Ski Jump?) And then the company gets praise for Bad Piggies, which

doesn’t feel like anything else on the market

Bad Piggies is a good game, and it certainly avoids much of the randomness that I found utterly infuriating with Angry Birds after the initial excitement of flinging avians at ramshackle buildings wore off. But it’s not like build-your-own physics puzzlers are something new.

This isn’t a criticism of Rovio, however. For once, I actually have some faith in the company, purely on the basis that it has done something different to what it has been milking for years now. Also, the execution of Rovio’s new game is solid and impressive. But it is curious to see a lot of writers these days offering very abbreviated takes on the games industry.