Ron Johnson did wonders at Apple, crafting a shopping experience like no other and that the competition would do well to ape (although not quite that closely, Samsung). But in his CEO role at J.C. Penney, things aren’t going well. His cunning plan of stopping race-to-the-bottom discounting, in favour of quality and honesty has made customers leave in droves.

Meanwhile, over at Apple, new retail VP John Browett has pissed off a whole bunch of people—not least staff—by attempting to make the already hugely profitable stores more profitable. His cunning plan: get rid of staff and essentially make Apple Stores more like any other mass-market retailer. To be fair to Browett, that’s what he knows—he used to fly high at Dixons and Tesco, neither of which is renowned for being a great experience, but Tesco at least is insanely profitable.

While it won’t happen, it strikes me everyone would be a lot happier (and two well-known retailing experiences wouldn’t be derailed) if these guys just swapped places.

Those cheeky chappies at Tap! magazine have been looking at the numbers surrounding iOS, and they’re big: 650,000 apps, 75 per cent of parents sharing app-enabled devices with kids, a grand a second raked in by Apple through the App Store, and, apparently, enough iPhones and iPads have been sold to make a Saturn-like ring around Earth. I also chuckled on reading Tap!’s extrapolation regarding the number of apps:

It would take you a week just to read the names of all the apps on the store

That’s how I feel time’s passing when trawling through insanely long RSS feeds, looking for apps to review.

Anyway, the spiffy graphic is below (Control/right-click and select the relevant option to view in big-o-vision) and Tap! the app is available now from the App Store. It’s very good.

There’s a story on the BBC about Tory MP Louise Mensch resigning, and it talks about her ‘Not Twitter, honest’ social network, Menshn:

Mrs Mensch was a prolific user of the micro-blogging site [Twitter] with 102,000 followers.

But she said recently she had grown “frustrated” with it and has set up a rival site – Menshn – which aims to keep conversations on topic and allow people to post 180 character messages – 40 more than Twitter.

There have been plenty of reports that have either failed to qualify the 180 character thing or have cited it as some kind of added value. Even all this time after Menshn launched, I find the 180 character decision arbitrary and odd. I can only assume Mensch and co. didn’t want to go for 140 through fear of being sued (or it being even more obvious about the service’s attempts to ‘clone’ Twitter). And so 180 was presumably plucked out of the air, because more equals better equals value equals PROFIT!? But Twitter chose 140 characters for a specific purpose: to enable compatibility with SMS.

Twitter’s now looking likely to move away from its roots, with things like expanded tweets, but the 140-character limit remains, enabling people using feature phones to still engage with the service. Menshn on the other hand remains lodged in a broken version of Twitter’s past, and lacks the ability to embrace what Twitter foresees as its future. It’s a strong lesson that decisions need to be more than arbitrary in order to make sense but also provide a service that enables more users to become involved.

Mac Performance Guide writes about data loss with OS X Mountain Lion and Save As. The Save As command was effectively removed from Lion, with Apple clearly wanting to end people’s reliance on saving at all, instead letting the OS deal with such things. In order to facilitate making copies of files (which many users had been trained to do via Save As), Apple provided a Duplicate option to clone an open document.

From what I can tell, Apple’s brave new way went down like a spoonful of piss. There was a lot of bitching and whining about Apple being stupid idiots for changing the way you deal with files. Personally, I liked the new workflow: I so often accidentally overwrite boilerplates, but the Duplicate option also enables you to revert the file you’re cloning from, which was for me a little slice of bliss.

Still, Apple relented and brought back Save As in ‘hidden’ form to OS X Mountain Lion (it’s only visible upon holding Option when you’re in the File menu). But instead of just saving a copy of the current document with a new name, it also overwrites the original with the same changes. Either this is a bug or Apple really has it in for anyone who doesn’t like its new ways of doing things.

Tap! magazine editor Christopher Phin has written about difficulty walls, and his frustration at being rubbish at games, thereby making his progress often resemble: Oh, this is quite nice. I’m having fun here, and I think th—SMACK. (We’ll ignore for a minute the super-secret that I’m about to reveal, in that Phin completed World of Goo HD in relatively little time and with no walkthrough assistance whatsoever, rather scuppering the ‘entirely rubbish at games’ thing, but anyway.)

Difficulty walls have long been a problem in gaming, and difficulty is extremely tricky to judge. Indies in particular have a hard time of it,  because they’ll regularly play their game and, naturally, get very good at it, and may ramp up the difficulty level accordingly. No worries, you might say, because good developers have chums and pals they can rope in for playtesting. Well, sure, but they regularly play the game and, naturally, get very good at it, and the developer may ramp up the difficulty level accordingly… Also, the opposite is sometimes true—devs get paranoid and the default (or, in bad cases, the only) difficulty level is set so low that you feel you could complete a level with your eyes shut and one hand tied behind your back, while being attacked by a mad person throwing inflatable geese at your head. Neither option is particularly fun for anyone. Apart from the geese.

In his article, Phin then argues Where’s My Water? has a kind of sawtooth curve, where each set of levels gets tougher until it’s complete; on starting a new set, the game eases off a bit. Long-time gamers will note that ebb-and-flow used to be quite common in gaming, especially in the arcades. Even those games that appeared relentless on the surface sometimes weren’t actually relentless at all if you were paying attention—instead, as a game hotted up, the odd easier level would be dropped in, enabling recovery. Eugene Jarvis once told me this was one of the main aspects of his game design, and it was why planet refreshes occurred in Defender after you’d carelessly allowed all the little guys under your protection to be horribly mutated by evil aliens:

It’s redemption, where if you can just survive a couple more waves, everything will be OK. Providing a difficulty curve, rather than a straight linear projection of progressive difficulty… instead, [Defender] has waves where it’s more and more difficult, and then—aah!—it’s easy for a little bit. You have this roller-coaster of emotions. “If I can just get through the next wave, I’ll be in paradise!”

It’s strange how few developers utilise this idea today, which can be beneficial for casual fare like Where’s My Water but also hardcore arcade gaming like Defender. I know Llamasoft‘s titles frequently use this technique, but so often developers think a straight line—easy to ‘really not very easy at all’—is the way to go, when variety in terms of difficulty can add spice and breathing space to games that often sorely need it.