In February, I wrote about motion-sickness problems I was experiencing because of OS X Lion. The full-screen transitions on my 27-inch iMac were making me dizzy, meaning I had to stop using them. A couple of weeks ago, I was shown ReSpaceApp, which looked like it could be a solution. The app is now called TotalSpaces and has joined Binary Age. It’s also had an update that brings precisely the functionality that I was hoping for. If you are having the same problems I was, here’s how to set up the app.

Install, then select Preferences from the app’s menu-bar icon. Under Layout, click the top-left grid (thereby reducing the number of desktops to just one) and check ‘Navigate right to full screen desktops’.

Under Transitions, uncheck ‘Use transitions’.

Under Hotkeys, you can define system-wide shortcuts for moving ‘left’ and ‘right’ between your desktop and full-screen apps.

Note that TotalSpaces doesn’t affect transition animations elsewhere—apps still ‘morph’ into full-screen, for example. However, for switching between apps, it does exactly what I needed, meaning I can finally start using full-screen apps in OS X, nine months after the OS first arrived.

The winners for the Appys Awards 2012 have just been revealed online, but the “long and star-studded night” might as well have been named Mobile Awards For The Usual Suspects. As someone who sees a lot of mobile apps and games, the final list is flat-out depressing, simply awarding big brands and seemingly entirely ignoring everything else. Regarding the nominations, the Appys site states:

What our staff don’t know about smartphones isn’t worth knowing. Naturally, we harnessed their expertise to bring you a shortlist of nominees across 12 categories in February earlier this year. All that was left was for you, the British public, to vote for your favourites.

Therein lies the rub: the public vote. This isn’t curation—it’s a popularity contest, rewarding the apps people know about already, rather than the best. It beggars belief in 2012 that Angry Birds should be winning any mobile gaming prizes, and that Facebook could win anything with its increasingly broken mobile apps. And while I am a big fan of the new responsive BBC News website, its news app is, at best, an oddball. There are a few choices on that list that don’t make me want to bang my head repeatedly against the desk, but they’re exceptions.

It only gets worse on looking at the nominations section of the website. It’s astonishing to see YouTube listed as ‘best music app’, but when you see it beat Spotify, GarageBand, Shazam and TuneIn Radio, you know this awards contest is garbage. In short: GAH.

In March, I wrote Why do magazines look so bad on the new iPad?, which fast became one of the most-read articles published on this blog. It was essentially a response to a Mashable article that attempted to explain why most magazines looked terrible on the new iPad. Since then, I’ve seen plenty of similar articles, arguing that the iPad’s Retina display has been tough for publishers, because the tools they use mostly export to rendered flat images at a set resolution rather than using native text. And every time I see such an article, my heart sinks a little, because they bang on about the future being PDFs and also inevitably fail to mention Tap! magazine.

I was invited to write for the launch issue of Tap! by editor Christopher Phin, and have edited the games section since then. From the very start, Tap! strove to be different. Mostly, this was down to the content: it had lively and punchy copy, and the reviews weren’t just rewritten press releases/App Store descriptions with a quick half-opinion bolted on the end.

Initially, the app was distributed digitally on Zinio, but there had always been plans to launch an app. Instead of simply churning out a PDF wrapper, the team built its own solution, and the workflow involves creating each issue on iPads or in the iPad simulator on a Mac. John Gruber recently referred to Cargo-Bot, an iPad game created on the iPad, as a “glimpse of the future”, but the iPad version of Tap! has been made on an iPad for months now.

However, technology isn’t the most important thing about a magazine: content is. As journo chum Gary Marshall points out on Tap! and magazines’ digital future, too many digital magazines that provide anything beyond PDFs treat the medium like it’s the 1990s, offering some kind of experience akin to CD-ROM. With Tap!, interactivity isn’t there for the sake of it—it genuinely enhances the magazine. In the video below, the editor takes you through some of the current issue:

http://youtu.be/G3B1yfeD7Bw

Although there are some cute visual touches in the magazine (such as the particle effects mentioned in the video, which make a round-up on astronomy apps look rather pretty), many of the things that I find most exciting about Tap! are the ways in which it increases usability and directly helps the reader.

In the latest issue, there are quite a few ‘comparison’ shots. These are simple drag-based affairs, but provide a great way to quickly switch back and forth between two images. Examples in Tap! magazine’s May 2012 edition include photos of the new iPad screen and that of the iPad 2, and a comparison of photo filter apps.

In the Games section, each review has a screen grab, but there’s also an in-context embedded video of the game, so you can get a better idea about it. These are also created in-house, so they’re not marketing fluff. Additionally, as the following grab shows, Tap! text is native, and so it can be copied and pasted. The mag also has built-in search and social-sharing functionality.

Other reviews also benefit from relatively subtle interactivity. In the Kit section, some of the images can be spun through 360 degrees. Again, this benefits the reader. Most press shots get a piece of kit’s best side, but in Tap! you can see if an expensive speaker looks good from all angles.

And from a purely content-oriented perspective, Tap! still goes a bit beyond, for example including a developer column by beardy coding wizard Matt Gemmell.

The Tap! app is available on the App Store, for free, and several previews are available for download. If you fancy experiencing an iPad magazine that looks fab on the new iPad (the latest update is fine-tuned for Retina, although it looked lovely anyway) and also has great content,  I urge you to give it a try.

In February, I wrote OS X Lion and motion sickness from full-screen animations and transitions. This outlined a problem I have with OS X Lion, in its full-screen transitions between full-screen apps making me dizzy. I’ve since written to Apple, practically begging for the company to bring in an option in OS X Mountain Lion to turn the transitions off, or at least change them to something less likely to fry my brain (such as a simple cross-fade). My thinking: if Apple can provide largely aesthetic alternate Dock minimisation effects, a checkbox in Mission Control’s settings that either enables a full-screen cross-fade effect or just turns off the slide isn’t too much to ask.

Based on the response I got on Twitter, I’m not alone in terms of OS X Lion and motion sickness, and today’s seen the article picked up by The Code Project. I hope, if nothing else, it might help the message get out there, and perhaps someone from Apple will even take note and become interested in solving the problem. The company, after all, makes a big deal out of universal access, and so I would hope it would attempt to reduce motion sickness in a sub-set of users.

In the meantime, Lukas Mathis earlier pointed me in the direction of ReSpaceApp. (Update: The app has now joined Binary Age and has been renamed TotalSpaces.) Currently in beta, the app aims to recreate the 2D Spaces grid functionality that Apple ditched from OS X Lion. But what Mathis pointed out to me was the app’s Transitions settings in the preferences—with a single click, transitions can be turned off, and user-definable hot-keys can be used to switch between spaces and to full-screen apps.

ReSpaceApp isn’t specifically designed to solve the problem I have—it’s an add-on for bringing Spaces-like grid functionality back to OS X. However, the settings nonetheless work much as I’d hoped. Command-tabbing to a full-screen app immediately switches to it, with no delay and no animation. It’s also possible to use shortcuts to move between full-screen apps. Currently, you cannot turn off the grid entirely, thereby forcing you to use at least two desktops along with full-screen apps; however, the developer tells me this will soon be fixed. (Update: This is now fixed.) Also, ReSpaceApp doesn’t affect Apple’s own code, and so the odd and—in my case—dizzying morphing effect as an app becomes full-screen remains.

Despite this, I can already recommend OS X Lion users suffering from motion sickness when working with full-screen apps at least check out ReSpaceApp. And while I wish the developer well with his product, I also hope someone at Cupertino is listening. Although transitions can be useful in providing direction to where things are located spatially, that’s no good if some people cannot use them at all, because the transitions make them sick. The transitions should certainly remain on by default, but Apple should also enable you to disable them.

I this morning awoke to find yet another email asking me how much it would cost for a developer to have their game reviewed and charges for placement. This isn’t nearly the first such email I’ve received—plenty have come my way, and more so since I started writing for Tap! magazine.

I find such emails hugely disheartening, because publications should not be charging for reviews (which some laughably refer to as ‘expedited’, as though it’s a good thing)—they should be curating on behalf of their readers and earning their money through advertising and readers paying for content.

Reviewers do get sent stuff—hardware, software, online codes—and sometimes they get to keep it. But there’s a world of difference between getting the odd freebie and outright asking people to pay you to review their wares. Gary Marshall sums this up nicely on Twitter:

It’s a betrayal of the readers. You’re in the scoring free stuff business, not the reviewing business.

I totally agree. So, devs, please stop asking me how much money I want to review your app or game, because the answer will always be nothing, and just the act of reading the email makes me sad. If you want me to consider your software for review, send me some information about it—a link to your website or to an App Store page; if it’s a paid app and you have a promo code handy, fire one over, so I can immediately install it on my kit, ready to check out later. But please don’t offer me money.