I was surprised yesterday to see 148Apps run a post on the Atari Pong Developer Challenge. I’ve written about this before on Revert to Saved, and the Atari competition is essentially spec work. Presumably gullible and desperate (or perhaps just naïvely optimistic) indies get to submit their ideas, which become the property of Atari, and one lucky winner ends up with a huge wodge of cash, although as Brian Robbins pointed out in February, said huge wodge might not be quite as huge as the dev was expecting. In his words:

If this were a typical publishing contract, there’s no way I would recommend any developer to sign these terms, no matter how desperate or cash strapped they are.

This is something of a far cry from 148Apps’s take:

Now is the chance to cash in that indie cred for a beefy paycheck.

More like cashing in your soul for a chance to win the King of the Spec World crown.

Like others who have run this story, 148Apps claims Atari is somehow extending an olive branch to the indie dev community, but there are other ways to do this. Atari could so easily have created its own shortlist of indie devs that create great games—perhaps great retro games, in some cases—and chucked a dev fee at them, thereby commissioning exciting and innovative indie games based around the Pong theme. This could then have been released as a series on the App Store, and if Atari was really wanting to doff its We Love Indies hat, it could have revenue-shared. But the Pong Indie Developer Challenge? That still, like a synonym of the original game’s name, stinks.

Gizmodo asks: What would it take for Apple to make a new iPad truly exciting again? Apple’s device is, after all, two years old now, and beyond totally revolutionising tablet computing and bringing with the latest version a display akin to print, it’s now a disappointment, argues Sam Biddle:

The new Apple iPad is kind of a paradox: At the same time it’s both the best possible tablet you can buy, and yet, it’s a disappointment. It retained the crown with an incremental performance bump.

See? (Obligatory link to ‘everything’s amazing right now and nobody’s happy‘.)

Waah, poor us: saddled with a piece of technology so well-executed in its first two iterations that the current generation is a letdown by virtue of not being Earth-shattering. We took a timeout from our tears to wonder: What would make a new iPad truly different, and even amazing?

People not banging on about how the new iPad isn’t amazing, despite the fact it kind of is?

Apple needs something that fundamentally changes the iPad.

As the new iPad’s terrible sales figures prove! (What we need is something that fundamentally changes tech journalism. Possibly involving mandatory lobotomies for many tech journalists.)

It needs something that makes the iPad a different, better sort of object, rather than just a refined one.

Because users and developers love nothing more than established popular platforms becoming moving targets. Just look at Android. Everyone loves Android!

Look, everyone’s a critic. We’re trying some constructive criticism—a wish list of ideas for a new iPad that actually feels new.

I WANT A UNICORN!

Luckily, Gizmodo then produces a list that doesn’t require magic or technology that doesn’t exist. No wait—it does precisely the opposite.

Imagine if the next iPad could run for days without a charge.

Imagine if electricity was free and smelled of strawberries!

Just imagine a subtle solar cell on the iPad’s back that would at least slow the battery drain while you’re using it outside.

Just imagine your iPad turning into the 2012 equivalent of a solar-powered calculator!

And focusing on a more efficient processor instead of a more powerful one would let Apple squeeze extra hours out of your pad—and we’ll take extra hours and days of life over a few aggregate seconds shaved off app launching.

Right up until Apple says it concentrated on the battery over the processor and Gizmodo runs with APPLE STUPID BERKS WITH RUBBISH PROCESSOR SCANDAL MEANS ANDROID WILL WIN.

And then we get “make it indestructible”, “make it flexible”, “improve the camera”, “resist the fingerprints” (OK, I like that one), “kill the Dock connector”, “GO GO GADGET PAGEVIEWS”, all before the wonderful finale:

Apple knows it doesn’t have to do any of this. For now. It can put out a minor upgrade every year and sell millions and millions more iPads—so why try? Because trying is what made Apple the most valuable technology company in the world.

If you’re still reading and your brain hasn’t exploded, here’s what not trying apparently  looks like:

• A Retina display considered by many to be among the very best displays that have existed, ever;
• Massive behind-the-scenes improvements in graphics power to ensure the screen doesn’t compromise performance;
• A battery that’s massively more powerful than its predecessor, housed in a case with roughly the same form factor.

Apple has shown that it can take its best current product (say, an iPhone 3GS), disassemble it, and put it back together as something golden and incredible and worthy of spectacle. Say, an iPhone 4. The step between those two phones was radical. The way the 4 was built, the way it felt, the screen, the camera that was like nothing else—it was dramatic.

I agree. The shift between the iPhone 3GS and the iPhone 4, which was mostly about improved performance, a better camera and the Retina display, really was dramatic.

A fundamental change.

Just like the new iPad. Which. Got. The. Same. Kind. Of. Changes.

After a few more years of institutional incrementalism, these iPad press conferences are going to stop justifying themselves. With enough cautious updates, the iPad will just turn into another thing you can buy. There’s no magic future there. But the magic future is what we all want.

The magic future is what we already have.

Kotaku reports on a tragic incident involving two children, from a story that originated at WJBF. They’d reportedly been playing Call of Duty, when one picked up a semi-automatic belonging to his parents and fired off some rounds, one of which fatally wounded the other. This is, of course, a horrible and tragic event, but the inference from the reporting is crazy.

The case—which has led to a charge of involuntary manslaughter—is being called an accident. Still, the television station reporting the incident spoke to child psychiatrist Dr. Dale Peeples…

Here we go.

who said that playing games like Black Ops could have contributed to this terrible event

Because kids never played ‘war’ before modern videogames arrived.

“A game that is rated M for Mature, probably doesn’t belong in the hands of a 12 year old”

Neither does a SEMI-AUTOMATIC GUN.

While it’s common to dismiss media outlets’ convenient linkages between violent video games and crime as sensationalist, this time—because of the closeness of the crime and the gameplay—it might not be as easy.

How about this for a link: had the child not had clearly far too easy access to a dangerous weapon, the other child would not have been shot. This has nothing to do with a videogame and everything to do with the gun.

Hat-tip: Xander Davis

AppStart recently argued in favour of an iPad mini with a 7.85-inch screen, and the story is now doing the rounds on Mac rumour sites. Inevitably, they are using it to back up ongoing unsourced garbage from publications that should know better than to claim a wee iPad is definitely due this year. Or possibly next year. But it’s definitely due! Honest!

The short of the thinking in this case is that a 7.85-inch iPad would result in a device with the same PPI as the original iPhone, and would therefore conform to Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines:

[When] Apple was designing its first iPhone (circa 2006), company engineers determined through testing that the minimum comfortable size for an interactive element on a touchscreen display is 44 x 44 pixels. Anything smaller would yield erratic results. The pixel density used to arrive at this number, naturally, was that used in the first iPhone — again, 163 PPI. […] In layman’s terms, all this simply means [is] that no app has tappable input zones smaller than Apple’s approved dimensions. Whatever the size of a given menu option in a given iPad app, it cannot shrink beyond Apple’s pre-established minimum. It might take a bit more hand-eye coordination, but overall interaction should not be affected.

This all sounds great until you realise that one of the fundamental aspects of iPad design isn’t slavish adherence to minimums, and that all existing apps have been designed for the current form factor. In other words, app designers haven’t been thinking about what-if scenarios such as a mythical 7.85-inch iPad—they’ve been optimising their creations for the 9.7-inch screen on the current models. That goes for everything: multitouch interactions; UI components and navigation; text sizes; and so on.

Arguing everything would be fine if a 7.85-inch iPad arrived with a 163 PPI screen is nonsensical. At best, existing apps would be fiddlier to use, causing more hit errors, and the text within them would be smaller and therefore harder to read. Apple to date has rarely been about compromising user experience in order to force itself into another market segment, and so I can’t see it doing that with the iPad. Additionally, Apple’s clearly moving its entire iOS line to pin-sharp Retina displays, and so why would it release a new product with a far inferior display to existing ones? Far better to perhaps power-up the iPod touch with 3G and improved electronic guts, thereby turning that device into a more viable iPad mini.

Reuters on Samsung seeking a killer design. Some great quotes from Samsung Mobile’s vice president for design, Lee Minhyouk.

I might not be at (Ive’s) level yet, but I believe Samsung will produce such iconic products one day. It’s not just effort that makes it possible for a new product to be a massive hit. It also has to be timely, and technology should be ready to make a certain design a reality.

I feel a bit sorry for Lee, but the way Samsung will produce iconic products like Apple’s will only be when it stops copying Apple’s iconic products and makes something truly of its own.