Via Daring Fireball, a couple of app galleries: Android niceties and My Favorite Metro Apps. Android has a reputation for poor, ugly design when it comes to apps, but that’s clearly not the case with these examples, and Metro showcases its slick, modern aesthetic. But one thing struck me about these designs: they all look rather similar, polished, shiny and slick, but they lack character, heart and soul.

I’m a fan of minimal design, and so these information-rich, no-nonsense designs do appeal to me. However, on seeing these apps as a gallery, it makes sense why Apple continues to take a very different route when it comes to interface design, regularly aping real-world items or, at the very least, adding some visual texture to apps. I don’t really like it—iCal on the Mac is, for example, horribly ugly, especially when sat next to the simpler, sleeker Mail—but there’s a certain familiarity and warmth generated by more texture-oriented design that no amount of flat colours, subtle gradients and considered typography will ever bring, no matter how often graphic designers cross their fingers and pray to the god of Pantones.

I last month covered Atari’s spat with the people behind Vector Tanks. In short, an indie makes a Battlezone tribute, which, to be fair, was pretty damn close to Battlezone, and tries to licence the original property but Atari remains silent. The dev then devises a sequel, which is to Battlezone what Galaga is to Space Invaders: a superficially similar game but one that actually feels very different. Atari finally notices Vector Tanks and has both games removed from the App Store, citing IP infringement. At the same time, it rampages about the place, forcing devs to change the names of games with ‘pong’ in the title. The company had previously, during its first (and brief) foray into iOS, also attempted to get bat-and-ball games (i.e. Breakout derivatives) removed from the store, albeit with less success.

Sites all over the web are now saying that Atari’s being the good guy regarding indies, through its Pong Indie Developer Challenge¹. It’s a great opportunity for indies to rework a classic game, and get up to $100,000 for their efforts, they say! Well, right until you bother to read the terms and conditions, which were expertly covered by Brian Robbins on Gamasutra yesterday.

It’s spec work, pure and simple. This isn’t so much an opportunity for indie devs as exploitation—a way for Atari to potentially get dozens of game ideas and not have to pay for them (since all submissions become Atari’s property, regardless of whether the submitter wins the competition). Despite its aggressive stance on the App Store, Atari has supported indies in the past—the recent remakes of Breakout and Asteroids were both farmed out to small developers rather than being done in-house. Had that been the same here, great. It would have been a way for Atari to again say: “Look! We do care about indies.” However, spec work is something I cannot celebrate, and so I find it difficult to see the Pong Indie Developer Challenge as anything more than a cynical attempt by a major publisher to get videogame ideas on the cheap.

¹ And the choice of game also presumably explains Atari’s blitz of App Store games with ‘pong’ in their names. Although since Pong is an Atari trademark, that’s not something I consider bad form from Atari.

Slide to Play reviews the PlayStation Vita:

The battery lasts about four hours, which isn’t great.

[The] overall interface is cluttered and somewhat unintuitive.

The touchscreen also feels occasionally unresponsive on both the home screen and in games.

The main cameras are definitely not up to par with the quality of the iPhone’s

The Vita is also rather bulky—especially next to an iPhone

It’s like a shopping list of ‘gnh’, and it feels as if Sony’s living in a little bubble where Apple and Android devices don’t exist, and where no-one’s switching to iOS and Android devices for all-in-one entertainment. Note that the review shows Vita does have some good points—it’s powerful, has a great screen, provides some innovation in the form of a rear touch panel, offers GPS, Wi-Fi, 3G and Bluetooth, has cloud sync for progress, and you can also control a PS3 with the handheld; but this next bit makes me slam my head into the desk with such force that it breaks in half and the sides fly up and hit me in the ears:

Probably the biggest complaint is Sony’s insistence on using a new and completely proprietary memory card format. The 16 GB card is about $60 and the 32 GB is $100, and unlike the standard Micro SD card that virtually every other device uses, these tiny cards are only for the Vita.

Really, Sony? Really? Did you not learn your lesson with UMD? Good grief. Still, at least the system is, according to Slide to Play, “very focused on online commerce thanks to Sony’s beefy online store”. Although whether people will be happy paying out for “$10–$50 Vita games” when iOS and Android equivalents are a fraction of that remains to be seen.

I suspect a core number of gamers will inevitably flock to the Vita, but I do wonder if the day of the dedicated gaming handheld is coming to a close. Even with Sony’s admission that apps beyond games are necessary on its console, adults and children alike enjoy the scope more ambitious devices bring them. It wouldn’t shock me to see a situation in a few years where PlayStation becomes a brand on Android devices and Nintendo becomes a Mario-flavoured version of Sega, releasing games for a range of devices that it didn’t create itself.

Via Daring Fireball, Trevor Gilbert’s The Curious Case Of The (Cr)apps That Make Money:

Apple has a serious problem on their hands […] the proliferation of scamming apps.

Gilbert talks about Anton Sinelnikov’s many rip-offs, clearly designed to con buyers into thinking they’re downloading the likes of Plants vs. Zombies, Temple Run, Tiny Wings and Angry Birds, and he interviews developer Paul Haddad about solutions to the problem. Haddad argues Apple needs to clamp down on scam apps, not send the developer any payment, refund those who bought the app, and

curate the Top 100 list beyond automating it based on sales.

It’s not entirely clear what the last of those means; the clarification in the article is:

This would dramatically decrease the number of copies that are sold, while at the same time covering Apple’s bases while they wait for an official takedown notice.

My assumption is he means removing potential scam apps from the charts. I’m not sure that would always help, since innocent apps and games could easily get caught in a takedown spat, such as the one Edge found itself in a while back. However, if Apple can figure out a way to more clearly identify scam apps (copied/recoloured logos, clearly infringing IP, names obviously riffing on popular apps, and so on), I’d be all for that, because otherwise the App Store will end up edging closer to the dross you find in the Android Market.

Gilbert’s conclusion is particularly interesting:

[The] original purpose of screening applications was two fold: security and quality. With one of these missions fulfilled, Apple should start paying attention to the second.

I recall Steve Jobs saying something about App Store curation being required to ensure good apps aren’t surrounded by amateur hour. But amateur hour is precisely what’s happened. The harsh reality is you don’t get half a million great apps for any platform—when the numbers get really high, the majority of releases are crap. But what sets Apple’s store above others is the top tier of apps and games—both from large companies and indies. Generally, buyers can trust that what Apple recommends and, most often, what’s in the charts, is worth downloading*. As Gilbert hints, should that trust be broken, the App Store, developers, users and Apple alike all suffer. Ultimately, whatever Apple’s doing right now regarding its app review process simply isn’t enough. However much time each app is being given needs to be increased, and part of the approvals process must include some kind of search regarding various types of IP (names, characters, icons, imagery). Even in such scenarios, scam apps will still get through, I’m sure, but it’s one thing to have the odd bad egg sneak on to the App Store, and it’s another entirely to have dozens of the things stinking up the place on a regular basis.

* That’s not to say apps and games not in the charts aren’t any good—I regularly cover good apps that haven’t charted highly or at all, such as in my Hidden Gems feature for iGamer. But the point is those apps people are actively encouraged to buy via Apple or its algorithms must not break trust.

Back in January, I complained about the user experience of shiny disks and also the manner in which the TV and movie industries continue to be dicks. It wasn’t a particularly unique piece of writing, and yet it struck a nerve, rapidly becoming one of the most-read articles I’ve ever written for this blog.

Since then, we’ve seen Matt Gemmell write a piece called The Piracy Threshold, where he blames piracy on the “incredibly short-sighted, greedy and stupid” media industries, and The Oatmeal’s amusing take, I tried to watch Game of Thrones and this is what happened. Both articles summed up my earlier thoughts on the piracy debate:

If your studio isn’t making content legally available, affordably, and on a worldwide basis, shortly after broadcast, you’ve only yourselves to blame when people hit torrent websites and download it for free.

Note that this isn’t advocacy of piracy—it’s the reality of the market we find ourselves in, with industries desperate to cling to old business models. Some people, though, have a different take. Harry Marks, notably, has strongly reacted against people he terms ‘entitletards’. On the Oatmeal comic, he responded:

I tried to watch Game of Thrones and realized downloading it illegally was doing fuck-all to help the situation.

I tried to watch Game of Thrones and decided to wait two weeks until it came out on DVD because I don’t have the patience of a toddler.

He also responded to Gemmell’s piece with a retort that blames the users and not the studios for piracy, arguing that people are now too used to instant gratification, and that there are plenty of services you can use to access legal content. However, the majority of these remain US-only, and it’s perhaps easy for someone in that country to have a skewed viewpoint when it comes to the availability of legal media. Again, Marks and similar thinkers might consider anyone complaining about that whiners or ‘the entitled’, but the fact remains we now live in a connected world. If I can now chat to people all over the planet in an instant, it’s rather absurd that I can’t legally watch a US TV show—even a topical one—for many months (or longer) after its original broadcast date, by which point I’d probably know what happens in it anyway through spoilers being found accidentally. This, of course, helps no-one: I don’t get to watch the show, and the studio doesn’t get my money.

On Twitter, Marks, I and others also got into a row over another key argument in the current debate over piracy and rights: format shifting. Fair-use/fair-dealing laws vary by country, but it’s currently illegal in the UK to format-shift pretty much anything, including CDs to your computer (as MP3 or some other digital format). The law on this might soon change in the UK, providing a personal-use exception, but studios will almost certainly fight hard against such changes in any country; recently, for example, the MPAA attacked a proposal in the USA to provide a legal exception for DVD ripping, because the studios make a lot of money reselling content.

Part of the aforementioned Twitter discussion turned into one about constant rebuying. If you own a CD or DVD, should you rebuy that content digitally, or should it be legal to rip to digital for personal use? Some will argue, morally, they’ve already paid for the content, so why can’t they do what they want with it? Others will equate the same action to effectively grabbing a free digital copy when you merely already own a copy of something on vinyl or VHS. And yet what if the content you want access to simply isn’t available digitally? Should a favourite album or TV show remain out of reach, because the studios no longer care about it? In part, the solution in the future might be massive services along the lines of iTunes Match and Netflix, but there will always be gaps in the catalogues, even if you’re signed up to all of those available.

I’d also argue that the problem in any forced-rebuy model is that such notions have historically led to planned obsolescence and restrictions—a lack of flexibility in media specifically designed to keep having you buy the same material again and again. For the studios, this can be great, and it’s one of the things that caused the media sales spike during the shiny disc era. But for users, it always comes back to the same thing: the user experience is weaker than it should be. With shiny discs, there are all kinds of problems that I mentioned in my earlier piece; with digital, the main issues are ease-of-playback across owned devices (in this often not being possible) and availability, with studios semi-randomly pulling content from services and often ignoring any country that doesn’t happen to have a ‘U’, an ’S’ and an ‘A’ in its name.

Marks concludes his piece with the following:

I don’t care what your reason is. I don’t care that you don’t like how things are. Bottom line: there is no justification for piracy.

I happen to agree with the last bit of that. But I also happen to think there are reasons for piracy that can relatively easily be fixed by studios, if they have the will and the foresight. There is, of course, a chunk of the market forever lost—those that will never pay for anything. But as Apple and others have proved, it’s possible to ‘train’ people back into buying media, as shown with music; that industry was once thought doomed, but Apple rose to prominence through offering a strong user experience and making content readily available and affordable. And if any service is good enough, we’ve seen how technology creates a halo effect, with a small number of advocates having the potential to drive a disproportionate number of sales. I just hope the studios are listening, watching and reacting accordingly.

Update: Gary Marshall points to a piece talking about both sides of the argument by Andy Ihnatko. Within, he also mentions the sense of entitlement angle, and I should note that I see the Oatmeal comment more as a general statement about the industry rather than a scathing criticism of a specific show. Ihnatko does also say “If a distributor shows up […] with a product we want, we’ll buy it,” which is rather my point.