Previously on this blog, I’ve provided some handy hints for iOS developers regarding boosting your chances of getting a review in Tap! magazine, and for creating press pages for your app or game. In the first of those articles, I offer the following tip:

Let me know about your game. Email me or get in touch on Twitter. If I know about your game, there’s obviously more chance of it getting coverage.

These days, I get a lot of press releases, and about half of them are doing it wrong. So, here’s what you should be doing when you send out a press release:

1. Use the email’s text body. If your press release is mostly text-oriented, use the email itself to provide the text. This text remains searchable, and so when I later remember your product and want to check it out, I can easily search for your press release in my email client.
2. Get to the point. I’m fine with friendly, amusing language and a sense of fun in your text. I’m not fine with you waffling on for ages and not making it obvious what you’re talking about. You’ve made a game, so now imagine selling it to me in one minute. That’s pretty easy. Now do it in ten seconds. Tougher, but possible. Once you’ve done that, you should have the basis for your press release’s text. Note that this should include, right at the start, why I should play your game and what your game is about.
3. Don’t try to hide. You’d be surprised how many press releases I read where I’m none the wiser afterwards about how the game actually works or what it does. The text tries to disguise a derivative mechanic, but here’s a secret: a derivative game is not necessarily a bad thing, if what you’ve created is great. Some games I’ve rated very highly in Tap! include: Space Junk (Asteroids), Monsters Ate My Condo (deranged Jenga), All-Stars Racing (kart-racing), Contre Jour (more or less Cut the Rope). Don’t get me wrong: innovation is a good thing. But a derivative game isn’t necessarily bad, and it can even be a hook used to gain interest.
4. Don’t lie. There’s a fine line between positive copywriting and outright bullshit. You need to ensure you do not cross that line. I’ve had several press releases lately that have outright fictions in them, designed to make the game in question look better or be reviewed more favourably. In all cases, brief research via a search engine enabled me to find the facts behind the claims, which contradicted what I was initially told. And even positive copywriting needs to take care. Send me a press release claiming you’ve made the “best match-three game ever” and you’d better be bloody sure your game is amazing—as in ‘Zookeeper amazing’—because if it isn’t, why am I going to believe anything else you say? But while ‘best’ is almost impossible to prove, there’s nothing wrong with positive descriptive terms instead: addictive; engaging; exciting; great; terrific.
5. Do not use text attachments. If you send me a Word document which is just text, you’re wasting my time. I get dozens of press releases every day. Wasting my time does not go down well. If you send me a link to a Word document, you’re wasting even more of my time. I was today also asked on Twitter if sending a link to a Google doc is OK. No. If you want me to read something, put it in front of me now, or I will just move on to the next of the dozens of emails I need to get through.
6. Minimise other attachments. It’s increasingly common for emails about iOS games to be extraordinarily weighty. I’m happy to receive some attachments, such as a couple of screen grabs, but keep it light. Don’t provide me, as one PR recently did, with over 10 MB of grabs and an attached video. A couple of grabs that show off your app in its best light (i.e. not Game Center shots, the title screen, or options) is what you want to be sending.
7. Don’t make me jump through hoops. An email from ‘no-reply@’ with no other way to contact you means you’re making my life harder. An email where (and this happened recently) you say I can get promo codes, but only after I spend ten minutes signing up to your PR website that then takes 24 hours to acknowledge I even exist… well, that means you probably won’t get coverage at all. If you want your game covered, contact me, but also make it extremely easy to contact you.
8. Where possible, provide a video link. This is a new one, and something I’ll talk about in a later post, but gameplay videos can be an effective way to convince me to check out a game for possible (and even probable) coverage after your initial email has grabbed my attention. Sadly, a large proportion of iOS gameplay videos are utterly dreadful, and so my next ‘helpful hints’ post will provide ways to address this.

Marco Arment on the Asus Zenbook (and with a less-than-subtle ‘the assbook air’ URL):

It’s sad, really, that the state-of-the-art in the PC world is attempting to copy Apple. Why isn’t Asus trying to blow the MacBook Air out of the water with something radically better?

Looking at the insides of the two devices, it’s almost criminal; it really looks like ASUS bought a MacBook Air, tore it down and told its engineers to reproduce it. The even more depressing thing: despite a bundle of cash from Intel and having Apple to use as a template, these other companies cannot match the MacBook Air. Every new ‘ultrabook’ that appears has some massive problem or other: a crappy screen, a rubbish trackpad, overheating. Of course, blogs are still banging on about the ‘Apple tax’, but when you’re paying over a grand for a notebook, would you really want to save a couple of hundred bucks by buying what almost amounts to counterfeit goods?

More to the point, this showcases problems in the tech industry as a whole. As Arment says, ASUS and other notebook makers shouldn’t be copying Apple—they should be trying to better it. And yet all we see in the market is Apple-like designs showing up a year after Apple’s released something, and often, comically, after it’s moved on to something new. Remember that rash of MacBook Pro clones when Apple unveiled the MacBook Air? Embarrassing.

The same’s true in the smartphone space. I’m hoping Samsung gets nailed to the wall worldwide in its legal spat with Apple, not because I dislike Android (despite what you may think from this blog, I don’t really care either way for the platform), but because I utterly despise the kind of lazy pilfering that goes on in the market these days. I’m sure some smart-arse will yell “XEROX! Ahuh-huh-huh” at me. Sure, because Mac OS was exactly like Xerox, and Xerox didn’t at all invite Apple over knowing full-well what it was developing and also get a ton of stock for good measure…

At any rate, Apple’s never really claimed to invent a great deal of things anyway. The company has at its best been about refinement, and its rivals never manage that. Had Asus come out with something that largely resembled the MacBook Air but somehow took it to the next level, that would have been close to the Xerox/Mac OS scenario, and that would also have been great. Something new. Something exciting. Something where you’d be saying: you know, Apple should really have created this. Instead, we just get knock-offs that do little more than dilute the original design and attempt to confuse people into buying something because it’s just like the (slightly) more expensive real deal, even though it’s clearly not.

Flurry has written up a report, Is it Game Over for Nintendo DS and Sony PSP? It shows market percentages for major handheld platforms and notes that over the past three years the PSP’s share has all but dried up and Nintendo’s has declined from 70 to 57 to 36 per cent. What’s filled the gap? iOS and Android!

The problem is the manner in which the data’s presented. In the pie-charts provided—the hook that’s being reported everywhere—Flurry combines iOS and Android. Last time I looked, iOS and Android were not the same thing. In fact, I’m pretty sure you could consider them rival platforms, so why the hell combine them in the charts? “Because we’re trying to make the point that smartphone-oriented systems are beating the traditional ones, you idiot,” Flurry might say. So why then not combine Sony and Nintendo’s share in the same charts?

Data’s only really useful if the same methodology for presentation is used throughout. When even one set of pie-charts screws that up, the rest of the report is akin to stabbing myself in the eye with a fork, no matter how happy I am that iOS revenue is now outpacing even Nintendo’s handheld revenue.

Matt Alexander, writing for The Loop:

Simply put, Mobile Flash has been an excuse of a “feature” for platforms in the face of iOS.

[…]

Having pushed Mobile Flash as such a key differentiator, they’re looking at dealing with a whole host of confused and misinformed consumers.

That assumes most consumers will hear this news (they won’t) and that Android tablet manufacturers will stop bundling Flash, even as it ages and doesn’t get updated beyond security fixes (they won’t). I think it will be a while before the Flash bullet-point is dropped from the spec list of most Android tablets.

ZDNet:

Adobe is Stopping development on Flash Player for browsers on mobile.

More elaboration:

Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer adapt Flash Player for mobile devices to new browser, OS version or device configurations. Some of our source code licensees may opt to continue working on and releasing their own implementations. We will continue to support the current Android and PlayBook configurations with critical bug fixes and security updates.

In case no-one realises, this is Adobe throwing in the towel for Flash being a viable general web technology. With this announcement, Flash just became Director: an authoring environment for apps and—until native web tech catches up—elaborate interactive desktop embedded web-page components (including games). Anyone who argues otherwise is deluded, given that browsing is rapidly transitioning to mobile and yet Adobe’s now exiting this market when it comes to Flash.

Still, Apple and its stupid decision to not support Flash on the iPhone and iPad, eh?

Update: Adobe Featured Blogs now has a post up on the company’s decision to quit making Mobile Flash.