Published stuff

My Stuff column this week is Apple realises it has no choice but to allow game streaming on iPhone – before it’s too late, which digs into Apple’s iffy history regarding its demands for cloud gaming services on iPhone and its recent abrupt about-face. I also wrote about the new 25 years of Star Wars Lego sets.

Over at TapSmart, a trio of new articles went up, including home gym apps, ways I’d like Apple to improve AI on iPhone, and Serial Reader becoming part of my classic apps series.

Other stuff

There are two ways to approach reviews. The first is to hedge your bets and review potential. The second is to review what’s in front of you. I’ve always subscribed to the latter. I don’t think it benefits readers to provide recommendations based on promises that might never come to pass.

Which leads me to my Atari 2600+ review. That console is an odd beast anyway, but at the time of review suffered from compatibility issues that knocked its ability to play real carts. Also, one of my gripes was “too few new available cartridges”. Rummaging around eBay for ancient games that might not work isn’t what I consider huge fun.

There’s still not a glut of new carts, but it was interesting this week to discover Atari reissuing Atari 7800 versions of Fatal Run, Food Fight and Ninja Golf. These carts work with the 2600+ (which plays 2600 and 7800 titles) and are compatible with original Atari 7800 hardware too. Annoyingly, they lack manuals (Atari apparently still having not cottoned on to that aspect of authentic retro games), but otherwise they look great.

Imagine if Nintendo did the same. If instead of a tiny closed NES mini that went out of stock in about eight seconds, there was a tribute console that could play real NES carts. And then Nintendo reissued some of its classics. That’ll never happen, of course – Nintendo’s happier selling you the same games over and over again on digital services.

So while I might have given the Atari 2600+ 3/5 in the review, Atari itself deserves a higher rating for being a company doing retro in a really good way.

Published stuff

It was the Mac’s 40th this week. I wrote about my first Mac experiences on this blog. Over at Stuff, there was The Apple Mac at 40 – and 6 of the best desktop Macs, The best Mac apps 2024 from the App Store and beyond, and the nostalgia-fest of 40 years of the Mac: 40 classic apps that made Apple computers great. (Thanks to Lukas for inspiring that in last week’s comments.)

It wasn’t all about the Mac over the past seven days, though. My new column for Stuff is Why Netflix loves adverts more than it loves you. And for TapSmart, Zen Bound was added to my classics series, while the iPhone buyer’s guide made its debut.

Upcoming stuff

I’m still digging into a trio of classic gadget makers, figuring out how to write about their best bits without driving myself mad securing imagery.

Elsewhere, I’m awaiting delivery of a fun controller that reportedly lets you turn even a massive iPad into a handheld console.

Other stuff

For whatever reason, I’ve found it hard to work efficiently this month. I do struggle in winter, but this year has been particularly tough. I’ve ended up working chunks of evenings and weekends to not fall behind, which should not have been necessary with my current workload. My wife has suggested I stop beating myself up about this, given that I’m not missing deadlines and such. But, well, I hope I can fix this in February.

Because I have FOMO brain, I’m trying very hard to not buy a PowKiddy RGB30. It’s yet another retro console. I have a drawer full of the things. But this one has a 1:1 screen, which looks perfect for Pico-8 and Game Boy. Fortunately, my rational brain has been winning the battle so far, reminding me I barely have time to play games at all these days, so why buy yet another gadget I don’t need?

On tech, changes forced on Apple by the EU’s DMA have eaten into the tech news cycle. The coverage baffled me. So many sites had headlines that inferred Apple was making changes (such as ‘allowing alternative browser engines’) out of the goodness of its heart. Few noted these changes were forced on the company and that Apple is pushing back in every way it can. Quite a few folks from the US also appear to be furiously angry that foreigners have forced ‘their’ company to change how it acts. (A notable exception: the reliably excellent Jason Snell, whose piece about the news is required reading.)

Personally, I’m disappointed by not surprised but how things have shaken out. I’ve long hoped Apple would treat mobile more like the Mac – default to App Store only, but allow (after a billion warnings) users to load notarised IPAs on to an iPhone or iPad. Nope. In the EU alone, alternative app stores will be able to exist, albeit with punitive restrictions relating to per-download charges (effectively eradicating popular free apps) and the stores themselves, which need a letter of credit for a MILLION Euros. Oh, and this is all iPhone only, not iPad. Because Apple’s App Store is in fact a bunch of different App Stores.

There’s also the suggestion Apple won’t allow parents in the EU to block installs, arguing third-party stores aren’t compatible with its blocking mechanisms. Which feels like priming a trap, so later on someone can say “See? We told you this would be terrible!”

Bleh. I’ve seen more than one person suggest chunks of Apple’s response amount to malicious compliance. Either way, I think all this makes Apple come across badly. That the iPhone will have a browser picker nigh-identical to the one Microsoft was once forced to introduce on Windows due to anti-competitive behaviour is not a good look.

A pity Apple didn’t rip off the plaster sooner and open things up a bit, and reduce its commission rates a tad. That alone might have been enough to make everyone happy enough with the status quo.

Still, there was one silver lining: streaming gaming will now exist on the App Store. This isn’t EU-only – it’s everywhere. Which means everything from Xbox Cloud Gaming to Antstream could now become available through the App Store. That it’s not EU only makes me assume Apple finally came to the conclusion its position on streaming gaming was indefensible. It never made any sense that streaming music, TV and movies were all OK, but that game streaming was only permissible if each individual game was submitted as a standalone binary. Apple’s news update said the changes “reflect feedback from Apple’s developer community”. I mean, sure. It’s only been four years and change since a bunch of these services launched. Why hurry?

So it’s been a bit of a blaaahhh week. On the plus side, a new episode of Digitiser Level 2 debuts tomorrow. Moc-moc-a-moc!

A Mac Plus, much like the one I first used at school. (Image: MARC912374)

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As the Mac hits 40, I’ve been remembering my key ‘firsts’ with the platform.

At school, in around 1989 or 1990, I was plonked in front of a Mac Plus stashed in a cupboard. My English teacher reasoned “You know about computers” and I was tasked, with a few friends, with putting together the first edition of the school magazine. It’s to the credit of Apple and Aldus that the Mac and PageMaker together were usable enough that we managed this with no instructions. Although the teacher was perhaps overly optimistic about how long it would take, since she started getting annoyed after a few hours of us working on it instead of going to class. Even my most hardcore editors would admit putting together a magazine from scratch with dozens of pages takes a bit longer than a single session of double-English.

In 1996, while studying at Cardiff Art School, I was fortunate enough to win the Helen Gregory Memorial Scholarship. I shall remain forever grateful to the Gregory family, whose generosity allowed me to purchase my first Mac. It was a mighty beast – a PowerMac 8600/250AV, optimistically purchased during a period where people wondered whether Apple would wink out of existence entirely. I used this Mac to fashion some pioneering multimedia artwork, even if its dodgy internal HDD and the integrated Jaz drive tried their best to scupper my chances of retaining data for the entire length of my course.

By the time my uni course was done, Steve Jobs was back at Apple, and it looked like the company had turned the corner. The iMac had arrived. Until then, my parents had been fighting with a terrible PC, sold to them by some local cowboy to help run their business. I suggested the Mac. My folks were reluctant, but bought the Bondi Blue – and never looked back. That was my first experience of a ‘modern’ Mac as well.

Clearly, it had an impact, because I’m still writing about Macs regularly over a quarter of a century later!

The Mac was announced 40 years ago. Over at Stuff today, I’ll be writing about this milestone. First up is The Apple Mac at 40 – and 6 of the best desktop Macs. Later on, there will be articles about great modern apps – and much-loved classics that made the Mac. I hope you enjoy reading them.

Published stuff

Given the kerfuffle over Apple and app stores this week, I for TapSmart appropriately wrote 10 apps we’ll never see on the App Store. That’s me off Apple’s Christmas card list.

I also wrote up a relaxation toolkit (apps to help you unwind and destress) and a guide to bucket list apps.

My column for Stuff this week is:
Samsung Galaxy Ring looks to ring in wearable changes – how will Apple and others respond? Which may or may not be an ENTIRELY SERIOUS look at how the competition might respond to Samsung’s one ring to rule them all.

I also updated best upcoming Lego sets and browser games to kill your productivity.

Upcoming stuff

The big thing on my plate right now is Mac apps. I’m delving into the best of them, to rework an article in time for the Mac’s upcoming 40th. If you’ve any thoughts on apps to include (big or small), holler!

Other stuff

We’ve started to wind down telly subs, because we’re not using them. Disney+ and Amazon Prime have been paused. We’ll see how that goes. Ideally, Netflix would go too, but we have a 9yo glued to that service. Oh well. I can’t say I’ve missed Prime. Not having it has stopped me wasting yet more time trudging through Fear the Walking Dead.

Elections are bubbling into people’s consciousness. I therefore took a proper look at our seat. It’s one of the safest in the UK, but reportedly in play, according to pollsters. Although the results of the boundary review have skewed it in favour of the Conservative incumbent.

What irked most was the commission arguing it bolted on villages in the south-west to ensure the community was cohesive, and yet carved an entire town in half in the north-east. So people who live across the road from each other may be served by MPs from different parties and with starkly different ideologies. Unsurprisingly, the bits carved off are strongly Lib Dem in nature, and therefore more likely to vote against the current government and incumbent. Hmmm.

In tech, I saw Plants vs Zombies 3 was on the way, and promised a return to the gameplay of old. Natch, it’s not returning to the pricing of old. It has IAPs up the wazoo. One is a £74.99 consumable. Bollocks to that. I’ll stick to the original, which I sideloaded on to my original iPad Air.

Speaking of, Apple looks like it’ll carve up the App Store on a regional basis rather than allow global sideloading or the removal of anti-steering. I like my Apple kit, but come on. We know where things are heading, and right now Apple is seriously annoying developers of all stripes, right when it could do with them supporting its new platform. Bonkers.

Finally, some good news. In the UK, a video games magazine called Digitiser used to be broadcast on Teletext. It was a daily blast of games coverage and absurdist humour, which was hugely popular and with a unique writing style that influenced countless young minds.

I found it akin to an evolution of the Newsfield magazines I’d grown up with, combining their smart writing with silly humour. The lights finally went out in 2003, when Teletext succeeded in ousting the folks behind Digitiser, whereupon it was replaced by the staid GameCentral, at which point a lot of people lost interest.

The spirit of Digitiser lived on in various forms online, driven by co-creator Paul ‘Mr Biffo’ Rose. But a few years ago, a successful Kickstarter led to the hugely ambitious YouTube Digitiser The Show. It was a lot of fun, mixing retrogaming with a chaotic vibe that reminded me of anarchic children’s TV shows of old.

This weekend, Digitiser Level 2 debuts. The format has changed – for the better. It’s faster and with a smaller presenting team. The show is peppered with weird animations that look like they’ve escaped from Teletext pages. But mostly I love it because everyone involved looks like they’re having a blast. We need more of that kind of thing.