In an earlier post today, I suggest Nintendo could be another Sega fairly soon, offering its IP on the App Store. Tap! deputy editor Matthew Bolton (who knows more than a bit about gaming), countered on Twitter:

I’m not so sure about Mario on [the] App Store. Nintendo’s technical meticulousness in Mario is unparalleled outside of racers… the controls’ responsiveness is tuned to perfection, and touchscreens are laggy. It’s an Apple situation

I agree. Touchscreens are fantastic for certain types of gaming, but not Mario-style platformers. (That’s not to say there aren’t decent 2D platformers for iOS, but they certainly don’t match Super Mario in terms of, as Matt put it, ‘technical meticulousness’.) But there is a solution: a third-party controller.

It’s not like such a thing is without precedent: I’ve written about iOS games controllers before, and although they’re something of a niche, Nintendo has the hardware savvy to produce such a thing, and the IP clout to encourage plenty of people to buy it. Of course, the company would lose control elsewhere, notably in terms of device hardware. But if Nintendo’s forced into a Sega-like position, its games on the App Store and a Nintendo controller doesn’t seem like the worst alternative.

I’ve written about Nintendo before. I used to be a huge fan of Nintendo in mobile, from the original Game Boy through to the DS. However, from the GBA onwards, I noticed a pattern, in that I’d increasingly end up noodling about with homebrew and emulators, through first-party games slowing to a trickle of recycled content, and third-party games largely being expensive crap. iOS then spoiled me. In just a few years, Apple’s hardware went from being quite interesting to utterly essential for anyone with a genuine interest in gaming. It reinvigorated the indie space on mobile, forced innovation through its lack of traditional controls, and although there was a gatekeeper, it was one that was far more likely to fling you the keys to the store than Nintendo or Sony.

Every quarter, we now hear some kind of bad news from Nintendo: its hardware isn’t selling as well as it hoped, and the profits the company is making aren’t high enough (or, in some cases, don’t exist at all). Marco Arment recently covered the various options for Nintendo, and his conclusion was much the same as what I said last summer: Nintendo cannot or will not deal with the challenges required to truly compete in the existing mobile marketplace, and there’s a good chance we’ll see the company exit hardware and become another Sega.

Arment’s final words, however, were particularly interesting:

I don’t think Nintendo has a bright future. I see them staying in the shrinking hardware business until the bitter end, and then becoming roughly like Sega today: a shell of the former company, probably acquired for relatively little by someone big, endlessly whoring out their old franchises in mostly mediocre games that will leave their old fans longing for the good old days.

To some extent, “endlessly whoring out their old franchises” is precisely what Nintendo’s business model on mobile has been for years. New console? Quick: crank out another Mario Bros. platformer that’s almost identical to the last! Rinse and repeat. Still, as the company responsible for so much innovation to mobile gaming with the DS, I’d like to think Nintendo has something brewing—something amazing that will kickstart its fortunes on mobile again. However, I’m not going to be shocked if we see an official Super Mario for iPhone on the App Store for $9.99 in a year or two.

Rob Griffiths recently penned a piece for Macworld, grumbling about Mountain Lion. He tore into two aspects of the OS: Apple’s tendency towards removing colour, and its decision to mess about with scrolling. On colour, I absolutely agree with Griffiths: colour is regularly used by people to rapidly differentiate objects. Cognitive load is lowered, enabling you to get to something far more quickly and efficiently. This is a trend in Apple’s interface design I’d like to see reversed, and perhaps it will be if the no-longer monochrome prefs icons in iTunes 11 are anything to go by.

The other points in the piece centre on scrolling. First up, hidden scrollbars:

Of these changes the invisible scroll is the worst: an invisible scroll bar is a useless scroll bar. Without a visible scroll bar, a user is required to take action to reveal the fact that a dialog or window contains additional information.

This is something that used to annoy me about iOS, and I thought it would drive me nuts on OS X. In reality, it’s bothered me little. Perhaps it’s because I’ve often attached the idea of scrolling to pages, and pages are rarely relevant any more. Perhaps it’s because in the majority of cases, it’s obvious if there’s more content outside of your view (due to the way in which it’s cropped). Maybe OS X’s little ‘scroll preview’ that pops up on opening an item that’s bigger than the viewport is enough for me. Who knows?

Where I very much disagree with Griffiths is on the subject of scroll direction.

The backwards scrolling also drives me crazy; Apple calls this “natural” scrolling, while I call it “insanely stupid scrolling.” The change was made to match the way people scroll iOS devices. However, interaction on an iOS device is directly with the screen, and it makes logical sense that the content moves the direction your finger moves.

I don’t see the opposite as being any more logical on OS X. It’s certainly what people have been used to for a long time, but I’d say Apple’s ‘natural’ scrolling makes at least as much sense. The old system evolved from you manually dragging a scrollbar. This was further abstracted on laptops that made it possible to scroll a viewport without you having to bother with clicking on the actual scroll bar. Therefore, your cursor could be over some content, and you’d be two-finger scrolling, updating the position of the scrollbar, which updated what you saw in the viewport.

The current system is simpler: you’re manipulating content. This is how things always worked on iOS, but with multitouch trackpads being extremely commonplace on Macs (since laptops are by far the most common type of Mac sold, and trackpads are also a built-to-order option for laptops), it makes perfect sense to me. You push up and the content moves up. You pull down and the content moves down. This isn’t backwards at all—and you can still, if you want, grab the scrollbar and move content that way. (Additionally, you can go into System Preferences and click [x] I HATE CHANGE—possibly actually labelled ‘scroll direction’—if you like.) As a sanity check, I asked my parents about this, whose Macs were recently ‘forcibly’ upgraded to OS X Mountain Lion when I got sick of doing Snow Leopard support. “Oh, it makes much more sense,” said my dad, dismissing any notion in my mind that scroll direction was a big deal for the most part.

On Twitter, David Marsden asked me for some thoughts on his piece on upcoming Apple kit. As is almost law these days, the Apple TV got a mention, with Marsden quoting The Loop’s Jim Dalrymple on a formal launch of an Apple television product.

Nope.

Marsden subsequently mulled over the possibility of an Apple TV SDK, and suggests that could start a progression towards a fully-fledged TV unit:

Let it sink in what the platform is about, then release the SDK at WWDC with big players on day one [… and] start the ground work for a fully fledged TV system late this year, or early next.

I’ve on occasion been very wrong about Apple in the past. I don’t still have a link, but one ex-MacUser wag once dug up my scathing dismissal of the original iPod, and I also once wrote about iPhone gaming, arguing it would end up floundering in the shadow of the DS and PSP. (Months later, I at least took my lumps and said “hey, what a total idiot I was” and set about yelling from the rooftops about iOS gaming at  every opportunity.)

The idea of an Apple TV still makes no sense to me though. Apple makes money on regular hardware refreshes. It would have to convince people to refresh televisions every two or three years. This is a very big ask. Marsden on Twitter suggested Apple would “need to have it as a screen with a swappable Apple TV brain”, but that runs counter to the Apple of today, which won’t even let consumers upgrade RAM in their laptops. The idea of enabling consumers to increase the longevity of an expensive unit by offering an inexpensive upgrade sounds more Windows PC than Apple TV.

Also—and importantly—the more interviews I do with media folk, gamers and the like, the more people talk about the ‘second screen’ taking over from the first. I don’t imagine televisions will vanish from sitting rooms any time soon, but people are now increasingly likely to watch video on mobile devices, and so concentrating effort on better iPads, iPods and iPhones seems savvier than working on a standalone television unit.

However, the existing Apple TV remains an interesting component—a relatively cheap ‘link’ to get what’s on your iOS device on to the television the Apple TV is connected to. The box itself isn’t that impressive (its innards being roughly the same as a cheap iPod touch), but what it does is modularise the ‘smart’ bits of ‘smart TV’, while remaining cheap enough to upgrade on a semi-regular basis. Furthermore, the software itself can be updated whenever Apple wishes, adding new services and content. Now that sounds very Apple, hence, I guess, why Apple’s actually released the thing!

To that end, I still don’t see an actual television in Apple’s future. Perhaps on this subject I’m lacking in imagination, but it seems no better a market to enter into than making a games console—Apple’s existing products already overlap with traditional media, and there seem few—if any—advantages in spending many millions of dollars going up against existing players.

On the current Apple TV, I expect to see more services—primarily US-centric ones—being drip-fed out over the coming months and years. I do hope Apple improves that particular situation. Although AirPlay is very handy, too many companies stupidly block video feeds, meaning the obvious tactic of starting a show on your iOS device and firing it at your TV via the Apple TV is too often scuppered. Beyond that, there’s perhaps some scope for bettering gaming on the Apple TV (most notably, reducing lag), but with the majority of iOS titles designed for touch interaction on the screen you’re holding, anything created specifically for the Apple TV will almost need to be thought of as being aimed at a different system entirely.

Microsoft’s got a new Surface Pro ad out—The Vibe:

http://youtu.be/tr3dFSzh1yU

So in case you’re keeping count:

Apple’s iPad is some kind of toy, only good for consumption, which is why Apple spends lots of its marketing dollars showing how you can do real work on the device, quickly, easily and in a fun way.

Microsoft’s Surface Pro is a professional tablet/laptop hybrid, for professionals, which is why Microsoft has spent money showing how it’s the perfect accessory to some kind of Glee/The Office mash-up, not least if your CEO has a rapper as an assistant.

Got it.