I’ve just found that I can use two apps in conjunction to get screenshots online very quickly from my Mac desktop.
First, I run CloudApp in my toolbar, an awesome tool that can automatically upload screenshots as they’re taken (but not in this case). One other feature it has is the ability to upload any photos that are dropped onto the toolbar icon straight into your Cloud account. This is where the second piece of software comes in…
SnapnDrag allows you to take screenshots of the whole screen or just parts of it, set the output format and then drag the result out of the application. As luck would have it, dragging the screenshot onto the CloudApp icon sends it to my Cloud account, all ready for linking and using.
Both apps and the Cloud service are free at the moment, so get both and enjoy!
I’m a long-time Google Reader user and here is my take on a few of the news readers available on the App Store, all from the perspective of an iPod Touch 2G owner!
Byline was the very first paid GR-integrated app that I put on my phone and compared to the GR web interface, it was awesome. The folder syncing, the ability to read folders as a whole and not feed-by-feed… what wasn’t to like?
Unfortunately, along the way, there were some design changes that started to make the app more irritating to use. Take, for example, the reverse blue disclosure icons. Pressing this drops down all of the feeds in that folder, something I found quite counter-intuitive.
But, this isn’t Byline’s biggest flaw. SInce upgrading to iOS4, Byline crashes. A lot. For example, I was trying to expand a folder to take a screenshot and it crashed. I opened an article to do the same and it crashed. The overall instability is so bad that I had to stop using it out of sheer frustration.
Next in line was the current darling of the Apple blogs, Reeder. The app is very nice to look at, especially with it’s status bar update, muted grey interface and torn paper date breaks.
All well and good, but again, post iOS4, the stability issues that plagued Byline are also present in Reeder. While nowhere near as pronounced, the app still crashes when browsing articles, sometimes while syncing; it’s not something you can predict. While I keep Reeder installed in the hope of a fix, I’m not so worried, mainly because of…
With three versions of the app in the store, each with differing levels of functionality, I actually snagged the Pro version as part of a sale a few months ago. I installed the app, but gave it very little attention, as the navigation, appearance and functionality seemed a bit out of kilter when compared to my other readers and it was soon deleted.
However, thanks to the instability of Reeder and Byline under iOS4 and my growing frustration to find a news reader that just worked, I reinstalled MobileRSS to see if it could at least stay running on my iPod. Turns out that in the meantime, the MobileRSS interface had undergone some very nice updates and has now got me hooked!
The app has a grey-blue appearance, slightly reminiscent of the one in Reeder, but it has a lot of great features that I find very appealing. For example, a simple one - marking all articles as read. It’s as easy as hitting the tick icon and choosing ‘Mark All As Read’.
MobileRSS also has great caching of articles that uses the pull-up-to-load feature that has been discussed across many blogs recently. I find it works very well, loading 15 articles at a time, smoothly bringing them into view.
The article view is also one of my favourite features, as the chrome of the interface all drops away, leaving a mobile-friendly version of the article. Tapping the screen brings up the controls, which allow you to perform a few operations, including posting to various services, such as Twitter or Delicious.
Swiping left or right will move between posts and pulling down at the top sends you back to the list of articles.
Stability-wise, MobileRSS very rarely crashes, no matter how many articles I add to a folder’s cache or articles I read. I can’t recommend MobileRSS enough. For an app that started out on my iPod as a cheap alternative, it’s now become my go-to news reader and I don’t see that changing any time soon, irrespective of stability fixes in the other apps, just because of the great interface features.
Give the free version a go, and I wholly expect that you’ll upgrade!
After watching both parts of the very informative WWDC ‘10 sessions on Game Design and Development, I was very interested to hear their take on control methods on iOS. As is discussed throughout the session, the developers started out using a virtual joystick to move the character. However, they soon decided that this abstracted the player from the world they were interacting with and opted for an alternative.
I have encountered a number of games where the virtual joystick (or d-pad) has worked quite successfully, namely Space Miner : Space Ore Bust and Meteor Blitz. But there has always been one issue that I’ve found it hard to get past and that’s the visible area that gets lost because of the on-screen controls. Take the following example from BloodnGuns :
The red areas in the lower corners of the screen, show not only the space taken up by the joysticks themselves, but additionally, the areas of the screen that were obscured by my thumbs during play. Now, I don’t profess to having the largest thumbs in the world, but you can see that, in total, I am losing about 1/3 of the screen real estate, purely because of the control mechanism.
I’ve also denoted in the orange areas, the space obscured by the HUD and the game controls. Obviously, you need to be able to pause the game and at any point see vital information about your player, but even the transparency of these areas isn’t much help when you have hundreds of zombies streaming towards you!
In this case, it’s kind of a moot point, as any other control scheme would make BloodnGuns a very different beast.
I have also considered that the iPad may have less limitations with it’s larger screen, but again, why have areas of the screen that the player can never see because of how they interact with their device?
So, with all this in mind, I began thinking back to the sessions I’d watched earlier, where the control scheme had been completely rethought to take advantage of the touch-based nature of the player interactions. While the control methods for dual shooters can’t inherently change, I am now heading down the route of building something very different from my original idea; something that will let the user see more of the world I build!