Patrick Patience has posted a fantastic little summary of jailbreaking hacks over at Smoking Apples. He’s got some gorgeous themes and extensions working together, complete with links and extended info—it’s definitely worth taking a look.
Mimeo and the Kleptopus King is a new iPhone game being worked on by Shaun Inman, creator of the great 8-bit title, Horror Vacui. The game gives homage to classic video games, with a twist—instead of enhancing the player, power ups in the game enhance the resolution of the world around him. Check out the homepage and hit refresh a few times for a sample.
The app is being developed under a MakeWork grant and should be available by the holidays. I’ve had the privilege of seeing some of the design over the past month on Dribbble, and I gotta say: The details are going to be fantastic. Check Shaun’s Flickr for a nice little video archive of the game’s progress.
Dimitri Stancioff questions the lack of utility apps (Weather, Stocks, etc.) in the iPad demos and raises the possibility of a secret “Dashboard” app.
As a concept, multitasking goes beyond just background processes. There’s an aspect of multitasking which is purely visual. For example, when developing a website, I’ll often put the Photoshop file next to my browser, for comparison.
In a roundabout way, this means the iPad already has multitasking. Consider apps like Mail where, on the iPad, the list view and detail view have been combined to one screen. Users can not only read an email, but also instantly see when the previous email in that thread was sent, who sent it, and delete it—all without losing their place. To me, this is a form of multitasking. Extending this split screen idea to the app level presents a difficult UX challenge, but could be a better approach for multitasking than the typical “windowed” metaphor used on desktops.
There has been a lot of discussion over the past few weeks on whether or not the iPad (and iPhone for that matter) should support multitasking. Many people seem to have a different interpretation of what this means, whether it’s just listening to Pandora while browsing the web, having a faster way to switch apps running in the background (akin to WebOS’s concept of “cards”), or just having an app be able to fetch data in the background.
I’ll be posting some more thoughts on multitasking throughout the day, but first a quick poll: Do you want multitasking? Why or why not?
Really great iPhone app design showcase and gallery. Excellent for any sort of UI inspiration.
A recent interview I did with the Los Angeles Times discussing the viability of web apps replacing native software. They also interviewed Loren Brichter—creator of the fabulous Tweetie and one of the best Mac developers out there—poising us against each other as the champions of web/native technology. Generally, though, I think Loren and I see pretty eye-to-eye on the subject: Web apps present a great opportunity for interoperability and eased development, but not without limitations in current hardware/software.
