The beauty of the backgrounds, running the course of the day, lighting the landscape is absolutely incredible. This game shows what the iPhone is capable of without focusing on it. Snow and rain fall, lightening and shooting stars flash across your screen, as you become one with the mountain. Fiery embers and smoke rise into the air as you blaze by. The animation is truly stunning.
It is the simplicity of games like these that hook mobile gamers. Alto’s Adventure reminds me of Tiny Wings a few years ago. Beautiful graphics is what sells these games, not game play. But even with very simple gameplay, the game has a lot of great elements. Capture the llamas— which are points; the llamas are points—, collect coins, and chain tricks to get a higher and higher score. But watch out for the elders. They don’t like your youthful antics.
As you complete 180 goals, you will unlock 6 characters. Maya is the flipper. Paz is slow to start, but builds up big speed. Izel is the gadget junkie, trailing fire behind her board. Felipe is a llama. On a snowboard. Go with it. And then the elder, Tupa, channels the energy of the mountain.
Use your points to expand the magnet and hover gadgets and buy the wing suit. Yes, the wing suit. Not only do you snowboard with llamas, but you can fly too.
To say that I have played this game for hours is an understatement. Last week my daughter, a six month old that sleeps soundly through the night, woke up screaming at 3 am. My wife and I were up for 2 hours trying to get her back down. For the second half of that time, I was playing Alto. At 4 in the morning.
Beautiful games are few and far between. This is something special and unique. The team behind Alto’s Adventure has been working on it for two years. You can see the earliest experimentations on Harry Nesbitt’s blog as he tooled around with the Unity engine and on his Dribbble account as he worked through llama animations. The passion of the design and development team just bleeds through every pixel. Their two years are worth it, in my book.
Alto’s Adventure is available today for $1.99 on the App Store. Two bucks. No In-App Purchases. Just two bucks. Go. Play for hours now and make sure you tweet your high scores!
Maybe you’ll see me on the evening news
Maybe you’ll see me with a bag over my head
If that’s the case, then I’ve met my doom
If that’s the case, then my comrades are dead
And I don’t hate my enemy
I hate the cloud he’s brought over my land
There’s no virtue in killing a man
Neither is there virtue in being afraid to stand
But I saw the black coats forming lines
They hit our beaches running
We’re on our knees but not to pray
You’re the only reason I stayed
In this coward’s melee
I’d rather die than live without mercy and love
Sing while the city decays
We’d rather go up in flames
Lest we betray thy names of dignity and love
Last month I pre-ordered the vinyl of one of my favorite albums, The End Is Not the End from House of Heroes. This album has consistently been in my playlist for nearly seven years. It is kind of crazy to think it’s been that long and it still ranks as one of my favorites. Last year they crowdfunded another album and one of the stretch goals was to do a vinyl runoff this album. Kind of a brainless choice for me.
This album contains a lot of songs set in World War II and the Cold War era, including Code Name: Raven, By Your Side, Journey Into Space, and Baby’s a Red.
Sitting here this morning, I cannot help but think of my Christian brothers that were just beheaded in Libya by ISIS. “I don’t hate my enemy, I hate the cloud he’s brought over my land. There’s no virtue in killing a man, neither is there virtue in being afraid to stand.” These men stood by their faith until they could kneel before His eternal throne. So many in the American leadership and media are afraid to stand for those that died in the Paris shooting last month or the Denmark shooting this month. Too afraid to stand for the freedom of speech. Heck, while Jesus was on trial, Peter denied any association with Christ.
Sometimes our wish to appease those that hate us— so as to not be hated, or to just survive— prevents us from standing for something good and true. When the nation of the crescent comes for our heads, will you stand for something or take knee before them to keep your head?
Song Ratings
★★★★☆ If
★★☆☆☆ Lose Control
★★★☆☆ Leave You Now
★★★★☆ Dangerous
★★★★☆ In the Valley of the Dying Sun
★★★★★ Code Name: Raven
★★★★★ By Your Side
★★★★★ Journey Into Space, Pt. 1
★★★☆☆ Sooner or Later
★★★★★ Baby’s a Red
★★★☆☆ Drown
★★★☆☆ Faces
★★★★★ Voices
★★★★☆ Field of Daggers
★★★★☆ The Young and the Brutal
★★★★☆ New Moon
★★★★★ Ghost
★★★★☆ If (Acoustic)
★★☆☆☆ Serial Sleepers (Acoustic)
As previously alluded to, due to a very low point in my career, I got hammered with writer’s block. I couldn’t write anything the way I wanted to. Everything that came out was wrong. It wasn’t long before I stopped writing. So often I have looked to solve my writer’s block, but couldn’t. But I missed something in searching for the answer.
Over the years, I transitioned my writing to social media. Little, short blips of commentary here and there. A bit of sarcasm. Twitter prevented me from ranting. From time to time on Facebook I’d post something more long and bloggy, but mostly kept to a link and something simple.
My expectation, I guess, was that I’d get back to writing full articles more quickly. Like a marathon runner that broke his foot, I didn’t want downtime. So I kept searching for answers to my writer’s block without realizing that I could write myself out of my writer’s block with consistency.
It is said that it takes two weeks of consistency to develop a habit.
So Finley.im, on it’s fourth week, has seen over 70 posts. Six of those have been “feature” articles, the rest have been links. A habit of writing is forming once more. As I said two weeks ago, for once in my experience blogging, I have a backlog of entries.
As I try to keep my writing consistent, I am keeping my finger off the publish button. Between three and five posts a day is what I want here. So as I find links, they get saved and scheduled out to be posted over days. When something hot comes in, I push colder links back. Holding off on publishing allows things to stew a bit. I can take time to edit my thoughts. I don’t have to be reactive all the time, as my editing is worse when I am.
Writer’s block comes when you give up. The cure to writer’s block is to write. Write something. Write anything. Momentum is only built by objects in motion.
Militants from Islamic State have burned 45 people to death in the western Iraqi town of al-Baghdadi, according to the local police chief.
Col Qasim al-Obeidi said the motive was unknown but he believed some of the victims were members of the security forces.
He has pleaded for help from the government and international community and said the compound, which houses the families of security personnel and local officials, was now under attack.
The last time the $2.99 email app appeared in the iOS App Store was February 12th, while the $9.99 Mac app was last available on February 13th. The Mac app, however, is still available from Sparrow’s website directly. The last time the iOS update received an update was October 2013 to add iOS 7 compatibility. The Mac app never saw an update. At one point, Sparrow was the most popular app on the iOS App Store. It is to be seen if Google will launch a dedicated, native Inbox application for the Mac to replace Sparrow.
Like many Mac & iPhone users, Sparrow was easily my favorite email client for quite some time. As I said a couple weeks ago, Gmail for iOS is horrible and best, and Sparrow was the closest thing we had to a good Gmail client for iPhone. Today, I use Mailbox exclusively on Mac and iOS. It works for what I need. Sad to see the last note of Sparrow’s song die out after years of near silence.
It begin nearly a year ago when we entered the IBM Watson Mobile App Developer Challenge with a unique concept: a toy that could learn and grow with a child. Winners of the challenge would receive access to IBM Watson — IBM's powerful cognitive supercomputer - which is one of the elements necessary to create a truly transformational toy.
Yes, David, Teddy has arrived. Just what we need, a dinosaur with access to IBM’s “powerful cognitive supercomputer” in every home teaching our children to submit to their no-longer-extinct overlords. Cool concept, but I will not be buying one.
I think the same thing is happening right now in the computer and mobile devices industry. Computers and phones have historically been sold based on performance, screen size, and battery life. The slow march of technological progress through the 1990s and 2000s was obvious to anyone who knows the word “megahertz”. But in the past couple of years, I think we have finally reached the 1945 equivalent in automobiles: all devices sold today can do everything any reasonable customer would want. The computer is now feature-complete. Almost all model segmentation is now based on the personality of the customer.
Something that my PC-loving, Android-using friends haven’t recognized yet: the spec don’t matter to the average consumer. Even as a tech guy, the specs seldom matter. When I bought my new MacBook Air last year, the only thing I upgraded was the RAM, knowing that I couldn’t upgrade that down the line. The 128 gigabyte SSD was more than enough, the processor was more than enough, and the graphics were more than enough. I know that I can get a more powerful computer if I go with a MacBook Pro. I know that I could have a Retina screen if I went with a different line of Macs. But I wanted the 11" Air because of the size. Simple as that.
It will be interesting to see what the pricing scheme is with the Apple Watch. Will there be different storage sizes? Will the two different screen sizes have different prices? Will a band come with the watch or will you buy that seperately? We’ll know in less than two months.
For the watch, it was a year before Ive settled on straps that clicked into slots. Ive later tested watchbands by wearing them outside the studio with other watches. The shape of the body, meanwhile, barely changed: a rectangle with rounded corners. “When a huge part of the function is lists”—of names, or appointments—“a circle doesn’t make any sense,” Ive said. Its final form resembles one of Newson’s watches, and the Cartier Santos, from 1904.
Love the simple logic of it. So many competitors to the Apple Watch let function follow form. A round watch has an interface designed to be round, but the moment you have an interface that scrolls, that round screen becomes the bane of your existence. A rectange just makes sense.
And this great piece on Steve Jobs:
Jobs’s taste for merciless criticism was notorious; Ive recalled that, years ago, after seeing colleagues crushed, he protested. Jobs replied, “Why would you be vague?,” arguing that ambiguity was a form of selfishness: “You don’t care about how they feel! You’re being vain, you want them to like you.” Ive was furious, but came to agree. “It’s really demeaning to think that, in this deep desire to be liked, you’ve compromised giving clear, unambiguous feedback,” he said. He lamented that there were “so many anecdotes” about Jobs’s acerbity: “His intention, and motivation, wasn’t to be hurtful.”
Those close to me know that I share a personality type with Steve Jobs. INTJ. I too see the value in being unambiguous in feedback. Be clear. Vanity has no place in this line of work. If all members of the team care to produce the best product, being clear about what is wrong about it is most important. If people care more about themselves, feeling get hurt too easily over something that has nothing to do with feelings. I just try to be a bit less of an ass than Steve Jobs could be. Sometimes I success. Sometimes I don’t.
