I haven't upgraded my iPhone yet to 3.0. I suppose when I do, I'll have to decide whether to attempt to save my SMS history.
(I really must find a quicker, easier way to post links to this blog, probably involving removing this mandatory 'Read on' custome code I appear to have added at some point.)
In an early sign of where things started to go wrong on this planet, some '70s and '80s arcade games acquired a habit of opening with a copyright prayer, by which I mean, an appeal to an entity that could never realistically intervene in the situation. It's a lot like writing a disclaimer on your forehead that your hairstyle is not to ever be seen outside the immediate environs of your skull. You'll run into this kind of magical thinking all the time on this world. These games hail from an era when such absurd lightning-in-a-bottle claims had less legal bite than they do today. But even now, controlling copyright is still as empty a prayer as controlling perception itself. I'm doing all this, for example, on one of the most locked-up software platforms in history. And still, I can have my way with it. And my way, in this review of the third row of my Cydia apps for a Time Walker's iPhone series, is to rescue the relevance to this planet of early video game history, by aiming you at the emulators of interfaces from the dawn of man/machine.
By this point in history, the 'rainbow' from Apple's crest, has fallen. MAME beams a broad spectrum of decades-old arcade games through nearly every type of computer or handheld you can name, except the iPhone. In fact, you could fill encyclopedias with the gaming knowledge that is excluded from this device by Apple's prohibition on emulators. There is certainly no performance argument for it. The 1983 vector game above, for example, plays great, and had me torquing my body in sync. (But the standard mame4iphone controls are not ideal for this one; it seems to have been coded with some sort of flightstick in mind.) So I used Cydia to install MAME to my jailbroken iPhone, then the Cydia version of 'Discover' to transfer my zipped ROMs to
/var/mobile/Media/ROMs/MAME/roms/
on the iPhone. Then start mame4iphone, and play! If you don't have any ROMs, 'Googling' MAME v3.07 Beta 5 ROMs should turn some compatible collections up.
Another fascinating game that you can play with mame4iphone, M-4 is essentially Space Invaders, only released a year earlier, in 1977, by Midway, before Taito turned it 90 degrees and replaced the mirror-image opponent with the now-famous drone armada. Even with a one-year head start and the same basic toolset, M-4 faded into obscurity, while Space Invaders seems to have inspired the first arcade gold-rush. Why? M-4 was, after all, a pretty smart machine for entertaining the human brain, presenting a single opponent that not only targets you through a reactive (i.e. player-destructible) shield, but evades your fire. Space Invaders dispensed with the evasion, instead borrowing Breakout's deep, if abstract, player-reactivity to graft onto its own, more concrete world of eroding shields and fungible enemy formations. In Space Invaders you are pitted consistently against the consequences of your own actions, rather than against just a half-competent AI. As it turns out, that's an even smarter way for a machine to attempt to entertain a human brain, as demonstrated by all the copycat hits that followed, from Asteroids and Missile Command, to Space Panic, Pac-Man, and even, Tetris.
In features, if not in proximity to the most seminal moments in game history, the Super Nintendo (SNES) emulator for the iPhone is more advanced. You can play in portrait mode, with a layout similar to MAME's, but also in landscape with the controller keys overlaid transparently (as above). I prefer landscape, though I wish they had positioned the game screen a little higher and the keys a tad lower. (It's not as hard as it looks to play with your thumbs covering a part of the screen, but considering the overall use of screen real estate, it just doesn't seem necessary.) The SNES emulator also has an array of options, most having to do with sacrificing stuff to make it faster. As with MAME, I found that turning off the sound produces the greatest uptick into playability. And also as with MAME, you can transfer your Googled SNES ROMs to your iPhone at
/var/mobile/Media/ROMs/SNES/
Super Mario World is the crowning glory of an alternate branch of games — which I call 'clockworks' — and which developed alongside the whole reactive branch rooted in Space Invaders. In a clockworks game, it's as if the 'periodically rotating' aspect of M-4's innovative shield undergoes runaway evolution, whereas the 'player-editable' aspect of it that was cultivated in Space Invaders, instead becomes vestigial, or even disappears, altogether. Player absorption is achieved by presenting a series of decisions made spatiotemporally complex by the cyclic movements of dangerous screen elements, like turtles that bounce to and fro, and platforms that raise and lower to different metronomes. Navigating clockwork was prefigured somewhat with Pac-Man's ghosts (though they are an attempt to seem intelligent so anticipating their routes feels like cheating), and then debuted as a distinct, unapologetic style in 1981 with Frogger and Donkey Kong, evolving into the Super Mario series to great acclaim, pitting humans all the while primarily against the undisguised gears of the machine. Kind of obvious now why this lineage succeeded best when paired with a radical concentration of 'cutesy' graphics. More than other interactive methods, a clockworks needs be humanised.
The one emulation test that didn't reward me with a fun and interesting experience was psx4iphone. The PlayStation is a much more advanced console than SNES, and a decade beyond most of my MAME ROMs. I ransacked my inherited collection and managed to turn up two PlayStation games: Tenchu, and Bushido Blade 2 (pictured). So after ripping them to .bin/.cue files with Toast for the Mac and transferring them to my iPhone at
/var/mobile/Media/ROMs/PSX/
I discovered that Tenchu didn't work (no video), and that Bushido Blade 2 worked but could not be made to play at an acceptable frame rate, with or without the music. Basically, this is a FAIL but I kept psx4iphone on my phone, and on this list, because both Tenchu and Bushido Blade 2 are fairly sophisticated 3D games, and I don't yet have any sidescrolling, PSX games in my possession on which to perform the test in 2D. If you have managed to make a PSX game play acceptably on the iPhone, which game was it? There is little reason not to venture into arcade (MAME) or console (SNES) history on the iPhone, but you'll likely not get much playability on the PSX front.
This iPhone screenshot is from an episode of a TV show called Flashpoint, which I discovered on my hard drive, and with which I discovered that the most common video container in the world (anything ending in .AVI), is unplayable on this 'iPhone' handset! It took a little bit of screwing with to get right, but there is an MPlayer app on Cydia you can use to watch this forbidden format. With a few skips and jumps, and provided you don't sic it on anything too hi-rez, it works. But MPlayer expects you to upload its data to an oddly placed folder. I recommend setting this up not as a folder, but as an alias pointing somewhere inside the standard Media folder (just so it doesn't become too difficult to back up all your media at once). Here's how.
Use iFile to navigate to your /Media folder so that what you see is pretty similar to the above. (You may not yet have as many folders in there as I do.) This folder is where most of your jailbroken iPhone apps will look for files. You can get to it by various routes (because of preinstalled aliases, which display in iFile in blue), and they are, starting from the top: (1) /private/var/mobile/Media, (2) /var/mobile/Media, (3) /User/Media, and (4) ~/Media — all of those paths lead to the same /Media folder. Once you get there in iFile, tap 'Edit' in the top right corner, then tap the big '+' to create a new folder inside your /Media folder.
Fill out the first two fields as shown above. (Case matters.) 'Directory' is a contemporary synonym for a Mac-style folder. The rest of the fields should default to what you see. Tap 'Create'.
Tap the top left button a couple of times to navigate iFile back to the /var folder, and then tap 'Edit' and then '+' again.
MPlayer ignores your /Media folder and instead looks for its files in /var/media. Fill out the screen as above to create an alias instead of a folder at /var/media and to point that alias toward the /User/Media/MPlayer folder that was just created two screenshots ago. Now tap 'Create' and exit iFile, and your MPlayer is set up. Just use Discover to transfer your AVIs to your /Media/MPlayer folder, and start MPlayer!
If you've done the setup and transfer right, your vids should show on MPlayer's list, like Flashpoint appears on this one.
Rather than rotating itself breathlessly with every jerk of your hand like a mental cat chasing a laser pointer, MPlayer opts to simply mix and match orientations in one view, and I have to say, I don't mind the result. It does everything it needs to do without much of a mode switch, which is actually superior to the built-in player. (Apple's screen reorientation acts like its got all the CPU power in the world, but the reality is it gets easily confused and stuck for long moments at forty-odd degree angles.) Run MemTest (that's fourth row, I'll be posting more on it soon) to clean your memory right before playing your video: it can help performance.
The most featured Cydia app is Cycorder, and for good reason: it does for creative video output what MPlayer does for input. You see, one of the video creators to whom access to the iPhone is officially denied is you, because Apple thinks the iPhone hardware's video capabilities are too poor for your tastes! Personally I find the results produce a visual feel that can be quite involving, and sometimes even a little eerie. (Both those links were, like the entirety of this article, written and captured entirely with this handset, and uploaded with Pixelpipe, which you can find in the App Store. And the 'PPVideoEnabler' app that patches Pixelpipe to read your Cycorder vids is available on Cydia.)
So, you're watching AVIs without conversion on the iPhone. It's not perfect but it basically works for most 350MB-or-below TV episodes. And you're lifestreaming video like you're a roving eye out of Max Headroom. Why not bust out of the same format prison, in sequential art? What you call, comic books. Pictured is just a smattering of comic book files discovered on my hard drive, and then, 'Discovered', via wifi, to my iPhone's /Media/Comic folder, where iComic (also on Cydia) looks for them.
Select a .CBZ file. (Unfortunately, iComic doesn't do .CBRs yet, but the conversion process is fairly trivial.) Note that you have the option to skip to your last position, or pick pages from a list.
In portrait mode, iComic just got completely out of my way like a movie player and immediately filled my screen with pure comic. Which transmogrified into pure frustration, when nothing I tapped or swiped appeared to turn the page, or even exit. I was stuck on page one! Turns out the controls are very simple, if not iPhone-intuitive. Tap bottom corners to page forward and back. Tap top left corner to return to the list. It's a bit picky about accuracy, which seems unnecessary. Anyway it looks great, and in landscape mode, you can even read it...
Not too shabby. And you can pinch and squeeze to your heart's content. The actual comic book pictured, by the way, would likely not be accepted to the App Store, due to mature themes that appear to have bounced out this artist, and this one, and this one. So odious to me is the news of such barrings that I don't plan to submit Hypothesis to Apple at all, and will instead be looking into how to assimilate iComic and codistribute via the free culture the way these artists have done.
On free culture: there are hundreds of thousands of free eBook files out there in various formats, and though you aren't wholly prevented from accessing most of them without jailbreaking, you are still placed at an annoyingly far remove from whatever personal collection of .TXTs or .RTFs or .PDBs you already have. Besides, THEY ARE JUST TEXT. This really should not be that complicated: have a file, read a file. You can get back to that ideal by installing this Cydia app textReader, and then transferring your eBooks to the iPhone's /Media/textReader folder.
Fonts are adjustable, and the app will do landscape, if you swing that way! But it does not read all formats. I seem to have inherited a lot of TomeRaider files, for example, and have yet to find a way to read them on this phone. 8(
You are looking at an impossible screen. This game Planetfall is under something called 'copyright', and is no longer sold on this world in a modern form. It could easily be converted, but this 'modern' iPhone is under lock and key, and refuses to open its filesystem to the kind of view that will allow you to make that decision. I know it's going to sound like a grim fairy tale of a dystopian grotto zone, but the iPhone indeed protects by default the commercial viability of millions of commercially *dead* works, blocking them from your view, wherever possible. Protecting zero sales isn't logical: even a supercomputer couldn't do it. This is a serious flaw: not because it isn't important to behave legally, but because the law of this land is functionally insane. Thus, a device that forces you into compliance with it, is also functionally insane, and so is using it.
I feel like I am already familiar with certain apps on this iPhone device, although I've never used them before. If your brains were to spontaneously explode, for example, over a square kilometre, your memories would lie disconnected on the ground in an amplified map of their former positions inside your head. Tiny differences in cranial coordinates would translate to much larger differences over a square kilometre. Someone - maybe even the next 'someone' to squat in your now-empty skull - could even decode that map.
The Wall Street Journal has raised the spectre of smartphones replacing laptops, not even realising, it seems, that it is a spectre. Apple's "cutting-edge" iPhone is held up throughout the article, without a hint of irony, as the prime example of the sort of device that the author sees one day bumping your main mobile computer into a Sarlacc Pit. No mention at all is made of the completely closed and capriciously-controlled nature of application development through the iPhone's App Store (practical unofficial alternatives to which, in a 180-degree turn from its tolerance of MP3s on an iPod, Apple specifically blocks or limits from its playground).
Apparently, the Journal finds perfectly agreeable the prospect of herds of formerly free-range computer users being corralled into an unholy pen where they will not be permitted to download any new form of software without Apple's express, case-by-case approval; in fact, the financial rag breathlessly anticipates that the old regime (which happens to safeguard our increasingly unfashionable ability to choose what we can run on our devices) will be willingly relinquished. Perhaps they'd like to volunteer to close and lock the gates when the deed is done?
Now, here's the part of this Wes Craven nightmare where self-satire turns to horror...
The Journal's prediction — while ethically tone-deaf — might be right. Apple has already blown right past its widely ridiculed '10 million phones' target for 2008, and shows no signs of letting up. So, if you are feeling at all 'no-big-deal'-ey about this, before you retire to a remote forest cabin to have sex with other clueless teenagers, be forewarned: this rough beast indeed slouches toward Bethlehem to be born.
Advocating a boycott of the iPhone at this point (or of any companies that try to emulate its obviously successful business model: and they will, cf. Zune) is probably a lost cause. By all means, if you feel like doing something, look into Google's much-talked-about, freedom-loving G1 — or even a Windows Mobile phone would fit the open-platform bill.
But this won't be enough. It's the independent application developers themselves who are going to have to bust out their Obi Wan Kenobis here; they're our only hope. And there are some signs that there may be significant resistance among them to the idea of signing up as complicit contractors aboard Apple's anti-rebel-coder mobile death star. Not only have some well-regarded formerly iPhone-friendly developers refused on principle to submit their code to Apple's casual disregard, but a highly touted developers' conference called 'iPhone Boot Camp' in New York simply failed to happen due to lack of interest, and another conference, called 'iPhone Live', was cancelled as a "necessary business decision" — a euphemism that Ars Technica interprets as, 'We built it but they didn't come.'
That's exactly what developers (and bloggers: yes, this means you) need to be saying about the iPhone; yeah, they built it, but we won't come. Not until Apple gets its head on straight, or sticks a pin in it, or whatever it is it has to do to stop Vadering out and start rediscovering the Anakin within. Then we'll all be able to enjoy the iPhone and its inevitable emulators in the smartphone space, without tattooing Lando Calrissian on our asses and handing the rebels among us over to some traffic-directing, techno-earmuff-wearing dude from the Wall Street Journal.
To be clear, this is my message to Apple: Quit with the ominous mouth-breathing. Open up the App Store to all comers, and institute a store-wide ratings system through which to indulge your elitist tastes. Either that, or allow developers to distribute their creations, independently of the Store, without limit. Most preferably, both.
If you do this, I'll be the first in line thereafter to sell my stuff for your phone, and I will trumpet your Jedi-like mastery of the touch interface, far and wide. But until that day, my sympathies are squarely with the younglings. They are the future, and for them your smartphone virtuosity may come at a terrible, dark price.
[Published originally at The Laroquod Experiment.]
When lodestar users like Harry McCracken, Dave Winer, and even John Gruber are gunning for you online, you know your mobile platform has a real problem on its hands.
Thus, is Apple reaping what it has sowed with its increasingly pathological obsession with control.
These aren't just some PC World geeks with permanent chips on their shoulders putting the most negative possible spin on Apple. These are Apple-friendly guys (well, let's just call Winer Apple-compatible), and they are extremely influential writers in the world where Apple's customers swim. They can't and won't be ignored. This chain reaction is well past critical mass, and the smart money is on Apple to respond formally in the very near future — maybe even this week.
But make no mistake, here: all these bloggers have been asleep at the switch, and are only waking up now to what rgbFILTER and I have been talking about for weeks.
The first unmistakeable warning sign was Apple's breezy willingness to extend their technological control into the silencing of artistic expression — this was the clear evidence that they do not feel any responsibility to carry the principles of democracy forward into their spanking new media space, and that there is really no limit to the control they are willing to exert upon their users.
Don't believe it? You will. Because with the recent news that they are now banning software that competes with them from the App Store, Apple has finally made the mistake that will spark that collective 'duh' moment among those who didn't see the problem with electronics mavens claiming this kind of control, before.
Let's all hope that Apple takes the biggest possible bath over this, and that other companies who are by no means innocent in this regard (I'm looking at those who forged the shackles worn by console artists), will sit up and take note that their days of controlling user culture are numbered.
[Published originally at The Laroquod Experiment.]
I have to say, when I wrote my first post on Apple's attempts to soup-nazi new media spaces, I had no idea a sequel would be so soon in the offing. In this week's episode, we have an actual App Store rejection letter from Apple, which is so galling in its casual application of censorship to a harmless fart joke app, that even in the unlikely event that it would be a good idea to let any one posse of techno-dudes carry the keys to the new media kingdom, it's as clear as day the people at Apple are not those dudes.
The rejection letter was emailed to MacRumors by the developer, who also posted a full demo of the app to YouTube. The text of the letter follows:
So, in other words, Apple controls the entire software market for this new medium (every effort having been taken to lock things down otherwise), which it will now fill capriciously according to its taste! And if you don't like it, you are free to use a method they have provided you to share your app with a 'small group of people of your choosing'? Why small? Isn't that a lot like saying you are free to sing in the shower — but they own everywhere else? Imagine if Apple had invented the microphone...Hello Developer,
We've reviewed your application Pull My Finger. We have determined that this application is of limited utility to the broad iPhone and iPod touch user community, and will not be published to the App Store.
It may be very appropriate to share with friends and family, and we recommend you review the Ad Hoc method on the Distribution tab of the iPhone Developer Portal for details on distributing this application among a small group of people of your choosing.
Regards,
Victor Wang
Worldwide Developer Relations
Apple, Inc.
Essentially, Apple is trying to appoint itself the cultural gatekeepers as well as the technicians of a new public square, blocking you from it without their prior approval — a responsibility, by the way, that they appear to approach about as democratically as picking a T-shirt.
I defy anyone in the 'iPhone and iPod touch user community' to watch this video, and not want to install this thing and run it, at least once...
[Published originally at The Laroquod Experiment.]
It took the appalling spectacle of Apple trying to deny iPhone distribution to these artists at Murderdrome to draw my attention to Infurious Comics and their neat little enterprise.
My willingness to try to distribute Hypothesis through the iPhone's App Store will hinge on how Apple responds to criticisms like this one. I could be comfortable with an App Store-wide rating system that treats all media equally, but it would depend on whether it's just a cloak for more censorship. (After all, nothing about having a rating system dictates that all or even a vast majority of entries will therefore be accepted.)
Don't enterprises that venture first into new media spaces that may hold the keys to the future of this planet (if their rhetoric is to be believed) have a special responsibility not to bar the way to others based on matters of taste? If not, perhaps they should.
[Published originally at The Laroquod Experiment.]
What is the real reason? Craig Hockenberry claims, in an otherwise very insightful article about why third-party background apps are a Very Bad Thing for your battery life, that the natural solution — letting the iPhone OS schedule access to the network and then giving apps the greenlight to connect in a single cooperative burst instead of activating the antenna piecemeal — was a little beyond Apple's capability for the beta Software Developer's Kit. He writesDo I expect such a sophisticated system to be available in a beta of version 1.0? Hell no. And neither should you.
Maybe it's just me, but this system really does not sound all that sophisticated, not compared to the enormous piece of engineering that is already the iPhone SDK. In fact, it's downright simple. A scheduler/notifier that maintains a queue with a few new API calls — what's so damn difficult?
Not that I am advocating everybody whine some more about this issue. But nonsense is nonsense. As I see it, this is not rocket science.
It's far more likely that the reason for omitting this capability for now is that Apple doesn't want iPhone developers to use it as a crutch, or as a backdoor into executing non-network-related background tasks. They want you to learn to do without. When the consensus becomes that background processing is not nearly as necessary as everyone believed — then we'll have our network scheduler.
The story goes that Apple has to charge for its recent software upgrade (1.1.3) for the iPod touch, despite the same upgrade (1.1.3) being free for all iPhone users, because the iPhone is accounted for on a subscription basis whereas the iPod touch is not, and according to accounting requirements in the Sarbanes-Oxley bill, without accounting for hardware products on a subscription basis, Apple can't upgrade them with new features unless it charges something for that upgrade.
Despite being complete bunk, this logic seems to have been largely accepted, even by its yes-but detractors, like Dan Moren of MacUser, who argued recently, 'Yes, but why did Apple have to charge a whole $20?' Or the Macalope, who, having disarmed the critics with his customary aplomb, set hoof on looser ground by arbitrarily deciding that "it all devolves into communism" — at exactly the moment the word 'iPod' is encountered.
But joking aside, precisely somewhere along the slippery slope of Apple's chiclet-coloured electronic devices, lies the answer to the real question raised by all of this regulatory handwaving. Where in its product line does Apple place the dividing line between 'subscribed' upgrades and pay-as-you-go, and why? I've read the thoughtless lumping in of the touch with the 'iPods', but common sense tells you when you look at this device that it is a gelded iPhone more than anything else. So, 'because it's an iPod' won't fly — and neither will, 'because of AT&T's subscription plan': the Apple TV, with no subscription plans but subscribed accounting, stands inconveniently in the way of that escape. (And it has nearly the same media sources and capabilities as the touch, to boot.)
There is just no contemplating these choices without perceiving how arbitrary they are. The question isn't, why did Apple comply with Sarbanes-Oxley? The question is why didn't they comply with it the same way they did the last two times (with the iPhone and the Apple TV)? Apple chose to charge us $20 because they chose to charge us $20. Because they clearly already knew what the implications of their accounting would be. Because they had already altered it in the past to avoid this very situation. And yet, here we are. Why?
