iPad 5 weight

Earlier this year, guessing the iPad mini's weight based on weight/volume of other devices.

What might the next iPad 5 weigh?

The current iPad mini is 0.93 oz/in³.

Assuming the iPad 5 was the same height of 9.5", but was narrower with about the same on the sides as the iPad mini for a width of 6.5".  And thinner, the same as the iPad mini at 0.28".

Using the same weight/volume number:  That ends up with a weight of just about exactly 1 pound = (16 oz = 453 grams).

To compare, the current iPad 3/4 is 1.44 pounds, and the still selling iPad 2 is 1.33 pounds (and the iPad mini is 0.68 pounds), so that's considerably lighter even if I'm off by a few percent.  Nice.

Nintendo

Yep.

Nintendo has another problem:  kids today don't have the same connection to Nintendo's big characters.

I keep forgetting to ask my nieces if they've even heard of Mario.  Maybe him, but I doubt they'd have heard of any other of Nintendo's big characters and franchises.  (Even if they have, the connection playing the characters in Mario Kart a few times isn't the same.)

But they've definitely heard of Angry Birds and all the other big iPhone games and characters.  That's who they have on t-shirts and hats and things.

Just like many of Nintendo's sales today, they're going to grow up and want to play new games with the characters from their childhood.  And that won't be Nintendo's.

Dad & MLK

My dad wrote this because my Nephew had asked for Martin Luther King Jr. day and dad emailed out to everybody in the family...but it's good for everyone else to see.

Background:  In the spring of 1965, following an attack on some civil rights demonstrators, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. broadcast a national call for clergy and seminary students to join him in Selma, Alabama.  It was a call that struck many sympathetic chords among the students at Chicago Theological Seminary, where I was a student.  For some students there seemed to be no question that they would go to Selma, while other students decided not to go.  Sue and I talked a lot with Betty and Gary Massoni about whether he and I should go.  Because final exams were coming up, one of my concerns was whether going would mean that I would fail the exams and, in effect, waste an entire term/year of graduate study.  Finally, responding to Dr. King's call to support those working for racial justice overshadowed my educational worries.  I have never regretted my decision.  (And I passed all my exams when they came around later that spring also)

Because we had a VW bus which would hold more people than anybody else's car, that was one of the transportation vehicles.  Jesse Jackson was a member of my class at CTS, drove a Chevy Corvair which would only seat four people, but since he was going, his was the second car.  Gary Massoni and I shared driving the "bus" from Chicago to Selma except for a few miles that another fellow drove who didn't know how to work the "four-on-the-floor" and who I relieved after only a few miles of jerky driving that I was afraid might wreck the transmission before we could even get to Alabama.  There were ten or eleven of us from CTS who went.  The group included one woman student and Arnulf Kraft, an already ordained Lutheran minister from Berlin, Germany, who along with his wife Mona, was taking one year of study at the seminary.  

Digression:  Following their year at CTS, the Krafts borrowed our camping equipment and traveled to the west coast.  They showed up on my parents' doorstep in order to meet them.  Arnulf told me later that he didn't expect my father to be so tall.  We kept in contact with them following their return to Berlin and visited them there, along with Nancy, following my intern year in Scotland.  Their son Jakob lived with us in Ephrata for one year as a high school student.  We still exchange Christmas cards/letters with them and Jakob has been back to visit us several times.  He also calls us via the telephone at least once a year.)

Jesse drove his car leaving Chicago until we crossed the "Mason-Dixon" line into the "south."  Because the other three people in his car were white, one of them now drove and Jesse sat in the back seat.  He or someone else had told us that if Jesse had been in the front seat, at least as a passenger, that they would have been pulled over by the highway police.  Lastly, one of the seminary professors gave us his gasoline credit card to use on the trip down and back.

Now to the pictures.

1.  Brown Chapel, where we met for a "service/rally" before lining up in the street.  This happened a couple times each day.  When the service/rally was finished, we all lined up, five or six people wide.  We walked perhaps a block or so before those at the front of the line, led by Dr. King along with Ralph Abernathy, Howard Schomer (CTS president), and other more nationally know people, were confronted with the street blocked by police cars, three wide, covering the entire next block and fronted by policemen standing nearly shoulder to shoulder holding batons/billy clubs.  At that point everyone stopped and waited while the leaders spoke with the officers.  Eventually everyone was asked to kneel and someone up front said a prayer.  Then we continued to stand or sit and talked with each other, sharing our fears that the police would attack as they had other demonstrators, and sharing our hopes that our presence would bring some small step forward for racial justice.  After being in the street for from one to perhaps three hours, and not being allowed move forward, we were dismissed until we gathered again in Brown Chapel.  I spent most of my time with Gary Massoni and Steve Davidson, both of whom, along with David Wallace (who now also lives in Spokane) and a neighborhood woman, are in one of the later pictures.  The waiting on the street in front of or near Brown Chapel also included some night time vigils as well.

2.  Inside Brown Chapel, an African Methodist Episcopal Church.  In the middle of the picture you can pick out Martin Luther King, Jr speaking/preaching, encouraging everyone as only he could do.

3.  In the middle of this crowd, with his head tilted back, is a Jewish Rabbi.  Dr. King's call was not limited to Christian ministers; all faith traditions responded to his appeal and to his leading.

4.  The four of us mentioned in my comment about the first picture in this list.  This may be a good time for me to mention that everyone who had a clerical collar, or could borrow one, were encouraged to wear it so that the people and authorities in Selma could more easily recognize us as clergy.  Dr. King called for clergy to come because I am convinced that he thought the police would be less apt to attack clergy than other demonstrators.  Gary had a clerical collar (not wearing it in this picture but he did later) but I never found one to borrow.  When we were not in line, we were free to walk about in the black neighborhood; hence the picture on this woman's front porch.  Needless to say, we felt much safer in the black part of town and we did not venture out of that neighborhood alone or even in small groups.   

5.  Jesse Jackson is standing behind the woman whose name I cannot remember; don't think I ever learned.  In the middle is Ralph Abernathy, a close colleague of Dr. King.  The other man I also recognize but neither Sue nor I can remember his name; but he was another civil rights leader.

6  The avowed goal of our "march" was to walk from the black neighborhood, across the bridge that led into downtown Selma, gather at the steps of the courthouse, kneel in prayer led by Dr. King, and disperse.  It took four days before the authorities allowed us to do that.  This picture was taken as we were finally allowed to cross the bridge leading into town with police officers lining the route.  I thought the sign in the background was wonderfully ironic.

7.  I said earlier that Dr. King's call was responded to not only by Christian clergy -- the Jewish Rabbi -- but not only by Protestant clergy either.  These two Roman Catholic nuns dressed in their habits so that they could also be more easily identified.  I also have a picture of another sister who was wearing a different style habit; obviously from another order.

8.  This sign, nailed to a telephone pole near the chapel, says that everyone had to "register" their name, address, phone number, and who to contact...in case we were injured or worse.  While I was aware of the potential danger...I had seen the TV reports of the attack which precipitated Dr. King's call...this sign brought that possibility more forcefully to my attention than anything else.

Conclusion:  After four days of chapel services, standing in line but not moving forward, wandering around the black neighborhood/ghetto, and sleeping on the grass beside the VW bus, our assemblage was given permission to cross the bridge into downtown Selma.  Following the long-awaited march and its concluding prayer on the courthouse steps...the leaders/prayers were on the steps, the rest of us were gathered in the area before the steps...our CTS group decided that there was nothing more that we could do and decided to head back to Chicago.

Gary and I again traded off driving the VW bus which had eight people in it.  We drove through the night but Gary was so exhausted that he went to sleep and I could not wake him.  So I drove most of the way and over the the last several hours I was so tired from the release of the pressures and worries being in Selma, and the sleeping fitfully on the ground, that I experienced hallucinations while driving, even when we finally reached the interstate highway and all its lights leading into Chicago.

Some of our group went to bed and didn't go to class that day.  But I went to class...don't remember which one...took a page or two of notes on the professor's comments.  But when I looked at them the next day or so, I was unable to make any sense of anything.  Sue, Betty, Gary and I also talked together, Gary and I relating everything we could remember about our experience, and our wives telling about their concerns for our safety.  We have about eight hours of commentary on a reel-to-reel tape.  Sue has told me that she had a radio on her desk at work and stopped everything when anything about what was happening in Selma during those days came on the air.

After returning, I wrote a long letter to my parents and to Sue's parents explaining why it was important for me to have gone to Selma.  They both got my letter published in their local newspapers.

Lastly, I now liken my experience in Selma to the musical of Les Miserables.  Many, me included before I knew better, thought the barricade scene toward the end was part of the French Revolution.  Then I learned that it came before the Revolution began, a sort of prelude to it.  Similarly, the Selma march that I participated in was a sort of prelude to the Selma to Montgomery march that Dr. King led later.  

Addendum, in an email about posting this up from my mom:  
We showed the prints of the pictures at church yesterday and Hope [my niece, 9] helped me lay them on a table. I told her the pictures were almost 50 years old and she said, "but they are in color".

Skeuomorphicless (apps that don't look like things.)

Good post.  I wondered how it might change some of our apps.

We've got a 2 player poker game (iPhone, iPad) and we've spent a lot of effort to make it look and play like real cards.

I wondered how it might look in a "flat" type UI.  I didn't do everything in the UI itself, since in a flat UI there's usually gestures too.  You'd drag over from your stack towards the bet to increase the bet, and drag up from the bet to the pot to make your bet.

The card actions would be like they are in our game now, drag the cards up to fold.  The iPad app has more space so shows your stack, dragging that up goes all-in, which would work with this too.

I'm sure a real designer could do better, but I think in some cases like this the realistic look will win.  (Probably because it's a game and cards are flat real-world items.)  Looking at the realistic picture, I know it's a card game immediately.


Updated since I got thinking how other games or apps might be done.

Bejeweled.

Tiny Wings

Internet, GO!  What would other games look like in this style?

Widgets Worth Revisiting.

I'd done another guess back in 2011, but this way from earlier this year is better.  Since iOS 7 is surely in progress right now, maybe someone will see it in time :)

Any Widget-able app would act like a folder does now.  When tapped it slides open and shows some details in a square area.  Just like a folder, tapping outside the area closes it.  Moving and deleting would work exactly like a normal app icon.  No new UI to learn at all.

The widget area would be a normal UIView, so it could scroll or do pages--anything an app can do, only limited to a 320x320 point square.

The app could add an "Open" button to itself that opened the app full screen as it does now.  That leaves the UI entirely up to the app: Weather could be as it is in the picture, iMessage could read or send from there, Facebook could post, Instagram could take pictures, you could play any number of games in a nice square area, anything.


Updated, Jan 2, 2013:

UI Widgets could be triggered by other parts in the iPhone system as well, and direct to different "widgeted" parts of the app.  For example an email app could have a widgeted "Reply" function for its new mail notification.  A quick cut-and-paste:

The UI could be much better--replace the notification message with the Cancel/Send stuff at the least.

Each app could define its own widget bits, and what a notification action triggered.  Facebook could allow replying to a post or message, SMS could reply, some games like chess could even let you make your next move.

The same function could work right on the lock screen too.

App Store bits that suck

Purely as a user and not developer, there are some bits of the App Store app that suck.

The biggest problems are the Updates and Purchased sections.  I admit I do have a bunch of apps in the iTunes account, so there are 500+ apps.  But really 500 is nothing--gmail instantly tells me I have 75,174 emails archived.

I timed it:  on a new iPhone 5, on my fast WiFi network at home, tapping the "Purchased" item it sits working with the little spinner going for 37 seconds before showing the list.  Many times I've thought it had crashed or simply given up.  Way, way too long.

The Updates isn't quite as bad, it loads within a few seconds, but still not as quickly sometimes.  But if I go and tap "Update" on a few things, it becomes slower and slower to respond.  After 5 or so taps, it seems a second or more between my tap and when it shows it recognized it.  After a few it gets unusable so I don't ever update more than a couple at a time.

Apple, you can do better.

Idea to App: BounceBash

I've been adding to this post as the game was developed...

(August 9, 2012...)

The initial idea came from reading about the "remake Pong for the 20th anniversary" competition.  I had an image of dribbling the ball along a curving ground.  We never submitted the idea for the competition, the rewards didn't seem to be worth it.  I didn't want to submit and get 6th or something, so not win anything but Atari has the rights to the idea!  And eventually seeing the winners, ours would have been pretty far out there.

I created the XCode project Feb 10, 2012.  "SpringPong" was the initial placeholder name.

We immediately decided it needed more than dribbling, and it became a mashup of Pong for bouncing, Tiny Wings for the curving ground, and Angry Birds for smashing stuff.

It started by using ground Shawn had drawn for a yet-to-be completed game, and he did the smiling ball too.  The initial theme was going to be "video game themed" and be inspired by all sorts of games thru history.

Funny that the initial placeholder ground is exactly the same as what we used in the final product.  (Though not this slightly textured version--the even plainer variation.)

The very first versions had basic little buildings, but we soon switched to the random stacks of blocks since there could be much more variety.

 Shawn did a few other things in this batch, and I did the minesweeper ones.

Lots of Physics (thank you Box2d) so the boxes fell and bounced realistically.

There's a big section about this time I missed taking screenshots while we tried many things that didn't survive long.

A number of versions had you releasing balls from cages.  We tried having them be copies of the original ball, but that got too busy--after a few balls were active, everything got smashed barely onto the screen, and it was very easy to keep at least one of the balls going.

We did so the balls that were released had a powerup, like exploding any blocks they hit, and those colored balls shrank away after a 10 seconds or so.  That got very busy too, and really didn't have a main character.  No screenshots, but a video!

We also tried something like paddle-ball with an elastic rope connecting the paddle to the ball.  It looked weird, and you'd expect the rope to hit the buildings.  This didn't even last an afternoon :)

I asked both my wife and niece what sort of animal would be bouncing along, and they both said an Armadillo.  I had an idea for a balled up armadillo character, and did this quick sketch to send to Shawn.  He then made it look much better :)

With the Dillo armadillo character, and trying sections with a ceiling.

Pete said something like "It's a great technology demo, but it has to be a game."  Figuring out the Game part took a long time.

Dillo Dreams.  We worked quite a long time with this as the theme.  Very meta, Dillo is dreaming he's the star of a video game.  We'd done three pretty complete themes:  iWorld, Jeweled, and Old School.

Thankfully the cat played it, so there's some video...

You'd break the boxes to release stars, and catch them with the paddle.  Breaking the boxes with a big star on it now released a big power-up star you could catch with the paddle and activate the power-up on Dillo.  You could pick colors for the helmet and that gave extra time for the power-up of that color.

Everything stacked up very precariously, so any tap would send the boxes falling.

For a long time you just bounced along faster and faster, but at high speeds it was hard to see things collapse--you'd be past before they hit the ground.  We added some "pauses" where it slowed down if Dillo was bouncing back toward the paddle, to give more time to see and smash stuff.

You'd get more power-ups available the farther you went in one game.  With some end-game bonus things so you'd restart at chapter 2 or 3 to let you get a bit farther in later games.

A ceiling, getting extra meta video-game-in-a-video-game with the iPhone status as the ceiling.  We liked it, but hadn't really figured a good use; going in a cave or something was the best idea for how to drop the ceiling and have you bounce off that too.

We'd done a menu for selecting the theme and to get to the costume design where you could pick your helmet and cape.  (Using stars you had collected as the currency.)

We showed it to some people at Chillingo as part of looking to see if we should work with a publisher....and they didn't like it.  Really they were 100% right with the comments, so we owe them a huge thanks.  It's going to be a better game because of them.

It was too easy, and the difficulty didn't ramp up well.  It was hard to aim and you could have bad luck with blocks getting in the way right in front of the paddle.  A good player and a bad player would get similar scores on the same section; there wasn't a level of player expertise beyond not missing.

And they didn't really like the armadillo character and video gamey theme.


So we talked a lot and started making changes.  One was the theme, to add more drama, he'd be fleeing a tornado in the desert.  (This was a first step on making sandstone type towers that would have a continuous texture between pieces that could break apart.  Cool, but scrapped since it would be hard to do that and make it look drawn like the rest.)

We tried and rejected some sort of swipe control to aim and shoot him.

Similar using quick sandstone colored blocks (it also shows the spinner towers we had for a long time.)

One big hangup with this desert theme was we never could think of what would explain the paddle.  Bouncing off a bed?  Tumbleweed?  Something else?

Somehow you'd have to keep ahead of the tornado--a bit we didn't ever figure out before changing.

  REDACTED  

Between August and November 2012, we worked quite a lot and had some totally new ideas that took the game in a very different direction.  The resulting game is still in being completed and hopefully will come out sometime early in 2013.  I'll post this section of the progress once the other game is released!

  /REDACTED  

(November 12)

Then...   Not so much back to the drawing board, as another drawing board :)

I wondered about doing both versions of the game, since we had so much of this game working too, so spent a bit of time revisiting the old ideas.  And in the end, they're very different.  People who have played both hardly even recognize that they're related.

We thought to do it very simply because we'd always liked the stark "70s" theme from the Armadillo game.  And, honestly, we though we could just whip it out faster that way and get some people playing it!  Do the best looking retro graphics we could do with modern effects.  So simple white shapes, but cool effects and the cracks Shawn drew for when they're breaking help make it something better that just a box :)  Don't bother making a story, just bounce and smash stuff ("Bounce and Smash" was one of the titles at this time too.)

We made a few changes, and figured out solutions to a few of the gameplay holes on this 2nd time around.

Now, you get one power at a time, and the whole game background and ball and paddle color changes to be that power's color.  (Before, you could have several at once and sparkles behind the ball helped show which ones--but could have a lot of colored sparkles!)

The other major solution we figured out was for "aimless bouncing".  Because of the curving ground, the ball can just get bouncing up and down, or be too high and passing over the piles of blocks.  A simple gameplay solution: a new tap action to call the ball to the paddle.  So much easier than some technical fix we might never have found.  And lets you as the player do cool back-side aiming to hit on the far side of towers, or retry to line up a shot on a block you want to hit.

And that recall-ball also helps for letting good players do much better than beginners.  By the time we were submitting, Shawn would consistently set scores twice as high as I could--a good sign that expertise matters :)

A bug, but a funny one so I took a screenshot.  The paddle could keep increasing in size if you got the Big Paddle star several times :)

Better status and score things.  Pete pushed for the powers to have a time limit, makes catching new ones and changing up the game important (rather than keeping the one big power you have.)

We thought up lots of fun and silly things for the random rainbow star.  And in our constant re-use of things, the "Laser" is part of cannon muzzle flash Shawn had done for the Armadillo game.  I stretched out a part of it to make a beam, and voila!  Laser!

Some of the better particle effects, nice outlines to go along with the outlined look of the paddle and ball.  This has the new thermometer graphic for the bonus multiplier, and better buttons for pause and recall too.

The blocks still can get in the way of the ball a bit, but not nearly as much with the much slower pauses at the towers.

And we just got rid of the floating blocks that got in the way even more (see way back above, crates supported by a balloon.)

Rather than having all the powers (since it quickly got overwhelming when we were even testing) we decided to limit to 4, and a nice power selector to let you pick any of them to mix and match.  Adds nice re-playability, to try different combinations as you get new powers.  Bullet Blast was the last power, there was a blank hole in the grid for a long time.

Adding lots of crazy things for the Random star is where the bullets started, and they turned out so cool it made sense to include them as the final destructive power you unlock.

Simple menu, but lets you see your current powers, and makes PLAY the big obvious choice.

We had trouble figuring out the name, finally coming up with BounceBash.  We'd always wanted Bounce in the name if we could, since that is the best one-word description of the gameplay :)  Bash had the nice alliteration, fits under an icon, and has the nice double-meaning of "hit" and "party".

(December 10...)

We contacted Beatscribe who did some great music for the game, and most of the sound effects too.

He loved the gameplay but didn't like the stark white graphics, so we went full circle and tried putting in the Armadillo again :) There were a lot of tries.  For a few days it was the stark black/white graphics until you got a powerup, then the whole world changed to be in color and have the Dillo character.

In the end we went with black and white versions of the nice drawn graphics, with those changing to color as you got a powerup.  It helps show "we do have nice graphics, it's a style choice to be black and white" even at the beginning when you haven't seen a powerup yet!

There were a few new things needed, but mostly we got to use all the things we'd done before, Sweet!  Shawn drew a few new things for the ground for different powerups, like the Moonscape and the very last one to get done was the awesome Earthquake ground.

Shawn drew smiles and grins for expressions on the guy, there's even a space helmet he wears on the moon!  Pete used them to make the awesome icon with the "crazy-smile" grin.  

The main menu needed to be a bit cooler after the change from "starkness", so added the game terrain constantly scrolling past.  There's an invisible thing behind the Y that starts everything moving and falling.  It shows before you even begin a game that 1) we have nice graphics 2) things are going to fall and smash which is cool.

It was fun thinking up all the crazy powerups.  Lots of testing to get them nice and destructive (increasing the number of lightning bolts, and adjusting the number of shots from the laser.)

We did keep the plain black/white, but as a "1980" powerup you can get from the rainbow star.  So it's still there, but as a funny random power and not the main UI of the game.  We're already pretty sure that if this does well (fingers crossed!) that we'll do that version of the graphics as an unlock-able theme for the game so you can play that version :)

We went back to the old ping-pong paddle as the main one.  Thinking if we say "bounce with the paddle" it's as obvious as we can make it what you use to bounce with.

Pete said: why not put back the cannon to get him started?  Sure!  Makes as much sense as bouncing an armadillo with a ping-pong paddle :)  (Or bouncing him with a flying saucer on the moon.)

We really did get to use nearly everything.  The old gem theme from the Dillo Dreams days, plus a new gem ground and paddle that Pete made work perfectly for the highest triple-stars and triple-points powers.

I spent a long time working on the help and tutorials.  This is I think the 3rd version of what you'd get from the HELP button on the main menu.  Little bits of animation, and lots of small tweaks to the wording as I showed people at the Seattle NSCoder Night group.   "Slide and Bounce" changed to "Slide On The Left And Bounce" and also added the finger on the left.

WHEN to use the recall wasn't as obvious in early help pages and confused testers.  This is a good change to the text and animation that came from the NSCoder meetings.  It animates a tap and him flying backward thru the blocks--as you can see in the final game.  

With the "Video" which is an automated gameplay script; and some slow-motion bits of text with pointers the first time you play (I think that was Pete's suggestion again); there's really 3 different how-to-play things.  I hope it helps anybody get started.  (Including a nice touch: if you miss really early, it triggers to show the first-game-slow-motion help again. Assuming it might be some new person trying the game who didn't know what to do so missed very early in the game.)

We tested and changed gameplay things right up to the end.  Until the last few days, breaking blocks was what increased the multiplier.  Only about 3 days before we were done did Pete suggest some change to catching the stars (since they didn't do much but unlock some powers.)   Pete's ideas would have been harder to do as we were trying to get done by Friday so I tried that catching the stars that increased the multiplier--an easier change to program :)  (Eventually we expect they will be used as currency to unlock themes or stuff--but increasing the bonus multiplier gives a reason to catch them right now too.)

Pete made the great icon and splash screen, as well as the trailer video.

And after all that, months of work and changes and testing, we submitted it December 7, 2012.  We all clinked drinks against the Skype window on our computers for a toast.

And finally, December 18, it got approved by Apple.

BounceBash In The App Store!