Apple Pay and the Complexity of Payments
For the past couple of years, "payments" has been a frequent area targeted for innovation, something that tech companies and startups boast about disrupting but rarely back up with actual results. It has...
Mobile
The Great App Cheapening
During a fairly lonely drive to a friend's gathering up in Tahoe a few weeks back, I was listening to ATP, and the hosts of the podcast were chatting about the newly announced iPhone 6 Plus. In their keynote, Apple showed off apps that made use of the additional screen real estate for...
Peak Mobile Gaming
It's been a couple of eventful weeks for mobile gaming, with some notable releases and twists and turns. In order of completely subjective industry importance: * Threes! was released in the App Store. A well-polished, simple but addictive puzzler that everybody likes, which reminds me a bit of the fervor around Dots. * Square got...
Exemplary Touch Gaming
Gaming on phones and tablets have certainly come a long way from that poker game that Apple released with the first App Store. There is, if not a particularly healthy ecosystem of games, at least a flood of them of all types and stripes: ports from handheld gaming devices; ports from old consoles; Flash-based games;...
Apple Maps and an Issue of Trust
Okay, it's been about two months since iOS6 was released with the infamous downgrade from Google Apps to Apple's own mapping app. Formal apologies and internet-wide bashing aside, I never understood the vitriol coming from iOS phone users, when http://maps.google.com/ is still available in Mobile Safari and ugly...
Realizing the Limitations of Responsive Design
Responsive design! The One True Way™, born from the humble media query, to restore principles of DRY for web development while allowing for optimized experiences on today's myriad of devices. And it cures baldness. But for better or worse, it's become a oft-cited, oft-deployed strategy to deal with screen size fragmentation....