Roughly a week before I began writing this review, I achieved a major milestone. According to Wakoopa, I have played Glitch for over 1000 hours. (that’s approximately one month and eleven days of time spent in the game). So I decided to celebrate by writing a review. There are already plenty of reviews out there, so I intend for this one to be different in several ways. First off, I joined Glitch after having read a review of it, which is partially why I decided to write this one. The review was more so interesting facts about Tiny Speck than a proper review of Glitch, so I’ll take it upon myself to provide that (among other things, it included only a couple of actual gameplay screenshots, and no video). Even if more comprehensive reviews do exist (I’ve honestly only read that one), they’re still most likely out of date. Glitch unlaunched several months ago, and much has changed since then. In fact, the biggest change (the imagination conversion; more on that when it happens) is yet to come. My bet is on Tuesday…
This brings me to another way in which this review will be different than any others you may find out there. As Glitch is currently in a state of near-constant change, I’ll try to review new content as it’s released (however, this review will cover the game in general, while emphasizing on the direction the game’s going so far). This will hopefully allow me to provide new direction for my blog itself, as I’ve been rather starved for content lately, despite promises to the contrary. A final note before I begin: If you’re looking for a purely factual review, stop reading here and go somewhere else. I tend to be highly opinionated on all things Glitch, and as such, I have no intent to spout out facts without giving my personal opinion of the gameplay elements involved. With that being said, let’s get started!
General Gameplay
Housing
Me, standing under a sampling of my trophies (click to enlarge)
There really is no “point” to Glitch. This is reflected in the game’s very own slogan (see below). That is, there is no singular goal to achieve, although this is contrary to what the Glitch Wikipedia article, by far the worst piece of literature I’ve seen on the subject, may otherwise lead you to believe. Time travel is not, in fact, a core gameplay element, and, as far as I know, is only part of an early quest. There are, however, many separate goals to achieve. Gaining experience points (which, most likely next week, will be converted to a new system, imagination, which is basically like spendable xp that still retains a lifetime count that determines one’s level), earning achievements, and collecting currants are the most significant, although others, like completing quests and fighting the Rook often come into play. A recent hobby many people have taken up is decorating one’s house (a small section of mine can be seen above), which is now possible due to the much-improved new housing system that Tiny Speck is in the process of transitioning to. Almost everything in new houses is customizable, from the wallpaper, floors, and ceilings, to the decorations. This is opposed to old housing, seen two screenshots down, that cannot be customized at all.
“Do stuff. In a game.”
Old housing had several templates to choose from, but the templates can’t be altered… at all
There are indeed several kinds of old housing to choose from, however what you see is what you get. The exterior, interior walls, ceilings, doors, furniture (however most furniture in old housing is merely part of the background), etc… cannot be customized to any degree. I won’t focus much on old housing, besides pointing out its deficiencies, as old housing is quickly on its way out.
Decorate Mode, along with a sampling of upgraded and non-upgraded furniture
Housing customization takes place within Decorate Mode. Here, one may make enlargements to their house, change the wallpaper, flooring, and ceiling, or add and remove furniture. Above, in the furniture tab, is a view of a category of furniture items, in this case seating (entirely ignoring the fact that a sitting posture does not exist in Glitch; you can always stand on the chairs though…). The items can be dragged into the game window to place them in one’s house, and from there can be “upgraded” to one’s choice of styling.
A furniture upgrade window
The exterior of my house, located on my home street
Here the exterior of my house, as well as its location, my home street, can be seen (for what it’s worth, it isn’t possible to stand on some houses, and even some of the platforms on my house, that look like actual surfaces, can’t be stood on; not really a major review point but it still really bothers me). Notice how the inside of my house is much larger than the outside (interior and exterior size are completely independent of each other, and exterior house size is, in fact, static). That being said, it is possible to expand the size of one’s home street (or back yard; home street and back yards function in the exact same way, but are customized independently).
Customization menu for my home street
House Customization (Exterior)
Both the street background (and background music – I was overjoyed when this was announced as I wanted the Uralia theme music instead of the much-overused Groddle Forest theme that formerly applied to all backgrounds) and house design are customizable. The background has one of ten or so predefined choices, and houses have seven base styles. These base styles have many further customization options (for example, the House of Whimsy design has an average of nine different choices for each customizable area listed). This alone makes new home streets much preferable to old housing quarters (which were basically just lines of the old-style houses, all on one street). But wait, there’s more!
Cultivate mode on home streets
Another feature of home streets (and back yards) is Cultivate mode. Unlike old housing quarters, which were barren lots usually containing nothing but housing (a few housing styles did have some resources, although they were template-based and not customizable by residents), home streets can be cultivated by their owners. This means that resources (which will, in the future, cost imagination, described earlier) can be placed on one’s home street. These resources are consumed with use, and must eventually be repaired. For example, herb plots, the item which breaks most often in my case as I’m using them to grind herb-related achievements at the moment, require lumps of earth and guano to repair. The ability to have customizable resources on home streets, coupled with the ability to link your home street to those of five friends, has led to interesting player-created developments, such as housing resource routes. These routes so far have been designed around harvesting trees, and due to their organization, have easily been the best way to gather large numbers of tree-based resources. These are particularly useful for finding usually hard-to-find resources, like planks, which have also met increased demand as they’re likely to be necessary for building furniture and upgrading one’s house, once those features are available in their final form.
Gardening
1200 words and we’re just getting started! Let’s move off the topic of housing now, and onto actual gameplay mechanics. First up is gardening. There are two kinds of gardens: crop gardens and herb gardens. This used to be more significant before the introduction of new housing (while no longer explicitly on the topic of housing, almost any other topic easily ties back into it). Previously, the kind of house you chose to have determined what kind of gardens you had. Bog houses had herb gardens, and all other houses had crop gardens. Tiny Speck has responded by allowing new housing to contain any kind of garden you wish (this also comes as a consequence of the fact that new housing is not tied to a specific region). I’ve created the following video to demonstrate the mechanics of gardening. While crops and herbs serve different purposes, I will only demonstrate herb gardening in this video, as crop gardening and herb gardening essentially follow the same process. The only real difference is in how seeds are obtained. Herb seeds are obtained by shucking the herbs, and crop seeds are purchased from vendors or by feeding the crops to a Piggy, who will then plop out seeds (in a pleasant contrast to the nerfings mentioned later, this has recently been enhanced to allow more than one packet of seeds to be obtained at a time through feeding).
Mining
I’m not entirely sure an MMO exists that doesn’t include mining. Glitch is no exception. However, it has mining, with some strange (and sometimes completely illogical) twists. For instance, you get rewarded with bonuses for mining cooperatively with other players. Four kinds of rocks exist (beryl, dullite, metal, and sparkly). Metal can be smelted into ingots, and the other rocks can be crushed into elements, which can then be used for assorted alchemical purposes such as creating powders and rubbing plain metal ingots into other kinds, which can then be used in crafting.
Animals
Up until last Tuesday, there were three primary kinds of animals in the game from which one could harvest, Butterflies, Chickens, and Piggies. In yet another demonstration of how Glitch brings innovation to the mostly stale MMO genre, Butterflies can be milked to receive Butterfly Milk, Chickens can be squeezed to receive Grain, and Piggies can be nibbled to receive Meat. The amount of these items that you receive is dependent upon your Animal Kinship skill, and at lower levels of this skill, additional action is required before these actions can be successfully performed. Assuming you have the Animal Husbandry skill, you can also use Chickens to incubate eggs.
Introduced on Tuesday were two additional animals, the Fox and the Sloth. Foxes are harvested for Fiber (for future use in furniture crafting), and Sloths chew Metal Rods into Snails (assumably for some construction use; a snail is a half-screw, half-nail item – see below). Foxes and Sloths were introduced along with five new gameplay regions and a few new streets in existing regions. I particularly enjoy the mechanics of harvesting the new Foxes. Difficult? Yes. But it’s far less “grindy” than the mechanisms for harvesting the old animals (watch the video above and try to imagine finding pigs and harvesting each one twice [the limit with a maxed out Animal Kinship skill] for an hour or more).
Snail
Trees and Other Resources
There are eight kinds of trees in Glitch (Fruit, Bean, Gas, Spice, Bubble, Wood, Egg, and Paper). The items harvested from these trees are used in cooking and other forms of crafting. Multiple other resources abound, including peat bogs (used for making fuel cells for machines), jellisacs (also used for making fuel cells), barnacles and fireflies (used for making crystals and crafting a few other items), and dirt piles. The following video gives a brief overview of some of these resources.
Commerce
Auctions
I’ll be totally honest, Tiny Speck has really screwed the pooch on auctions. They’ve stated a goal of encouraging more trade between players, and as such are phasing out vendors. Okay, I get the recent vendor nerf (vendors now sell higher and buy lower). But if you’re trying to encourage trade between players, why make auction items take about eight minutes longer to be received? You want to nerf the undesirable action, not the desirable one. This is without even going into the asinine fees associated with using the auctions. That said, sometimes it’s unavoidably necessary to use auctions. They’re great for finding (almost) any item you may need (with some exceptions; see below).
The latest auctions
Marketplace Forum + Marketplace on the Go
Among the many shortcomings of auctions is that many items (generally either really worthless items, or really valuable rare items; although cubimals spread this entire spectrum) can’t be auctioned. Furthermore, you again have the ridiculous taxes on auctions. There exist two major solutions to this problem; one official, and the other player-created. The official solution is the Marketplace forum. This allows players to discuss and facilitate trades. A player-created solution also exists, in the form of a group called Marketplace on the Go. It allows bargaining to take place within a chat/IM-type setting, as opposed to the threaded forum styled official solution.
Final thoughts (or are they?)
For all its shortcomings (really, the only ones that need to be addressed at this point are those involved with auctions; and making sure that annoying Groddle Forest banjo tune actually stays in Groddle Forest – although they’re making decent headway on that), I can still safely say Glitch is the best game ever. Why else would I average six hours a day playing it? Plus, Tiny Speck has pretty well proven that they’re quite capable of addressing shortcomings. I’ll once again use as an example the housing system. The old system downright sucked (well okay, it seemed fine back when we didn’t know any better; but when presented with something better, we realized how awful it was). The new system isn’t even quite finished, but already, it’s vastly superior to the old housing quarters. I haven’t made much mention of this yet, but possibly the best thing about Glitch isn’t that it’s a great game (and it is; you’ll never find better), but that it’s got an awesome community. That’s not to say that there aren’t a few bad apples. Just like any other MMO, you will run across the occasional griefer (word of advice here: don’t let random people in your house; it’s one of the most common ways they steal things). But in most cases, griefers aren’t a perpetual issue, just an occasional annoyance. More often than not, the people you run into will be either benign, or friendly and helpful. I’ve been playing Glitch every day for close to six months now, and there’s a reason: An MMO with lots of new ideas, coupled with the best community on the internet is a winning combination.
I usually don’t assign scores to products that are beta/pre-release, but Glitch couldn’t be any more deserving of this rating.
Overall Rating: 11/10. (yes, that’s eleven of ten)
While there are still many changes to come, that I will assess in future posts as new content is released, I’m certain that Glitch will only get better.
Thanks to Zen Kitty for help with the review, and to Scarlett Bearsdale, Kristen Marie, and Saucelah for corrections/suggestions!
I’d like to end with this screenshot, just because it looks cool.
Roughly seven months ago, I posted about what I called Sonyfication, a term I created to describe the acts of a company that promises and delivers features, then, out of nothing more than pure greed, removes them. The namesake of this term was, of course, Sony’s removal of the OtherOS feature of the PlayStation 3. My first usage of the term was aimed at Spotify, who initially offered free (but with advertisements) unlimited listening, then altered their free plan to enact severe limits on listening after six months of membership.
Today, Glitch has announced that it’s “unlaunching.” That is, they are returning to a beta stage. As an end-user, and as a developer who understands (at least to some small extent) his responsibilities to the end user (oh, and let’s not forget, a huge fan of Glitch), I figure I have a few things to say about this.
Before I begin, let me make one thing clear: I am not comparing Tiny Speck (the developers of Glitch) to Sony, or to Spotify. I have nothing but the utmost respect for Tiny Speck, and nothing but the utmost of loathing for Sony and Spotify. Tiny Speck is not doing this unreleasing of Glitch for profit, but to make the world of Ur a better place (unlike Sony and Spotify, who clearly performed their actions as a malicious act of greed). I applaud their motive, but I’m worried that the results may still be disastrous. So I’m not entirely confident that the term Sonyfication is appropriate here. However, for lack of a better term, it’s what I’m using.
Quoted below is my comment on the Glitch forum topic on the issue, verbatim, and in its entirety (but with some formatting added):
I’m going to add myself to the list of “please no reset” people. As much as I’ve always wanted the honor of “being in the beta” and getting a pickle and all that jazz, I’ve realized something. None of that will make up the 99 hours I’ve devoted to accomplishing stuff in the last three-ish weeks. I’ve more or less renounced real life in favor of spending more time on Glitch, although if I lose all I’ve got on here, I may not come back. I feel really sorry for those who are up at levels 50-60. The amount of time they’ve had to spend doing rather menial tasks in the game (I’m looking at you mining) is incomprehensible to me. The previous resets (while I can’t actually speak for those who had to deal with them, as I had not yet signed up) made sense. If people sign up knowing it’s in beta, then they sign up expecting the worst. However, many people, myself included, signed up after this period, and expected smooth sailing (I’ve written about this kind of thing before; companies like Sony and Spotify have promised features then later removed them, in an act I’ve termed “Sonyfication”). While I’m a developer myself, and certainly acknowledge the fact that software can have bugs after launch, as I am also an end-user, I realize my responsibilities toward the end-user as a developer (e.g. making it a priority to cause as little disturbance to users as possible when there are indeed bugs).
One possible solution (I realize I’ve never developed anything on as large a scale as Glitch; so correct me if I’m wrong on this) would be something like what Chrome does. Have a “stable channel” (e.g. Glitch as it is now), and a “beta channel.” Then, completely informing them of the possible repercussions (resets included), allow them to opt into the “beta channel.”
That said, and to attempt to end on a somewhat positive note, I’m glad to see that things like housing and the ability for more player control over the world are being addressed. Remove the ability for players to kill each other by splank fight, and I think Glitch has the opportunity to become the perfect game (the lack of violence as a core gameplay element is key, in my opinion, and I applaud Tiny Speck for making such strides in this arena; also, I realize that the term “perfect” is subjective). For what it’s worth, I’m not offended by or opposed to violent games. It’s just not my cup of tea.
You already posted that there. Why repost it here?
A couple of reasons. First is visibility. My comment will quickly be buried in that forum post. Here, it will remain at the utmost level of visibility for, at the very least, the better part of a month. Second, is out of my respect for Tiny Speck. The Glitch forums are theirs, not mine. I have a bit more I’d like to say on the topic than what I said there, but I respect that the Glitch forums are their home turf, so I’ll instead post the extended version here.
So I’ve always wished I were in the Glitch beta, as I felt, until today, that in order to really be part of the community, it’s a prerequisite. Furthermore, and partially for the same reason, I’ve always wanted the Special Item That Only Beta Testers Get (aka Señor Funpickle). However, what I never really gave much serious thought, is that sure the pickle says you were in the beta. But that’s not much of a real accomplishment. It’s actually just a stroke of luck, being in the right place at the right time. What really struck me in light of this was my reconsideration of a Glitch who was level 59 for as long as I could remember, then finally accomplished reaching level 60 (by comparison, I’ve attained level 30 at the time of this writing), and another Glitch who was in the beta, but has only attained level 8. Let’s assume the level 60 Glitch wasn’t in the beta. Still, it’s obvious as to which one was more devoted to the game. So really, a special item doesn’t properly make up for resetting one’s level, as it isn’t an accurate indicator of the amount of effort and time one has put into the game. Upon giving this some consideration, my advice to Tiny Speck would be to provide an additional piece of information on each player’s profile, stating “Pre-Reset Level: [level number].”
In addition to level number, the other thing I’m most concerned about is cubimal collections. I’ve, admittedly, only recently started collecting cubimals (for those who do not play Glitch, just know that a cubimal is a collectible in-game item, often of excruciatingly high value). However, I have a little over half the different kinds of cubimals in my collection (sadly, the more common half of the cubimal spectrum, in general). Of these, a couple were obtained from Cubimal Boxes, and the rest were obtained by trading with other players. This is cause for alarm. What if, after post-reset, these other players are no longer able to trade cubimals at the same prices I paid for them the first time?
At this time, I’d like to reiterate the ultimate moral of this post: the responsibility of developers toward users. Especially after launching my first paid iOS app, I’ve learned some of these responsibilities quite well. Like see that “App Support” link up top? In my opinion, it’s unnecessary clutter. It’s also the first time that my blog contains content that I don’t really want. But Apple requires that I offer a support page (maybe in the future, I’ll create a support page separate from my blog), so I have to put it there. Returning to Glitch, the subject of this discussion, I understand the previous resets. As far as I am aware, it was made quite clear to users that they were part of a beta, and that there would be resets. However, for those of us now, who signed up to what we thought was a finished product, the ethics of the situation have changed. A beta was not what we signed up for. Stuff like resets wasn’t part of the deal. So I leave Tiny Speck with this challenge: No more resets, please. And I do understand that you’re working for the good of the community (and I’m deeply sorry that I had to mention the likes of Sony and Spotify in this post along with the good guys). Even if you do have to perform a reset in the course of this (and I’d also like to remind the reader at this point that they said it’s extremely unlikely, and to apologize for my “the sky is falling” tone), I won’t lose any respect for you. Will it perhaps preclude my return after such a hypothetical reset? Yes. But that’s more so my fault than theirs. I simply can’t bring myself to spend the many hundreds of hours to get back to where I was. Ultimately, Glitch is a free game, and I suppose Tiny Speck doesn’t really have an obligation to go out of their way to avoid a reset. But I challenge them to go above and beyond what’s expected, as they’ve already more than proven that they can, and to ensure a seamless user experience by avoiding a reset. I have faith in them, and until some terrible reset comes, I shall continue to play Glitch in every possible minute I can find.
At the beginning of WWDC 2011 yesterday, Apple announced iOS 5 and iCloud, along with Mac OS X 10.7 Lion (again).
Apple claims iOS 5 includes over 200 new features, previewing ten of them yesterday.
Let’s look at a few of these features, as well as a few of the bugs that I hope will be fixed by the next beta release.
Warning: iOS 5 betas supposedly cannot be downgraded to iOS 4.x, particularly on devices that have a baseband (iPhone, and iPad 3G). While I have not tested this, and I have written an article about how to downgrade betas in the past, there is no guarantee that my method will work this time. Download and run the iOS 5 beta at your own risk.
With that in mind, I’ve only upgraded my iPad 2 to the iOS 5 beta. My iPhone remains on iOS 4.3, and as such, this post will only cover iOS 5 as seen on the iPad.
The iOS 5 home screen, as seen on my iPad 2
There are a few things to notice here. First, a new app called Reminders (no, it’s not an App Store app, it’s built-in; I have no need for a to-do list app and would never install one =/). There is also a new app/folder called Newsstand. I’m not entirely sure which one it is, as it appears in the multitasking tray (probably a bug), but it opens like a folder.
My Social folder, containing the new Messages app
In iOS 5, Apple is introducing the new iMessage service. Apple is also adding the Messages app to the iPad and iPod touch in order to allow usage of this service (however, iPads and iPod touches still cannot send regular SMS messages). iMessage is an instant messaging service provided exclusively to users of iOS devices, that gives SMS-like messaging, with the ability to send media, receive read receipts, and see notifications that indicate when the other user is typing. It feels a lot like the old iOS Messages app, while adding a lot of features similar to those found in Windows Live Messenger.
Game Center in iOS 5
In iOS 5, Apple has enhanced Game Center, adding the ability to have an avatar for your profile. Furthermore, they are also adding official support for turn-based games, which will probably bring many promising offerings once iOS 5 is released this fall. Until then, games that leverage this functionality most likely will not appear in the App Store, as Apple does not accept apps written using a beta version of the iOS SDK (much like how Game Center was utterly useless in the iOS 4 betas since no games supported it).
Newsstand
Much like the new functionality in Game Center, there isn’t much to see here either. No apps support the functionality offered by Newsstand yet, and the Store button is disabled. Newsstand is supposed to be a collection of newspaper/magazine apps. It is also supposed to be capable of pushing updated content to these apps. Most likely, there won’t be much to do with this until after the official release either.
A couple of screenshots of the Reminders app
In what I consider to be a questionably stupid move on Apple’s part, iOS 5 now includes a built-in to-do list app called Reminders. Considering something of the sort could exist perfectly fine on the App Store (and, in fact, many things of this sort already do), I’m really wondering why Apple bothered with this one. Nonetheless, you can see a couple of screenshots of it in action above. You set up tasks that the app can remind you about either by time, or, in what may be the one interesting thing about this app, by place. Supposedly, when you’re at a certain location, it can deliver a reminder. Anyway, the first screenshot above shows my list of reminders, and the second shows those tasks which I have completed (even though I just threw that up on the spot, it’s pretty accurate about what I do and don’t get done).
The emoji keyboard on iPad… finally!
As seen above, Apple has finally enabled the emoji keyboard for iPad (well, they’ve enabled the ability for you to enable it). Just go into your keyboard settings, and add the Emoji keyboard like any other. Then annoy your fellow iOS users to death with emoticons.
The split keyboard
While on the topic of the keyboard, Apple has added the ability to split the keyboard in iOS 5. Hold the keyboard dismiss button to access the option to do so. Some people I’ve spoken to love this feature. I, however, find it dismally annoying. It makes me really prone to typos, by both making the buttons smaller, and by putting them in unusual locations. I hate it, and will still be using the regular keyboard, but your mileage may vary. Also of note, you can undock the keyboard to move it up or down the screen as you wish, while keeping both halves attached and the buttons their usual size. This feature may be useful for some, but I will be leaving the keyboard in the tried and true location of the bottom of my screen.
The About menu in General Settings
Okay, there’s a few important things to notice here. First off, the build number of this beta is 9A5220p. Second of all, there’s an option to change the device name… on the device itself. In addition, there is a Diagnostics and Usage menu, which gives you the ability to turn the option to send such data to Apple on or off (something normally done in iTunes).
These next two observations are quite significant. Why would Apple give you the option to do these things on the device itself?
Apple has finally dropped the requirement of having a PC or iTunes. iOS devices are now completely independent. When you open the box of an iOS 5 device, it will no longer greet you with the familiar “Connect to iTunes” screen. It will instead prompt you to set up the device… on the device itself. As pointed out in the keynote, this is the logical conclusion to their theory that we are living in a “post-PC era.” To enhance the independence of the device from iTunes, you may also delete music directly from the device in the Music app. There is also a Usage menu in General Settings that provides an overview of the amount of storage used by a given app, along with the ability to delete a given app outright, or to dump its data (I greatly appreciate this feature; I commonly download videos using Terra Web Browser then have it open them in VLC. VLC can play the videos just fine, but it gives no way of deleting the copy of the video that Terra dumped in its documents folder. And considering some giant douche forced Apple to pull the VLC app, that’ll never be fixed either).
Over-the-air updates
As seen above, Apple has also introduced over-the-air updates in iOS 5. Supposedly it will also be more efficient than the previous update mechanism, as it will only download that which has changed, as opposed to an entire firmware image. It does, however, seem to be somewhat buggy at this point. While I don’t know if it’s even really enabled in this beta, or if it’ll allow you to update between betas, it claims I’m not connected to Wi-fi, even though I am.
As a side note, as much effort as Apple has put into removing the dependency on iTunes, I wonder why they’ve also added Wi-fi syncing with iTunes now.
While I think it’s broken in this build as well (either that or the iTunes 10.5 beta is broken), there is an iTunes Sync option in General Settings that allows you to sync over Wi-fi, although it claims that iTunes is never available to sync to.
iCloud
Furthering the theory that we are living in a “post-PC world,” Apple has introduced iCloud, their cloud storage service. As seen in the Mail option above, Apple is now giving away @me.com e-mail addresses for free. It also includes the former MobileMe service of Find My iPad. It also introduces the ability to sync your bookmarks, notes,contacts, calendars, and reminders, as well as Photo Stream, a way to store your photos in the cloud (why it gives Photo Stream a separate menu, I don’t know; the only option that menu gives is yet another on/off slider). By the way, did anyone notice that Apple changed the slider images? Personally, I liked the old ones better. As seen immediately above the big red Delete Account button, you can also back up your devices straight to iCloud. However, this disables automatic backup with iTunes, so I left it disabled.
Twitter integration in iOS 5
iOS 5 now features direct integration with Twitter, allowing single sign-on for all Twitter apps, a most welcome addition after Twitter’s basically made developers of Twitter clients bend over and take their crappy web-based authentication. Apparently iOS will be spared the awful experience, as you can add accounts directly in the Settings app.
Posting to Twitter from Safari
You can also post to Twitter directly from certain apps, including Safari (pictured above) and Photos. However, photos tweeted from Photos seem to be in highly reduced quality.
While I find this functionality both well-implemented and convenient, I’m slightly worried about the precedent that it’s setting. If Apple is this accepting of third-party software out-of-box, this may eventually introduce Facebook support in iOS. Considering I do not use Facebook, I would find this to be unnecessary bloat. And for those that do, if I really need to scare you with what may happen, this could lead to crapware in Macs down the line. What I’ve always enjoyed about Mac OS X is that Apple makes both the hardware and the software, therefore wants to make both work well together, not loading a ton of crapware onto Macs out of box. While this is somewhat different, it is setting a precedent that I’m concerned may lead to such things.
A notification in iOS 5
As was probably the most (over-?)hyped feature of iOS 5, Apple has included a revamped notifications system. While I’ve never used MobileNotifier, I’ve seen screenshots/videos, and the fact that Apple has hired its developer, Peter Hajas, is apparent (while talking about Apple hiring a jailbreak developer, let me add a bit to my rant on Sony by saying Apple is setting an excellent example of how Sony should’ve handled their argument with Geohot).
Notification Center
Apple has also provided Notification Center, a summary of recent notifications. It allows you to open the app that created them, or to clear the notifications created by a given app.
Lock screen notifications
Notifications on the lock screen have also been improved. You can swipe across one to go to the app that created it, and it now handles multiple notifications better.
Notification options
Notifications in iOS 5 are also incredibly customizable. You may select whether they appear in Notification Center, whether they appear on the lock screen, and even how many messages appear in Notification Center. Furthermore, it is also of note that Apple has not completely removed the old notification system. You can configure an application to use the old notification style by setting it to use “Alerts” instead of “Banners.”
Thank you for reading my review of some of the many changes in iOS 5. While not pictured, a couple of other things are of note, such as the music app having been split into two on all devices. The music app on iPad has also been redesigned. The one thing that really, really peeves me about iOS 5 thus far, and I really hope is a bug that Apple plans to address, is the “lock out of device upon X incorrect passcode attempts” functionality. For one thing, syncing with iTunes no longer resets this lockout. Furthermore, even if it did, if Apple really plans to cut the cord and sell to users who don’t own a PC or a Mac, they’ve gotta at least make that functionality an option. My password would take millions of years to bruteforce, and I’d rather some stupid kid playing with my devices not prevent the person intended to access the device (me) take millions of years to get into the device owned by the person who actually knows the password. I don’t need a software-enforced lockout to keep my stuff safe. Besides this (hopefully once again a bug that will soon be addressed), my only real disappointment with iOS 5 is that it hasn’t provided a unified way to access files across apps (as opposed to the Open in… functionality that gives me a mild measure of trouble in VLC). Storage space is finite, and having to make a copy of a large movie just to watch it, as opposed to being able to just watch the copy that I downloaded from its present location, is quite annoying.
In summary, while iOS 5 has a couple of critical bugs, and lacks one feature I really wanted to see, it’s certainly moving even further in the right direction. The best mobile OS on the market today, and most likely for the entire foreseeable future, has gotten better with messaging across devices, sexy new unobtrusive notifications, finally gaining complete independence from the PC, and built-in free cloud backup and syncing.
"Tandem, is that kind of like spooning? Mommy doesn't allow me to watch porn, especially not gay porn starring people in fake police uniforms." - anakata
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