Is It Really a Tablet

I’ve literally re-written this entire post about four times now so hopefully this time I’ll get it right.  I was reading some comments on an Apple rumor site the other day and they got me thinking about the whole tablet, laptop concept.  With everybody telling you that your tablet can replace your laptop and all this two-in-one stuff I just needed a second to take a step back and think about everything for a minuet. . . and then share my thoughts with you.

So I spent the last three iterations of the blog post trying to talk about how an iPad and an iMac could replace a laptop for someone who needs computing power but doesn’t need computing power on the go.  Then I started thinking about all the different MacBook / MacBook Air options and what market / user base each one fits into and then I realized that none of this was really answering the question I had in the first place: Why does everybody want a tablet-laptop (or ‘lablet’ as I like to refer to them)?

The answer I came up with is that people (including myself) are seriously confused about the basic concept of a tablet.  After a little thinking, I was able to gather my thoughts.  If you already have a desktop machine and are just looking for a way to browse the web, check Twitter, or edit a couple of text documents or presentations (Office and iWork are both on the iPad) then a tablet is what you want.  The tablet can also sort of stand in as a very low end notebook, for people who just need to surf the web and maybe type a few things.  But if you already have a laptop then a tablet is basically pointless.  You already have all the function of the tablet and now you’ll just have an extra thing to carry with you.  I think this is where the two-in-one market is trying to put itself.  They are trying to sell you the actual computing power of a laptop with the cool new touch interface of a tablet.  The problem is they end up making these things as small as possible so you can hold them in one hand like a tablet, but then they have no where to put any actual processor, ram, or storage.  In the end you end up with something that’s still to heavy to use as a tablet and still too slow to be an actual computer.

In the end, I think all of this two-in-one non-sense simply comes down to the fact that people are confusing a touchscreen laptop for a tablet.  They’re not adding a keyboard to a tablet to make a laptop, they’re adding touchscreen to a laptop and trying to call it a tablet.  So even though a touchscreen laptop makes absolutely no ergonomic sense, people want one because it has the fancy new touch screen. 

Anyways. . . I hope this post wasn’t too confusing.  It took me about two days to write this so I’m glad to finally just have it written.  If you have any thoughts about this feel free to leave them in the comments, I’d love to hear them.

As always, thanks for reading

-Matt.

v1.0.3

So with v1.0.2 we had a couple lines of code commented out (oops) that are essential to the progression of Block'd. For those of you who have downloaded Block'd since yesterday, or will go download Block'd within the next week or so, will find that all 30 levels are unlocked and playable.

We fixed this problem right away, and it has been submitted and uploaded to Apple as v1.0.3, but as anybody who has worked with Apple will know, it'll be about a week or so until that goes live.

We hope you all take advantage of this time to get acquainted with some of the more difficult levels, and practice them! v1.1 will bring more reasons to have those levels down pat, so get to know them, and get to know them well.

With all that being said, this weekend we will be sharing a good bit of information about what we plan to have coming in v1.1, so stay tuned if that sort of information interests you.

Austin

Website Update

Taking a step back from Block'd for a moment, I wanted to give you all a quick idea of what direction we're about to take our website in. When we first switched to Squarespace over just a simple blog, we had the idea that we would like to create a bit of web presence for Matt and myself as individuals instead of just as parts of a larger picture. After several months we have decided that this is no longer the best way to go about establishing ourselves.

The first reason that comes to mind is that our content is spread thin on the website, trying to decide what things actually belong in which blogs. The other reason we have made this decision is that we are sure that there are better ways to branch out on this monster that is the internet and bring new viewers in from different areas.

Over the next week or so, we will be slowly moving any development related content out of our individual blogs and into the blog I'm writing on now. During that process we will get a better tag and category hierarchy setup so that it is easier to find the content that interests you when you'd like to see it.

That's all the news for now, keep an eye out for Block'd v1.0.2 and another eye out for information relating to v1.1. Matt and I are actively debating what features we would like to move forward with, as soon as we have that solidified we will be updating you with what's coming.

That's all for now, thanks for reading!

Austin

v1.0.2 Update

Constantly keeping Block’d up to date has been one of our goals with it. Instead of just letting it fester as we did ColorGuess! However, that’s a different story. Today I’m going to fill you in a bit on what will be coming in v1.0.2.

First and foremost is the reason we pushed the update in the first place. Our iPhone 5S users were experiencing a weird delay in between completing a level and receiving the “You Win” statement and “Next” button. This has been fixed in v1.0.2, and the images should display at a constant rate now.

Just to talk a little bit more about this bug, it was an interesting one to squash, and to be honest: we may not have really squashed it, just buried it. As I said, the bug was only present in one model of the iPhone. Not only that, the bug would not show up when run from Xcode, only when compiled and transferred to the phone. In order to fix it, we removed the slight randomness of the timing. While we do not know what the root cause of the bug was (and may never will) we believe that this fix will hold.

Other than that bug, we worked on some quality of life improvements that were easy enough to just throw in. There will be continuous work on some of these changes to make them more aesthetically pleasing and better suited. For now, what we’ve done is added some level numbers, enlarged the tutorial images to make them easier to read, scaled down the credits scene to allow players out of it, last but not least, we added a few labels here and there to make things clearer.

I hope that these explanations of our changes make sense. Keep an eye on the website for informations regarding our first content patch, which will add new levels, new colors and new challenges for players to experience.

Austin

A Quick Block'd! Update

So about a month ago we were running our “10 days ’til block’d” count down blog post event thing where we posted about a different aspect of the Block’d development each day in anticipation of the launch on 7 - 7 - 14. . . But then Block’d! didn’t come out we just kinda stopped posting stuff . . . (although to be fair, Austin did post about the delay and then the release and then the first update)

So we’ve decided that we are going to try much harder to keep this blog updated with news about the minor and major updates we are bringing to Block’d (and the other projects we are working on), along with other stuff we find interesting (maybe some game reviews or a look at the new iPhone or . . . who knows).  See, one of the good things about not having a lot of people reading this is that when I say “we are going to keep the blog updated" people aren’t going to remember that this is probably the third or fourth time I’ve said that.  But I digress.  Let’s take this back to Block’d!

First things first, If you haven’t downloaded it yet go do it now.  It’s completely free so you have no excuse to not at least give it a try.  Secondly, I guess I can give you a recap of what happened (if you haven’t already read Austin’s posts).  So basically what it all comes down to is that we didn’t give ourselves enough time.  We were a little rushed submitting to try and get it released on the 7 - 7 - 14 deadline.  When we finally did get it submitted it took a week for Apple to tell us that we were missing one freaking icon, and we were already behind our scheduled release by two days.  We resubmitted with the proper icon and after about another week we had success!  But then things started breaking.  The ads weren’t working, the Facebook share button wasn’t working, there was a wired delay in one of the animations that was only happening on the 5s. . .  It was clear that we needed a quick 1.0.1 version to address some of these issues.  So we started on that and within a couple days we were submitting the update to fix most of the major issues we found in the first release.  And that pretty much brings us to where Block’d! is today.

Right now it’s in version 1.0.1 which means pretty much all the little bugs we found on release day were fixed. We fixed the ads and fixed the Facebook sharing button.  Although with this version there is still a delay in the animation on the 5s device.  However, we actually just fixed that issue yesterday so we will be pushing a 1.0.2 update pretty soon here with some other minor but fixes. Additionally we are working on a 1.1 update which will include a new level group with 30 new levels, a new color scheme, and a bunch of other new features that we’re still discussing.  To try and avoid the problems we had last time we are planning on releasing this major update sometime late September or early October depending on how things go.  One of us will post about some of the new features we are thinking about adding in 1.2 but I think this post is long enough as it is.

So yeah.  It’s always an experience submitting to the App Store but I think we learned some good lessons from all of it.  We're moving forward with bug fixes and content updates for Block’d! along with some other side projects, so keep checking back for more updates and other fun posts

As always, thanks for reading

-Matt.