iPhone Audio Controls Rant

I've been meaning to complain about this for awhile. Dreaming, nay fantasizing, about complaining about this. Really. I had this fantasy where I would be at one of those diners where you pay lots of money to sit next to somebody famous. I'd be sitting next to Steve Jobs and I would spend the entire time not just complaining, but ranting to the point where Mr. Gates wouldn't care one way or another about the problem, but just be so sick of the whole thing that he would get his people to fix it just to shut up the echo of my voice in his head.

There are two unfortunate problem with that opening. The first is that Mr. Jobs has since passed away. I pay him tribute by not saying, gone to that 'something related to Apple or Tech in general' in the sky. The second unfortunate problem is that I think that opening may have  raised your expectations of what this problem is way above my ability to express how much it gets under my skin.

Anywhere, let me present you with a picture. This is the iPhone lock screen after you've pressed the home button twice. Doing that overlays the iPod controls for the audio. You get the four main controls: back, pause/play, forward and volume.

My problem is with how close the back and forward buttons are to the centered play/pause button. Why aren't they moved off to the edge more? Do you have any idea how many time I've hit back or forward when I meant to hit play/pause? It is really easy to do and really annoying while in the car. Know that this isn't a problem while listening to music, who cares if you accidentally skip ahead to the next song. It is a problem when listening to an audiobook. Some books have really long tracks and you don't want to have to re-listen to 10-20 minutes of a book to get back to where you were. And trying to manually trying to find the exact spot where you were is annoyingly difficult and certainly not something you can do while driving.  there is no reason the back and forward buttons aren't all the way on the left and right edges of the screen.

/rant off


UPDATE: They fixed this a few patches ago. They moved the Back and Forward buttons more toward the edge of the screen. Yay.

Highborn Video Trailer & More!

The game has been out for a week now and still doing pretty good. I expect another bump as some more reviews come out. Here is another great review from The Portable Game just came out last night and another one from 148 Apps just came out a few minutes ago.

I also posted another Developer Diary that talks about why we didn't include an Undo Feature in Highborn, and what we are going to try and implement to compensate for that. It also talks about a few other things we are working on for the game.

We also have this wonderful review that was posted about the game in Apple's App Store:Finally I want to post this sneak peek at some of the tokens we are redoing for the iPad version of Highborn. We are increasing the scale of the game by 150%, notice that isn't the standard doubling. The new scale allows you to see more of the maps and still have bigger squares to touch. The original tokens from the iPhone are above, and the new ones for the iPad are below.

Fixed the Valve Apple Ad

You may have seen the faux Apple ads that Valve released today.

Well, I thought one of them wasn't quite right, so I fixed it for them.(click image for full size)