My Anticipated iOS 5 Features - Part 4 - Gaming Controller API

One of the usages for my iPhone is like many others, gaming.
And my favourite kind of game has always been soccer gaming.
You have to control the 3D player's movement by the left hand "directional" buttons and right hand "shoot, pass" button.





As the iPhone has no physical buttons like those on the NDS or PSP, controlling by rubbing your fingers over the capacitive invisible buttons can be a pain, and it blocks the images on the screen at times.

I was thrilled when this iControlPad hardware gaming controller for iPhone was announced sometime back. However there's no news for its release to date.





This iControlPad would be any iPhone gamers' dream to own. It's easily seen that quality games on iOS devices are apparent.

However, the iControlPad still does not address full compatibility for all iOS games, as I would think that it uses its own API / codes to interact the game with its hardware buttons. That is, only games that are written using its API can utilise this piece of hardware.

Gaming is a huge market on Apple Appstore. Apple should address this and come out in the upcoming iOS 5, a standard API for game developers to use to develop their games to utilise this standard-based hardware buttons.

This will surely give the PSP a run for its money!

Read also:
My Anticipated iOS 5 Features - Part 3 - Standby Screen Clock
My Anticipated iOS 5 Features - Part 2 - Beaming
My Anticipated iOS 5 Features - Part 1 - USB Mass Storage



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My Anticipated iOS 5 Features - Part 3 - Standby Screen Clock

No, I'm not the only one around that don't wear a watch. When I'm away from my computer, I will rely on my handphone for the time. It is my watch.
I don't remember when I last wear a watch.

In pre-touchscreen handphone era, there's usually this clock display that appear every time you turn off the handphone screen. To view the time, you don't have to turn the set on. The time is there 24/7!

Since the advent of touchscreen handphone, the Clock Display suddenly disappears for unknown reasons! The ONLY touchscreen phone that I've used that sport a standby screen clock is the Palm Treo Pro. (It's still has the best Windows Mobile OS implementations, although the OS itself sucks big time!)



If Palm is able to put in on a touchscreen phone, I don't see why other manufacturers can't.

This standby screen clock is so handy and useful that I really think it should go in iOS 5.

Read also:
My Anticipated iOS 5 Features - Part 2 - "Beaming"
My Anticipated iOS 5 Features - Part 1 - USB Mass Storage

My Anticipated iOS 5 Features - Part 2 - "Beaming"

What is "Beaming"?
Long before iPhone got introduced in 2007 by Apple, PDA dominates the gadgets market. One of the neat features of Palm OS PDA is allowing the sending of a contact to another Palm OS PDA by just pressing and hold on to the "Contacts" hard button. No configuration needed, just press and hold for half a second.


As an owner of multiple iOS devices (iPhone 4 and iPad), I currently find it a pain to transfer files and URLs from my iPhone 4 to my iPad and vice versa. I normally resort to using a "cloud" based solution like Dropbox to exchange my files between my iDevices.
However, there's a problem here when there's no internet connection for my iPad. I'm having a WIFI-only iPad.

So, what I'm hoping for in iOS 5 is to have Apple adopting the NFC (Near Field Communication) technology to allow exchange data, files, URLs, etc between iOS devices. This is particular useful in Singapore where majority of the smartphone users are using the iPhone.

So, why not using Bluetooth? Why NFC?
Bluetooth connection still needs a considerable time to establish the link between the 2 devices. NFC needs just 0.1s compared to Bluetooth's 6s.

A major disadvantage of NFC is that the data transfer is about 5 times slower than the Bluetooth transfer rate. But if the uses are just limited to URLs, contact infos or small picture file exchange, the data transfer rate of 424kbit/s for the NFC is really fast enough.

Read also:
My Anticipated iOS 5 Features - USB Mass Storage

My Anticipated iOS 5 Features - USB Mass Storage

I'm going to start off a series of topics on the upcoming iOS 5 features which I very much anticipate.

First off, "USB Mass Storage".

Now, the closest competitor, Android OS is able to mount its file system(SD Card) as a standard "USB Mass Storage" device all along.

Even at the current version 4.2.1 of iOS, Apple is still not opening up this very much needed feature.


I take it that Apple is not going to compromise system instability by opening up filesystem access.

I very much hope that in iOS 5, Apple at least dedicate a single directory, say "/var/media/massstorage" and has its API allowing applications to have access to this particular directory.

Then, allow "USB Mass Storage" capability which points the root to this directory, so that users can copy/read files using the usual USB plug in.

In other words, do not restrict file transfer to just PC iTunes!

Reverse Parking - Head In or Butt In

Most of the car park lots in Singapore, and probably most countries are "Reverse Parking" type.

So, why is Reverse Parking called "Reverse Parking"? Why not "Forward Parking"?

Majority of Singaporean car drivers will "reverse" in (i.e. butt in first) their car when parking in Reverse Parking Lot. I'm one of them.

Now, I wonder why there are still drivers insisting in going "head in".

The problem comes when you are driving out of the car park lot.
You have to give way to traffic when driving out of the lot.
So now, do you prefer to "reverse out" or "drive straight out"?
Reversing out of the car park and giving way to traffic is definitely a pain and accident prone.

On the other hand, traffic have to give way to you when you are doing your parking. So, why not leaving the difficult part of "Reverse" to parking in, and not driving out?

iOS File System Restriction

Whenever Apple releases a new version of its iOS firmware, I will be hoping that they open up more low-level API to the developers.

Even simple and non-destructive API call to read/write to the ringtones file directory is not available. The iOS API only allows the app to write to it's own subdirectories only.


Now, Android OS users have been able to simply copy or download any .mp3 to a designated file directory on the SD card and the OS will be able to pick it up and set as ringtone.

For iOS, without jailbreaking, the only way you can add a new ringtone is via iTunes syncing.

I don't see any potential compromise to system instability by opening up the access of the ringtone directory to developers. As I've jailbroken my iPhone 4, I do know that the ringtone directory is at "/library/ringtones". I can just copy and .m4r music files to this folders and I can use any of them and set it as my ringtone.

There are now numerous "Ringtone Maker" apps in the App Store now.
However, if you read the instructions of all these apps, they will typically mention that the generated .m4r ringtone file can only be copied out using iTunes File Transfer. Thereafter, you will copy this copied out .m4r file to the iTunes Ringtone menu item and sync.

If only Apple allows the writing to the /library/Ringtones directory, the above tedious steps won't be necessary.

Let's see if Apple come to their senses in iOS 4.3.

Odd Chinese New Year Characters Explained

So here we are. One week away from Chinese New Year (CNY) on the 3rd February 2011!

CNY food and decorations are now crazily being sold all over the country.

Two of the decorations are these:









First, why is the character, "福" shown upside down here?
The character actually means good fortune. And upside down in Mandarin sounds like "coming to you".
So, an upside down 福 means "Good fortune will come to you".

The second picture shows a chinese character which is not in the dictionary.
In fact, it's 4 chinese characters joined together to form one gigantic character.
This gigantic character consists of the 4 characters, 招财进宝 in traditional Chinese characters. It means "Wealth comes to you".

Happy CNY to all!