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60Beat GamePad controller works with iOS games through the headphone port
There have been a few game controllers released for iOS devices like the iPad and iPhone, but none that I've seen that work as elegantly as the 60beat GamePad promises it will. The GamePad offers all of the buttons you'd expect on a HD generation video game controller (with analog sticks and triggers and so on), but instead of using the iOS device's 30-pin connector, it hooks up through the headphone port, and apparently passes audio information across there somehow. Unfortunately, because that's such an interesting connection, the controller only works with two games at the moment, Bugdom and Aftermath. But the company is promising more compatibility next year, and hopefully as more developers jump on board, we'll see more widespread support. It's certainly an interesting prospect. The controller itself is $50, but as it works with more games, that price will definitely become more and more worth it. I personally have been using the OnLive wireless controller to play those games on my iPad (which still isn't available to the public, unfortunately), and I've been wishing for a controller like this, so hopefully 60beat will get the support it needs from devs.
Chrono Trigger screenshots out, with touch controls and redone menus
Square Enix's Members site has posted a few screenshots of the long-awaited release of Chrono Trigger on iOS, and truth be told, they're a little disappointing. Don't worry -- the game is still there, and as one of the best console RPGs of all time, I'm still excited to play through it again on iOS. But those touch controls, like a lot of Square's games remade for this platform, look pretty tacked on. The original menus for the game were so gorgeous, I'm sorry to see they didn't make the jump to the touch-based version. I guess that's all right for this title -- better to just have it out, at this point, and maybe these touch-based menus, ugly as they are, make the game play that much better. But hopefully we're seeing the end of ports like this, where classic games just get an overlaid virtual joystick and big clear buttons for their menu options. It'd be nice to have a really great old RPG remade into a port where someone has actually thought about how to do the interface justice. Chrono Trigger is due out sometime "before the end of December," with price yet unknown. [via Joystiq]
SteelSeries' Simraceway SRW-S1 racing wheel trades pedals for paddles
As serious racing-simulator enthusiasts out there know, the allure of the racing wheel is almost inescapable. When your fancy is tickled by buttons, levers and switches, the only thing better than a full racing setup is the original Steel Battalion controller which, sadly, cannot be used for racing games of any kind. Ignoring the generous amounts of space and money required to utilize a racing setup, most racing wheels are also fairly unportable, which can make showing off your new toy rather difficult when invited round to a friend's place. Enter the $120 SteelSeries Simraceway SRW-S1, a motion-based simulation-centric peripheral which abandons foot pedals in favor of gear-shift-style flappy-paddles mounted to the backside of device. Motion controls seem like an odd choice for a peripheral aimed at accuracy obsessed simulator aficionados, but maybe 19 buttons and 3 dials affixed to the face of the wheel will be tempting enough to risk the cost of entry.
LG announces LSM-100 Scanner Mouse, saves valuable desk space
You may recall, back at CES, we got our hands on LG's LSM-100 mouse scanner and were able to try it out for ourselves. Well it appears that you may have that same opportunity soon. The company has announced that it will be "opening a new era for scanners" at IFA in a few days with its mouse that boasts a built-in scanner. Simply by holding the Smart Scan button, you'll be able to save or drag and drop scanned images as large as A3 paper size in a variety of formats -- PNG, JPEG, TIFF, and PDF, just to name a few -- by swiping the mouse over it. If that wasn't enough to entice you, the peripheral also features Optical Character Recognition that converts text from said images into an editable Word document. Perhaps lost in all this is the fully functioning mouse bit... which you'll probably need as well. No word yet on pricing or availability, but hopefully soon, you'll have room on your desk for one of these. Update: Apparently this bad boy is already available the UK for £89.98 (around $148), via the coverage link below. Also, we added a promo video from the folks at LG showing the peripheral in action -- which you can check out after the break. [Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
Dev Juice: Help me fix my UIView animations
Dear Dev Juice, I'm having an issue with UIView animations, that I'm struggling to describe in keywords, so I can't find anything helpful with Google. The problem is that I can't seem to work out how to make a UIButton move relative to the bottom of the parent view, as I shrink the parent view. I've managed to get the other views inside the parent to scale with an autoresize mask, but I cannot for the life of me work out how to make the bottom (or even center) of my button clip on to the bounds of the view. Not sure if that accurately paints the picture, and I'm not sure if it's relevant, but I'm making a widget for NotificationCenter. Hope you can help, I'm tearing my hair out. Thanks, Rory W. Dear Rory, It's still the autoresizing mask you have to deal with, but you need to be working with the struts instead of the springs. The Autosizing pane in Interface Builder lets you establish a fixed distance between a view and its parent's edge. Imagine setting a view at 40 points from the top and left of the superview. Enabling the top and left struts in the inspector fixes that view at its relative position. When you use a right or bottom strut, those distances are also maintained. The view must either move or resize to stay the same distances from those sides. The equivalents of struts in code are UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleLeftMargin, UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleRightMargin, UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleTopMargin, and UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleBottomMargin. These flags allow a view to resize by expanding or shrinking in the direction of a given margin without affecting the size of any items inside. Although each of these correspond to the struts of Interface Builder's Autosizing pane, they act in the opposite way. In IB, struts fix the margins; the flags allow flexible resizing along those margins. Enjoy your afternoon sip of Dev Juice!
HP ships $50 WiFi Mobile Mouse, gives your Bluetooth radio a break
If you've been waiting oh-so-patiently for HP's $49.99 WiFi Mobile Mouse to ship, take heart -- the aforesaid critter is now ready to free up one more valuable USB port at your workstation. As mentioned before, this ain't your mum's wireless mouse, as it makes use of WiFi technology -- you know, instead of the tried-and-true Bluetooth. In other words, this bad boy doesn't require anything other than itself to connect. HP promises up to nine months of battery life, offers five programmable buttons, a four-way tilt scroll wheel and adjustable sensitivity. Just think -- you can finally choose to keep those remaining Four Loko cans chilled without resorting to an inbuilt trackpad. Reason enough to pull the trigger, yeah? %Gallery-126581%
Cool Leaf keyboard's shiny, buttonless future gets release date
Keyboards get really gross, really fast, especially when you eat around them. It's a problem the backlit, buttonless Cool Leaf doesn't have to contend with, since it doesn't have any pores for crud to fall into and is easily wiped off with a wet cloth. The lovely mirrored peripheral will be hitting Japanese retailers on May 13th at an unknown price that we expect to be around 20,000 yen ($245) -- steep, not to mention the cost of repairing sprained fingers after an all night term paper writeathon. The Cool Leaf will only be available in a Japanese language, Windows-compatible version at launch, though other languages -- including US English -- and a Mac-friendly variety have also been announced, so the rest of us may have a wait a little longer for the future to arrive.
Donya wish your touchscreen had buttons like these? (video)
Touchscreen gaming's like cheese pizza -- a generally tasty treat, but significantly improved by an addition or two. Good thing Donya's got some new toppings for your touchy-feely display: a set of physical buttons and D-pads. Available in Japan for ¥999 (about twelve bucks) you get single, dual, and triple button stickers along with two D-pads to bring some much needed physicality to your handheld experience without sacrificing pocketability. We're not sure what marvel of modern science makes these tactile additions cling to your screen, but we do know they make firing off a few Hadoukens quite a bit easier. That plus a few Hurricane Kicks after the break.
Sony Ericsson details Xperia Play development: buttons easy, touchpad just a little trickier
In a post on Sony Ericsson's Developer Blog coinciding with the official launch of the Xperia Play at MWC earlier this month, the company clued in developers on how to take advantage of the game-specific controls they'll be dealing with on that glorious slide-out board. In short, it's insanely straightforward for the most part: the hard buttons just generate standard key codes, which explains why existing games worked so well with the unit we'd previewed. The only tricky part comes into play with the center-mounted touchpad, which can't be accessed through the standard Android SDK -- for that, you'll need to turn over to the NDK, the native-code escape hatch that Android devs use when they need higher performance and want to get closer to the hardware. SE's published a 16-page guide on getting to the touchpad through the NDK, and it seems straightforward enough -- and plenty of game developers are well acquainted with the NDK already, anyway -- so we're guessing it won't be much of a hurdle. Getting devs to support an input method that's only available initially on a single commercial device might be a bigger hurdle... but we digress.
HTC Incredible S auto-rotating buttons explained? (video)
We were quite bedazzled by the HTC Incredible S after our hands-on at MWC, but it's the auto-rotating icons for the capacitive buttons that left us most intrigued. So we went back to the HTC booth to try to make sense of it all. From what we were able to observe, there's some optical trickery happening here: the icons appear to be glittering and shimmering depending on viewing angle as if lit through a prism, half-mirror or grate of some kind. We think that a pair of LEDs are used to project the intended icon onto the glass surface via either a combination of prisms and half-mirrors, or via horizontally and vertically polarized grates. Watch our video after the break, and let us know in the comments how you think this actually works.
Verizon iPhone has relocated buttons, might require new cases
The leaks suggested that the Verizon iPhone would have slightly relocated buttons, and it's true -- as you can see in the photo above, the newly revised CDMA antenna notch has pushed the volume and mute controls down a hair from GSM version. That means a lot of cases -- Apple's current bumpers included -- won't fit properly on the Verizon version, although many third-party cases feature an open slot for the buttons that might still work. Either way, we'd bet Apple and third-party manufacturers are scrambling to have compatible cases in stores before the February 10th launch date -- just make sure to check yours first if you're switching from AT&T.
Visualized: the real Android fragmentation
It's been staring you in the face all this time. The Android fragmentation that not only threatens, but dooms Google's mobile OS: the buttons are always in different places. How will we ever cope? [Thanks, Drummertist]
Tactile+Plus adds buttons to your iPhone - kind of
Steve Jobs dislikes buttons, which is why one of the most premier gaming devices in the world has no tactile feedback whatsoever. But there's still a call for finding buttons on the screen by feel alone, and Tactile+Plus is designed to let you do just that. It's a little plastic sticker sheet that you can place on your iPhone or iPod touch's touchscreen, and it will provide touchable, raised bumps where buttons go in certain games. Just peel the buttons (you get a D-pad sticker and four buttons with the pack) off of the sheet, place them onscreen where the virtual controls are, and voila, you've got bumps that let you know what to press. The product is made in Japan, but there is a US price listed of $7.40, so you can order it (though it'll be at your own risk). Plus, it seems a little messy -- if the buttons really are sticky enough to stay on the glass, they might leave residue there, and if they're not, they might be tough to actually control games with. But it's an interesting idea, and until Steve and Apple work out that dynamic tactile interface, it might be a workable solution. [via Joystiq]
A controller for the iPhone ... or bust
The iControlPad project seems to have fizzled out, so another group is trying to bring the dream of a hardware iPhone button-based controller to life. Controller or Bust is a new project trying to move through the long list of steps required to get a hardware controller into production. The blog is the work of Benjamin Morisse, who is looking for all kinds of help from the community to get an actual controller off the ground. "This is ridiculous," he writes. "The iPhone was introduced over three years ago and there still isn't a game controller peripheral available to the masses. I've seen several prototypes that have kicked around the internet for some time now, but nobody has stepped up to the plate and actually delivered." All true, and Morisse hopes to change that himself. One big issue is getting approved by Apple -- in order to run a peripheral that actually connects to the iPhone hardware, the project will have to be approved in the "Made for iPhone/iPad" program, and that's been the biggest obstacle for developers so far. But Morisse is working on that already, along with iterating on product designs, so hopefully he'll accomplish that goal quickly. In the meantime, we'll wait and see. There's certainly a demand for such a device at a reasonable price -- Steve Jobs may not like buttons, but most gamers do, so the first actual production device to go on sale in this market will probably find plenty of buyers.
iControlPad using unlicensed dock connection, forced to go Bluetooth
The folks at iControlPad can't seem to catch a break -- the design for the plug-in iPhone controller was finally finished, but the creators are now backing off of that design. Specifically, they're worried about Apple's lawsuit against Sanho, in which the battery manufacturer was sued for creating products that unofficially connected to dock connectors on iPhones and iPod touches. Because the iControlPad was originally designed to plug right into the dock connector on the iPhone (and presumably, its creators don't want to have to pay the "Made for iPhone" fee to officially license that hardware), it's got to be tweaked for Bluetooth support instead. Fortunately, Bluetooth support was always an option, as there is a chip already inside the device. But the software will apparently have to be worked on, leading to even longer delays in production. At this point, it's hard to believe the product will ever actually get out the door in a mass market state. But that doesn't mean there isn't still call for buttons -- maybe some enterprising accessory maker will pick up the gauntlet and run with it. Since the iPhone was introduced, gamers everywhere have been asking for some type of external controls for iPhone games, and maybe the iControlPad's setback will provide some drive for someone else. [via Cult of Mac]
Sony launches anti-Kinect attack website, yaybuttons.com
Sony's typically the equal-opportunity offender, poking fun at everything from Wii to iPhone, but the company's latest marketing campaign is unmistakably aimed at Microsoft's motion-sensing peripheral. Head on over to www.yaybuttons.com to interact with a two-dimensional PlayStation Move, which will pop out a series of quotes from Kevin Butler -- Sony's fictional VP of Realistic Movements -- explaining Sony's tactile advantages over Microsoft's Kinect. While members of the Sony Defense Force will surely eat this up in spades, the rest of us will simply enjoy this latest tussle, and go back to waiting for both companies to put their money by their oral socket and make more games worth playing.
iTunes 101: Using the Album Art widget
Here's a cool new feature in iTunes 10 that we haven't mentioned yet: when listening to any song in your library, you can double click on the album art window in the lower left hand corner to detach it from the main window and see it full size. That's not new -- you could get a closer look at the art in previous versions of iTunes. But what is new is that when you mouse over that detached art, you now get full QuickTime-style controls for your tracks. You can then minimize the main window (using those weirdly-aligned buttons, of course), and then just control the music directly from that square widget (which can also be resized any way you want). Pretty neat, and somewhat hard to find if you don't usually zoom in to see your album art full size. This replicates some (not all) of the functionality provided by CoverSutra and a number of other "iTunes controllers," so it looks like Apple has (yet again) decided to make a popular function in third-party apps part of the official thing.
Apple patents another haptic feedback solution
AppleInsider reports that Apple is still bouncing around ideas for a screen that allows for haptic feedback on its iOS devices. A new patent filed this week outlines a system of screens on a device designed to not only detect touch and protect the underlying technology but also provide physical feedback in various areas of the screen. We've talked about this before, and Apple's been working on it for a while; as nice as the iPhone and iPad's screens are, there are some functions (like typing on a keyboard or hitting buttons in games) that call for a little more physical feedback. The patent also mentions things like giving users notice when they've reached a limit (as in scrolling or panning across pictures) or providing clicks on a scroll wheel. Unfortunately, this is all still in the prototype stages. For whatever reason (I can guess a few, from power requirements to manufacturing costs), Apple still hasn't included any of this technology in a production device. But they're obviously very interested in providing haptic feedback, so hopefully, it won't be too long before we see an idea like this come to fruition.
Apple patent application shocker: games need buttons
It's pretty rare that Apple patent applications reveal much more than vague plans and ideas about future devices, but a newly-public filing out of Cupertino just comes right out and states the truth about gaming on touchscreen devices like the iPhone: it can be "somewhat awkward, particularly on a portable electronic device having a touchscreen" because the "user's fingers block the action." So what's the solution? Buttons, dude-man. The patent describes a handheld gaming dock that fits around a "substantial portion" of an iPhone or iPod that has both physical input controls and secondary storage for game information like scores and save data. That's certainly a nice idea, and one we'd love to see supported by Apple, but we're also pretty certain this patent doesn't have much of a chance as written, since we've been hearing about this concept since games first hit the App Store and similar products -- including a keyboard -- are on the market now. We'll see -- like so many of Apple's patent applications, this one might well just linger on the vine forever.
Apple thinking about game controller, headset
We've mentioned the idea of an external game controller on the iPhone (and now, the iPad) before, but this is the first we've heard of Apple working on one themselves. Apparently a new patent would cover applying buttons, joysticks, or direction pads to an external controller, something that would either plug in to the dock port or be included in a shell-like object that the device could slide into. This is very similar to the unofficial iControlPad that we've seen, but it would be designed by Apple. Apple is also working on some sort of head-mounted display system, and it's possible that these two things could be used in conjunction -- the buttons would provide tactile feedback, while the headset would bring in immersive audio and video. This is all far in the future, and just because Apple nails down a patent on something doesn't mean it will ever be released to the public. As we all know, Steve loves the iPad and the iPhone because there is only one button, and it would likely take a lot of convincing, even for the game market, to get him to add more. Still, games are getting more and more complex on the iPhone and the iPad, and sooner or later, buttons may come in handy for selling those games. Apple may not be working on an actual console, but they may be working to make their current hardware more accessible for traditional gamers.
