Aquarionics

A short list of companies who use Foxconn manufacturing’s services and aren’t Apple Inc.

Acer Inc., Amazon.com, ASRock, Asus, Barnes & Noble, Cisco, Dell, EVGA Corporation, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, IBM, Lenovo, Logitech, Microsoft, MSI, Motorola, Netgear, Nintendo, Nokia, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, Sharp, Sony Ericsson, Toshiba, Vizio.

(Source)

A short list of Foxconn’s customers mentioned in articles about Foxconn’s working conditions:

Apple Inc in all of them, and “Xboxes” twice.

(Source, Doing a google news search for “Foxconn”, reading the top articles for each story on the front page, and a random selection of the non-top stories, around 20 in total)

Foxconn’s conditions are awful. The latest round of allegations makes me upset at what we do to human beings, and a lot of this coverage comes from Apple’s recent release of a report on how they have to do better by the workforce, but every Foxconn tragedy story I’ve read since they came to light has mentioned iPhones (Which is fair enough, they’re a good and well known example to use) and very few have mentioned any other company at all.

Notably absent from either of these lists is HTC, who do their own mass production. I haven’t seen any news stories about their factories, so they must be paragons of virtue.

So today, I’m going to tell you a tale of a game with an open world, filled with characters who repeat the same dialogue, where a primary concern is how full your inventory is and how useful a large percentage of it will be, and involves defeating trolls.

Dizzy has been released for Android, iPhone & iPad.

The earliest games I can remember playing:

• Caeser’s Travels
• Some kind of Counting game
• Dizzy 1

The first Dizzy game came out in 1986 – I’d have been five – and was perilous. You had three lives, a single inventory slot, and touching any dangerous thing at all would kill you instantly. In modern game parlence, it’s a game of fedex quests, but with a single item inventory. So you pick up the grease-gun to fix the cart, which means you can’t carry the birdseed which allows you to kill the birds, and you need to get the diamond across the map which means swapping over to get the raincoat to stop the water killing you occasionally. Lots and lots of back-tracking.

By the time of POTY, which the new release is a port of, came out the inventory had been beefed up a lot and the instadeath mostly restricted to “Don’t fall in the sea” and “Don’t stand in the fire”.  With the new version comes infinite lives, which makes the game easier.

It’s certainly a far prettier game, with updated graphics and detailed animations.

It’s not very good, though.

It’s a perfectly servicable port of the original game, but with updated graphics, but it suffers from a half-hearted finish that lets the game down. It just seems a few steps away from being complete.

The biggest gripe for me is one that’s followed the game since the unremake, it suffers from a excess of float in the jump which makes precision platforming quite hard. Dizzy’s jump move is quite complicated for a platformer, in that has you jump he somersaults, and if you land while he’s somersaults he’ll roll for a bit until he stands up. This doesn’t seem consistent, and sometimes when you land you’ll roll directly off the platform you were trying to hit. If it was predictable when this would be, I’d be less irritated, but it butts against one of the other fundermental flaws with the game: You can’t tell where the platform ends. The new game has beautiful, cartoony graphics where your platforms connect to the trees behind them, where the clouds float in mid-air, but invisible on top of this is the edges of the platforms, which don’t match up to where the cartoon hand-drawn graphic says they do. In a game where you are required to stand at the very edge of a platform in order to make a jump, it’s incredibly annoying to fall though it instead. Dizzy has gained a Batman/Lara Croft style move where if you *almost* hit a platform, he will grab at it and hang there looking worried, but this doesn’t help, because he can’t – with his stubby little red gloves – pull himself up. It just delays your inevitable fall and death with a cheery animation.

There seems to be a half-finished integration with something as well, although it doesn’t call to Gamecenter or Twitter or anything; but when you actually do something you get a first-person announcement about it, like this:

Games can be unforgiving, so long as they’re fair. As long as the reason why I’ve just plummeted to my death is that I didn’t pay attention, it’s all fine, but this isn’t that.

As a call to nostalgia, it works wonderfully. I spent the time wandering though this game (Spending a lot of it wandering backwards and forwards having entirely forgotten you can jump on clouds) remembering trying to finish various Dizzy games on various 8-bit devices in the 90s, and it’s a faithful recreation of the kind of 8-bit platformer I really used to love beating my head against.

As a modern game for iOS and Android, it’s unpolished and the controls require more precision than the game allows. Without the Infinite Lives addition, it would be an exercise in pure frustration, but as it is I can highly recommend it for people who remember the old games and wish to wallow for a while. For everyone else, there are better games out there.

I hope it does well, though, because if they can tighten up the controls for the next one it could be a star.

A final point: Codemasters: Releasing the iPad and iPhone versions as two separate games is a Dick Move, especially when there are no differences between them. The iOS Universal Binaries system is good for customers.

A couple of months ago, I wrote an article called “Android’s not as good” where I listed all my various problems with the Android platform as it was then. A lot of them are still true, although the music skipping’s gone away, but one in particular has been resolved, and it is this:

I did a factory reset of my phone, and now all the Marketplace items I bought before I did the reset are gone from my “Downloads” section, but it will let me download them again, happily adding them to the same google account I bought them from in the first place. This is shit.
When I finally get a reply about the above problem from the aforementioned support ticket, and ask when, roughly, it might be fixed I am told:
Unfortunately, we are unable to comment on the exact timing of the fix because of different variables affecting the roll out.

…which is shit.

And, indeed, it was shit. A couple of weeks ago, I got bored of waiting for the “rollout” of this “fix” and asked the exact question again, supplying receipt IDs and everything, and discovered something interesting. Going though the whole process again and explaining it all to a new representative, instead of “Our engineers are working on a fix” I got this instead a couple of days ago:

Thank you for your patience. We see that you have made these purchases
using your @aquarionics.com account.

Please use the same primary account on your device to access these missing
apps.

When I did the factory reset, I’d entered my Gmail account first, whereas previously I’d added my Aquarionics Google Apps account first. Unlike every other google app on the phone, the market only uses one Google account, the one you typed in first. This is your “Primary” account, a distinction not marked anywhere on the interface, and you cannot change what account the Market uses without a factory reset. I mean, it’s quite lucky I didn’t originally type in my Skimlinks account details when I first got the phone, or I’d have lost access to all my apps when I left that job.

This really sucks from a UI perspective, from a user flow perspective, and is generally a horrible and misguided way of doing anything. There’s no indication of what’s happened (Since you can’t get Checkout accounts in Google Apps yet, all my payments were still made from the GMail account, so all the receipts for the transactions are there), you can’t transfer apps between accounts, you can’t log in to more than one account, a user who does this is effectively screwed.

And that’s crap, and it’s even less than I’d expect from the Android UX, which is not a particularly high bar to have banged its shins on, but it’s not the thing that annoys me most. The thing that annoys me most is this:

Hello Nicholas,

Thanks for notifying us of this issue, which our engineering team will address as soon as possible.

In the meantime, please feel free to contact us again if you have additional questions. We apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced.

Regards,
The Android Market Team

and, later:

Thanks for writing in.

Unfortunately, we are unable to comment on the exact timing of the fix because of different variables affecting the roll out.

Please rest assured we are working diligently to resolve this issue as soon as possible.

Regards,

[REDACTED]
The Android Market Team

That’s a lie. That’s all bullshit. There is no “issue” the fault, such as it is, is a UX/Metaphor Shear problem caused by a thing *I* did differently, as the second CS Rep managed to work out. It’s even partly my fault, as I didn’t even realise I’d reordered the accounts after the reset. A very small amount my fault.

But as a direct result of being told “We’re working on a fix” I believed them, and I went and bought more apps on the “new” account, even replacing some of the ones I’d bought before, so now I have a block of apps under two different accounts, which cannot be merged and cannot be accessed.

Which is shit.

I’m giving up on Android. It’s good enough for now, and I won’t immediately go out and replace it with an iPhone 4, but come the next iPhone revision, I think I’ll be back to being an Apple customer.

These are some of the reasons why:

Upgrading to Gingerbread has increased my battery life by 100%. My phone will now go a couple of days without a charge, but it still goes from 100% to 20% over many hours, then ticks down the last 20% over ten minutes. This is shit.

The music player skips and bounces around sometimes if something else wants to do anything else. This is shit. If it’s due to the expensive SD card I bought not being quite expensive enough, that is more shit, not less.

The media syncing system, even with doubletwist airsync, is comparatively shit.

The music player will pick up every sound file on the device, from other program’s podcasts down to voice recordings. This is shit.

The market is filled with shit. A search for a popular item will result in the item – somewhere – and dozens of “$popular_app Wallpaper” or more subtle customer gouging shit.

The market support is beyond shit. I expect a support request email to result in user-blaming boilerplate text, because I am trained to expect little from technical support, but to respond to a reply with *more* user blaming boilerplate that doesn’t actually answer my question is just shit.

I did a factory reset of my phone, and now all the Marketplace items I bought before I did the reset are gone from my “Downloads” section, but it will let me download them again, happily adding them to the same google account I bought them from in the first place. This is shit.

When I finally get a reply about the above problem from the aforementioned support ticket, and ask when, roughly, it might be fixed I am told:

Unfortunately, we are unable to comment on the exact timing of the fix because of different variables affecting the roll out.

…which is shit.

The upgrade path is shit. As soon as HTC decide they can’t be arsed with the Desire upgrades anymore (a process I expect to happen before Gingerbread is officially released) I’ll never get an official update again, and I’m lucky that I don’t have an operator as an extra level in that. For all people complain about Apple’s “Another model along shortly” attitude, they’ve supply major OS updates for two years for each phone.

There is no good time to buy an android phone. Anything you buy will be succeeded in weeks, if not days. This is shit.

The Hardware UX standard design is shit. You cannot predict which buttons are on the phone in which order, whether they’re hard or soft or what. Good UX means avoiding metaphor-shear and maintaining consistant rulesets, and Apple’s good at that, there is probably a button *here* which will take you back a screen, *this* button will take you back to this place. Just the Back button in android could take you back to the last application you used, the last screen you saw in this application, the home screen of your current application, back a web page, or the home screen of the whole phone. This is shit.

There are two email applications on every phone. One is for GMail, one for IMAP. Widgets use one or the other, and every app which wants to send an email has to ask every time. This is shit.

If you try to open an MP3 attachment from the GMail program, the temporary file is deleted before the Android Music App can see it. This is shit (and stops me getting phone messages).

A cheap MicroUSB cable appears to have a 50/50 chance of carrying a charge. This isn’t really anything to do with Android’s fault, but is still shit.

Every so often I’ll answer a call and the UI will change to the “You’re on a phone call” one, but the phone will still be ringing and I can’t answer it anymore.

My phone has gigabytes of storage in it, but only a few hundred megs of app storage space, because every tin-pot application believes it has a divine right to hinder sleep mode, and therefore refuses to go on the SD Card. That I have to care about this is shit.

My Android has never failed to wake me up because the year or timezone changed. It has, however, failed to wake me up because it spontaneously crashed necessitating a battery removal at roughly 3am.

The default array of apps that HTC supplied with my phone (like the Facebook app that’s not as good as the official one, and the twitter one that’s not as good as the official one, and the Flickr one tha…) cannot be prevented from wasting the limited app space I have. This is shit.

MobileSafari has a useful thing: If you double-tap on a block level element, it zooms the view-port to match the width of it. In the Android browser, double tapping zooms the page in a lot. This is shit.

Gestures on the Android are almost always “I am doing this gesture to make the phone perform this action” rather than “I am performing this action”. Zoom and Rotate in particular suffer from the classic shower-tap problem of requiring a massive amount of micro-dexterity to get the effect you want.

None of these are deal-breakers. They’re bugs, annoyances, or lack of joined up thinking. But what I need out of a phone is to be able to pull it out, do the thing I wanted, then put it away again. Joined Up Thinking is the very thing I actually *need* it to do. The lack of system-level design (both UI design and hardware-spec) makes a day with android just a little more frustrating than the same day with the iPhone.

Apps I use a lot:

To Play The Game

Abduction 2

It’s a game with a bouncing cow. What else do you want out of life?

Angry Birds & Angry Birds Seasons

On the off-chance you haven’t seen it, it’s a game like worms only with birds. Or like Scorched Earth, really, since the catapult doesn’t move.

You remember Gorilla.bas under QBasic? Like that. Not as much like that as Kian’s faithfulish conversion, but close.

Nimble Nimbus

Backup to Gmail

Copies all your smses to a label under your gmail or google apps account. Optionally does the same with your phone logs. Get all your communications with a person in one place :)

Dropbox

Everything is in dropbox.

TweetDeck

The Twitter client I use. There are others, but I like this one.

Don’t Talk To Me About Lifestyle

Gentle Alarm / Sleep as a Droid

I’m switching between these at the moment. Gentle Alarm is a pretty good alarm program, with a “Prewake” quiet alarm system that works quite well (a quiet alarm ten minutes beforehand to see if you’re already awake, then a real one if you don’t respond). Sleep As A Droid does the motion-sensor graph thing I liked on the iPhone, though. Neither’s failed me yet, and I do like Gentle Alarm’s pre-buy version, which is fully working except the alarm won’t go off on Wednesdays.

Kindle

Coming up, Kindle tricks and things I like about the Kindle, and why it’s not an iPad competitor.

WTFSIMFD

It’s http://whatthefuckshouldimakefordinner.com, but on the Android.

Sounds Delightful

Doubletwist / Doubletwist Airsync

I generally use the Native android music player for actually playing music (The lockscreen integration is the thing I like most) but DT’s airsync system works really well, and the video player Just Works.  I wish the desktop client could do app installs, though.

Shazam

It’s a thing that listens to what you can hear and tells you what the song is. It’s reasonably awesome.

Telephonic\technologic

Barcode Scanner

For scanning 2d barcodes, but also creating them.

Connectbot

An SSH client.

Locale

A thing that changes phone settings and does stuff based on other stuff, like the current GPS location, or time, or something. For example:

• Between 1am and 6am, turn off all notification sounds except phone calls if I am within wifi range of home.
• If I am within a few hundred yards of home, work or the pub, turn on wifi.
• If the battery is low, turn the screen right down, kill wifi and GPS, put the screen timeout down too, and turn the wallpaper a dark red colour as a hint.

Locale’s handy.