Posts Tagged ‘ UI

The future of RTS

Interesting post by Sebastian de With of the Cocoia Blog about the past, present, and future of Real Time Strategy game UI.

Of course, only time can tell where we will be taken in the future when it comes to interface design. However, it’s interesting to note that we’re gradually making the experience more tactile. While giving users a controller that resembles a gun to play a shooter game doesn’t work very well and feels rather gimmicky, making a realistic landscape that the user can reach out to and touch seems like the natural evolution for strategy games. It shares some of the best characteristics from the origin of strategy games: the board game.

Also check out this sweet trailer for Ubisoft’s upcoming strategy game RUSE, do yourself a service and watch it in HD. As a side note though, I don’t think I’ve ever seen such hansom and trim gamers. In fact the guy with the black hair reminded me of actor Gael García Bernal of The Science of Sleep and Y tu mamá también fame.

Cocoia Blog » The future of RTS.

Subtle iPhone OS 3.0 UI Changes

Inspired by Sebastiaan De With’s blog post on the new UI details in iPhone OS 3.0 I found two small but interesting UI changes.

The first one, which I expect many have seen but is easy to pass by is the new third-party app camera support. When I first noticed this I thought the app developer had just changed it for their own app, but it’s actually system wide. The new interface not only obstructs less of the image to be shot, but because is nearly the same as the standard Camera app will fit much naturally to the users who are already accustomed to the interface.

Comparison between taking pictures on iPhone OS 2.2.1 and 3.0

Camera Take Comparison

Comparison between retaking pictures on iPhone OS 2.2.1 and 3.0

Camera Retake Comparison

This one is pretty hard to notice unless you regularly use a car audio adapter or the apple iphone dock to listen to music. But now when you insert the iPhone into adapters that use the bottom port to output audio, the volume control will slide away in the iPod app. The reason it makes sense to have the volume control disappear is because it doesn’t control the volume anymore if it is outputting audio through the bottom port.

Comparison between iPod app connected to car on iPhone OS 2.2.1 and 3.0

iPod in Car Comparison