The other day, I happened to stumble on a YouTube video where the creator explored the problem of “discoverability” of video games on platforms like app stores, Steam, and Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo’s shops. That’s something that has been bothering me for a long time about the Apple App Store.

By pure coincidence though, this morning, as I was browsing through the “You Might Also Like” section at the bottom of a game that I am interested in, I began to go down a rabbit hole where I ended up finding a good handful of games I had played on Steam that I wasn’t aware were available on iOS/iPadOS as well. It’s quite sad, because these are games that I really enjoyed, and I paid for them on Steam, a platform that Valve (understandingly) neglects on macOS, whereas I could have played them optimized for iOS/iPadOS.

The creator in the YouTube video didn’t really have a solution for this problem, and it seems to me that as the industry grows, and more and more “slop” begins to flood these platforms, it will only become harder and harder to discover the good indie games buried underneath it all.

I feel this intense urge inside me to start some kind of blog or website to provide short reviews so that at least some people will discover these games. We definitely need more human curation.

I’m also appalled that so many of these games on the Apple App Store have little to no ratings. No one makes an effort to leave behind a few words so that other people can get an idea of whether it’s worth to invest their money in a game.

I guess that there isn’t really anything that can be done about the issue of discoverability. As an indie developer and publisher, you just have to do the that best you can to market your game, and hope to redirect potential customers to your website or socials, where you should clearly list all the platforms that your game is available on (surprisingly, a lot of developers don’t do this). But that’s about all that you can do. The rest is luck.

Ever since I was a kid, I thought planetary rings were cool, and whenever I scribbled a non-specific alien planet I would give it rings. Lately I have been worldbuilding for a story, and naturally I gave the world rings. But since I made that decision, I've paid more attention to rings in other sci-fi I watch.

There's a lot of sci-fi planets out there with their own Saturn-esque rings. Very often it's just there for the vibes. In the opening to Rogue One, for instance, Galen Erso's farm is on a planet with rings, but this doesn't really come up or affect the plot in any way. I forgot this until I recently rewatched the movie. Similarly in the Foundation series on Apple TV+, even though the protagonist is from an ocean planet with rings (that are beautifully rendered), the rings never really come up. The endless ocean ends up driving both plot points in the show and the superstitious culture of the people who live there, but the ring does not. Maybe this is discussed more in the Foundation books but I'm not familiar with those.

Sometimes rings end up being plot relevant, like in Alien Romulus, where instead of being set dressing, the rings are an obstacle that can cause the space station to crash. Still, the rings don't directly impact the planet or the people who live there. The thing that more directly affects the colonists' lives is the atmosphere blocking the sunlight instead.

What really got me thinking was when I saw this Sci-Show video a few months ago about research that Earth possibly had rings about 450 million years ago. The rings lowered the overall global temperature and caused more extreme summers and winters due to light reflecting off of them. This made me realize rings can add quite a lot to the actual worldbuilding, since besides from the obvious cultural impact on any humanoid life, it can cause big environmental changes as well. This is pretty obvious when you consider how The Moon can do many things that affect life on Earth such as the tides.

Of course there's nothing wrong with stories hand waving away these types of questions, but it's interesting when stories like Three Body Problem take these tropes like living in a multi-star system and consider how that would mess with the people living there.

Astronomy nerds and sci-fi fans of Tildes, are there any other interesting ways rings would affect life on a planet?

Was rifling through a drawer looking for a printer cord and came across my old school calculator. This Sharp Elsimate 201 was my pride and joy. I think I got it in junior high so about 1975. And for a 50 yr old calculator it still does exactly what it should.

Then I realized how much old tech I have that I have an emotional attachment to. I still have a Mac Plus and a Mac SE as well as an Imagewriter dot matrix printer and about a hundred 3.5" floppies sitting in a closet. I loved the first time I tried a Mac after the frustration of using DOS on a 286 PC. It just seemed like light years of improvement to actually use a mouse and playing with MacPaint was magical. I sometimes got chided for being a Mac evangelist at university and many people thought Apple would be crushed by Microsoft - looks like they're doing just fine.

My Marantz stereo is about the same vintage, mid 70s, and the Yamaha speakers still sound as good as the first day I fired them up. That stereo was built back when 22 watts per side was actual output and its loud enough to shake the walls. None of this "300 watts" fakery that came along when boom boxes became a thing. Plenty of distortion and zero fidelity is easy, quality sound takes quality engineering.

What have you got laying around that you just dont want to get rid of?

They all released videos at almost the exact same time, so even though I don’t care, I was made to care. Therefore, I’m inflicting that same pain on you. You’re welcome.

Mrwhosetheboss made a good point saying that the target audience for this thing are rich people who want phones that look flashy and can pay for them, but don’t care that they have worse specs than the less flashy ones at a similar price.

MKBHD called it the “S25 Ultra Lite”, which I thought was funny. He also brought up the issue of cooling. He additionally said that no one is asking for thin phones, although it seems that Apple has also bought into the idea that people want this, since it’s rumored that they want to release a thin iPhone this year.

Dave2D said that he tested the heat dissipation capacity of the phone and that it can handle itself well. Apparently it still somehow has a vapor chamber inside of it, as well as a wireless charger. Apparently it also has the smallest battery in the lineup, even though it doesn’t have the silicon carbon tech that is all the rage now. He made a good point though, namely that this could just be Samsung starting the trend so that the technology matures in a few years’ time.

All three of them mentioned that everyone uses cases these days, which immediately kills the whole purpose of buying a thin phone and losing out on better specs.

If you somehow have not gotten enough of tech YouTubers acting confused over Samsung launching a product that no one asked for, there’s also Techaltar and Tech Spurt. I recommend the latter for dirty British humor.

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like blackouts, misconceptions and epic games v apple. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was hawk-eyed.

But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched offbeat stories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!

This is a bit of a round about story, but bear with me.

I like PowerPoint, I love using it, it's intuitive to me. Google slides is okay, (I never delved into OpenOffice or any other offshoot really), but when I have a choice, I like using PPT.

I consider myself a comfortable Apple user as well, I prefer it for most of my computing needs, but not all, so it's not like I am not capable of using the Apple ecosystem.

However, whenever I have tried Keynote or Pages or any of the "office" tools, I don't like them.

I cannot tell if this is because these products or projects were killed off because of lowspread adoption at their onset, and thus did not get any development or improvement. Apple often does not release things and then just let them die, it usually waits a long time before it releases something, so they don't release things with potential failure (maybe I'm wrong, my memory doesn't recall anything like that other than this very example lol, and I guess their camera, but I digress).

I guess my rambling is, is PowerPoint just good and Keynote just bad or is there some more interesting story to it?

While not the same website, this reddit thread from several years ago is the only thing coming up on Google for me and everyone in there has had the same thing happen to them: the Screen Time settings in iOS showing some website being up 24/7

It should be noted I don't have Verizon, have never been to verizon.com, and don't even use Safari as my browser. I have -0- idea how in the world this is showing up, and so it automatically makes me assume my phone has been hacked somehow (but try to remind myself that tech is also just wonky).

I set the screen time limit to 1 minute, and it has not showed up again as an app that has even been used. This is on a iPhone XS on iOS 15.4.1

Does anyone have any idea what this means or why this would happen?

Just asking for opinions. I've got a subscription to Apple Music at the moment (redeemed a free three months I've been sitting on before it expired), and the one thing that's been bugging me is that some songs are available with spacial audio; they're "surround" mixed, and when listening to music with my airpods, it tracks the rotation of my head and simulates speaker placements based on it.

Does anyone really think that their music is actually improved with this feature? Seriously. I don't get it. Why is it better that when I turn my head the quality of the mix goes down? It wouldn't be too bad, but I'm rather annoyed with Apple's implementation because it assumes that if your head is in one place for a while that's how the virtual speakers should be orientated, which is really annoying when using my desktop multi-monitor setup, which requires me to move my head from time to time.