2026-01-22 07:34:08
Longtime design and software firm The Iconfactory has a new Kickstarter where they’re hoping to bring some more classic games back to the App Store as well as offer it for free to everyone. Ollie’s Arcade started as a home for minigames, including ones the Iconfactory had included in its app Twitterrific (which died when Twitter killed support for all third-party Twitter apps). Ged Maheux of The Iconfactory writes:
This week we announced a new Kickstarter that’s aimed at expanding the game offerings of Ollie’s Arcade, the fun, ad-free retro gaming app we introduced back in 2023. Ollie’s Arcade has always been a great way to escape doomscrolling, even if just for a little while, and now we have an opportunity to bring these retro games to even more people on iOS.
The Iconfactory has been hit hard by a rise of AI artwork that has really harmed its design business. The Iconfactory’s Craig Hockenberry is working hard to recover from an Annus horribilis of his own. As Maheux writes:
We’ve struggled to pay our salaries, keep up with the rising cost of health care and to compete against the onslaught of AI driven design solutions. The new KS won’t be enough to solve all our revenue problems, but it will help give us runway to keep the lights on while we find new ways to stick around and serve you. The more we raise now, the longer and safer that runway gets.
If there’s anyone who deserves more runway, it’s The Iconfactory.
2026-01-22 07:22:50
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman is back from some time off with a blockbuster report about how Apple’s planning on rolling out its new Google-based AI models and functionality:
The previously promised, non-chatbot update to Siri — retaining the current interface — is planned for iOS 26.4, due in the coming months. The idea behind that upgrade is to add features unveiled in 2024, including the ability to analyze on-screen content and tap into personal data. It also will be better at searching the web.
In other words, Apple’s first plan is to make good on all of its broken AI promises from WWDC 2024, using a currently-available Google AI model. It’s an interesting decision, and suggests that Apple’s executives feel those promises hanging over their heads even now.
Gurman continues:
The chatbot capabilities will come later in the year, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans are private. The company aims to unveil that technology in June at its Worldwide Developers Conference and release it in September.
The report says that iOS 27 will feature a newer Google-based model, and it will power Siri in both a voice and text-based chatbot mode. This just makes sense. But Gurman reports that Apple hasn’t committed to launching a full-fledged Siri app in the style of the Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT apps. This suggests that Apple may be reluctant to embrace the free-form prompt approach, which has its pros and cons. (I think having a place to refer to past chats and continue them is interesting; I also think that making a blank text box the primary interface for anything is a step backward, not forward.)
One last tidbit from Gurman:
In a potential policy shift for Apple, the two partners are discussing hosting the chatbot directly on Google servers running powerful chips known as TPUs, or tensor processing units. The more immediate Siri update, in contrast, will operate on Apple’s own Private Cloud Compute servers, which rely on high-end Mac chips for processing.
I wonder what technical roadblocks are bringing an issue like this to the forefront. Can Apple’s carefully architected Private Cloud Compute infrastructure not provide enough power to run the Google-designed models they need? Will Google host that chatbot on hardware with similar privacy protections, or would this be a crack in Apple’s privacy approach? It will be interesting to see what Apple will do if forced to choose between privacy and functionality.
2026-01-22 07:09:22
Via Juli Clover of MacRumors, The Information is reporting that Apple is working on a “small, wearable AI pin with multiple cameras, a speaker, and microphones.” Clover’s summary:
The pin is said to be similar in size to an AirTag, with a thin, flat, circular disc shape. It has an aluminum and glass shell, and two cameras at the front. There is a standard lens and a wide-angle lens that are meant to capture photos and videos, while three microphones are designed to pick up sound around the wearer. An included speaker allows the pin to play audio, and there is a physical control button along one edge. The device is able to wirelessly charge like an Apple Watch.
This is a report about an early prototype, not a product being prepped in the supply chain, so if it ever exists, it’ll be quite a while from now—and there’s a good chance it’ll never exist.
However, I think it’s interesting that Apple’s considering this product, because in many ways it fits with Apple’s product strategy. Sure, maybe in the future everyone will just wear AR glasses containing cameras and displays and audio output and an Internet connection. But it’s also possible that we’re headed for a more mix-and-match future with a constellation of smart devices that we wear in various contexts throughout our day. If you are someone who just has an iPhone in your pocket, it’s hidden away from the outside world… a problem rectified by wearing a small device with cameras and microphones on your shirt.
Does such a device fit in the future, or would it be pointless and redundant? It’s hard to say right now, but it certainly seems like something worth an investigation by Apple. I’d be shocked if Apple’s long-term wearables strategy isn’t based on offering a load of ancillary devices that leverage the iPhone’s computing power and cellular connectivity wherever possible.
2026-01-22 05:30:24
Netflix’s new live voting show, reflecting on the metaverse and why it happened, tech devices we use occasionally but find worth the investment, and repurposed or restored old tech.
2026-01-22 01:16:04
[Editor’s Note: I asked Antony to detail the process by which he created his interactive crime novel, Can You Solve The Murder?, which required some specific tools and a lot of intricate planning. And of course this article contains no spoilers for the book or any of Antony’s work.—J.S.]
I’m an author, primarily writing crime and thriller novels. I’m best known for the Cold War spy movie Atomic Blonde, which was based on my graphic novel. I also write the Dog Sitter Detective murder mysteries, the Brigitte Sharp spy thrillers, and most recently the interactive novel Can You Solve the Murder?
Hang on — an interactive novel? That’s right. You see, in addition to all the above, I also write video games. I grew up loving both books and games of all kinds, and was fortunate (read: old) enough to have been a young boy when the original Choose Your Own Adventure, Fighting Fantasy, and Lone Wolf books were first published.
Those series are examples of what came to be called ‘gamebooks’, because they’re both forms smushed into one; books where the reader plays an active part, directing the story by making choices, like playing a game. (These days we sometimes get fancy and call them ‘interactive novels’.) This is achieved by dividing the story into numbered sections and sending you to read different sections depending on your choices.
If you’ve ever played a text adventure game on a computer…
…Then you’ve essentially played a gamebook, just with all the page-flipping done for you by the computer. The modern ‘Visual novel’ form is basically the same thing, too.
We call these types of story a branching narrative, because the choice map often looks like a tree, with each new section branching off into further choices.
At their heart, all video games are essentially branching interactive experiences. You make a choice — whether in text, or with a joystick, or by pressing an action button — and something happens in the game reflecting that choice. The presentation of those choices, and the results, is nowadays enormously more sophisticated and complex than it was in a 1980s text adventure. But at their core, all games are about players making choices and the system reacting to them.
Back in the late ’70s & ’80s, computer games looked very much like that screenshot above. They weren’t the interactive movies with ultra-realistic graphics, hours of cinematic music, and dialogue voiced by professional actors to which we’ve become accustomed. Instead, they were basic, often poorly-written, and any graphics were extremely primitive. Those early limitations allowed gamebooks to thrive. They were almost always better-written than computer games, with richer and more evocative text, and were also often illustrated by professional artists.
As video game technology accelerated, though, and digital interactive experiences became ever more realistic and immersive, gamebooks fell out of fashion. They became a curio, remembered with nostalgia by enthusiasts but largely forgotten by the mainstream.
I was one of those enthusiasts from the very start. In fact, I was so taken with gamebooks that eleven-year-old me even had a go at creating one of my own, written on a manual typewriter and illustrated with a ballpoint pen, which I then made my friends play. Sadly, the ambitiously-titled Hellfire of Death’s Caverns is lost to the mists of time, but looking back, it certainly explains a lot about my career.
You see, a love of gamebooks introduced me to early role-playing games and fantasy board games, which in turn led to an interest in game design… which ultimately led to me working in videogames as a writer and narrative designer. That career has run in parallel with my fiction writing for the past twenty years1, and more recently I’ve also established myself as an award-winning crime author.
I love writing and plotting crime and mystery fiction. I love writing and designing games. So I kept wondering: was there some way to combine the two?
That’s when I remembered the many hours I spent as a boy with my head buried in gamebooks. Was it possible to write a crime story in that format? How would I handle clues, red herrings, and all the other elements that people love about murder mysteries?
And how on earth do you plan a book like that, anyway?
While answers to many of those questions would take months of work to figure out, the last — how do you plan a gamebook? — was one to which I already knew the answer thanks to that early typewritten effort, and my later experience in game design: you build a huge flowchart.
The original gamebook authors drew their charts and maps by hand, on taped-together pieces of paper, with markers. If you’ve ever mapped a text adventure game in a notebook as you played, you were effectively doing the same thing in reverse.
Nowadays, though, we have better tools. Digital tools. Surely one of them would be better suited to making such a flowchart. But which one?
There are quite a few apps and services out there with which to build flowcharts. I was already familiar with Miro, an online service used by many game designers for brainstorming and building ‘paper prototypes’ (while there’s no paper involved these days, the name has stuck). I used Miro to plan a couple of proof-of-concept interactive short stories, which I wrote to get a handle on the format and test whether I could make it work.
I could, and friends to whom I sent the prototypes enjoyed them, so I began planning a book-length mystery.
But Miro is a subscription service, with only a small number of ‘boards’ available to free accounts. I was already at my limit, and reluctant to subscribe — believe me when I tell you that very few authors actually make a living writing novels! So I put aside the decision of what to use for a moment and focused on pitching the book itself. After all, if it didn’t sell, there’d be no need to build charts.
I needn’t have worried. Can You Solve the Murder?2 went to a bidding war, and was eventually acquired by Transworld in a two-book deal with a frighteningly short deadline. The matter of choosing a flowcharting tool had now become rather urgent.
My criteria were simple, but specific. I wanted to:
But have the option to snap-align objects to one another
Draw arrows that snap to destination objects with auto-applied directional heads, and that can be moved and modified freely later
Easily apply text labels to arrows that represent a choice (most do, but not all) and have those labels move with the arrows when modified
Draw multiple such arrows coming from a single object
Have multiple arrows also arriving at a single object
Mix object shapes, and be able to easily resize and re-color them however I wish
Write text directly into any object, and have the text be easy to modify: size, color, style, etc
Overlay shapes on top of one another (in order to track section numbers and clues discovered)
Finally, I needed it to feel intuitive and simple to use. While that’s not really a quantifiable metric, it was important to me. I knew I’d be spending many, many hours making and using these charts. As a former graphic designer, not to mention lifelong Mac user, I want my tools to get out of the way and let me work, not make me wrestle them into submission.
I spent the next couple of weeks trialling many different charting apps and web services. I won’t go into detail on them, but suffice to say that while several had the features I was looking for, none of them felt particularly easy or intuitive to use…
…Except Miro, to which I kept returning. So I sucked it up and used part of my book advance to pay for a subscription.
Ultimately, the best tool had to win out. I’m a big believer that using inferior tools simply isn’t worth the hassle and frustration they cause, no matter how cheap they may be, and while Miro still isn’t perfect (it doesn’t do per-character text sizing, and object color modification could be better), it remains the tool best suited to how I build gamebook flowcharts. In some ways, using Miro reminds me of a good vector design app, like the venerable Aldus FreeHand3 or modern Affinity Designer, with an ease to its interface and UI that at times becomes almost invisible (the highest compliment I can pay an interface).
So, how do I use all those features I mentioned to build a gamebook flowchart? Well, let’s take a look.
Colors: Green boxes represent ‘core story’ sections, which all readers will see, while yellow boxes are sections that will only be seen by readers who make particular choices. Blue boxes are ‘ghost’ sections — they don’t exist in the book, but here they note where a choice will send you to a different part of the chart. Dark green boxes are good endings, while black boxes are — you guessed it — bad endings that require you to return to #1 and try again.
Overlaid objects: Each main colored box has a numbered red circle overlaid on it at top-right — this is the number of that section in the book, to which you flip when directed. Some boxes also have a blue circle bottom-right for Clue Numbers, which I’ll explain below.
Text inside any object: In addition to text in the main boxes, the number codes in those red and blue circles are contained directly within the object, rather than being a separate text box placed on top and grouped. This sounds like a small thing, but it makes them much easier to manipulate, edit, and move around the board, and when you’re dealing with literally hundreds of these objects, it makes a big difference.
Grid alignment: Although most of the boxes are aligned with one another by choice, note that section #52 is not. This tangle demonstrates the value of not being forced into a grid:
Freeform arrows: Many boxes have multiple arrows branching out of them, and #46 even has multiple arrows branching into it. That’s an essential requirement. Again, that tangle reinforces the need for fine control over arrows.
Arrow labels: These show which section a choice (or conditional: see below) directs you to read next.
The blue circles are part of a system I call Clue Numbers. Many sections of Can You Solve the Murder? ask the reader to write down a Clue Number. In this example, the text of section #23 would end with the instruction:
Write down D2 in your notebook, then turn to #46
Later, if you decide to keep walking and thus turn to section #9, a conditional check is made. The text of that scene would end as follows:
If you have D2 written in your notebook, turn to #32
Otherwise, turn to #58
This mechanic is vital to the success of a clue-based mystery like Can You Solve the Murder? because it effectively allows the book to ‘remember’ your choices, and the information you’ve gathered, throughout the story — but does so in a way that doesn’t give the game away, because the reader doesn’t know what those codes mean. (I do, of course, and track them all in a spreadsheet).
It’s impossible to complete Can You Solve the Murder? without using Clue Numbers. Thus, it’s vital that I can easily assign them to the appropriate sections and move them around if need be when building the book’s flowchart.
One nice element of using an online service is shareability. This was necessary for Can You Solve the Murder? because of something called ‘structural edits’. In fiction writing, this is what happens after you submit your first draft, and the editor then suggests changes such as removing/adding subplots, modifying characters, perhaps re-ordering some scenes, and so on. All these things change the structure of the book, hence the term.
Making such large-scale changes to a gamebook manuscript would be absolute hell.
Every choice in a branching narrative sets off a cascade of subsequent choices and reactions, meaning structural changes ripple downstream throughout the book. In a regular novel, revising a manuscript to remove a secondary character can often be accomplished fairly easily. In a gamebook, though, it might require re-plotting half the story, creating new sections, re-ordering existing paths… a nightmare that could take weeks or even months to untangle.
To avoid this, I gave my editors password-protected view-only access to the flowchart board, something Miro makes very easy (I could also have given them full editing access, or not required a password), and asked them to make their structural edit notes based on the flowchart. None of us had ever worked on a book like this before, and doing so required a lot of mutual trust, especially with strange requests like this! But it worked out, and part of that was down to how easy Miro makes sharing and viewing.
You can also easily export a Miro board, or part of one, to a variety of formats, including JPG, PDF, and even CSV. While I haven’t needed that facility for Can You Solve the Murder?, I use it often in my video game work.
The truth is that I barely use a fraction of Miro’s power. There are Miro wizards out there who can make it do all sorts of things: presentations, prototypes, slideshows, you name it. I’ve worked with some of them at game studios. Apparently, even the NFL’s digital team uses it to plan gameday strategy for their apps and services. Miro’s YouTube channel has many such case studies, along with tutorials.
Me? I don’t need to do any of those things, and wouldn’t know where to start. But that leads me to the final thing I like about Miro: it doesn’t force that stuff on me.
One of my favorite and most-used apps is the writing software Scrivener, which I’ve used since it first launched in 2007. (I’m writing this very article in it.) A common refrain amongst its advocates is that most people only use 20% of Scrivener’s features… but we all use a different 20%. Miro feels very much the same.4
I expect most of you reading this aren’t writing interactive novels. But you might need to create charts or diagrams of some kind, and if so, I recommend Miro. Yes, there are free alternatives out there, but I haven’t found any that are as flexible and intuitive to use.
As for the book, Can You Solve the Murder? was published in summer 2025 and quickly became my best-selling novel ever. A sequel, The Forest of Death, is due this year… and yes, I used Miro again to build its flowchart.
2026-01-22 00:00:00
Enough about the icons, Lex tells us about his big night, Dan talks about his e-reader and Moltz is also on this episode.
.jpg){kind=link}