Last month we released Orion, a small app that turns your iPad into an HDMI monitor. This was certainly a big departure from our usual practice of making camera apps, so I wanted to take a moment to show the ‘why’ — and, after that, the ‘how’: our process of making it from thought to launch.
This is a dive into the conception, design, and development of Orion, a showcase of the fun one can have while making an app, and a look at the way a simple utility can be infused with funky retro charm.
The Pitch and the Product
This summer, Apple announced iPadOS 17 would support UVC, or USB Video Class devices (basically:”webcams”). This could be compelling to us, so we researched adding support to Halide. After all, how cool would it be to have Halide’s interface for your digital camera?
After some quick research, we found it didn’t really work quite like we had hoped. However, our experiments uncovered that those inexpensive USB-C “capture cards” you find on Amazon work like webcams. With one of those, you could plug any HDMI device into your iPad and its output would show up on your screen. It was a “Woah” moment.
What if we built an app that helped you use your iPad as a monitor?
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Evaluating An Idea
It’s one thing to have an awesome idea, and another to come up with product. We love doing things for the sake of art, but when you run your own business, you have to avoid new and shiny distractions. Otherwise, you’ll end up neglecting the work your customers rely on you for.
Ben and I pride ourselves on reviewing each other’s weird, left-field ideas whenever they come up — making sure we don’t jeopardize our entire business to, say, build an app that launches a game in the dynamic island when you press the action button (it was a promising idea, Ben). So before jumping on a new project, it helps to be skeptical. We asked ourselves a few questions.
❓ How many people want this? Our gut said, “A lot.” We’ve lost count of the times we wished we had a portable monitor within reach, whether it’s plugging it into our video and still cameras for better monitoring, connecting it to a Mac-Minis we have sitting in a closet, or just hooking up to a Nintendo Switch while traveling. At the same time, there’s a huge barrier asking someone to spend even $15 on a separate adapter in addition to the cost of our app.
❓ What makes our version special? We expected a glut of free “iPad monitor” apps in the App Store, like the Flashlight App gold rush of 2010. What could we bring to the table?
Design, in and of itself, is a feature. If this was going to be a possible use of the iPad, we might as well make it delightful.
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We also had technical tricks up our sleeve. Our research found that those capture dongles only supported 1080P resolution, and this presented an opportunity. Thanks to our background in image processing, we could build a resolution enhancer that would intelligently upscale to 4K resolution.
❓ Could it make some income to recoup our time? Assuming there’d be a lot of free utilities to enable this, we felt it was ideal for this app to be ‘freemium’. We’d make the core experience and most important part — using your iPad as a monitor — free. Advanced features, like our 4K upscaling, could be a one-time purchase. A big plus here was that we saw it as a fun exercise to build something new, and didn’t have the pressure to turn it into a business.
📝 A side note on fun: we never intended Halide to be a business, either. We just built it out of passion, and had a lot of fun doing it. That ended up becoming a huge success, and a ton of fun to work on. To this day, I think the best products are often built out of passion, not in an effort to chase huge payouts.
Okay, we had a plan, maybe. On paper, this all sounded like a good plan at that, but one with uncertainty. We know we’re obsessed with details. Unchecked, we could find ourselves spending a year on this, and if it flopped, we’d be kicking ourselves that we hadn’t made that dynamic island action button game instead (it could be a massive multiplayer game, Ben!).
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But we held ourselves to a short schedule, we could risk it. If it made a few bucks, great! If not, we could treat it as the quirky art project it was.
It was August 4th, just around the corner from New iPhone Season. This is our busiest time of year. That makes it sound kind of casual, but we are talking nights-and-weekends-crazy-busy-busy — when new iPhones come out, we don’t get advance hardware or a heads-up on what’s coming. We have to run to the store, buy the phones, and fix what is broken first and then work long nights to support what’s new.
We had to get Orion out before then. If we didn’t ship Orion in time, we had no choice but to shift focus to Halide and Spectre updates and abandon it. So we set the new iPhone launch as our deadline— either ship this app in 45 days, or abandon it and move on.
Buckle up.
The Design Process
While Ben worked on the technical functionality, in parallel, I explored Orion’s potential visual design. I wanted it to be very fun and even a little campy — I got a lot of inspiration from in the 80s which had a very futuristic, yet tacky look.
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I loved the optimism and almost science-fiction like reverence for technology back then. There was a lot of color and whimsy involved.
In my first explorations, I just jammed on silly, hypothetical promotional materials for Orion. I pretended flat screen displays didn’t yet exist, and imagined ads like, ‘finally, a screen you can take anywhere!’, ‘watch whatever, wherever!’, showing a couple on an abandoned sand bank with their car during a pink sunset.
Noodling around, I was suddenly inspired to make the first screen of the app: A… box?
I didn’t know what the app would look like, but I wanted it to be a physical experience. Maybe a user could unbox it, as if it really was a TV from the 80s? The most satisfying possible experience unboxing is a tearaway strip; that could translate well to a swipe.
I threw together some bits and made the box less bare: I labeled the box with an address and electronics certification sticker, using Sony corp’s old Tokyo address, along with a sticker typical of the electronics of the era, listing its voltage and Hz. The dot-matrix type on that sticker is ever so slightly misaligned, as if it wasn’t quite printed perfectly in that semi-analog world.
Funny enough, this was the first screen I designed and the last thing we actually built. In the final days, we even managed to get a few more finishing touches into it. More on that later — but suffice to say this would become both a figurative and literal shipping label.
Orion was the kind of project that is pure fun to me, and it gave me an excuse to reach out to people whose work I loved and admired. The first person I reached out to was a longtime friend and collaborator: Jelmar Geertsma.
Jelmar is an exceptional designer. He’s a master of type design, for one, but also a spectacular graphic designer. I have worked with many designers in my time, but Jelmar is the kind you only meet once and file mentally in a dramatically lit cerebral hall of fame. Most designers can pull off doing a layout or product page, but type design requires the kind of obsessive nature to keep perfecting a single letter for weeks, if not months. It requires you to have an ever-burning fire and love for the craft inside you that motivates you to do what you do. Jelmar has that fire, and it’s very bright in him indeed.
I am also lucky to call him one of my best friends, whom I met at art school days about 18 years ago. With our shared appreciation for niche design humor, typeface particularities, beautifully made things and Pulp Fiction, we got along very well in school. It led to many long sessions just designing things for fun and jamming on typefaces along with a few clashes with teachers whom we often out-witted with our computer design chops.
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In August, my grandfather passed away peacefully of old age. I flew to the Netherlands to attend the service, speak at his funeral and grieve with my family. While I was there, I took the opportunity to visit Jelmar for a few days — or nights, rather — bringing with me some fine American whiskey, a cigar or two, and a lot of ideas.
For Orion, our brainstorming sessions blended nostalgia and excitement.
We both love retro-80s vibes (Jelmar often wears a highly tech-forward Casio watch), and one of our most successful collaborations became my favorite detail and one of our most praised aspects of Spectre and Halide: our custom typefaces.
We’d certainly showcase our love of type in Orion, but that is not where we started.
My first sketch of the app (post-box design) had me imagining a sort of retro VCR / TV screen aesthetic. I saw two crucial parts we had to design: the ‘screen’ experience, and the on-boarding experience.
The manual was a pretty key experience. We’ve always had ‘physical’ manuals in Halide as a tactile and visually fun way to get acquainted with the app, and we notably switch their design up for major releases.
For Orion, we wanted it to be far more rooted in the period’s graphic style. That required experimenting a lot more with visual style, the Orion logo and typography. Jelmar did an insane job and put together a massive variety of designs:
I debated changing these up depending on device type, but we narrowed it down and started improving just one, in a more traditional manual aspect, which would greet the user after unboxing. I also added some paper texture and mild wear and tear. We really wanted you to feel an uncanny old-yet-modern vibe from it:
If you wonder about the phrase ‘Video System’ in Orion, that’s more than a casual label. It’s a tribute to the VCR and CRT TV era, a time when on-screen type and iconography was new, pixel-y and clumsy.
True to my first sketch, we were now down the second step in a basic flow: users open the app to a very tech-tastic, VHS tape-like manual cover design and 80s-style internal illustrations, then transition to pixely menus.
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We ended up crafting display curvature, slight chromatic aberration and interference noise, and a quasi-analog feel to the digital interface of Orion.
This effect would have been difficult to implement in years past. By limiting the app to iPadOS 17, we could take advantage of custom shaders, those tiny programs that run on your GPU, responsible for the most complex effects in video games. However, Ben was focused on the app as a whole, so it was risky sending him off on days-long explorations of cool but superfluous effects (or MMORPGs that run in the Dynamic Island). We needed help, and enlisted Anton Heestand.
Keep in mind, it’s a VERY bad idea to add more developers to a project thinking things will just go faster; more people means more time spent managing everyone’s time. You run the risk of teammates duplicating work, or making changes that interfere with each other. Luckily, Anton’s shader effects didn’t really touch the rest of the app, and he was a delight to work with. The same went for his help on the initial unboxing experience (which we’ll talk about later).
Based on designs I built in Sketch, Anton built out these cool effects, independent of the rest of our work. Despite his challenging time offset with us — Anton is in Japan — he pulled in his changes at night, and we provided feedback. This delegation was critical given our short timeline, and a big win.
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While Anton worked on the CRT effects in the interface, Ben built the CRT effect applied to the video. Why two? The UI effect was pure “flair,” while the video effect strived for physical accuracy. Ben performed rigorous QA testing…
We won’t dig too deep into how analog TVs work, partly because this isn’t meant to be a technical post, and partly because there’s no topping this outstanding YouTube series by Technology Connections.
However, a detail we wanted to get right was the arrangement of color phosphors. These arrangements defined the three “looks” of the analog era. The triadic, where the different colors were arranged in a triangular layout:
Then, there’s slot masks:
Finally, there was the pinnacle of television, Sony’s Trinitron. It provided the brightest, most vibrant colors. That was thanks to its unique makeup:
The technical name for this is “Aperture Grille.” While that sounds like a delightful diner that is catered specifically to photographers, it is a real technical term. We avoid saying Trinitron, since it’s a trademarked name.
For our authentic CRT effect, each pixel in the shader passes through a “virtual phosphor,” and then gets slightly diffused to simulate halation — the process where every phosphor kind of ‘bleeds’ into the adjacent one.
These shaders took about four days to build, which included some experiments with scan lines. We even tried drawing the whole image in two alternating phases, like a real TV would. We ultimately stopped at phosphor emulation as we found it hit a sweet spot in recapturing the feel of pixel art as originally shown. Virtual phosphors act as low-pass filter, whereas scan lines just hide pixels.
So Orion emulates a “perfect” television, one where there are zero gaps between runs of the cathode ray gun.
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Or maybe we’re just telling ourselves this until we decide we like scan lines.
Typography
In the type department, Orion would meet the bar set by our previous apps. The manual uses an unique cut of a Dutch sans-serif by Jelmar called Azimut, and in the menus you can spot Orion’s custom pixel font, Radiant.
We noticed most mid-eighties VCR type followed a similar grid. Radiant is based on that raster, but mixes those proportions with the style of Ambrotype, the typefaces in Halide. It also features my delightfully clumsy pixel art icons!
We call it Radiant because we designed it together while Foundation Season 2 aired its last, excellent episodes— we loved watching the show together on long nights in between jamming on the app.
Controls
Honestly, I almost went overboard with control design. It was easy to envision a wood-paneled remote with funny plastic buttons. Perhaps the plastic would be textured, like it typically was back in the day. Gritty and dark grey. I caught myself somewhat early, because a critical part of building a fun app is finding fun that doesn’t completely harm usability.
I remember the fantastic animation in iOS 6 that shredded a pass in the Passbook (now Wallet) app with a long, amazing animation. It was super whimsical, fun, and gorgeous – but deleting more than 1 pass was a real slow slog.
The happy medium is a set of controls that feels and looks very tactile, yet not completely out of place on a modern iPadOS interface.
We probably said ‘no’ to hundreds of unhinged but fun ideas, and threw away so much delicious eye candy, just to keep things practical and grounded. In the end, it’s still plenty fun.
At the same time, fun helps keep things during the boring jobs, like explaining hardware requirements to the user. That made us grateful for the detailed manual that opens on first launch — it’s putting the ‘fun’ in ‘functional’, because it helps show how new users how cool the app could be, even without the dongle.
On the inside of the manual, we detail what you can use Orion for, and we explain the hardware you need.
We made sure to not take ourselves too seriously here: I used Jelmar’s tiny, vintage 2-cup Douwe Egberts coffee maker as an icon for ‘Various Other HDMI devices’, for instance, and switched up the heading on the second page from ‘Already have a USB-C Capture Card?’ to the far more catchy ‘Dongle Owner?’:
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I felt pretty done here. We had the manual. You could plug in at that point and use the app. Ben and Jelmar didn’t see it that way: they saw another big challenge. After the manual, how do you convince someone using Orion is worth spending $15 on a dongle?
Ben had a great idea: adding a full featured demo mode with a sample video helps anyone get a great feel for it, and we could make it a particularly campy old 80s video to really make it fit the mood.
One possible snag: bundling a long video inside the app would add to Orion’s download time, and take up needless space on your iPad. No problem: we download the demo video on-demand and discard it after viewing.
The Icon
I whipped up an Orion glyph on day 1 of the project before seeing much else. I figured it had to feel a bit retro-TV like, with a hint of space age.
This was nice enough, but my friend Louie Mantia wrangled with the curves a bit to arrive at this version:
Extremely eagle eyed longtime Lux fans might understand the visual pun in the icon here: Halide launched as our first app, and had an app icon shape hidden in the aperture of the camera:
With Orion, our fourth app, it hides a similar visual joke but with a bit more layering. Perhaps our development icon can reveal it to you:
App four — four icons. Get it?
Now it was just a matter of choosing the final app icon.
Honestly, I simply chose the one that was the most fun to make: the test-image TV tube. It matched our last minute domain name choice of Orion dot tube. We still use the Orion logo throughout, though — on our website and all over the app.
The Upgrade Screen
The final challenge in the last week or so was designing an attractive upgrade screen for the Pro features. We decided to reuse some of our unused manual graphics — they were just too good — so we could pack more retro-80s graphic design into the app and inform people of the kind of cool features that we had in Orion Pro.
I really wanted to do something fun with the price label, so I made a rather too detailed, half-peeled and slightly damaged discount tag.
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While investigating typical typefaces, I discovered Apple’s San Francisco Compressed typeface style matched great:
To accomplish the worn sticker effects, I used a combination of textures and brushes in Photoshop to get the material right, then created vector shapes in Sketch of the label and its small paper ‘folds’.
Final details and the little curl were all rendered in Sketch. We exported a blank ‘tag’ bitmap so we could dynamically render the price for localization.
Chunky Friends
Recall Ben’s solution to users not being sold with just the manual? As we put final touches on these screens, Jelmar worked on designs outside of the app. He had already worked on a fun series of chunky renders of various movie props:
So, we figured, rather than just tell you what the app does with dry text, he jammed on these extremely cool, chunky renders showing the app in use.
See it connected to a camera:
Or a computer:
Or consoles:
We mixed things up with modern and old versions. Going fully retro with all our materials might confuse people. “Orion only supports ancient, 1982 era hardware?”
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If you look closely, you might spot a few fun easter eggs in there too. Let’s just say it’s all in the Halide cinematic universe – and we’re very grateful that our friends at Panic and Campo Santo let us use imagery here from some of our favorite games in action: Untitled Goose Game and Firewatch.
What Didn’t Make It
With our deadline fast approaching, it was time to cut stuff. While it’s tempting to add features up until the last minute, at a certain point you need the discipline to say “pencils down.” The final stretch of any release should be about pixel peeping and bug hunting.
One feature that hit the cutting room floor were alternate icons — imagine a NES icon, an Xbox icon, a beige Macintosh screen, and more. I’d love suggestions if you have any, because we still want to get this into an update, and I genuinely love working on app icons.
On the marketing side, we didn’t have time to shoot a launch video. I even visited a thrift store to buy 80s clothes and enlisted some friends — one of which was committed to cutting their hair to leave only a mullet. Next time, perhaps?
What shouldn’t get lost in lamenting that which we couldn’t, is relief in what we somehow could.
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I was tremendously glad that we managed to include our unboxing experience— our very last feature to get implemented. Remember me writing about it? I wanted to get a last few changes in: notably, I wanted the edges to be somewhat irregularly ‘torn off’, so I had to dust off my old Photoshop dual brush skills to create nice, ragged fibrous edges on the bitmap mask.
This detail in the app is my personal favorite, and I was beyond honored that Cabel Sasser was willing to write a bit of beautiful intro music to set the tone perfectly once you finish pulling that cardboard strip.
It’s a playful nod to tech unboxing videos, and I secretly still hope someone makes a dedicated unboxing video for our quirky app — though some videos already show it off beautifully, like this great one from Jackson Hayes.
Launching Orion
As Ben focused on last minute scrubbing for bugs and prepping for submission, I spent the night before launch assembling our Orion site.
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That was, fortunately, easy even for this self-admitted web-challenged designer. I managed to create a pretty decent page in Framer in just one very long night in a very uncomfortable wooden chair in a farmhouse. And with that, we were all set for a launch.
On Wednesday — two days after iPadOS 17 came out, and just two days before new iPhone 15s would hit stores and arrive at people’s doorsteps, we sent out notice to press and flipped the switch.
Much like Halide’s first version, before we launched, barely anyone tried it besides ourselves. You really never know with a project like this if it will be well received or not. We wondered if we struck the right balance between inside joke and functional product.
And… people actually got it. Financially, it exceeded our (admittedly very low) expectations, but most importantly, it seems to have put a smile on many people’s faces.
Money was never and has never been our metric of success. When you get hundreds to thousands of messages from people geeking out on our weird, quirky details, those late nights fretting over little details instantly became even more worth it.
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We’re so glad you love Orion. It really was our pleasure.
ISRO is working on making India’s regional navigation system, NavIC, available to the public in the near future. Until now, this precise positioning system was mainly used for critical, strategic purposes, such as defence and other key government operations.
NavIC is expected to benefit civilians with its accurate navigation capabilities. NavIC, short for Navigation with Indian Constellation, was previously called the Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS). It is an independent satellite-based navigation system designed by ISRO to provide accurate positioning and timing information across India and nearby regions.
Interestingly, the NavIC system includes a group of seven satellites and a network of ground stations that work continuously, around the clock. NavIC offers precise location services across India and reaches up to 1,500 kilometres beyond the country’s borders.
The NavIC system provides two types of services: the Standard Position Service (SPS), which is available to the public, and the Restricted Service (RS), which is reserved for critical, strategic purposes like defence. SPS is the open-access navigation service from NavIC that is available for all civilian users. It provides reliable and accurate location information for daily applications, such as navigation and mapping.
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On the other hand, RS is an encrypted navigation service provided by NavIC exclusively for authorized users, like defence and government agencies, offering secure and precise positioning for strategic and sensitive operations.
NavIC to be open to public use via L1 band tech
ISRO’s plan to make NavIC available for public use includes launching new satellites equipped with L1 band technology (1575.42 MHz). The L1 band enables improved signal strength and compatibility with common GPS-enabled devices worldwide. This upgrade will allow NaVIC signals to work on civilian mobile phones that have compatible chipsets.
“This effort is intended to make NavIC more accessible and increase its usefulness for everyday purposes. NavIC offers impressive precision, with location accuracy within 10 meters across India and up to 20 meters in nearby regions. Such precise accuracy is essential for many uses, like navigation, mapping, and location-based services,” said space expert Girish Linganna.
‘A dependable alternative to GPS’
“By allowing public access, ISRO is making NavIC a dependable alternative to global navigation systems like GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, and BeiDou. This reduces India’s reliance on foreign systems and strengthens the country’s navigation capabilities,” explained Linganna.
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This move will help advance new technologies like self-driving cars, drones, and smart city systems. These technologies rely on precise and dependable navigation to work smoothly. ISRO is focused on growing India’s space industry, with plans to launch about twelve satellites each year by 2025, including six GSLV missions. This increased launch activity is expected to open up opportunities for private companies to participate and bring innovation in satellite technology and related services.
This move is also expected to have global implications as well. “Making NaVIC compatible with other global navigation satellite systems allows ISRO to enhance the worldwide navigation network. This compatibility ensures users around the world enjoy improved accuracy and reliability in their navigation services.
ISRO’s efforts create opportunities for partnerships in space technology and navigation services with other countries. By sharing its progress, India can build stronger international relationships and encourage joint efforts in space exploration and technology,” added Linganna.
Experts observe that with the planned civilian access to NavIC, India’s navigation services will have a new dimension of autonomy and localized accuracy. NavIC’s potential impact on agriculture, for example, is significant. India’s farmers will be able to leverage accurate satellite data for precision farming, enabling them to optimize fieldwork, manage resources more efficiently, and increase crop yields. This access could particularly benefit remote and rural areas, where access to advanced farming technologies is limited.
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Precise satellite data would allow farmers to make informed decisions, supporting better planning, yield forecasting, and sustainability in farming practices. In urban infrastructure and transportation, NavIC’s expanded civilian access is likely to bring new opportunities for public and private sectors alike.
“By relying on a locally controlled system, India can improve its logistical operations, from managing public transit to optimizing last-mile delivery for businesses. For urban planners and government agencies, NavIC offers a robust tool for building “smart” cities, as it enables precise tracking and planning capabilities for infrastructure development, traffic management, and public services. Furthermore, the system’s independence from foreign satellite networks ensures that these applications remain secure and reliable, even in cases of geopolitical tension. India’s push toward using NavIC for civilian applications also aligns with the nation’s broader strategic goal of technological self-reliance,” pointed out Srimathy Kesan, founder and CEO of Space Kidz India, which is into design, fabrication and launch of small satellites, spacecraft and ground systems.
With NavIC’s data, Indian companies and startups can now develop home-grown navigation services that can compete with foreign offerings, creating new business opportunities within the tech sector. “Startups, in particular, stand to benefit, as they can tap into NavIC’s resources to develop apps and services optimized for Indian consumers. This initiative stands to reshape agriculture, urban planning, public safety, and tech innovation, bringing the benefits of cutting-edge satellite technology directly to Indian citizens and paving the way for a more self-sufficient and resilient future,” added Kesan.
HBO’s The Penguin, starring Oscar nominee Colin Farrell and (hopefully) future Emmy nominee Cristin Milioti, just wrapped up its eight-episode run with an explosive and tragic finale that featured a completely different Oz than the one we met in 2022’s The Batman. This spin-off, which chronicles Oz’s ascent in Gotham’s underworld following The Riddler’s (Paul Dano) reign of chaos, tells a remarkably dark story of trauma, revenge, guilt, and family, culminating in an operatic finale that surely left more than one with their jaw on the floor.
The Penguin follows Oz Cobb’s (Farrell) attempts to take over Gotham’s underworld. The city’s crime is controlled by the two main crime families: the Maronis, led by the infamous Salvatore (Clancy Brown) from prison, and the Falcones, currently undergoing something of a succession crisis following the unexpected death of heir apparent Alberto (Michael Zegen) at Oz’s hands. Things are further complicated by the release of Sofia Falcone (Milioti) from Arkham Asylum, sending the city into unexpected chaos. So, how does this violent tale end? Let’s discuss.
Mainly, The Penguin is a tale of greed and revenge following three distinctive characters, each with unresolved trauma. Oz is obsessed with making a name for himself in Gotham’s criminal world, largely to finally earn his dementia-suffering mother, Francis’ (Deirdre O’Connell) approval. He attempts to secure it by becoming Gotham’s new head honcho, forming alliances with pretty much every major player before promptly betraying them. Oz also takes control of Sofia’s drug operation and kills Salvatore’s wife and son.
Victor Aguilar (Rhenzy Feliz) is a young homeless orphan who lost his parents during The Riddler’s attack. He is Oz’s unwitting accomplice at first but soon becomes completely loyal to the future Gentleman of Crime. Victor’s path turns increasingly dark, getting more involved with Gotham’s gangs and even becoming a murderer in the name of Oz’s plans.
Finally, Sofia spent years in Arkham, accused of committing numerous murders and receiving the moniker The Hangman. Upon her release, she wants revenge against her brother’s murderer. As she learns more about Oz’s involvement in her unjust incarceration in Arkham and her father’s hand in framing her for the Hangman’s murders, Sofia becomes increasingly vengeful and unhinged, dropping the Falcone name and pursuing two main goals: destroying the Falcones’ legacy and killing Oz.
In the last episode, titled A Great or Little Thing, Oz is taken prisoner by Sofia, who is also holding Francis captive. In a tense showdown at a rundown club, Sofia tortures Francis to force Oz into confessing he killed his brothers, but he’s unable to. Finally, Francis confesses she has always known the truth about Oz’s guilt, telling him she hates him and should’ve killed him when she had the chance. She then stabs him in the gut with a broken bottle, to Oz’s horror. Shortly after, Francis suffers a massive stroke, allowing Oz to overpower his captors and escape the club with her.
Oz takes Francis to the hospital and reunites with Vic. He then goes to see Councilman Sebastian Hady (Rhys Coiro), a corrupt and gambling-addicted quasi-ally of his and blames Sofia for the deaths of Salvatore (who actually died of a heart attack in a fistfight with Oz) and his family. Oz also tells Hady that Sofia blew up a massive drug lab in Gotham’s underground (which she actually caused, to be fair), subsequently damaging the already heavily affected neighborhood of Crown Point. Thus, Oz makes it seem as though the events of the entire series were orchestrated by Sofia, exonerating himself in the process.
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Meanwhile, Sofia summons the gangs of Gotham and offers them the Falcone family’s resources, claiming she only wants Oz and will leave Gotham after she kills him. Although the head of the Gotham triads, Feng Zhao (François Chau), delivers Oz to her, he is betrayed by his underlings and killed. Oz then takes Sofia to a secluded location and leaves her for the authorities, sending her back to Arkham and effectively eliminating the last of his obstacles.
However, the stroke left Francis in a vegetative state. As he talks with Victor, Oz realizes he has developed a soft spot for the kid and kills him, not wanting to be vulnerable with anyone else now that he has achieved his goals. Oz chokes Victor and throws his ID into the river before abandoning his body.
Sofia returns to Arkham, where she receives a letter from her half-sister, Selina Kyle (Zoë Kravitz); although the contents are not revealed, Sofia softly smiles while reading the letter, a glimmer of hope traveling her face. Outside, Oz is now the king of Gotham’s underworld and has moved his mother to a penthouse overlooking the city. Francis is very obviously miserable, as she had made him promise he’d kill her before allowing her to lose her mind and body to her growing dementia. However, Oz is unable to let go of her and prefers to keep her with him, even if it’s in anguish. Finally, he meets his lover, Eve (Carme Ejogo), who is dressed in one of Francis’ dresses. The two dance, and Oz makes Eve say she’s proud of him and loves him. As the camera pans away, the Bat-Signal shines in the sky.
Who knows! There is no official announcement yet, but Farrell is confirmed to return as Oz in 2026’s The Batman 2. In fact, The Penguin sets up The Batman 2 quite neatly, placing The Penguin as a villain worthy of Batman’s sophomore adventure. It would actually make a lot of sense to have Oz as the villain, as The Penguin ends with him a winner, having defeated all his enemies and effectively taken control of Gotham. Thus, Batman could finally give The Penguin his just punishment for murdering Victor and the many other crimes he committed.
As for Sofia, it’s unclear if Milioti will return in The Batman 2 or if there’s even a role for her in the story. The letter from Selina Kyle does hint at Sofia’s potential return, maybe in a team-up between The Hangman and Catwoman, which could come in the movie sequel, a potential season 2 of The Penguin, or even in another TV spin-off centered around the two. In fact, Matt Reeves recently confirmed more The Batman spin-offs are coming, which bodes well for a Sofia-centric show, especially if Batman does indeed deal with Oz in The Batman 2.
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For now, however, fans should enjoy the tremendously dark and bittersweet ending The Penguin just pulled off. It was bleak, frustrating, and exhilarating, a triumph of the crime genre worthy of standing alongside the best Batman storylines in live-action. Hopefully, the Emmys will remember The Penguin come July because Farrell, Milioti, and O’Connell are all Emmy-worthy, proving that there is much to be enjoyed in the world of comic book adaptations.
All eight episodes of The Penguin are available to stream on Max.
YouTube has been rolling out dozens of features lately based on user feedback. Last month, the video streaming platform rolled out support for creating custom thumbnails for video playlists. Now, YouTube is rolling out a redesigned playback speed interface on Android and iOS.
YouTube app gets a redesigned playback speed control interface on Android and iOS
The first time Google updated YouTube with playback speed, it was available on desktop. However, the latest update is coming first to the app. Late last month, some reports hinted that YouTube could scrap the current playback speed interface with a new one.
Fast forward to today, YouTube has started rolling out the updated interface for playback speed control to the masses with app’s versions 19.43 and 19.44 on Android and iOS, respectively. We can already see the redesigned playback speed slider in the YouTube app on one of our Android phones. You can check out the screenshot at the end of this article.
Previously, the YouTube app used to open a tall list with five different playback speed options – 0.25x, 1.0x, 1.25x, 1.5x, and 2.0x. Although it was easy to pick the desired playback speed, the list used to take up almost half of the screen. Now, that problem is solved.
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Users can now use a slider to pick the desired playback speed
The updated playback speed control is much shorter and comes with a slider. It is now placed at the bottom of the screen and has the same playback speed presets. While you could previously choose the playback speed from the list, there’s a new slider interface for the same purpose.
All you have to do is slide through the playback speed and release it once it reaches the speed of your choice. Alternatively, you can use the plus “+” and minus “-” buttons sitting at each end of the slider to pick playback speed. Moreover, if you aren’t seeing the updated playback speed interface yet, make sure to update the YouTube app from the Google Play Store or App Store.
Japanese automaker Nissan is taking a big ax to its workforce. reports that the company plans to make some steep cuts to its operation, including 9,000 jobs and of its global manufacturing capacity.
The cuts won’t just affect workers on the assembly lines. reports that Nissan Chief Executive Officer Makoto Uchida is taking a 50 percent pay cut from his monthly compensation.
Japan’s third-largest automaker has to cut $2.6 billion in costs this fiscal year. Nissan revised its annual profit outlook by a whopping 70 percent as its struggles to sell cars in places like China and the US “where it lacks a credible line-up of hybrid cars.” Nissan’s global sales fell by 3.8 percent for the first half of the fiscal year, witha 14.3 percent drop in China and 3 percent drop in the US.
Nissan says in a that it’s taking “urgent measures to turnaround its performance” beyond just making cuts to its labor force. The automaker says its planning to introduce new energy efficient vehicles to China and plug-in hybrids and e-POWER vehicles in the US. So far, the only EVs in Nissan’s garage include and fleet.
India’s game market could grow from $3.8 billion in 2024 to $9.2 billion by 2029, according to a report by Lumikai.
That represents a 20% compound annual growth rate. Lumikai, a venture capital fund in India focused on games, also said that India’s $3.8 billion gaming market is about 30% of its broader $12.5 billion new media market.
Gaming is India’s the fastest-growing new media segment, and it is just shy of the $3.9 billion video and over-the-top media market (based on the fiscal year periods ending March 31). Overall, the new media market is growing at a compound annual growth rate of 16%, said Salone Sehgal, founding general partner at Lumikai, in an interview with GamesBeat.
Such growth is similar to China’s growth in gaming a couple of decades ago, making India the next hot market that game investors should follow, Sehgal said. Aditya Deshpande, senior investment associate at Lumikai, said in an interview with GamesBeat. believes that gaming is in the process of surpassing India’s vaunted Bollywood film industry.
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Lumikai’s own growth has mirrored the Indian gaming market’s growth. Back in 2020, when it started, there were 25 game companies in India. But over the course of five years, Lumikai has evaluated more than 2,300 leads with Indian game entrepreneurs, Sehgal said.
The Lumikai State of India Interactive Media and Gaming Report is being unveiled at the Lumikai Insignia interactive media and gaming summit for Lumikai’s limited partners.
Key statistics
The report found that out of the total of 591 million gamers (up 23 million from a year ago) in India, female gamers rose from 41% to 44%. And in fiscal year 2024, more than eight million new paying users were added, taking total paying gamers to 148 million.
Sehgal said Indian gamers have seen a 30% increase in average weekly gaming time to 13 hours. That was double the time spent on social platforms. Average revenue per paying user of $22, which was up 15% in a year. About 66% of gamers were from non-metro cities, with 43% of gamers being first-time earners in the 18-year-old to 30-year-old age group.
In-app purchases, propelled by mid-core games, grew by 41% year-on-year, and continues to be the fastest growing slice out of the $3.8 billion revenue pie for fiscal year 2024.
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“The mid core games emerge to tap into that very large mid-core appetite in the India market,” said Sehgal.
The report said 64% of paying users who play real-money gambling (RMG) also pay for mid-core games, suggesting a high degree of overlap in gamer personas and migrating preferences of gamers.
India is the world’s second-largest mobile gaming market in terms of downloads, with 15.2 billion, or three times the combined volume of Brazil and the U.S. And 25% of gamers said they have spent money in games this year, consistent with FY23, with 83% preferring UPI or digital wallets to make in-game payments.
India also saw a 20% increase in time spent on casual games in fiscal 2024. Users spend 25% more time on interactive social media/streaming platforms compared to passive social platforms. And 47% of users are ad-tolerant to avoid paying for subscriptions with preference for micro-transaction based in-app purchases.
In terms of mobile platforms, Android is about 90% of the market in India, where smartphones may cost $200 to $400. Most games are played on smartphones, with PC and console games a few percent of the market, Desphande said.
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As for esports, revenues are still a small slice of the overall pie, but Sehgal said viewership continues to rise fast.
Methodology
The report includes primary research covering nearly 3,000 mobile users across India. And it was developed with Google and Deloitte. Lumikai’s analysis is based on third party analytics data providers, secondary research, Lumikai proprietary data, primary survey and expert interviews. The gaming estimates include subscription, in-app purcahses, and ad revenues.
“We understand both the urban markets, the rural markets and the gender demographics as well,” Sehgal said.
Lumikai’s growth
Lumikai has backed some of India’s leading interactive media companies including, Elo Elo (India’s live social entertainment platform), Bombay Play (hyper-social, casual gaming studio from India for the world), All Star Games (casual sports gaming studio), Studio Sirah (mid-core strategy gaming studio), Supernova (real-time, interactive, personalized AI tutors disrupting edtech), Autovrse (India’s fastest growing AR/VR company building solutions for industrial training), Vobble (India’s first interactive audio platform for children), Mayhem Studios (building Indian battle royale game) among others.
The Mayhem Studios game is interesting in that it is a battle royale game focused on Indian setting and culture. Such trends toward culturally relevant games for certain regions are on the rise, according to Matthew Ball, gaming analyst and author of The Metaverse.
“These game kind of games take time to build. What Battleground Mobile India (formerly PUBG Mobile) taught us is that there is a massive (opportunity) in the market,” Sehgal said. “Our strategy to back Indian games (resonates) as we increasingly here people saying they want to play IP which reflects our culture.”
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Despande said, “There is more diversity in terms of indigenous games trying to take on global giants. It’s a matter of just development cycles. So a lot of these games are now in the process of being made.”
Many of the entrepreneurs are coming out of work-for-hire companies that took advantage of India’s low costs for development. Now those entrepreneurs are striking out on their own to make their own games. There are also a lot of Indian diaspora founders who are coming back to India to build new companies in their homeland. And there are a wave of strategic companies and investors who are looking at India as the next big major market. Over time, this should lead to a healthy acquisition market in India.
“The smartphone has completely revolutionized the kind of games people play,” said Deshpande. “Almost two thirds of the population that we surveyed consumes one or two gigabytes of mobile data a day, and that’s because we have one of the cheapest data rates in the world.”
Lumikai Insignia
The speakers at the Lumikai Insignia event include Oscar-winner SS Rajamouli, Abdullah Alorainy from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (which is investing $37 billion in gaming), Crysis co-creator and Crytek founder Cevat Yerli, chip design veteran Raja Koduri who has led graphics/CPU design at Intel, AMD and Apple.
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Good morning! Let’s play Connections, the NYT’s clever word game that challenges you to group answers in various categories. It can be tough, so read on if you need clues.
SPOILER WARNING: Information about NYT Connections today is below, so don’t read on if you don’t want to know the answers.
Your Connections expert
Your Connections expert
Marc McLaren
NYT Connections today (game #519) – today’s words
Today’s NYT Connections words are…
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LIGHT
SCORE
LAND
SEA
HOST
BOW
WIN
YANG
ANCHOR
MASCULINE
FLOCK
DECK
EXPANSIVE
BRIDGE
EARN
CROWD
NYT Connections today (game #519) – hint #1 – group hints
What are some clues for today’s NYT Connections groups?
Yellow: Get
Green: Lots of people
Blue: STERN could be another
Purple: Confucius would have got this one
Need more clues?
We’re firmly in spoiler territory now, but read on if you want to know what the four theme answers are for today’s NYT Connections puzzles…
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NYT Connections today (game #519) – hint #2 – group answers
What are the answers for today’s NYT Connections groups?
YELLOW: ATTAIN
BLUE: PARTS OF A SHIP
GREEN: LARGE GROUP
PURPLE: ASSOCIATED PRINCIPLES IN CHINESE PHILOSOPHY
Right, the answers are below, so DO NOT SCROLL ANY FURTHER IF YOU DON’T WANT TO SEE THEM.
NYT Connections today (game #519) – the answers
The answers to today’s Connections, game #519, are…
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YELLOW: ATTAIN EARN, LAND, SCORE, WIN
GREEN: LARGE GROUP CROWD, FLOCK, HOST, SEA
BLUE: PARTS OF A SHIP ANCHOR, BOW, BRIDGE, DECK
PURPLE: ASSOCIATED PRINCIPLES IN CHINESE PHILOSOPHY EXPANSIVE, LIGHT, MASCULINE, YANG
My rating: Moderate
My score: 1 mistake
Does it matter how you beat Connections, so long as you do? Probably not, but it is more satisfying when you get the answer right because you know what it is, rather than because you got lucky. That happened to me today with the purple group, ASSOCIATED PRINCIPLES IN CHINESE PHILOSOPHY, and it’s just as well that it did.
I’d solved blue (PARTS OF A SHIP), which was remarkably easy for that color, and yellow (ATTAIN), but had already wasted one guess on what turned out to be the green group, LARGE GROUP. For some reason I’d placed DECK with CROWD, FLOCK and HOST, when the final answer was SEA, and hadn’t yet realized what the connection was here beyond ‘groups with lots of things’, and was thinking that DECK was in there as in ‘deck of cards’. Anyway, DECK was now out of the running due to it appearing in blue, so I should really have spotted the green connection and moved on.
Instead, once burned, I looked at the other words and decided that maybe they were part of some ‘opposites’ connection: YANG (and yin), MASCULINE (and feminine), LIGHT (and dark). I wasn’t sure what EXPANSIVE was the opposite of (narrow, maybe?) but decided to include it anyway and it revealed the purple group. Great! Except obviously I’d got the connection sort of wrong. I guess they all count, though…
Yesterday’s NYT Connections answers (Sunday, 10 November, game #518)
YELLOW: BARREL-SHAPED CONTAINER CASK, CYLINDER, DRUM, TANK
GREEN: GUIDE PILOT, SHEPHERD, STEER, USHER
BLUE: N.F.L. TEAM MEMBER COWBOY, JET, RAM, RAVEN
PURPLE: THINGS THAT SWING GOLFER, PENDULUM, SALOON DOORS, SWING
What is NYT Connections?
NYT Connections is one of several increasingly popular word games made by the New York Times. It challenges you to find groups of four items that share something in common, and each group has a different difficulty level: green is easy, yellow a little harder, blue often quite tough and purple usually very difficult.
On the plus side, you don’t technically need to solve the final one, as you’ll be able to answer that one by a process of elimination. What’s more, you can make up to four mistakes, which gives you a little bit of breathing room.
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It’s a little more involved than something like Wordle, however, and there are plenty of opportunities for the game to trip you up with tricks. For instance, watch out for homophones and other word games that could disguise the answers.
It’s playable for free via the NYT Games site on desktop or mobile.
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