

Play Breakout while you pull to refresh - julee04
https://github.com/dasdom/BreakOutToRefresh

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declan
When working on an early version of [http://recent.io/](http://recent.io/), I
added a physics animation of bouncing/falling balls during the network request
to the server. When the network request completed, gravity pulled all the
balls off the bottom of the screen.

Some early testers liked the animation, but it turned out engineering effort
was better spent on getting the backend tuned for better performance. Now the
request for user-specific news is down to around 500ms on WiFi, and the
physics animation has gone away. :)

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octo_t
I can't tell if this is madness or genius.

Whats the use case? If the refresh takes a long time, is pull-to-refresh the
best UX? If it doesn't, then you won't get a good game in?

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btown
> If the refresh takes a long time, is pull-to-refresh the best UX?

If that's an open question, then this is the one thing that makes the answer a
resounding YES.

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michaelbeil
In other words, it is a both/and :).

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_almosnow
Coming soon. "Watch an ad while you pull to refresh"

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xuki
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tOvOMbizBs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tOvOMbizBs)

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laumars
To be fair, if that's used _instead of_ a traditional ad banner, then I think
it's a great step forward. It's intrusive as it doesn't take up your
operational screen real estate, however it is still extremely visible. And
it's impact is when you're bored waiting for a sync which means the ad is more
likely to get read than a traditional banner would.

Sadly though, I could see this being used _in addition to_ traditional
banners. :(

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0942v8653
It does say "Let's kill the banner" at the end, so that seems to be the
intent, but you're probably right…

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a2kadet
Google has a patent on this:
[http://www.google.com/patents/US5718632](http://www.google.com/patents/US5718632)

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crowbar
It's Bandai Namco that has the actual patent, but what's really interesting is
the fact that it is is set to expire in November of this year.

Since installs have become so prevalent in console games, I would love to see
these sort of mini-games be used to ease the wait.

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Roodgorf
I recall some minigame-esque loading screens in some old Dragon Ball Z games
and wondering why more games did do something similar. It's interesting to see
there was actually a reason beyond simply missed opportunity.

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mhd
Wow, the first time I actually played Breakout was during the loading of a C64
game from its cassette drive. As there wasn't even a guarantee that that
succeeded, I think I played the loading game more than the actual one.

Plus ca change…

(And it had parts of the theme from One Man and his Droid as the sole
background music. So it's going to take a while until I can scrub that out of
my hearing canal now…)

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msc96
I want to make a pull-to-refresh that smiles while it's being revealed or
during its refresh animation and frowns/cries when it scrolls away.

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knd775
A saw an app a few months ago that did almost exactly that. Unfortunately, I
have no idea what it was.

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stormbrew
Once upon a time, I worked for a social networking site where, in the early
days, we had to take the whole site down for database migrations for hours at
a time (the longest was the migration that allowed us to break free of this
pattern, ironically). During the downtime we had a breakout game load instead
of the site.

The funny part? We would get legitimate complaints when the site came back
that the game was gone. We had to keep it up on an alternate page just so we
could direct those people to it.

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staunch
The logical result is to add a 10 second delay to all your requests. It's the
right thing to do.

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bengali3
the UI did appear to show that you can stay in play after the request has been
completed. - letting to of scroll to exit Im assuming.

however, consider the ramifications where losing a life on breakout drops your
requests and makes you try again ...

might be a cool option for a 'youve refreshed too many times, beat this level
or wait 10 seconds' scenario?

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dasdom
If the property `forceEnd` is set to false (the default value) the game ends
when the user lifts the finger. The label tells the user when the loading
finished.

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teddyh
My cassette tape copy of Ghostbusters for the Commodore 64 lets me play Space
Invaders while loading:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invade-a-
Load](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invade-a-Load)

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corbinpage
I love this. Beats a boring ol' spinner any day of the week. Keeps my
attention on the app and is just plan delightful.

I wonder the first app to add something similar?

My bet is Snapchat. They always have fun pulldown animations.

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joeblau
I would probably never implement this, but this looks like an awesome proof of
concept. Very creative!

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josegonzalez
If your users have time to play a game while data is loading, you're doing it
wrong.

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gibsonje
[http://i.ytimg.com/vi/-P5drxuiJkM/maxresdefault.jpg](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/-P5drxuiJkM/maxresdefault.jpg)

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rcthompson
[http://www.vandaliersheart.com/keenfaq/KeenPage2g.html](http://www.vandaliersheart.com/keenfaq/KeenPage2g.html)

