Our video for the week is online, and in keeping with the press conferences that were ongoing for much of the day today (thanks to E3) it introduces some great new apps that you may find extremely useful to install on your iOS device.

LoadingReadyRun: Find My Friends
Unskippable: Godfather 2
Checkpoint: Infinite Lawsuit
Feed Dump: The Salty Watermelon
Loading Time: Friends and Foes
GPLP: Cursed Crusade (PT4, PT5)

As occasionally happens, I had nothing to do with any part of the filming or production of this video. Thankfully, Paul was kind enough to pass along some thoughts about the thought process for this one, so I’m going to let him take it from here. Paul?

Since the entire crew has iPhones, Find My Friends has actually been quite useful to our production schedule. We will often be scheduled to meet up at the office and be waiting around for the last person and Find My Friends allows us to call them and say “Why are you still at your house when you were supposed to be here HALF AN HOUR AGO?”. There is no doubt that it definitely raises some privacy concerns, though, and that is what made me want to write this video. Also I love the idea that Apple is devoting ridiculous amounts of engineering to solving minor social faux pas.

We actually shot the “Bob from Apple” bits and the intro with Jer and Tally more then 2 months ago, but with various conventions and other commitments, we did not have the time to do the needed post production with the CGI stick figures and fancy interface mockups until this week. As I was writing the script, I had a general idea of what I wanted to graphics to look like, but I wasn’t really sure how complicated they should be. The actual direction in the script is “illustration of how the app works, either with a live action reenactment or with futuristic cg sick figures”, and I think Graham nailed the futuristic cg stick figures part.

If you want the apps shown in this video for your iPhone or iPad, go to these pages and bookmark them to your home screen:

Find My Friends (Who are Doing it)

Messages (Only From People I Like)

Game Center (Without Everyone Who is Better than Me)

I made these pages so that we could show a real iPhone with the apps. We didn’t end up using them in that form (we used the large versions of the icons instead), but maybe someone will enjoy having them. They won’t actually work as apps, of course, but you can fool your friends into thinking that you are on the cutting edge of Apple product development.

Cheers!