Alex Hardy

The release of the iPhone / iPod Touch SDK and the excitement among developers and gamers begs the question: Just what kind of games will be on the iPhone?

Comparisons can be drawn with the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP consoles. Both have revised hardware, an established library of games and a head start in sales. Both also demonstrate that the best portable games have these characteristics:

• Simple
• Make use of the hardware’s unique features
• Suitable for short periods of gameplay (e.g. the bus to work)

On PSP, Loco Roco displays large areas of brilliantly vivid colour. WipEout Pure shows that the wide screen aspect lends itself particularly well to racing games. On DS, Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, Nintendogs and Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training leverage the Nintendo heritage, as well as the dual screen, stylus and microphone.

Both platforms fall prey to what is often called “shovelware”. Clones. Lazy ports. Tedious licenses. The iPhone will be no different. It will be the game designers’ challenge to figure out the iPhone’s key features. At a glance, they include:

• Touch screen (game interfaces can be unique)
• Accelerometer (also referred to as a “tilt sensor”)
• 3D graphics which appear to be inferior to the PSP, but on a par with the DS
• Multiplayer gaming over wifi
• Internet access and a unique content delivery mechanism

The lack of traditional control buttons and tactile feedback will present a new design challenge. Some will use the accelerometer for controls, while some may choose to draw virtual buttons and joypads for more traditional games. Some ideas I’d look forward to seeing:

• “Touch Tetris” is so obvious I’d be surprised if EA haven’t already written it
• Line Rider
• Flick Sports (think Wii Sports for touch screen)
• Tap-tap rhythm action games
• Episodic games

If the iPhone / iPod Touch has one unique advantage, it’s that it will provide an opportunity to sell games to people who don’t buy games machines.

The Apple Store went down this morning. Nothing unusual about that; they have routinely taken the store down every Tuesday this year so far to introduce updated iPods, MacBooks, Time Capsule etc. Today was apparently just maintenance.

It isn’t common practice however to take down an online store to add new products. Imagine if Amazon did the same. It has been claimed by people on the inside that it is actually an architectural limitation of the store itself. It has to be re-published in its entirety – a requirement you could justifiably call poor design.

Apple’s relationship with the web conflicts with its image. They provide tools to write a blog but notoriously forbid their own employees from doing so. They are secretive and openly hostile to rumour sites (Think Secret the latest casualty). Bizarrely, their management of the store seems to be an exception.

A company with Apple’s resources could easily build a new store, but they choose to persevere with the old one. Why? It can only be the excitement and speculation that spreads through the mac websites like wildfire the moment that little “We’ll be back soon” post-it note appears on the page.

Call it PR, call it the Reality Distortion Field at work. Only Apple could spin a flaw in their service into a social marketing campaign. If I was a conspiracy theorist I might imagine Phil Schiller sat at his desk, leaking “rumours” to the web…

A video of yesterday’s SDK event is online at Apple’s website.

Much will be said in the coming months. In the words of Jason Fried of 37Signals:

What we saw today was the beginning of two decades of mobile domination…

Enterprise features (e.g. Exchange support). AOL Instant Messenger. Console quality games (the Super Monkey Ball demo was allegedly built in just two weeks). A comprehensive software development kit, to be released in June.

The 30% sales tax by Apple seems steep at first, but developers can set their own prices and won’t have hosting/bandwidth or credit card processing costs. They also gain a platform and delivery channel with millions of users and an installation mechanism that’s as easy as buying a song. I think most will find these terms livable.

The iPhone / iPod Touch platform just became a deadly rival to every mobile phone, PDA, media player and handheld videogame console out there.

Check out Trism, an upcoming puzzle game by Steve of Demiforce. GameSetWatch have posted an interview with him. It looks like the accelerometer may do for the iPhone what the stylus did for the Nintendo DS.

If people like him can create gems like this with no tools, documentation or support from Apple then I can’t wait to see what appears once the SDK is released.

I’m pleased to see that O2 have amended their iPhone tariffs. The miserly allocation of 200 minutes and 200 text messages that was previously in place can only have been putting people off. I was certainly not going to buy one at that rate. The new £35 tariff of 600 minutes and 500 texts is better than what I have now though!

Suddenly the O2 Simplicity deal + new phone (which I would have to buy because my current phone is half-dead) + iPod Touch starts to look like a false economy…

Apple, increase the capacity to 16Gb this summer and you have a customer!

Steve Jobs on the Amazon Kindle:

It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read … Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.

Let’s put aside the debate that people may read a lot despite buying fewer books. This would be the same Steve Jobs who said that video on a mobile device is “the wrong direction to go” and that less than full-featured laptops are “undesirable.”

With any luck, it will be an iPod Touch / iPhone application.

Via MacUser:

Microsoft have decided to relax their previous stance on virtualisation, where only Windows Vista Business and Ultimate editions were permitted to run inside a virtual environment such as Parallels or VMware.

This may not seem like a big deal since you could run it under Boot Camp. Anyone who has used Boot Camp will tell you that it’s great option for processor intensive activities (like playing games), but a total pain in the ass if you have to regularly restart between platforms when working.

I found this recently when building a CD-ROM using Adobe Flash on Mac OS X and Zinc on Windows Vista.

This won’t cost them anything in the long run. It may help to shift a lot of copies of Windows Vista to Mac users. This is a straightforward response to customer demand and should be applauded.

All I want now is an IE6 testing solution for developers and I’m happy

So I was right on one or two things, which is an improvement on last year!

iTunes

Movie rentals seem like a good idea to me. If the service is fairly priced when it hits UK shores then I might use it in preference to the local Blockbuster, if only to avoid the hassle of out-of-stock films and returning discs. As I said previously, this update makes the Apple TV useful at last.

Now that the big four labels (Sony BMG, Universal, EMI and Warner) are all on board with Amazon MP3, I’d like to see Apple play hardball and say “drop the DRM, or you’re out of the Music Store” to all labels.

iPhone and iPod Touch updates

The refinements to the iPhone and iPod Touch are welcome, and make the ‘Touch much more attractive to me. It’s not surprising however that the upgrade tax on ‘Touch owners is causing controversy. $20 won’t exactly break the bank, but the inequity of it is a problem.

If it were completely free, the complaints would be coming from iPhone owners, unhappy that they are subsidising software development for a device they don’t own. As it is, people who rushed to buy a ‘Touch prior to this update feel exploited.

It should be free for all, or not free at all.

I don’t think it would be a problem if these apps were designated outside the scope of a standard ‘Touch, and had to be bought regardless of when you got yours. After all, that will be what happens when developers are using the SDK to build their own apps. Perhaps Apple could sweeten the pill with some free downloads from iTunes?

MacBook Air

Very very nice, but not for me. Honestly I think it’s aimed at countries like Japan, where consumers are well known to favour small form factors. The size reduction wouldn’t benefit me though, and I’d be inclined to either save my money and buy a MacBook or go all the way and get a MacBook Pro.

Time will tell whether the non-replaceable battery unit, lack of optical drive and impressive thinness (and its effect on heat dissipation) were wise decisions.

All this makes me wonder when the MacBook will be refreshed. The last update was a bit of a yawner, and it’s now the odd one out in Apple’s range (white plastic, LCD screen etc). I’ll eagerly await the next MacBook.

First things first: happy new year!

It’s that time of year again, when a young mac user’s thoughts turn to wondering what will be unveiled at Macworld Expo. It becomes a bit of a game, as the rumour mill goes into overdrive.

I take a perverse sense of pride in my total failure to correctly predict anything last year. My dismissal of iPhone as “baseless rumour” is particularly funny in hindsight, as was my expectation of Blu Ray drives, the Beatles on iTunes and a March release date for Mac OS X Leopard. Oh, how we laughed…

In that spirit, I present my 100% certain* predictions for MacWorld 2008! Yesterday’s announcement of new Mac Pros clears the decks for a more consumer-oriented keynote, so here goes nothing:

• I’ll start with an easy one: Steve Jobs usually likes to kick off with sales figures. Expect boasting about how well iPhone and Mac OS X Leopard have sold
• There may be a small joke at Bill Gates’ expense, now that he is unemployed
• Preview of Microsoft Office 2008 (thankfully without Roz Ho)
• Full release of Safari for Windows
• Jobs will probably say “boom” at least once while demoing
• Preview of the forthcoming iPhone SDK, and some apps based on it
• A new section of the iTunes store will sell applications for iPhone and iPod Touch, as well as manage updates
• Movie rentals through iTunes will finally make the Apple TV useful
• The Apple TV will be upgraded with more storage and PVR functionality
• The audience will whoop like hyenas on cue
• Reveal of the rumoured ultra-portable MacBook. It will be much thinner than current MacBooks, owing mainly to its lack of an internal optical drive (sold separately). Opinion is split on whether/how it will use flash memory – I expect a small amount will be used for a performance boost rather than storage
• We will get new displays with built in iSights someday… – why not next week?
• And one more thing… iPhone socks. The crowd goes wild…

No, I am not taking bets.

* None of these predictions are in any way certain.

If you work on a Mac and make zip files to share with Windows users, you’ll know what a nuisance it can be when invisible files from Mac OS X find their way in.

Resource forks and ._DS_Store files (which store data such as icons, associations and view preferences) are redundant and visible in other systems, and not only confuse users but inflate the zip file with unnecessary data. It becomes a manual task (on a Windows PC) to remove these files.

So I thought I’d share a little app I discovered the other day: Compress Files by Apimac. Two little checkboxes instruct it to remove these files and you have a nice clean zip ready to send. The $9.95 asking price is nothing compared to how much time it will save you.