During CES 2010, HP gave the public a slight tease of its upcoming slate device. The touchscreen device, which runs Windows 7, sports a form factor similar to Apple’s iPad, as well as similar uses; it supports eBooks, music, videos, and of course, the Internet. But wait, there’s more. According to a post on HP’s Voodoo blog, the device will give you a “full Web browsing experience,” not a “watered-down Internet” with “sacrifices.” In other words, the HP slate device supports Flash and, well, the iPad doesn’t.

While the blog posting didn’t mention the iPad by name, it was fairly clear that the statement in question was an indirect jab at it. Accompanying the post is a short, 30 second clip. The highlight of the clip, which occurs toward the end, shows the user going to Hulu.com and watching a Flash-based video.

The reason that the clip is only 30 seconds long, and the Hulu portion is at the end of it, is that running Flash may have drained all of the device’s batteries before all footage could be shot. (Just kidding! I couldn’t help myself).

On a serious note, while the lack of Flash on the iPhone, and now the iPad, has its drawbacks, these drawbacks have been muted to a degree. The advent of the App Store created a non-Flash, potentially monetizable, playground for the creations of developers and content creators to play in. In addition, HTML 5 is emerging as a potential Flash development alternative.

via [AppleInsider]

TUAWHP attacks Apple iPad over Flash originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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IPhone – Apple – Windows 7 – Adobe Flash – App Store

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Now that Valve has committed to offering full support for the Mac for both its in-house games and Steam, its digital game delivery system, other developers are expressing interest in the Mac as a gaming platform, too.

Gas Powered Games, creator of Supreme Commander 2, Kings and Castles, and Dungeon Siege, has said of the Mac: “We, as a developer, will include a Mac platform option in all of our proposals moving forward. We’re in 100 percent support of it, absolutely.” Chris Taylor, founder of Gas Powered Games, says that porting games over to the Mac is relatively easy since Macs and PCs now have largely identical internal architectures. Intel processors and ATI or NVIDIA graphics cards are common to both platforms, making game porting far easier than it was back in the PowerPC days. Taylor also says that recent rises in Mac sales are another contributing factor making the Mac a more attractive target for game developers.

Swedish gamemaker DICE, best known for the Battlefield series of games, may also be throwing more support behind the Mac — one of the company’s lead developers has said that “We’re currently investigating the possibility of making [Battlefield: Bad Company 2] available on Mac.” That’s not as big or flashy a commitment as Valve or Gas Powered Games, but considering the popularity of the Battlefield series, it still goes a long way toward improving the state of gaming on the Mac.

Over the next year or so, many other developers are likely to be watching Valve’s success (or lack thereof) on the Mac with a very keen eye. If Valve manages to make a healthy amount of money by selling games to Mac users, it may only be a matter of time before many more gaming outfits follow suit.

TUAWValve on Mac piques interest from other game developers originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Chris Taylor – Gas Powered Games – Battlefield – Mac – Battlefield Bad Company 2

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Recently I’ve been preparing to move home and finally did last weekend. Naturally I had to pack up all my musical gear, equipment and of course, my Mac. In the week leading up to the move, I’ve had my iPhone and nothing else. With no creative outlet and the pressure of looming project deadlines, I found myself scouting the app store for a fix to help me start fleshing out a few creative ideas.

This is what I found that worked well for me.

1. TonePad and TonePad Pro

The iTunes Store describes TonePad Pro as “…the easiest way to make music. Discover the inner musician in you. Create songs by simply touching.” And this is exactly what I found. With a 16 x 16 matrix, and an easy-to-use user interface (literally start tapping your fingers and music is made), I found myself coming up with little melodies and tunes immediately. Although you only have the 16 x 16 matrix, to me, what initially seemed quite limiting soon became a boundary for creative focus.

You can save an unlimited number of tunes to listen back to, and upload them to a shared server where your buddies can check out what you’ve been musing. With the paid version, you can save your melodies into a ringtone that will sync back to your iPhone, too.

2. Flourish

Flourish is something a bit more immersive. While having a steeper learning curve, there’s loads more to explore here. The user interface is really fresh and unique (especially for the iPhone), and presents a creative challenge in focusing your composition whilst giving you the space to try different approaches to what you are creating.

Basically Flourish represents musical phrases as physical loops:

-Record loops with expressive multi-touch keyboards.
-Generate percussive and melodic sequences.
-Build arrangements by ear or by eye.
-Select from a consonant collection of instruments.
-Sequence loops by connecting them in chain.

Check out the Flourish website for a few demo clips.

Let us know in the comments below what other apps for the iPhone / iPod Touch, or the Mac, that are inspiring you to make music.

TUAWCount The Beats: Inspiration… two apps for the musician on the move originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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iPhone – App Store – Apple – ITunes – IPod Touch

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They started by looking at the original game developed by Activision and Treyarch. Zombies is a extra mode of Call of Duty: World at War that was developed as a “lunchtime project” — a few developers threw it together on a whim, and enjoyed it so much that they released it as DLC, outside of the original game. So Ideaworks wanted to run with that vibe — create a game that you could play on your lunch break, or squeeze into a few minutes. They did find that the App Store tended towards more casual and family games, but they didn’t feel that the mature game could be successfully translated to a family-friendly format. Instead, they decided to stick with the blood and gore: “Activision,” Clarke joked, “said we would have to learn to love our 17+ rating, and live with not releasing in every country in the world.”

And they also wanted to create a game with “relaunchability,” a term that a developer at Treyarch coined. “What keeps you relaunching the game,” said Clarke, “is that, like most zombie games, you don’t really win. You’re just postponing your inevitable death.” He also said that learning became a big function of the gameplay — the game allows you to defend the same environment against zombies every time, so eventually you learn the best spots to make a stand, and so on.

Before development even started, they created a set of benchmarks in terms of performance and gameplay that they wanted to hit: Twenty zombies felt right for gameplay (you’d only be fighting 10 at any given time, but 10 more would be hanging around in the background), 20 FPS seemed like a good target for speed, 2000 triangles for graphics, and of course two thumbs (“the amount that most people have”) for control.

The controls were probably the most interesting part of prototyping — Clarke says his team really tried to brainstorm an interesting way to control an FPS on the iPhone. The problem, however, was that in an FPS game, you’re doing three things (running, looking, and shooting), but you only have two thumbs to do them with. One prototype they created had you tilting the accelerometer around to move (while looking and shooting with two onscreen controls), but for some reason, that made everyone who tested it rather dizzy. In the end, they went with a compromise, including a few different choices: a dual stick standard, an aiming assist system, and even a mode that only slightly uses the accelerometer to look around.

Authenticity was another question — obviously the iPhone doesn’t have the processing power of the latest and greatest consoles, so Ideaworks had to work hard to walk the line between keeping the game running smoothly and keeping it detailed enough to compare to the bigger title. They did a lot of pruning on the original model work, turning geometry into straight textures, and cutting off 3D modeling that couldn’t actually be seen by the player (the original team had even modeled tree roots underground, rendered on the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, but never actually seen). They did things like not animating enemies when they weren’t in the player’s line of sight, and just using a sphere for the grenade hit model rather than actually modeling the shape, since it worked just as well. In the end, the iPhone had only about 1/7th of the geometry of the original game, but Ideaworks tried to make it at least look as similar as they could.

Multiplayer was a challenge, but fortunately, Activision had already created an online backend, so when Ideaworks hooked into that system, they were able to put together all of the multiplayer ideas they had (2-player, 4-player, and even a full online system) and then some (host migration was a project one of their engineers threw together in his spare time, and Bluetooth multiplayer was also added in on a whim).

Finally, Clarke shared a few lessons from the game’s development. In terms of the controls, they learned that offering a choice to the player is sometimes the right move, and when there is a choice, you usually need to force it at some point (if you hide a different control scheme in the options, most players will never find it). Piracy was something else they learned — while Clarke was hesitant to speak much about his opinions on piracy, he did say that it was easier to pirate the game than anyone on his team believed, and that in the first days of the release, they saw a significant number of extra users playing than had actually bought the game.

Still, Clarke said that the game had done very well — they’ve been high on the App Store’s Top Paid list ever since release, and while he didn’t mention sales for the main game, he said that the lite version has seen over three million downloads. Clarke’s panel offered up an interesting look behind one of the App Store’s big name hits.

TUAWGDC 2010: Call of Duty: World at War Zombies postmortem originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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iPhone – AppStore – Activision – Call-of-Duty-World-at-War – Apple

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Thank you for speaking with us, I appreciate it. So, a fighting game on the iPhone — how did you approach that?

I used to create arcade games, and the equipment is kind of similar to the iPhone.

It’s similar? But there’s no buttons on it.

It is different. The device is completely different. But the behavior for game users is very similar. When you go to game centers, you want to jump in and play a game spontaneously. And the iPhone is the same thing — it’s like an arcade experience.

What did you think of developing games on the iPhone as a platform? Was it easy, hard?

It’s really interesting as a platform because people that play games on the iPhone usually don’t have a game console at home. I am interested to see how people react to playing video games on their handheld, not on a full console. It’s very interesting. Music fans, and other application fans, they play video games on the iPhone. It’s very interesting to see those people playing the games on the iPhone.

Are there other iPhone games that you like?

[Laughs] Except Capcom games?

Right, besides Capcom games of course.

I really like Homerun Battle 3D, it’s by this company called Com2us. [Pulls out his iPhone and shows us the Japanese version.]

Have you looked at the iPad at all? Are you interested in developing a game like Street Fighter for the iPad?

I’m very interested.

What would be different than the iPhone game?

The iPad is obviously heavier, so the user experience would be very different. [Motions with thumbs, has trouble holding a bigger device the same way.] Different than using iPhone.

On this game, how did you work on developing the interface to make it easier to use?

There’s actually a mode called dojo mode, it’s a tutorial or training mode, where you can learn how to improve your technique, brush up your technique, and learn to fight against really hardcore players as well. It doesn’t only teach you how to play, it teaches you how to do super combos, hadoken, and how Ryu fights against Ryu, how Guile fights against Ryu. It’s learning, dojo style. With this game, the major segment that we’re targeting is late 30s. Those people who used to play Street Fighter II big time. So that’s why it’s a little easier for those people to pick up and play.

Was there anything that you wanted to do that you couldn’t do because of the smaller platform?

Because of the memory capacity, we couldn’t implement any more than eight characters total. We would have liked to put more characters in there, but the memory is limited.

A lot of people wouldn’t have expected Street Fighter to become an iPhone game. Are there any other Capcom games that you’d like to put on the iPhone that people might not expect?

We have a lot of plans. But we can’t tell you anything right now. We will try our best to do more than you expect.

Great, we’re excited. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

TUAWGDC 2010: Interview with Street Fighter IV producer Takeshi Tazuka originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The ever-popular MacHeist bundle, offering eight Mac apps for $20 total, closes out at midnight Pacific Time tonight. If you’ve been on the fence so far about whether or not to buy in this year, two bits of news may push you over the brink.

First, all the initial applications have been unlocked; both Tales of Monkey Island and RapidWeaver are fully present and accounted for. Second, there’s been a last-minute addition to the roster; Tweetie for Mac (normally $20 on its own) is now part of the bundle.

If you’re Macheisting this year, let us know what you think of the app selection; if not, share your reasons why. (We will accept “I’m saving up for tickets to Tron Legacy” as a valid reason.)

TUAWMacHeist nano bundle adds Tweetie for final day originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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MacHeist – RapidWeaver – Tales of Monkey Island – Macintosh – Apple

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The delightful Twitter client Birdfeed has been bought, updated, and rebranded by Brizzly and is now available as Brizzly for iPhone… for free! [iTunes link]

If you’re looking for a great Twitter client, give Brizzly a try. It really should cost money.

[via Daring Fireball]
Birdfeed Twitter Client is now Brizzly… and Free! is a story by TiPb. [...]

Birdfeed Twitter Client is now Brizzly… and Free! is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb – The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

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9to5Mac continues its tradition of tearing through new iPhone 3.2 SDK for iPad betas, this time digging into beta 4 and finding:

In the gestures folder, you’ll see two new types of commands (3Tap.plist and LongPress.plist) that are certainly not implemented in the current 3.1 iPhone SDK.

No idea what these mean yet, [...]

New Gestures in iPhone SDK 3.2 for iPad? is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb – The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

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Unit testing refers to a software validation methodology that allows programmers to test individual program units for correctness. It’s been an ongoing question in the iPhone developer community as to whether the iPhone’s view controller class is testable or not.

In response to these discussions, iPhone developer Jonah Williams has written up a view controller unit testing how-to over at the Carbon Five web blog. His write-up offers examples that show how to incorporate some best practices into your code.

Williams points out how broken NIB bindings are a common problem for iPhone OS applications. To address these issues, he regularly adds simple assertions that test that each IB outlet and action are set properly from inside his view controller class implementations. These assertions check that IBOutlet instance variables are not set to nil and that IBAction targets have been assigned, adding a layer of protection against broken bindings.

Another typical view controller issue involves responding to application memory warnings. To respond, he adds tests that ensure that each view-dependent property gets correctly released and re-created as views unload and then later reload. By building these into test methods, he can execute this behavior on demand, and ensure that the sequence will execute flawlessly in real world conditions.

Finally, Williams discusses view controller interdependencies. Often instances are tightly intertwined, with objects acting as clients for each other. For example, a simple table view controller, living within a navigation controller, might present a detail view via yet another view controller when a row is selected. That’s three separate controllers to account for, when you really only want to test one at a time. Williams suggests isolating these view controllers away from their interdependencies to test each component separately and provides examples of how you can do so.

What made Williams’ approach pop for me is how he carefully exposes and isolates dependencies for testing. These are features that can otherwise be hard to inspect and validate in the normal course of programming. His write-up is well worth reading through, and provides an excellent jumping off point for investigating view controller unit testing.

TUAWiPhone devsugar: Unit testing for iPhone view controllers originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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iPhone – Apple – Operating system – Unit testing – Unofficial Apple Weblog

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Apologies everyone but there won’t be a TiPb Live! tonight due to me being at GDC 2010, Chad being sick, and Mickey being horribly disappointed in the both of us.

We’ll try to make it up to you with some more great GDC coverage, however. I’ve shot tons of video for TiPb Apps and will be [...]

No TiPb Live Tonight, More GDC Coverage to Come! is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb – The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

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