Verizon tonight was caught distributing a memo to retail staff encouraging them to sell to iPad customers. The note obtained by Engadget encourages floor workers to promote the idea of using a Wi-Fi only iPad with a Novatel MiFi router. Mixing the two would not only save the $130 premium on an iPad with built-in 3G but would help users get off of AT&T's "overloaded network with limited coverage," according to the memo….

OWC has launched its OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro mini 1TB portable drive, which it claims is the first ever 2.5-inch 1TB drive shipped with a quad interface. The bus-powered drive has eSATA, USB 2.0, and FireWire 800/400 connectivity in a brushed aluminum, fanless enclosure. In addition to the new 1TB capcity, the drives are also available with 7200RPM 500GB drives and solid-state drives up to 200GB….

Filed under: Gaming, Software, Developer

Unity Technologies hosted the sponsored lunch panel during GDC 2010 today, and their “product evangelist” Tom Higgins gave a quick rundown of the software platform that enables developers to assemble and release games extremely quickly on multiple platforms.

The company was actually founded in Denmark, but has since expanded around the world with just two products: Unity Pro and Unity iPhone Pro. The second product, as you might imagine, allows developers to put together an application that can then be exported out into an Xcode project and released on the App Store. Higgins said that they’ve had over 90,000 people download the software since it was released for free last fall, and that more than 500 games in the App Store were authored by Unity.

He also ran a short demo of the software at the panel. While some of the coding got a little technical (the system allows you to create and change variables on in-game objects even while the game is running in the engine), the coolest feature was the way they simulated iPhone controls: by using a real iPhone as a remote. They’ve released a free app on the App Store that will connect via Wi-Fi with a copy of the development tool running on your Mac, and as you touch and turn the iPhone, the editor reacts, and sends the (slightly lower resolution) output to the iPhone’s screen. You can also make changes to your code as the game runs in that mode, so you can be playing and coding at the same time.

That was pretty impressive. Of course, Unity won’t actually help you be a game developer — like many of the tools on display at the conference this week, it’s a professional tool that can only make your ideas and art come to life, not actually create them for you.

But when you combine Unity’s compatibility across platforms (there’s even a web player that will play your Unity-created game on any web-compatible computer) with the ease of development (the app just outputs an Xcode project, so you can write an app in Javascript with the tool and output it straight to the App Store, or even edit the Xcode after the output if you want to take advantage of features that Unity doesn’t support by default), it’s definitely worth a look as an iPhone development tool. I’m not a developer, so I don’t have much insight on how the program actually works, but just in terms of creating apps for multiple platforms at the same time (”author once, deploy anywhere,” as Higgins said during his talk), Unity seems like a worthwhile solution.

The Unity platform is available as a free download, and the iPhone app either comes in source code with the rest of the platform, or can be downloaded straight from the App Store.

TUAWGDC 2010: From concept to Top Paid with Unity iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 09 Mar 2010 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Apple should be able to churn out approximately 5 million iPads in the first half of the year, claims FBR Capital analyst Craig Berger. The number is higher than what some analysts have said Apple will sell in all of 2010, and is based on a dismissal of claims that the company is experiencing production setbacks. “We believe various news articles and competitor notes calling for a build delay were just false alarms,” says Berger. At least one report has suggested that the delay to April 3rd is based on software issues….

This nicely designed, easy-to-use app that may provide a valuable service for some users. But My Med ID is not without its downsides.

Progressive rock band Pink Floyd on Tuesday sued its label EMI for allegedly breaking the terms of its contract through online sales. The complaint accuses EMI of knowingly “unbundling” the band’s songs by letting those at iTunes and other online music stores buy some songs individually, against terms that insist all the content of an album be sold as one item….

UniPrint has launched UniPrint 7.0, intended for Mac network printing in server-centric physical or virtual desktop situations. It works in both 64- and 32-bit environments using a PDF-based universal printer driver, which in turn is designed for Citrix, Microsoft Remote Desktop Services, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure and other non-Windows host system servers. It allows administrators to manage a single universal print driver and, through the use of PDF conversion and compression, in theory save up to 90 percent of the network bandwidth consumed by other direct prin…

Samsung on Tuesday announced it will soon release the HW-C450 sound bar for simple home theater setups. The 2.1-channel system comes in black, while the HW-C451 will be available in silver. Apart from the color, the systems have an identical 280W power rating and sport Samsung’s Touch of Color design. Their speakers are grill-less, and the subwoofer is wireless….

Filed under: Gaming, Software, Other Events, Developer, iPhone

The 2010 Game Developers Conference kicks off today in San Francisco, and TUAW is in attendance to check out the latest and greatest in iPhone game development. The conference boasts a whole track dedicated to iPhone gaming this year, and all week long, we’ll be bringing you panels, news, and interviews straight from the conference floor. This morning, panel number one was from Stephen Detwiler and James Marr, two engineers at Ngmoco, to talk to developers about how they put the server software together for Eliminate, the “freemium” first person shooter that’s serving as their flagship app lately.

As they explained during the presentation, they had a heck of a goal with this project: they wanted to put together “the definitive FPS for iPhone,” complete with all of the functions of a standard console deathmatch-style FPS, in just five months with just three engineers. And they started with the toughest nut of all: the networking code.

They looked first at commercial solutions for game networking, and it turns out that the Quake 3 engine that they eventually used fit their ideas well. The toughest obstacle was of course the lag — in a fast-paced game like Eliminate, even a delay of 200 milliseconds is too much. But it turns out that the way the Quake 3 engine handled dialup Internet back in the day is very similar to the way many developers are handling the slower speeds of mobile 3G. As the devs said, “a dialup connection from 1999 looks a lot like a 3G connection today.”

In addition to the networking code, the Quake engine also gave them lots of other benefits during development, including graphics and lighting engines, a map editor, and an easy way to model animations in the game. The engineers said that using a commercial engine like Quake 3 allowed them to spend much more time on the out-of-game experience (the lobbies, the in-app purchases, and so on), and they really appreciated that.

The next big hurdles were player management and matchmaking. After considering a few different options, they went with an open-source messaging server called ejabberd — while it’s written in Erlang, a language that they said had some “crazy syntax” (they showed an inexplicable piece of code on the projection screen to make their point), it scaled very well and clustered the way they wanted it to.

Matchmaking was a little tougher — they used console games by companies like Microsoft, Infinity Ward, and Blizzard as a model, and decided that they wanted to have players wait a max of about 10% of the time they spent playing. For console games, that turns out to be about a minute of waiting to make a game versus ten minutes of actual gameplay, but for Eliminate’s shorter three minute games, Ngmoco decided they only had about fifteen seconds to make a match. Still, they were able to put a pretty robust system in the game even in that short time — they assign players a number of various qualities (character skill, level, ping time, and so on), and then the matchmaking system searches for other game players, slowly expanding the limits on the search criteria.

In other words, when players first start searching, they’ll be matched up with players of approximately the same skill, but as time goes on, that skill window grows. Fifteen seconds in, the skill differential could be up to ten times what it was when the search first started. Not all qualities “degrade” the same — party size, for example, degrades much slower, so someone looking for four players won’t get hooked up with just two or three for a while. And while the devs originally didn’t include character level in matchmaking at all (they figured skill was a better match for players than actual level), a “HUGE outcry” by players made them include level in the process. Players really didn’t like being connected with opponents who were at a much higher character level, even if the skill level was the same.

Ngmoco runs 16 different servers for each implementation of Eliminate: four for messaging with the clients, two for matchmaking, eight for what they call “game managers” (which are servers that run multiple game instances), and two management consoles that oversee the actual Ubuntu-based servers they’re running, and update the 24 apt-get packages that make up the actual game software. Messaging servers are based in San Francisco with the company, but game servers are co-located around the world, in Chicago, Virginia, Amsterdam and Tokyo. Unfortunately, they didn’t mention how many people are actually playing, but the servers were tested for up to 30,000 users just for messaging and 50,000 for matchmaking — Ngmoco actually made a headless version of the game for OS X, installed it on “all of the hardware” in their offices, and ran it like crazy to load-test their software.

It was a pretty interesting talk — very much on the technical side, but Ngmoco set out to create a competitive online FPS on the iPhone and that’s what they did. It was cool to hear some behind-the-scenes details on how a very complicated iPhone gaming network is designed and run.

We’ll have more from GDC 2010 all this week, including hands-on of the latest games from Ngmoco and lots of other game developers. Stay tuned!

TUAWGDC 2010: Ngmoco explains how Eliminate was built originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

The simmering marketing battle between Verizon Wireless and AT&T over whose LTE network is first and best promises to explode in the coming months.

Parallels has just issued an update for Parallels Desktop 5.0 which adds support for Google’s Chrome OS, according to the developer.

Filed under: Gaming, iPhone, App Store

Namco is bringing the popular Tekken franchise to the iPhone. It’s not confirmed whether it’s a port of the original game — released back in 1994 in arcades, then on the PlayStation — or the current Tekken 6.

This comes a few weeks after Capcom announced the release of Street Fighter IV for the iPhone, leading to an eventual fighter game showdown in the App Store. While both games on the iPhone is pretty awesome, I’m waiting to see how they will look and play on the iPad. I also wouldn’t mind seeing even more Namco titles on the iPhone – especially selections from the Tales RPG franchise.

Namco has a number of games in the store, including classics like Galaga, which was “remixed” for the iPhone, Burger Time Deluxe, which graced arcades way back in 1982!

Here’s hoping for old-school Tekken.

[Via Gizmodo]

TUAWTekken bound for the iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Alchemist Guild has launched a new backup application for the Mac, Warehouse 1.0. The tool is built on Unix utilities and relies on a single-window interface for backing up files, whether to external hard drives, USB memory sticks or other Macs on a network. Any number of assigned tasks can be set, with options source folders, destination locations and up to four different backup modes….

Filed under: Developer, iPhone

In a step towards transparency, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has made the entire iPhone Developer Program License Agreement available for the general public. This is the document that all iPhone developers must agree to when they become part of the iPhone developer program.

As EFF points out, public copies of the license agreement are pretty scarce thanks to developers being locked under a non-disclosure agreement as part of the contract. EFF used the Freedom of Information Act to get its copy from NASA, which is the version from approximately a year ago (Rev. 3-17-09). The agreement has been updated since then.

The EFF characterizes the agreement as “a very one-sided contract, favoring Apple at every turn,” and that’s not an overstatement. Some of the clauses and conditions in the Apple developer agreement do smack of “our field, our ball, our rules” thinking from Cupertino. Highlights from the 28-page document include:

• A ban prohibiting developers from making public statements about the license agreement; however the contract itself is not considered “Apple Confidential Information.”
• Apps developed from Apple’s SDK are only allowed to be sold through the App Store. You can’t push it anywhere else (Cydia, etc.), even if Apple has rejected the app for any reason.
• Developers are forbidden to tinker with any Apple products, not just the iPhone. This includes jailbreaking.
• Apple is not liable for more than $50 in damages in case something happens on their end to your app. This is laughable, and I’m honestly surprised that Apple has not had a legal challenge over this yet.
• Devices used for testing purposes could be locked into a “testing mode,” and may not be able to be restored to their original condition. That is one way to brick your device.

I discussed the EFF’s post with Mike Rose, and he offered some editorial comment; read on for more.

Mike’s Op-Ed Soapbox Dept.

To get a sense of where the EFF is coming from, it’s worth taking a moment to review the first sentence of Fred von Lohmann’s post: “The entire family of devices built on the iPhone OS (iPhone, iPod Touch [sic], iPad) have been designed to run only software that is approved by Apple — a major shift from the norms of the personal computer market.” While that’s a snappy lead, it’s not technically accurate; all three of the devices are designed to run any compiled & signed application for the platform, and all developers may distribute ad-hoc builds of their apps to a limited number of users without Apple knowing or caring; enterprise developers (who pay $299 for the privilege) can distribute unapproved apps much more widely.

The point von Lohmann is aiming for is that the iPhone OS ecosystem and application distribution channel is almost entirely controlled by Apple; that’s obvious and clear. While it’s certainly “a shift from the norms of the PC market,” it’s far less alien to the norms of the cellphone and consumer electronics market, and none of the devices in question is a personal computer in the traditional sense of the term — not even the iPad. There doesn’t seem to be a similar degree of campaigning for openness around the Xbox Live or Wii online marketplaces, for example.

Although developers aren’t supposed to talk about the program agreement, I’m sure we will be seeing and hearing quite a bit of public comment around it now that EFF has lifted the veil. The EFF post concludes with a call for developers to demand better terms and for users to support them; while it’s unlikely that Apple is going to shift on this, some public feedback from prominent developers might make some difference.

TUAWEFF releases iPhone developer license agreement originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Inspired by the recently released film from Disney and director Tim Burton, Alice in Wonderland is a remarkably clever 2-D adventure game that is more than a mere movie tie-in.

This is the year that Sony, Panasonic, Samsung, and other television makers throw serious weight behind 3D TV, but their sales projections seem rather generous.

Dell today provided an official explanation for the disappearance of the Adamo XPS from most of its online stores. The Texas PC builder in a statement now argues that the ultraportable is actually “similar to a limited edition” and was never designed to be a long-term product. It was an “engineering marvel” meant to show what Dell could do and is simply nearing the end of its run, the company claimed….

Online retailers Play.com and Expansys will both stock Apple’s iPad when it hits the UK.