Tag: iphone

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Nathan Brown for Edge, on Nintendo’s recent statements that they won’t allow a race to the bottom for 3DS downloadables:

Nintendo’s Hideki Konno has renewed the firm’s attack on low-cost software, saying that neither hardware manufacturers nor software developers want to see 3DS games sold at smartphone prices.

“We don’t want content to be devalued,” Konno told Gamasutra ahead of 3DS’s launch this weekend. “Let’s say there’s a ton of other software out there that’s free, which forces you then to take your content which you want to sell for 10 dollars and you have to lower it down to one dollar to be competitive. It’s not a business model that’s going to make developers happy.”

I love and admire Nintendo, and they are the caretakers of a vast amount of IP and a number of franchises that I have enjoyed since my childhood.

But in my opinion, the Nintendo DS was the pinnacle of handheld development and existed in a pre-iPhone/iPod touch era. They are pricing and hardware-designing (look at the 3DS battery life!) themselves right out of competition. I’m sad that it’s going away and I unfortunately don’t believe the 3DS is going to be as successful.

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The last.fm blog:

On February 15, the radio service built into Last.fm mobile apps and on home entertainment devices will become an ad-free, subscriber-only feature.

Last.fm Radio will remain free on the Last.fm website in the US, UK and Germany and for the US and UK users of Xbox Live and Windows Mobile 7 phones. We’ll also continue to offer radio for free via the Last.fm desktop app.

That sound you heard was the remaining last.fm users deleting the app from their phones and installing Pandora instead.

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The Bing Community Search blog:

Today we are happy to announce the first official Bing for Mobile Android App available to Verizon customers.  You can now download the free Bing App from your Verizon Wireless Android phones’ Marketplace.

This is precisely why I (unfortunately) hope that Android doesn’t gain the upper hand in the mobile market. Apple did a great job freeing handsets from a lot of carrier interference with the platform and user experience—though AT&T fought back by using network restrictions—and Android is handing that control right back to the carriers, where it shouldn’t be.

This app should be available for all Android phones.

(via Bing Community.)

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So, if a normal human eye can discriminate two points separated by 1 arcminute/cycle at a distance of a foot, we should be able to discriminate two points 89 micrometers apart which would work out to about 287 pixels per inch.  Since the iPhone 4G display is comfortably higher than that measure at 326 pixels per inch, I’d find Apple’s claims stand up to what the human eye can perceive.

Great article about the pixel size and density of the new iPhone 4G, with some pleasantly nerdy microscope photography and technical explanation.

(via Apple Retina Display – Jonesblog.)

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Today, we’re overwhelmingly, insanely, ridiculously excited to introduce Sencha Touch, the first HTML5 framework for mobile devices. We think it’s the first cross-platform framework that builds web apps that make sense for mobile devices. It comes with a comprehensive UI widget library, complete touch event management with CSS transitions and an extensive data package.

This has the potential to become very, very popular—and it’s licensed under the GPL.

(via Introducing Sencha Touch: HTML5 Framework for Mobile — Sencha Blog — JavaScript Framework and RIA Platform.)

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The Apple Design Awards 2010 recognize iPhone OS applications that demonstrate technical excellence, innovation, superior technology adoption, high performance, and outstanding design. Each year, winning products set new standards for the developer community to follow. Read about what made this year’s winners stand out above the rest.

Well-deserved, though I think there are too many games represented in the iPad group. Star Walk is particularly awesome.

(via Apple Design Awards – WWDC10 – Apple Developer.)

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Gizmodo’s Joel Johnson, responding to Cory Doctorow:

The old guard has The Fear. They see the iPad and the excitement it has engendered and realize that they’ve made themselves inessential—or at least invisible. They’ve realized that it’s possible to make a computer that doesn’t break, doesn’t stop working, doesn’t need constant tinkering. Unlike a car, it’s possible to design a computer that is bulletproof. It just turns out that one of the ways to make that work is to lock it down. That sucks, but it certainly appears to be a better solution than design by committee gave us for the last couple of decades.

Stuff like this is why the iPad excites me. Not only is it going to be dead simple to use, it’s the first truly new paradigm in interface design we’ve seen since… well, the iPhone. It really is like personal computing’s Wii.

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An awesome write-up on how the brand-new, released-on-launch-day iPhone app came to be from Raanan:

Back in late February I met up with Raven Zachary and his team from Small Society as well as our own Matt Mullenweg, to figure out if we could get an iPad app for WordPress ready in less than 30 days.

The team at Automattic pulled it off, and iPad users will be rocking the official WordPress app starting tomorrow morning. Check out the full post, which includes one of WordPress.com’s fancy new slideshows, and this shot of the plan behind the app:

So cool.