Home add your blog Archives Search Forum Contact RSS FEED

This site is an rss/xml news reader containing our favorite feeds. All articles are the copyrighted material of the blogs that wrote them.

Lux Delux

post from Daring Fireball on 20 November 2009 10:04:00 PM. © Daring Fireball

My thanks to Sillysoft for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote Lux Delux, a Risk-like world domination strategy game for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. Lux offers over 700 maps, including fantasy realms and historical scenarios, and has a map editor for building boards of your own. Lux also offers cross-platform network play. There’s even an SDK for programming AI opponents.

And there’s a version for the iPhone and iPod Touch. I’m a sucker for this type of game — I’ve lost a lot of time to both the Mac and iPhone versions of Lux.

?

Read The Full Article:
http://sillysoft.net/lux/

Digg this

Maybe Instead of Two Cars, You Just Need a Car
and a Bicycle

post from Daring Fireball on 20 November 2009 07:48:00 PM. © Daring Fireball

One thing that strikes me about Chrome OS and Litl is that neither bother trying to do everything Windows or Mac OS X can do. Not even close. I don’t think either even bothers trying to serve as one’s primary computer.

The idea that they’re designed to serve as secondary computers is a big part of the opportunity I see for new Web-focused OSes. I think that’s one of the implicit factors that define what people call “netbooks”. How many people use one of those as their one and only computer?

If you start with assumption that a computer will be a secondary machine — something purchased because it’s cheaper, smaller, and lighter — you can make all sorts of different assumptions about what it needs to be capable of.

In the early part of this decade, Apple’s turnaround under Steve Jobs was based on the concept of the Mac as a “digital hub” — a device to which you connect and manage satellite devices like iPods and cameras.¹ If you have more than one computer, why should the secondary computer (or computers) need to be just as capable — and just as complex, expensive, power-hungry, and heavy — as your primary one? Why should it run the same OS?

The idea of a computer that does a lot less — leaving out even things you consider essential, because you can still do those things on your other, primary computer — is liberating. That’s the opportunity, and that’s the idea behind Chrome OS and Litl and even Android and iPhone OS.

Long-term, there’s no denying that Google is steering toward a future where typical users have no “primary” computer, but instead where every computer is just a terminal to Web-based software running on servers across the Internet. But there’s an opportunity today for secondary computers that offer just a subset of the functionality of Mac OS X and Windows, especially if they don’t just do less, but (like the iPhone) do less really well.

Here’s a YouTube clip of Steve Jobs introducing Apple’s “digital hub” strategy in his January 2001 Macworld Expo keynote. It’s sort of mind-blowing — both in terms of the prescience of the strategy itself and just how long ago it seems. There was no such thing as an iPod yet, Mac OS X 10.0 was still two months away from shipping, and, talking about digital cameras, Jobs mentions that they then accounted for 15 percent of the camera market but would “soon” account for 50 percent. ↩

Read The Full Article:
http://daringfireball.net/2009/11/a_car_and_a_bicycle

Digg this

Gameloft Says Its Cutting Back on Android
Development

post from Daring Fireball on 20 November 2009 06:45:00 PM. © Daring Fireball

Alexandre de Rochefort, finance director of French game developer Gameloft:

“We are selling 400 times more games on iPhone than on Android.”

?

Read The Full Article:
http://us.mobile.reuters.com/m/FullArticle/p.rdt/CTECH/ntechnologyNews_uUSTRE5AJ1
EU20091120

Digg this

Gameloft Says It, Others Cutting Back on Android
Development

post from Daring Fireball on 20 November 2009 06:45:00 PM. © Daring Fireball

Alexandre de Rochefort, finance director of French game developer Gameloft:

“We are selling 400 times more games on iPhone than on Android.”

?

Read The Full Article:
http://us.mobile.reuters.com/m/FullArticle/p.rdt/CTECH/ntechnologyNews_uUSTRE5AJ1
EU20091120

Digg this

Multi-carrier iPhone in France doubles sales

post from MacNN | The Macintosh News Network on 20 November 2009 06:30:00 PM. © MacNN | The Macintosh News Network

The elimination of the iPhone's exclusivity to Orange in France has resulted in "more than double" t...

Read The Full Article:
http://feeds.macnn.com/click.phdo?i=a354c15d343d3703e46600565c142df1

Digg this

FileSalvage 7 runs on Snow Leopard, upgrades
interface

post from MacNN | The Macintosh News Network on 20 November 2009 05:55:00 PM. © MacNN | The Macintosh News Network

SubRosaSoft has upgraded its file recovery software, FileSalvage 7. The software recovers deleted fi...

Read The Full Article:
http://feeds.macnn.com/click.phdo?i=12292b53831b2c9a68f86a692ec78879

Digg this

Minco 1.0 time-earnings tracker integrates with
iCal

post from MacNN | The Macintosh News Network on 20 November 2009 05:45:00 PM. © MacNN | The Macintosh News Network

Celmaro has released a new time-tracking application, Minco 1.0. It is designed as a minimalist trac...

Read The Full Article:
http://feeds.macnn.com/click.phdo?i=ff729aaabfa0aed2188694c7a1c59786

Digg this

Microsoft roadmap puts Windows 8 in 2012

Microsoft should once again release its next mainstream version of Windows about three years after t...

Read The Full Article:
http://feeds.macnn.com/click.phdo?i=50aac80ec3c02f40895d963c6d556563

Digg this

Yours Truly on iPhone OS Private API Usage

Apologies for the self-link, but I’ve gotten a few questions today from readers asking, honestly, just what the problem is with private APIs. This piece I wrote last year addresses it.

As an addendum, I think there are many developers, especially those who aren’t coming to the iPhone from the Mac, who don’t understand how seriously Apple takes its public APIs. When Apple publishes an official API, it’s a serious commitment that says how something works and will continue to work in the future. Private APIs are subject to change or go away. The idea that something marked private works now so why not use it? is short-sighted. The iPhone OS isn’t just something that Apple has built to last for a couple of years. It’s a platform they’re building to last for the foreseeable future. They don’t want apps in the Store that aren’t future-proof.

?

Read The Full Article:
http://daringfireball.net/2008/12/private

Digg this

Ommwriter word processor offers Zen-like
meditative focus

Herraiz Soto, an independent creative agency, has launched Ommwriter, a new word processor with a "Z...

Read The Full Article:
http://feeds.macnn.com/click.phdo?i=c9dc8d806b9b6cac8bfc9d716f9f1db9