Preview: Daisy Mae's Alien Buffet

I could not help but preview this title. I absolutely love the name of this game, but did not expect this to be a dual stick shooter, more like a very odd time management cooking game. Take a look at this title while we wait for it to launch in February 2010.IUGO’s latest adventure on the iPhone, Daisy Mae’s Alien Buffet, offers over-the-top alien slaying. Check out the description, screens and video below:Daisy Mae’s peaceful, simple life in her little desert trailer park will never be the same. A full scale alien attack on earth has begun and Daisy becomes the unlikely heroine outta nowhere. Take hold of the steering wheel and help Daisy Mae...

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Preview: B-Boy Beats

It seems like Tag Games are going down the track of publishing titles as well as developing their own like Car Jack Streets. In their first published title they are aiming to show the other music games how it's really done. Read on below to find out all the hip-hop happenings in this title.Scottish iPhone publisher and developer Tag Games is today pleased to announce full details of its upcoming hip hop rhythm action game B-Boy Beats. Developed in partnership with Mobile Pie, a hugely talented studio based in the UK’s hip hop heartland of Bristol. B-Boy Beats aims to reinvent the stale rhythm action genre made popular on iPhone by titles such...

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Waaaaah!

Oooh, a petition. I'm sure this will change something.No I don't.This modified re-tweet gave me a laugh, thou...

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Future Shock

Go read Frasier Spear's Future Sho...

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Failure to Think Different

I'm not even going to say very much in response to this blog post, except to point out that her sense of self-importance is way out of proportion. Apple doesn't have to convince her that the iPad is "better than a netbook" because it's not about her. This isn't a product primarily targeted at techies, tech reporters, developers, gurus, pundits, or the like. Much of the target audience doesn't even grok what a netbook is.I'm sure somebody has told you all this before, but let me point it out again: it's not always about you. Products can be successful even if they aren't right for you.Frankly, I think this thing could be a huge success just from techies buying them for their parents or other relatives who rely on them for tech support.This thing doesn't cost all that much more than a portable...

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Adobe's Unhappy

I was going to respond to Adobe's self-serving, biased, and not entirely factually accurate blog post, but rather than incur more wrath from the legion of Flash "developers", I'm just going to link to Chris Rawson's piece at TUAW.Regardless of how the iPad does, with over 70 million iPhone OS devices in the world that don't run Flash, content providers who currently use depend on Flash HAVE to be looking at other options. In many cases, the other option will be an alternative instead of completely supplanting Adobe, but either way, it's good for the w...

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Apple is Hiring Cocoa Touch Programmers

In the last few hours, I've seen tweets from at least two different folks at Apple about new openings for engineers for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. Here's one. Here are some more.Or you could just do your own search on Apple's job's site.Also, if you're more of an East Coast kinda person, Rosetta Stone is also looking for a good iPhone programmer. Ping me on Twitter or in e-mail for more detai...

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A4 Specs

Wikipedia now has a page on the Apple A4 SOC (system on a chip) with some specifics. It appears that it's a ARM-A9 multi-core chip combined with a PowerVR VXD. The article seems to suggest that OpenGL ES 3.x and OpenCL are both possibilities with this chipset.No matter how you slice it, it's pretty fast for a mobile device and this bodes well for the next generation of iPhones if they can scale the A4 to the iPho...

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GizModo Also Knows About Not Sucking…

Since I linked to them when they denigrated the iPad, it's only fair if I also link to them when they do the opposite, so here it is. Good artic...

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Same Ol' Same Ol'…

There seems to be a pattern that's formed over the last decade. Apple releases a product. It's different. It doesn't follow the rules. It defies a lot of widely accepted assumptions. Then, lots of people all over the Internet, both so-called pundits and everyday schmoes pronounce that it's a horrible device that nobody in their right mind would ever want. It doesn't support Ogg! It has no floppy drive! It has no multi-tasking! Product X already does this and it's cheaper!. Etc., etc. ad nauseum.And then the product goes on to be a huge success, expanding the perception of who uses that type of device greatly. The iMac, the iPod, the iPhone.So, here we go again with the iPad.Here's the thing: It's not a general-purpose computer. It's not a Mac. They did this really subtle thing to tell you...

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Multi-Resolution Device

I can't post SDK 3.2-specific code because it's under NDA, but I can post SDK 3.1 code. Now, let's say you wanted your application to be future-proofed to run properly in full-screen on some theoretical new device with more pixels than an iPhone. You might do something like this:- (BOOL)application:(UIApplication *)application didFinishLaunchingWithOptions:(NSDictionary *)launchOptions{ UIScreen *screen = [UIScreen mainScreen]; [window setFrame:[screen applicationFrame]]; return YES;}This assumes that your nib is set up using autosize attributes to properly scale. If you need separate nibs, that's another blog posting that'll come after the NDA is lift...

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GizModo Knows About Sucking, Apparently

Gizmodo was very quick to put up a page denigrating the iPad. Generally, for a consumer device, I would view disapproval from Gizmodo as a good omen for future success1, but wanted to address their statements anyway.Big, Ugly Bezel - Yeah, I thought it was too big when I first saw it, but ugly? It's black and shiny. What's ugly about it? Were you hoping for beige plastic, perhaps? Anyway, then I gave some thought as to how you would hold a device this size, and you know what? I bet Apple had a darn good reason for making it precisely the size they did. I'll bet on Apple's product design and testing against Gizmodo's kneejerk reaction any dayNo Multitasking This is a geeky need. Most people don't need it. I need it in my day-to-day computing so this would never be my primary computing platform,...

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Tablet Post Mortem

Okay, so even some of my "safe" predictions were wrong. This thing is basically an iPod Touch on steroids - bigger screen, faster processor. It does run the iPhone OS, which is still called the iPhone OS, and not all that much has changed. I can't talk specifics because the new SDK version that supports the iPad is under NDA, but if you know how to program the iPhone, you know how to program the iPad. They didn't even change the major version number (much to my joy, given that we've got the version number in our book titles).My thoughts: at $499, it's amazing. Now a lot of developers are a little disappointed. Frankly, we're not the main intended audience. For a lot of people, this is the perfect computer. For my mom, who doesn't really like computers, for example. This combined with the keyboard...

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The Fabled Tablet

I've been studiously not making predictions about the iPad/iSlate/iTablet or whatever the product being unveiled today turns out to be, but like most people, I'm assuming it will be a touch screen device that's larger than an iPhone. Beyond that, I have some guesses, but not even that many of those. I've learned with Apple that it's generally best to play wait-and-see.I do think it will be based on the iPhone OS rather than Mac OS X, although it could be a completely new variant of OS X that borrows features of both Mac OS X and iPhone OS. The reasons I don't think it will use the Mac OS is that touch handling isn't an integral part of the responder chain. Cocoa Touch is also "cleaner" than Cocoa. By that, I mean there are less legacy libraries so less code that uses design patterns from a...

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Flash and Fireball

Daring Fireball's John Gruber and I don't see eye-to-eye on everything, but we do when it comes to Adobe Fla...

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360 iDev Conference, San Jose 2010

I am very sorry to report that I have had to back out of going to 360 iDev San Jose due to some personal commitments that have arisen. I'm very bummed about this. John and Tom put on a great conference (you should go), but I have a conflict in my personal life that I simply cannot get out of. Hopefully I can make Denver in the fall. But, seriously, you should ...

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Crime and Punishment

KRAPPS.com has a very disturbing article about Apple's action against the developer of the forChan app. The forChan application is simply an image scraper designed to work with image boards such as 4chan. While many of the pictures posted on these imageboards (which are all posted by users) are innocuous, many of these imageboards cannot be described as anything but the nasty, grimy underbelly of the Internet. ForChan.app is simply a client to a particular type of web application that is widely used for non-porn images as well as porn. The app scrapes the imageboard HTML for image tags, then presents all of the images from one subboard as thumbnails, allowing the user to view them larger by tapping on a thumbnail. The app doesn't, itself, contain porn or do anything that clearly and undisputedly...

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Chapter 4 and the Tale of the NSFetchedResultsController

Okay, some people have been experiencing sporadic problems with the Chapter 4 application as described here. The solution I'd like to use would require being able to determine the number of pending, uncommitted section inserts and deletes that a table view has. Although I can get to this information, I can only do so by accessing a private instance variable of UITableView. Obviously, I don't want to give you all a solution that's going to get your application's rejected during the review process.So, I went back to the drawing board. I don't like this solution as much since it requires us to duplicate work that the table view is already doing by keeping a shadow count of inserts and deletes, but it seems to work well and doesn't add too much complexity. I now have a pretty thorough test case...

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