November 2007: Monthly Archive

figure 1: John Carmack of Id Software

Gamedaily.com recently interviewed John Carmack about a good many things. One of the things that they ended up chatting about was iPhone games, or as one could say, lack thereof. It turns out that Carmack has an iPhone, and would love to write some games for it. Carmack talked to Steve Jobs about it at WWDC, and had followup meetings, and he’s pretty frustrated with the current situation. It’s a great read into one of the brilliant minds of gaming — even if DOOM is a parody of itself nowadays, he’s still one of the pre-eminent names of gaming.

“We’ve certainly been looking at it but Steve Jobs and I have not been seeing really eye to eye on a lot of important issues. We were in a fairly heated argument at the last WWDC [Worldwide Developers Conf.] and we’ve had a few follow-ups. I have an iPhone right now and it’s a platform I would enjoy developing for but Apple is not taking progressive steps in regards to [gaming]. Their strategy seems to be working just fine from a business standpoint, so I’m not going to second guess them and tell them they’re being fools or idiots for not focusing on this.

“The honest truth right now is that Apple’s not exactly hugely supportive of this. When they finally allowed games to be put on the iPod… in many ways it’s one of the worst environments to develop games for. You have to work on an emulator… just all these horrible decisions. I expressed my fears directly to Steve Jobs that some of these mistakes might be carried over to the iPhone, so they’re at least aware of all of them, but they’re not giving any spectacular signs that it’s going to be a big deal for them in the next year.”

February just can’t come soon enough. There are a lot of mobile games that I’d like to be playing, a lot of interesting options available with the iPhone and iPod touch, the sensors, the touchscreen… I just can’t wait. I think a lot of the big name companies will hop over to the iPhone pretty quickly. Even if they don’t like how they have to work, they’ll still be writing games for the iPhone.

Here for your enjoyment is a Saturday Night Live sketch that spoofs Apple’s current iPhone ads. The ad apparently went unaired, perhaps because NBC’s lawyers wouldn’t let them air a sketch that condones punching cops and the use of meth to stay sane. That’s what makes it humor, I suppose. That or they ran out of time.

Here’s a sketch from Mad TV that parodies Feist’s 1234 song and it’s newfound connection to Apple iPods.

figure 1: Bronfman doing the evil fingers thing

Edgar Bronfman (ridiculed previously) actually had some positive things to say about iTunes recently, totally unbidden. He said that the music industry execs “used to fool themselves” and their dismissal of online markets put them “at war with consumers.” I don’t ever take it as a good sign when they refer to possible customers as consumers. But, my guess is that now that Warner is building their new online store, they’ve realized that it’s not as easy as it looks. So here’s my premonition: Warner is probably ripping off the iTunes look and feel left and right with their new music store. That, or they figured it was too hard and they’re scrapping the thing, opting instead to dive wholeheartedly into the iTunes scheme.

Why, that would be the saddest thing in the whole wide world. C’mon folks, he says his XDA is better than the iPhone, and that Windows Mobile will surpass the iPhone’s interface with the next release. Judging from all the typos and missed capitals, he even slipped it past his editor. C’mon, he just wants you to comment.

figure 1: Gene Munster. Gene, I didn’t mean to treat you bad.

The Google mobile phone operating system known as Android has been getting a lot of press lately, and one of the more interesting angles I’ve seen in the past few days is that Android isn’t meant to compete with the Apple iPhone. Gene Munster, an oft-quoted analyst at Piper Jaffray with plenty to say about the iPhone, thinks that the iPhone is aimed at a much higher market than any phones built with Google’s Android.

“We believe Google is working with, not against, Apple in the mobile world.”

They do share a key executive, Eric Schmidt, who sits on the board at Apple and is chief executive at Google. It’s unlikely that the two companies would allow a massive conflict of interest like that. I (unfairly?) made fun of Gene Munster in the past for posting wildly optimistic sales estimates of the iPhone, but he’s probably right about this one. Google’s use of webkit as the browser on Android reinforces Apple, and by the time Android phones are actually released, iPhones will be even farther ahead in terms of features — Android doesn’t even support wi-fi or bluetooth yet. It could easily be that Apple is trying to grab the high-end customers and Android is aiming for everyone else.

It can tough to position a software product with the masses when it doesn’t cost anything. In a lot of people’s minds, this is true: no cost = worthless. But it’s that same quality makes it attractive to handset makers, it allows them to push prices down. Multiple handset makers shipping multiple phones with one operating system (like Windows Mobile) tend to push prices down, since those handset makers compete with each other. If those same handset makers can shop a Google phone to carriers at less cost than they could make a Windows Mobile phone, it becomes attractive to them. It becomes attractive to carriers, since they don’t have to do as much work to brand all of those featurephones with weird RTOS operating systems, they just have to brand Android once, and they don’t have to share their intellectual property with anyone.

I post a story about iPhone coming to Commiland, and now Reuters steps in with news that iPhone’s arrival in China may be delayed by technical (read: Political) and fee (read: money under the table) issues. The gist of this delay centers around iPhone being locked, as apposed to Chinese phones which are unlocked and portable to any GMS carrier. Does anyone else besides me feel utterly ashamed and embarrased that communist mobile phones enjoy more freedom and liberty than our capitalist phones?

Maybe this Communism thing isn’t so bad after all… Capitalist pig!

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If you’re running iTunes 7.5 with an iPhone running 1.1.2, making custom ringtones is drop-dead simple again. All you need to do is download a new copy of MakeiPhoneRingtone and you’re pretty much back in business. The only catch is that you need to edit your AAC files to 40 seconds or less. For that, the makers of the freeware app MakeiPhoneRingtone hope you pick Fission, their not-as-free audio editor. Maybe this is the carrot I was talking about yesterday to get people to think about upgrading to 1.1.2.

Unlike most professional bloggers, I have a real job (snap!). I work as a self-employed freelance web designer and creative professional. A job that consumes most of my available time that would otherwise be devoted to writing. Since this site was incepted I have run it, literally, with one hand and four fingers tied behind my back. Each post I write is done with one remaining pinky finger, in the span of whatever free minutes I can spare each hour or afternoon. Even as time deprived as I am, I still managed to make this blog one of the most popular iPhone enthusiast destinations on the internets. Not a bad achievement for one person, but still woefully inadequate.

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A study has been performed about the error rates of mobile keyboards. The three keyboards picked were the iPhone virtual software keyboard, QWERTY keyboards (like those on BlackBerries and Treos), and T9 numeric keypads. iPhone users erred at a rate of 5.6 errors per message, T9 users erred at a rate of 2.6 errors per message, and QWERTY users erred at a rate of 2.1 errors per message. The test was done with 20 folks in each group, and the iPhone owners had to have used their device for at least a month to qualify as eligible.

There are some doozies in the press release:

While the iPhone’s corrective text feature helps, this data suggests that iPhone users who have owned the device for a month still make about the same number of errors as the day they got it,” said Gavin Lew, Managing Director.

Compared to hard-key QWERTY devices, the iPhone may fall short for consumers who use on their mobile device heavily for email and text messaging. The iPhone was clearly associated with higher text entry error rates than a hard-key QWERTY phone. The finding that iPhone owners made more texting errors on iPhones than their hard-key QWERTY counterparts (on their own QWERTY phones) suggests that the iPhone may have a higher fundamental error rate. Specifically, the high rate of false alarms for iPhone keys adjacent to high frequency letters is troubling. The iPhone’s predictive and corrective text features do alleviate some of the errors users make while texting, but it does not catch them all.

“iPhone is a great switch from a numeric phone. But if you’re switching from a hard-key QWERTY phone, try the iPhone in the store first.”

I’m not sure I agree with him on that last bit. The rate difference from QWERTY to T9 vs. the error rate on the iPhone is basically insignificant. What’s another .5 errors per message amongst friends when you’re talking about an average of 5+ EPM anyway? But what’s most interesting to me is that software and hardware keyboards were just as fast. It’s just that software keyboards are prone to more errors.

There’s a new Nintendo emulator for the iPhone. Beyond the venerable NES.app Nintendo emulator, there’s now the GameBoy and GameBoy Advanced emulator named gpSPhone for the iPhone., made possible by some of the same folks that brought you NES.app. I’m guessing you can expect gpSPhone to mature fairly quickly.. There are limitations, you have to supply your own boot ROM, you have to hack your iPhone first, and sound support is iffy at best, and you definitely have to install it to /Applications, but those are meager gripes about a software emulator at version 0.0.5.

[via TUAW]