Not sure when this went live, or how I missed seeing it the moment it did, but the snippet of video on Trism that Apple showed off in their iPhone 3.0 Sneak Peek Event is up in full on Apple’s developer site, and it’s brought along some friends. The full list includes:

• Werner Jainek of Cultured Code (Things)
• Dr. Ge Wang of Smule (Ocarina, Leaf Trombone)
• Steve Demeter of Demiforce (Trism)
• Christina Wick of AOL (AOL Radio, AIM)

The videos show not only some great insights into the personalities behind some of our favorite apps, but the development process as well.

(Via Cocoia on Twitter)

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Apple Videos Highlight iPhone Developers in Advance of WWDC

Today is “A Day”, the day T-Mobile announces Google’s Android mobile platform (see our brand new little sibling site, AndroidCentral, for all the details and coverage) to an anxiously anticipating world. Well… mostly anxiously anticipating.

Turns out some people aren’t as interested. Is it because Google’s latest forays into content, including YouTube and Wikipedia rival Knol, and platforms, including Android and Firefox rival Chrome (and gLinux OS on the horizon?), make them think “don’t be evil” is just a sinister plan to catch the world — and our privacy — off guard and unaware? Nope. We tend to like and trust Google. What then?

Same reason some people are less than thrilled with Windows Mobile. See, while supporting multiple hardware and handsets is “choice” for the consumer, that translates into “headache” for the developer. Make a game for the iPhone, and it plays the same on every iPhone 2G, iPhone 3G, and iPhone Touch on the planet. Make a game for a multi-device OS, and suddenly you have to worry: some don’t have keyboards, some have full Querty, some have T9, some don’t have touchscreens, some don’t have d-pads, some have 320×240, some have 480×800. Infinite combinations leads to infinite complication, and that’s before you even worry about bug fixing. And for some developers, including Steve Demeter who just cleared $250K from the iTunes App Store for his game, Trism, that’s a deal breaker:

“Do I want to be spending 6 months to write the game, and another 6 months making it compatible? If I had Trism available for Android, and there are 50 Android devices and every time one of them crashes (the users) contact me, do I want that?”

Sure, some developers won’t care. Freedom alone will make the effort worthwhile to them. But these are the developers already coding for Windows Mobile (or LinMo). But for others? The App Store, with all its problems (and they’re still many), maintains a value prop that’s going to be incredibly tough to beat.

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

$250K iPhone Dev Says “No Thanks” to Google Android

Daring Fireball points to this Twitter from Raven Zachary as a reason why developers will put up with Apple’s capricious and communication-challenged App Store:

Trism, the $5 gravity/tilt-assisted iPhone puzzle game by Steve Demeter, has made $250,000 since July 11.

We’re pointing to DF because they’re right.

And for more on the other side of the App Store debate, check out the latest episode of MacBreak Weekly from TWiT, where Scott and Alex take complaining developers to task, pointing to PodcasterGate as something that could threaten Apple’s revenue stream if Amazon or another major company sited it as precedence for releasing their own music catcher Apps, bypassing iTunes, instigating Apple shareholder lawsuits, and other corporate level intrigue.

Agree or disagree, all sides of the issue are definitely upping the debate. (And Trism may just have given one side 250K more arguments in their favor…)

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Trism Developer Clears $250K Since App Store Launch

(The Lightning Reviews are coming fast and furious — our next one comes from a game we’ve been eyeing as a potential Bejeweled-killer, but new things are scary. Fortunately, cjvitek is not afraid of new things and brings us this review of Trism, $4.99 at iTunes)

I am a big Bejeweled fan, and I love similar games. Trism bring that idea to a whole new level.

Instead of having block, or sqaures, or jewels, trism simply has colored triangles. The trick is, however, you can move a row of colored triangle any direction (along a row). You can move a row to try to get three matching colors together – if you don’t, the row “snaps back” to the starting position. The rows wrap around, so if a triangle goes off the screen on one side, it reappears on the other side of the screen.

The other twist with Trism is that the blocks will fall based on how you rotate the iPhone. As you rotate, the block will always fall down – with “down” being indicated in the lower right corner (and if it changes, a grey arrows appears briefly showing the new direction – see my last picture). So as you are deciding how to move blocks, you ALSO need to decide how to hold the iPhone to achieve the best success. Hold it one way, and you will end up with empty triangles (making it more difficult), but if you had rotated it, something might have fallen into the empty spot.

You also have powerup and other special features that you can unlock as you play. To date, I have only unlocked a few of them, so I can’t tell you what they all are. There are three game modes, but I have only played “infinism”. “Terminism” and “Syllogism” ar the other two modes. I know one of them is timed, but I am not sure about the other.

I give this game 4.5 out of 5 stars for it’s unique gameplay and new take on an old game. The only problem with the game is the gameplay is sometimes not as responsive as I would like. It sometimes take a few taps for the game to “figure out” what row I want to move (or the game thinks I am trying to pause).

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Lightning Review: Trism