Archive for the ‘Steve Jobs’ tag
Today’s Apple Event – Hands on with iPod Touch, Nano and More
Today Apple held its media event at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and unveiled its work in significantly evolving a number of its mobile and media products. I had a chance to see it all first hand and spend some hands-on time with the fruits of the company's recent labor.
The announcement that is likely of the most interest to our readers is the arrival of the new iPod touch, thinner than ever and featuring the same razor-sharp Retina display used in the iPhone 4. (And, holding the new device in my hand, I can confirm that the screen is every bit as sharp as that of the iPhone 4.) The upgraded device is, indeed, basically "an iPhone 4 — without the phone," with a few exceptions. It utilizes the same A4 processor used in the iPhone 4 and the iPad, and features integrated gyroscopes for added in-game control precision. It has front- and back-facing cameras, as well, allowing FaceTime video chats. But the rear-facing camera offers a relatively low 960×720 pixel resolution, as compared to 2592×1936 pixels on the iPhone 4. That means it produces photos that are only 14% the size of those taken with big brother iPhone 4.
But, we're gamers here! And in that capacity, the new iPod touch is a golden mobile gaming device. During today's event, Steve Jobs indicated that the iPod touch is presently the #1 selling mobile game device, outselling Sony and Nintendo's devices, combined. He revealed that 1.5 billion entertainment and game app downloads have passed out of the App Store. With the dramatic enhancements on most every front that the new iPod touch puts in the hands of gamers, we don't expect the touch to give up the crown anytime soon.
Another big announcement that Steve had in store is the reinvented Apple TV. No longer a scolding-hot slab of metal and plastic with the footprint of a Mac mini, the new Apple TV is a quarter the size of its predecessor, shrouded in black plastic, and cool to the touch.
This time around, Apple dispensed with local media storage and has positioned the new unit as a video streaming device, built on a video rental model. First-run HD movies can be rented at $4.99 per, with HD TV shows available at $.99 an episode — all HD. Netflix streaming is integrated, as well. And all of the local media sharing capabilities of the original device (tying to computers in your home for media display on TV) are preserved, with the notable addition of media streaming from an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch. And all that, which I can confirm fits comfortably in the palm of your hand, can be had for just $99.
The new Apple TV should be of particular interest to our readers for another reason — it's based on Apple's A4 processor. Intel is not inside, this time around. Given that, it's clear that the new device is based on some form of OS X for the ARM processor. Apple isn't calling it iOS but, if it's not iOS proper, it's something extremely close. But, likely, it actually is iOS under the hood. Daring Fireball's John Gruber recently , as well.
And if, indeed, the new Apple TV is an iOS device, is there an App Store in its future? Let's hope so…
Apple also showed a new iPod shuffle which, happily, brings back the buttons of the previous versions and also demonstrated the new iPod nano. The nano is about the size of the shuffle, but features a multitouch display and a user interface styled after iOS (though it's not iOS-based). It's a pretty amazing device to play with, extremely light, small, and functional. It's not improvements all around with this one, though; the new nano lacks video recording as well as playback capabilities. It seems Apple's decided that's functionality to be found only in the iPhone and iPod touch.
On the software front, Apple has released iTunes 10 (available now), which offers several interface improvements as well as Ping, a new social network of sorts that allows iTunes users to follow one another and share news of what they're listening to online. Facebook integration is in place as well. iOS 4.1 will be released next week and will include a number of new features including the launch of Game Center — Apple's leaderboard network. Other improvements include bug fixes, and performance enhancements for 3G owners. iOS 4.2 was also previewed which will finally bring OS 4 to the iPad and is due in November.
It's clear from today's event that Apple has been keeping a laser focus on the areas that have become its clear domain: media and mobile.
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Apple’s September Press Event – Where Can I Get That Guitar?
‘Doodle Jump’ Surpasses 5 Million Downloads
It's amazing to see the success of Doodle Jump [99¢], especially when you consider the meager beginnings of , which essentially is little more than two brothers building simple games for the iPhone. Igor and Marko Pusenjak announced this afternoon that since its release, the game has been downloaded over 5 million times, which they believe is a first on the App Store.
Since its initial release, Doodle Jump has become somewhat of a pop culture phenomenon. It's been , , and the doodler himself has even been spotted on stage with Lady Gaga.
Doodle Jump like so many other games built in one or two man teams perfectly embodies the indie spirit of the App Store. It's hard to say what really made Doodle Jump take off like it has, but it's unreal to think that the $99 a year Lima Sky pays for their iPhone SDK license has given them access to their pool of 5 million customers, and even more remarkable to think that this is barely 5% market penetration, per the "over 100 million devices" figure Steve Jobs quoted in his latest keynote address.
The Pusenjak brothers seem to be planning to keep the regular updates coming, with an underwater Doodle Jump theme in the works. After winning an Apple Design Award this year at WWDC, I'm confident that Lima Sky will keep the updates rolling for some time to come. Either way, it's no secret that we love Doodle Jump around here. If you haven't yet, give episode #10 of our podcast a listen, we interviewed Igor regarding the game and his company a few million downloads ago.
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Got Gyroscope Envy? The ‘Perspectiverse Engine’ Might Just Cure It.
With the release of the iPhone 4 less than a week away, many readers are surely counting down the days until they can call Apple's most powerful pocketable device their own. The iPhone 4 boasts hardware enhancements that will allow for more sophisticated applications of every sort — but especially games. Its "Retina display" packs four times as many pixels as the current iPhone into a display of the same physical size, yielding a 326 pixels-per-inch, razor sharp display that makes jaggies a thing of the past. The 1GHz Apple A4 processor, which is currently used in the iPad, will allow for more complex games with improved physics and AI. And, finally, there's the gyroscope which will allow for incredibly accurate in-game motion tracking.
During the WWDC 2010 keynote, we saw Steve Jobs demonstrate the new iPhone's gyroscopic capabilities in a Jenga-like demo app. It was an impressive display of motion-tracking tech that went beyond what we had previously seen from the iPhone. After all, you need a gyroscope to pull off that kind of control, right?
Developer Vishal Srivastava of might beg to differ.
As , Srivastava, formerly with Microsoft, has created what he calls the "Perspectiverse Engine" that allows the iPhone 3GS and iPad to track motion in a fashion that yields seemingly impossible results from a device lacking actual gyroscope hardware. His system allows the user to manipulate their body in the physical world and see corresponding motion in the virtual world, making the iPhone or iPad feel quite like a window into that world.
According to the developer,
[The engine] uses a combination of device sensors to constantly align the game world with the real world. No matter how you orient your phone, north in the game universe is the same as north in the real world, south is south, up is up, down is down, and so forth. This allows you to interact with that game universe as if you were in it.
And, I can tell you, it works far better than you're probably guessing. If you've got an iPhone 3GS or an iPad, you can give it a try right now with Srivastava's [App Store], a Universal entertainment title that allows you to paint a 3D easter egg by moving around it in virtual space. (And it's on sale for $0.99 through this weekend.) The effect, even in this rather basic application, is pretty amazing.
The developer will soon be releasing a rather more interesting game title called Gyromaniac (previously known as Colonoscapade) in which you move your body around in order to find your way through a human colon and various other internal systems. A demonstration video shows the app in action (and gives one much appreciation for the trials of poor ).
Srivastava began work on his Perspectiverse Engine long before we knew that the iPhone 4 would sport a gyroscope (it was put together last July, in fact). So, is he daunted by the news that came in the iPhone 4 unveiling? Not at all. The physical gyroscope will improve the accuracy of his engine on new hardware, while on supported devices which lack a gyroscope, the engine will do its thing to simulate one.
And for other developers that like what they see in this system, Srivastava tells us that he is definitely open to the possibility of licensing the technology for use in others' apps, but his first order of business is to build a range of apps on top of the engine that showcase its capabilities on current hardware.
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WWDC 2010: iPhone 4 Gyroscope
While the Apple A4 processor and higher resolution screen of the iPhone 4 will be fantastic for gamers, what likely will cause the biggest splash in future game development is the addition of the electronic gyroscope buried inside of the device. This additional orientation sensor will likely add a similar dimension to gameplay as the , an addon that also utilizes a gyroscope for incredibly accurate motion tracking.
While on stage during the keynote today, Steve Jobs showed a brief demonstration with a Jenga game that was able to rotate the stack of blocks while utilizing the gyroscope in addition to the accelerometers. When only using the accelerometers like games on today's devices use, rotating the stack of blocks worked, and was fairly precise, but once the gyroscope was enabled the difference was remarkable.
Here is a brief video of the gyroscope portion of the keynote, the quality is mediocre but you can easily see how the phone is able to track Steve's various movements then translate it to the game world:
The game that immediately sticks out to me that would benefit the most from this extra degree of control would be a game like Zen Bound [$2.99 / Free], as I imagine manipulating the objects you wrap could be even easier with yet another degree of control. It's not hard to think of other games that could be enhanced by the extremely precise motion tracking, especially if you've ever used a Wii Motion Plus and have seen just how much the addition of a gyroscope can improve how accurately a game can track your movement.
Like anything on the App Store, it's up to developers to implement these new features. All we can do is wait and see what they come up with once they finally get the device in their hands.
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WWDC 2010 Keynote – Say Hello to iPhone 4 and iOS 4!
This morning in sunny San Francisco, California I lined up ridiculously early for the Apple keynote outside of Moscone. After hours and hours of waiting, we finally filed in to the convention center and up to the massive meeting room to watch Steve Jobs take the stage and officially reveal the new iPhone.
Dubbed the "iPhone 4", it comes packed with the same A4 processor found in the iPad, a new gyroscope sensor, a screen that is 4x the resolution of the existing iPhone, and plenty of other awesome features. From a gaming perspective, the additional horsepower provided by the A4 means much like the iPad, existing games will load up faster as well as have higher frame rates. New iPhone 4-enhanced games will look even better on the device, although I can't wait to see how developers tag these games as "HD" is already in use to signify an iPad game.
The iPhone 4 will debut at $199 and $299 for 16GB or 32GB models, with the iPhone 3GS taking the iPhone 3G's current spot as the $99 "entry level" iPhone. Pre-orders for the new device will begin June 15th, and Apple plans on shipping out the new handsets on June 24th.
Even bigger news is that the iPhone OS is not only officially dubbed "iOS 4", but it will also be available for free, even for iPod touch owners. (Although, unfortunately the first generation iPod touch won't be capable of running iOS4.) This should be a boon for developers, as they will no longer be pressured in to supporting ancient OS versions for the sake of compatibility if everyone can upgrade for free.
We'll be taking an in-depth look at what all of these things mean for us at TouchArcade later today. In the meantime, take a look at and be sure to .
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Live Bloggin’ The Apple iPhone OS 4.0 Keynote
Apple's surprise media event unveiling the iPhone OS 4.0 is set to begin shortly. We'll be providing live updates, and focusing on things that specifically pertain to iPhone gaming or things iPhone gamers might be interested in like all of our other keynote coverage in the past.
Steve Jobs just took the stage, and started things out by talking about the sales figures of the iPad. On Saturday they sold 300,000, and as of today they've sold 450,000. Apple apparently is making them as fast as they can, but notes that Best Buy is already out of stock. On the first day, 1 million paid apps were downloaded, and since then 3.5 million have been. (In addition to 600,000 eBooks.)
Photo courtesy of .
Jobs also mentions that there are over 185,000 apps in the App Store, with over 3,500 iPad apps. He then took some time to show off the more impressive iPad apps in the App Store currently such as the ABC app, Netflix, the Marvel comic book reader, and others. Shifting gears to talk about the iPhone, Steve mentions they've won three JD Power awards for customer satisfaction, and currently holds 64% of the mobile browser market share. Apple has sold over 50 million iPhones, with 85 million combined devices between the iPod touch and iPhone.
iPhone OS 4.0 is coming this summer, with a developer preview available today.
Photo courtesy of .
Photo courtesy of .
Among the seven "tent pole" features of iPhone OS 4.0 is multitasking. Steve goes on to demonstrate how multitasking is going to work. With multiple apps running, double clicking the home button raises a window that looks a lot like the bottom dock of the iPhone showing what apps are running. Tapping an icon instantly switches to that app.
Photo courtesy of .
To explain how this all works while preserving battery life and performance, Steve hands things off to Scott Forstall, SVP of iPhone Software. iPhone OS 4.0 will provide seven multitasking services. The first of which is audio streaming, and Forstall specifically cites Pandora as an example of an app that will shine with this functionality. Developing applications to utilize this functionality is apparently extremely easy, as it only took the Pandora developers a day to make the app background aware. Skype also works fantastically with this new functionality, even allowing you to accept calls while running in the background.
Doodle Jump spotted:
Photo courtesy of .
The next multitasking function is background location. Apps that use the GPS functionality such as TomTom will be able to continue routing while in the background. This raises obvious privacy concerns, and a new settings menu will be available to enable and disable location services per application, as well as showing a small arrow icon next to the battery indicator.
Moving on to push notifications, Forstall mentions they've sent over 10 billion notifications since the service went live. Building on push notifications comes local notifications, done entirely on the phone to see alerts from apps you have running in the background. One example mentioned was a popup when a photo was finished uploading to Flickr.
Photo courtesy of .
Steve takes the stage again and announces folders to organize apps. The interface seems an awful lot like the various jailbreak app organization solutions. So far Apple is really knocking it out of the park with this keynote.
Photo courtesy of .
The iPhone mail client is also getting enhanced, with a unified inbox for each email account on the device along with a threaded email view for reading conversations. Unsurprisingly, the iPhone is also getting the iBooks app which will sync pages and bookmarks with other devices that have the app.
Forstall just announced "Game Center", Apple's own gaming social networking service that seems to handle everything Plus+, OpenFeint, and others do with presumably one unified login tied to your iTunes account. Matchmaking, leaderboards, and achievements are all part of it.
Photo courtesy of .
Also mentioned was Apple's own iAd advertisement services, which we expect to see making appearances in many free games that have historically relied on AdMob and other advertising networks.
iPhone OS 4.0 will be coming this fall, and sadly, multitasking will not be supported for the iPhone 3G and second generation iPod touch. That's it folks, Steve is taking questions now.
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TouchArcade Padcast #11: iPad Discussion with Bolt Creative, Illusion Labs, Imangi Studios, and Freeverse
In the wake of Apple's keynote today unveiling the iPad, we rounded up Dave Castelnuovo and Allan Dye from , Anders Mårtensson from , Natalia Luckyanova and Keith Shephard from and Bruce Morrison from to hear what four successful iPhone development studios thought about the new device.
The reception amongst this group of developers was remarkably positive, and everyone had ideas for new projects exclusively for the iPad, as well as refining or enhancing existing games to take advantage of the additional screen real estate and processing power of the device. We also discuss the niche that the iPad will likely fill, and what kind of usage patterns we expect the device to see once it is available for purchase.
Music lovingly lifted from the .
Podcast: Subscribe in iTunes or (M4A, 50MB)
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