The EFF has published the iPhone developer agreement. Many of the stipulations are not new to most of us, but the EFF offers a number of criticisms on the agreement’s limitations.
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EFF
Both Samsung and Panasonic will begin selling 3D TVs this week.
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AP
March 09 2010
Valve: full "Steam" ahead on Mac OS X with free syncing
Valve has stopped with the teasing and has officially announced that its online gaming service Steam is coming to the Mac. As a bonus, the company also plans to make the Mac a “tier-1″ platform, promising simultaneous release of games on Mac OS X, Windows, and Xbox 360.
Valve has developed a Mac-native version of its Source engine, using the cross-platform OpenGL. “We looked at a variety of methods to get our games onto the Mac and in the end decided to go with native versions rather than emulation,” John Cook, Director of Steam Development, said in a statement. “The inclusion of WebKit into Steam, and of OpenGL into Source gives us a lot of flexibility in how we move these technologies forward.”
TiVo announced a loss of $10.2 million for the fourth quarter of its fiscal year.
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The Hollywood Reporter
March 06 2010
Week in Apple: Steam on the Mac, Apple flings poo at HTC
Apple’s lawsuit against HTC may have been the talk of the Internet for most of the week, but Valve’s teasers for Steam coming to the Mac took the prize for most exciting news. MacHeist also released a new software bundle and the rumor mill gossipped about HDMI on the next Mac mini. Need to catch up?
March 06 2010
Apple reconfigures Mac dev program, drops price to $99
Apple has announced that it is scrapping its old developer programs, which included multiple tiers that cost thousands at the top end, for one modeled on its wildly successful iPhone Developer Program. Simply called the Mac Developer Program, it will cost just $99 per year.
Included in the new and improved Mac Developer Program is access to prerelease builds of Mac OS X, member-only developer forums, a series of instructional videos from Apple engineers, and two direct technical support incidents per year. The TSIs give developers direct access to an Apple engineer for assistance with code problems or other troubleshooting, and developers have the option of buying additional TSIs as needed.
Microsoft has unveiled some important elements for the Windows Phone 7 Series development platform. Most importantly, the software giant has confirmed what we’ve been expecting the company to announce for a while now. “For Microsoft, the cost of going from good to great is a clean break from the past,” a Microsoft spokesperson told Ars. “For example, previous Windows Phone content will not run on Windows Phone 7 Series.”
Charlie Kindel, Microsoft Partner Group Program Manager for the Windows Phone Application Platform & Developer Experience, went into a little bit more detail on his blog, Charlie Kindel on Windows Phone Development. “To enable the fantastic user experiences you’ve seen in the Windows Phone 7 Series demos so far we’ve had to break from the past,” Kindel writes. “To deliver what developers expect in the developer platform we’ve had to change how phone apps were written. One result of this is previous Windows mobile applications will not run on Windows Phone 7 Series. To be clear, we will continue to work with our partners to deliver new devices based on Windows Mobile 6.5 and will support those products for many years to come, so it’s not as though one line ends as soon as the other begins.”
March 05 2010
Sony plans new mobile initiative to take on Apple
Perhaps stirred by Apple’s claim of being one of the biggest mobile device companies in the world, Sony is planning a number of new devices and services to compete with Apple’s iTunes Store, iPhone, and iPad. That strategy will revolve around what’s currently being called Sony Online Service, along with smartphone and tablet-like devices meant to connect to it, according to a recent Wall Street Journal report.
March 05 2010
Sony plans new mobile initiative to take on Apple
Perhaps stirred by Apple’s claim of being one of the biggest mobile device companies in the world, Sony is planning a number of new devices and services to compete with Apple’s iTunes Store, iPhone, and iPad. That strategy will revolve around what’s currently being called Sony Online Service, along with smartphone and tablet-like devices meant to connect to it, according to a recent Wall Street Journal report.
March 04 2010
Bright future for UMPCs, touchscreens, and tablets
Market research firm Gartner is forecasting a much better year in 2010 for PC shipments worldwide than last year, expecting a 20 percent increase year-over-year. However, mobile computing will be the main impetus behind that growth.
Mobile PCs accounted for over half—55 percent—of all PC shipments in 2009, but Gartner expects that percentage to climb to 70 percent by 2012. Apple in particular has seen most of its sales of Macs come from MacBook and MacBook Pro models for some time, leading the industry in this trend for the last three years.
