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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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.”
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.
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.
The folks behind the scenes at MacHeist are at it again, this time with a promotion they call the nanoBundle 2. The software bundle includes five Mac apps for $19.95 with the possibility of two more being unlocked if certain sales figures are met. The retail value of all the applications, including the two that are currently locked, is over $260. Once again, the team is giving a portion (25 percent) of all sales to a charity of your choice. You can choose from a list of 11 at checkout.
The bundle is what we have come to expect from the folks at MacHeist: a couple apps you may never use, one or two that you will use once, and two or three that may find their way into your everyday workflow. Included this time around are MacJournal, RipIt, Clips, CoverScout, and Flow. Tales of Monkey Island will be unlocked when 50,000 bundles are ordered, and RapidWeaver will be unlocked at an undisclosed number of sales (which will be revealed after ToMI is unlocked). Each one of the included applications retail for more than the $19.95 asking price for the bundle.
March 03 2010
Apple loses one, gains one in employee shuffle
Long-time Apple executive Pablo Calamera has left Apple in favor of a CTO gig elsewhere, while former Mozilla security chief Window Snyder started work at 1 Infinite Loop on Monday. Pablo will become the CTO at Thumbplay, a company specializing in ringtones and streaming music, while Snyder will work as a senior security product manager at Apple.
According to the Thumbplay announcement, Calamera served as director of MobileMe service while at Apple. Despite the service’s less-than-stellar reputation during his time there. Thumplay saw fit to scoop up Calamera. The newly branded CTO spent time at Danger Inc. and WebTV Networks, among others, before joining Apple.
March 02 2010
Mac OS X North American installed base almost 11%
Web analytics firm Quantcast has recently published some usage statistics for operating systems, broken out into geographical regions. The company’s data shows that 10.9 percent of online users in North America are using Mac OS X, an increase of nearly 30 percent over the past year.
