Nintendo vs Apple and social gaming

 Posted by (Visited 12012 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , ,
Apr 082010
 

Reggie Fils-Aime of Nintendo thinks that Apple isn’t a viable profit platform for games. The picture for game developers on iPhone certainly isn’t all rosy — the App Store has effectively recreated all the bad elements of retail, without the profit margins.

On the other hand, there are literally 50,000 games and entertainment apps for the iPhone and iPad. Fifty. Thousand. Number for the DS? More like 2500.

And now, Apple’s taking a big big hint from the networked, connected world, and introducing a gaming social network to the iPhone OS.

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Flash comes to the iPhone

 Posted by (Visited 9579 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Oct 052009
 

Well, this is a nice end-run around Apple. In a nutshell: develop in Flash CS5, cross-compile to iPhone as a standalone app. Public beta later this year.

How is this different from Adobe Flash Player 10 coming to iPhone? Will iPhone users be able to view web content built with Flash technology in the iPhone browser?

The new support for iPhone applications in the Flash Platform tooling will not allow iPhone users to browse web content built with Flash technology on iPhone, but it may allow developers to repackage existing web content as applications for iPhone if they choose to do so.

Flash Player uses a just-in-time compiler and virtual machine within a browser plug-in to play back content on websites. Those technologies are not allowed on the iPhone at this time, so a Flash Player for iPhone is not being made available today.

Flash Professional CS5 will enable developers to build applications for iPhone that are installed as native applications. Users will be able to access the apps after downloading them from Apple’s App Store and installing them on iPhone or iPod touch.

Adobe Labs – Adobe Flash Professional CS5: Applications for iPhone.

This s a huge game-changer. Expect the App Store to get overwhelmed with Flash apps within days of this becoming available as every good Flash app is ported over. It’s another solid step on Adobe’s part towards making Flash a common rendering and development platform across multiple devices, too — Flash 10.1 is already scheduled to land on basically every other smartphone, and honestly, users don’t care whether it’s runtime interpreted or not.