tequila bomb

News.me is a social news reading app that presents the news that the people you follow on Twitter are reading, and filters it based on how many times those stories are shared and clicked on overall. It pulls in data from not only Twitter but also bit.ly, the betaworks company that shortens billions of shared links every month. In contrast, The Daily will produce its own articles and videos with a staff of 100 journalists. It is not clear how many social features will be included in The Daily, but the emphasis seems to be more on the original content. We’ll find out more tomorrow…

From TechCrunch.

My money is on News.me.

Very cool use of a springboard hack and the accelerometer (or more likely the gyroscope).

Very tempting reason to jailbreak your iPhone. It will of course speed up your battery consumption.

Graphical front-end for the PVRUniSCo shader compiler allowing easy creation and editing of OpenGL ES 2.0 shading language vertex and fragment shader programs in addition to POWERVR FX (PFX) files.

PVRShaman is an integrated shader development environment allowing rapid-prototyping of new vertex and fragment shader programs. PVRShaman brings together geometry exported using PVRGeoPOD (or converted using Collada2POD), textures compressed using PVRTexTool and on-the-fly editing of Shader programs with editing functionality on the same level as the PVRUniSCo Editor. Projects are saved as POWERVR FX files allowing easy integration with your code base.

For the longest time I have been optimising my own OpenGL ES shaders using my knowledge of the underlying hardware and things that may stall or slow down the pipeline. It is not very clear on Imagination Technologies’ site that these tools are now available as OS X utilities that run in X11. All you need to do is download the folder of the app, rather than the .exe, and then “chmod +x” the relevant file for your OS (Linux or OS X).

PVRUniSCo is particularly useful as it gives you estimated instruction / cycle counts for shaders. Some estimates for shaders I have long thought were fairly optimal surprised me, and showed me where I had perhaps missed a trick or two.

Recommended development resources, if you haven’t already found them and had a play.

Join the free music service that gives you easy access to your music collection across the web and on smartphones. Upload your music to the mspot cloud and start listening anywhere.

Your first 2GB of music storage, that you can access from anywhere on Android, iOS or Windows via its dedicated app, is free.

All Things Digital, in an interview with CEO Daren Tsui, note that mSpot does not have a “licensing agreement” with the music companies for this service. Here is the exchange…

This is roughly the same idea that both Apple and Google have discussed with the music industry for much of 2010, but neither of those two heavyweights has the licenses it needs to launch. How can mSpot pull it off?

Good question. The answer is that mSpot CEO Daren Tsui argues that he doesn’t need a license, for a variety of reasons.

I’ll spare you the technical details, but common sense supports his position–why shouldn’t you be able to move your music from one machine to another? And the law, via the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, may be on his side as well.

I presume nonetheless that the record labels are getting (or intend to receive) a cut of the $3.99 / 40GB packages.

We work closely with all four of the major music labels (Sony, EMI, Warner and Universal), as well as major studios (Universal Studios Home Entertainment, The Walt Disney Studios, Image Entertainment, Lionsgate, Paramount Pictures and Screen Media Ventures) and broadcast companies (including ABC, CBS, ClearChannel, Fox Sports, NPR).

Overall it’s a neat idea. With similar package pricing to the backup service Mozy.

But I have to wonder how long the studios are going to be happy with promise of the kick back they may eventually get from the “premium” package. And how mSpot will support that as well as increasing bandwidth usage, and lawyers fees?

And how this will all play out with any iTunes Cloud service coming from Apple in the future…

Epic Games will tomorrow release a new version of its Unreal Development Kit, now with support for iPhone and iPad versions of the engine.

This follows the well-received launch of Infinity Blade, the first Unreal-powered title for iOS, and which turned over at least $1.6 million in its first five days on sale.

The kit remains free to download, while Epic requires no payment for any UDK games released for free, regardless of platform.

Developers wishing to charge for their Unreal-powered iOS Apps will be required to first buy a $99 license and to provide 25 per cent of all royalties once passing $5000 in sales.

It’s a great deal. And a great engine. Available here tomorrow.

Couple that with the App Store as a sales channel and you should be all set…

Apparently it runs almost exactly like a stock Amiga 500 when running on an iPhone 4. The video below brings back some amazing memories for me of some of the best games I have played.. and some of the best projects I ever worked on too.

In fact many of these games rival a lot of iPhone games from this year! Retro games are a gold mine of inspiration and forgotten classics for gamers and developers alike.

“Apple didn’t have an in-house game designer before me so I think it was pretty unique,” Devine told Kotaku. “Game technologies touch everything from the graphics stack to touch latency to push notifications. No other app type covers so many technologies and having someone there to validate and help shape that was basically my day job. It was pretty kick ass.”

Overall I think Devine certainly made his mark on iOS. A lot of the graphic stack is certainly better put together (now) than anything on OS X – in terms of respective modern gaming support on the two quite different hardware platforms. It would be nice to think that he had some input there. I wonder how many frustrations he faced also with some obviously bad decisions at times.

“I don’t think a lot of people are really thinking yet what games mean on these touch platforms, the joystick is gone, there is no proxy in between you and the screen anymore,” he said. “I am not a fan of virtual d-pads, pointers, or other crutches, we have an opportunity on these devices to let players hold, move, touch, and feel the game in front of them and I intend to focus on that.”

Devine certainly gets the unique problems, and the unique opportunities of iOS hardware for gaming.

Despite his departure, Devine insisted that Apple’s commitment to iOS gaming wasn’t diminished. “I can’t comment on what’s next inside Apple, but I can tell you, they really do ‘get’ gaming,” he said.

Good to know. Let’s hope they don’t fall back into bad habits without his input.

What this feature hopes to achieve is a clearer understanding of what challenges the iPhone audio developer faces, how to overcome them, and, in fact, what game audio on the iPhone really means.

Worth a read if you are new to this.

Epic Games, the creator of the widely-used Unreal 3 game engine, is gearing up to release its Unreal Development Kit (UDK) for iOS, which will give iOS game developers unrestricted access to powerful 3D game development tools.

The UDK is Epic’s free version of the Unreal Engine, a powerful game engine that has been used to power such graphically intensive titles as Gears of War and Epic Citadel (pictured)—the latter of which has already been released for iOS as a demonstration of the Unreal Engine 3′s performance on the platform.

When it ships, the UDK iOS will include the same editors and code used to create a number of blockbuster games, and will be available to anyone wishing to publish games via the App Store. Toolsets of this quality generally cost developers anywhere from $500 to tens of thousands of dollars, so by releasing the UDK for free, Epic is drastically lowering the barrier of entry for iOS developers wishing to create graphically impressive games.

From MacWorld.

Should really turn things on its head in 2011.

If there were a Mt. Rushmore of computer gaming, John Carmack’s head would not only be on it, it would have the highest polygon count.

An interview of particular interest to those wanting, thinking about designing, or working on more exotic and ambitious titles for iOS.

Carmack also ran through id’s decision process on pricing…

Every release that we’ve done on here has been an experiment with price point, and with different strategies. So far, we’ve had the most commercial success with Doom: Resurrection, which launched at $9.95. But we don’t have enough datapoints to really draw conclusions from this. We had great success with Wolfenstein Classic and Doom Classic, but they’re sort of riding the nostalgia buzz. So they can’t necessarily be evaluated in isolation.

With Rage, we intentionally went with a much lower initial price-point, because to some degree this is marketing and promotion for the big title.

This is something I touched on when Rage first hit. And I wrote elsewhere that it is clear that id see Rage on iOS as mainly marketing at the moment…

So in that sense I get too much of a feeling overall that Rage is a piece of marketing for the Rage franchise as a whole. And I am disappointed that I didn’t get to have a true FPS experience in a mobile Rage sandbox like I was expecting.