Source: TUAW

Filed under: Apple, Developer, iPhone, iPod touch, iPad

Universal apps. They’re the solution for delivering your iPhone OS application to both the iPhone and the iPad and having it run natively on each without silly make-do’s like pixel doubling. It’s a way to ensure that your app “fits” each platform, providing art and interfaces that match the target screen. Or, as Apple puts it, “Developers can now start planning for universal applications, allowing them to take full advantage of the technologies found on iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch with a single binary.”

Right now, I’ve got a bug up my sleeve about the whole issue. I’m not convinced that it’s the right solution for a lot of apps. Just because you *can* merge an iPhone app with an iPad app, and sell one product, you shouldn’t — unless the functionality is significantly the same for both platforms.

The thing is this: once you start programming iPad, it becomes clear that you can do things that don’t make sense on the iPhone. And so your apps start to morph. They evolve to something significantly different. New features. New ways of interacting. Bigger possibilities and a much more computer-like experience, even in a mobile setting.

So at what point do you pull the plug? When do you say, I’m going to sell an iPhone version and an iPad version and they are different enough to justify the need for another purchase?

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Source: Gizmodo

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Sony’s gearing up to take on Apple this year, with the long-awaited PSP phone and a netbook/eBook reader/PSP hybrid to fight the iPad.

There aren’t extensive details available yet—including any info about pricing and specs—but we can expect to see the both the PSP phone and the PSPad sometime this year. The Sony Ericsson PSP phone, in particular, has been in the works since at least 2007, but has met with various delays since then.

As for the multifunction iPad competitor, it’s not clear exactly what form that will take. Both devices, though, will leverage the media platform Sonys launching later this month. The Sony Online Service—a temporary name—is going to provide similar media content as iTunes, but will supplement its offerings with its extensive (and exclusive) catalog of PlayStation games. Mostly older games are expected to be available on the mobile devices.

The project is apparently being speared by Kunimasa Suzuki, who has an oversight role in both Sony’s Vaio and PlayStation businesses. Getting previously disparate corporate divisions to work together has been a major part of CEO Howard Stringer’s turnaround plan, making the PSPad an incredibly important sign of if that labor has born any fruit. Is this the Sony renaissance we’ve been longing for? Or will it be another in a long line of proprietary format failures? We’ll find out soon, either way. [WSJ]

Read the full article at Gizmodo

Source: Engadget

Penguin UK unveiled a peek at its upcoming plans for iPad formatted e-books, and we have to say, they’re really taking the whole interactive experience trip and running with it. If you take a look at the big P’s video presentation (which is embedded after the break), you’ll spy a lot of noisy interactive games targeted at children, the innards of the human body laid bare on the screen taking text books to the next, less boring level, plus a vampire novel with an “online community for vampire lovers” built right in. On the whole, it seems like Penguin’s vision for its books moving forward is less about… books, and more about… not books. Still, we seriously can’t wait to see the company’s iPad version of The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Full, semi-educational video is after the break.

Continue reading Penguin’s iPad-formatted books shown off, making waves

Penguin’s iPad-formatted books shown off, making waves originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Mar 2010 11:23:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: TUAW

Filed under: Gaming, Apple, Developer, iPad

AppAdvice has an interview up with Secret Exit, the folks who made one of the best iPhone games of last year, Zen Bound. They spoke not only about that game and how the iPhone turned out to be the perfect platform for them to start out on, but also about the iPad and what they’re planning to do with it in the future.

Secret Exit echoes a lot of other developers in saying that it plans to make completely different apps for the iPad, not just upscaled or updated versions of iPhone apps. The hardware and the market, says Secret Exit, both call for completely separate releases.

They also say, however, that they’re worried about iPad pricing. A bigger screen and more complicated layouts mean that the investment for apps will be bigger, and if only the most recognized brands can hold down a $9.99 price point, Secret Exit says that they may not be able to build out their games to the point that they’d like.

Interesting points all. Of course, much of the iPad thinking so far is speculation — it’s certainly possible that the $9.99 price point could become the default for new iPad apps, which would give developers a little more money to play with. But as with everything else iPad, we’ll have to see. At least the wait’s not that long.

TUAWInterview with Zen Bound creators on iPad and iPhone games originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 04 Mar 2010 07:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: Mashable

Speaking at the Digital Landscapes conference at UCD, European Director of Google’s online sales John Herlihy saidthat Google is mostly oriented towards mobile devices, claiming they’ll become more important than desktop PCs.

“In three years time, desktops will be irrelevant. In Japan, most research is done today on smart phones, not PCs,” he said.

True, with Android and Nexus One Google has shown a commitment to extend its dominance from the online world to the mobile world. But will desktop PCs really become irrelevant? Depends on how you look at it. Google isn’t really interested in how we edit our photos; it’s interested in where we store them, and increasingly, we do that at a place is a part of their domain — the cloud.

And if your data moves to the cloud, and most of your daily online activities are done on devices such as the Nexus One and the iPad, where simple, widget-style applications cater to your precise needs, then yes, desktop PCs as we know them now will become a lot less important. On the other hand, not many users are ready to ditch the desktop just yet; we’ll see if it all pans out according to Google’s plans.

Read the full article at Mashable