We got to sit down with Australian developer Firemint here at the Game Developers Conference 2010 in San Francisco — it’s a mobile game developer who hit it big last year with the very popular iPhone game Flight Control, and while it used to make mobile games for just a handful of larger game publishers like EA, the company is now trying to cement a reputation for making a smaller stable of high quality App Store games. “We like to joke that we went from ten customers to ten million,” community manager Alexandra Peters told us.

She also showed us their second game, Real Racing, which has been winning all kinds of awards even in the crowded accelerometer racing game genre, and talked with us both about Flight Control HD (their upcoming “soon after launch” title for the iPad) as well as what’s next for the company.

Real Racing was impressive for an iPhone racing game. While the accelerometer-as-steering is basically a cliche in iPhone games at this point, Real Racing pulls it off pretty well by focusing on that — depending on the settings, you can simply let the car accelerate and even break on its own, and just focus on hitting the curves while driving 48 different cars around the game’s 12 tracks, or actually jump in and control the car yourself.

We only got to drive a few laps, but the game’s crystal-clear presentation got us interested enough to want to play more. The game is currently $4.99 in the App Store, but there is an interesting lite version to try as well — Volkswagen actually approached Firemint after the success of the game and commissioned an “adverware” version to release on the App Store. It’s there to try — unfortunately, the content is a little light for a game with so many ads, but it’s one of the better integration models for in-game ads I’ve ever seen, and the extra commission for Firemint certainly help offset the costs of development for a free game.

Firemint also told us about the version of Flight Control they’re working on for the iPad. It will be called Flight Control HD, and of course it’ll make use of the bigger touchscreen, but like most developers, Firemint hasn’t had an actual iPad dev device to work with — they’ve only got the game running in the iPad SDK simulation. Peters said the iPad makes for a “very personal and very immersive experience,” so they’re hoping to take advantage of that with Flight Control HD — they’ve even set up a Wacom tablet to test the larger control scheme out. And they’re hoping the game comes out soon after the iPad’s launch on April 3rd, so look for it then.

Other than that, Firemint also has two other games in development, still under wraps. The first will be coming out later this year, and the other one is definitely the biggest iPhone project they’ve ever done (we got the impression that it would be a larger, 3D action project) that will be out sometime in 2011. We asked them if those games were planned for the iPhone or the iPad, and they told us while they were currently working on both of them for the iPhone, “we’ll have to wait and see” on the iPad.

All in all, Firemint seems to be a company that has really taken advantage of the opportunities in the App Store, and grown both their reputation and their repetoire thanks to Apple’s platform. Flight Control and Real Racing have both been excellent examples of their “just a few good games” philosophy, and we can’t wait to see what they do with other titles and the iPad.

TUAWGDC 2010: Real Racing and Flight Control on the iPad with Firemint originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The game does have a lot of extras and addons, including a dojo mode for training and Bluetooth multiplayer. And while the game’s eight characters offers up a pretty slim selection compared to the current console titles, these are definitely classic Capcom characters, and all of the old moves you’ll remember still work. Save for the controls, nothing about this game is half-done — it’s definitely a premium port of a premium game. But as a true fighting game experience, this one comes up short. Buy it if you want, to see the spectacle of Street Fighter squeezed into Apple’s touchscreen, an achievement in and of itself. But don’t buy it expecting an ideal Capcom-style showdown that you’ll be able to pull up time and time again — for that, save your quarters for the arcades.

Stay tuned — we did get to talk with the Japanese producer of the game about what he thinks of the iPhone, the iPad, and the challenges he had to overcome by squeezing this one on to Apple’s handheld. That interview is coming up later today right here on TUAW.

TUAWGDC 2010: Street Fighter IV for the iPhone out now originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 10 Mar񎧚 02:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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TUAWeBooks outnumber games in the App Store originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 09 Mar 2010 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Every year there is a torrent made to let listeners download most of the music for SXSW. This year’s torrent has recently been posted (previous years’ are also available at the same site). I don’t usually use Bittorent, so I asked around for client suggestions; Transmission seems to be a favorite among several of my TUAW colleagues.

I also remembered a tip from my friend Guillermo Esteves (who did the awesome Star Wars crawl using only HTML and CSS), about using Dropbox to start torrents remotely. Guillermo provides some detailed instructions for Transmission and µTorrent to set them up to “watch” a folder for new .torrent files, with an important caveat to make sure that you don’t download the files to your Dropbox.

One additional Transmission tip: be sure that you un-check the box next to “Display ‘adding transfer’ options window” so that files will automatically be added, and be sure to check the box next to the “Start transfers when added” option. Guillermo shows both of those settings in his screenshots, but it took me a few minutes to figure out that I had them set incorrectly.

Then I asked myself: “How can I be even lazier?” and I remembered Hazel, a program for automatically moving files from one folder to another based on a set of predefined rules. So I added a Hazel rule for ~/Downloads/ which will move any file where “Kind is BitTorrent Document” to my ~/Dropbox/Torrents/ folder. I repeated this on both my iMac and my MacBook Pro. Now I can be on my MacBook Pro and download a torrent file to ~/Downloads/ and have it moved to my Torrents folder, and have the torrent automatically start downloading on my iMac. So when I’m done with my MacBook Pro I can just close it without having to worry about interrupting any of my downloads.

You may have noticed that we’re big Dropbox fans around here. We use it for syncing Things or instead of a USB sync cable or keeping our notes with us or sharing screenshots, along with any number of other uses. Do you know of any other unusual uses for Dropbox? Let us know in the comments.

In the meantime, enjoy the free, legal music downloads from SXSW!

TUAWAutomatically open Bittorrent files using Dropbox and Hazel originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Unity Technologies hosted the sponsored lunch panel during GDC 썚 today, and their “product evangelist” Tom Higgins gave a quick rundown of the software platform that enables developers to assemble and release games extremely quickly on multiple platforms.

The company was actually founded in Denmark, but has since expanded around the world with just two products: Unity Pro and Unity iPhone Pro. The second product, as you might imagine, allows developers to put together an application that can then be exported out into an Xcode project and released on the App Store. Higgins said that they’ve had over 90,000 people download the software since it was released for free last fall, and that more than 500 games in the App Store were authored by Unity.

He also ran a short demo of the software at the panel. While some of the coding got a little technical (the system allows you to create and change variables on in-game objects even while the game is running in the engine), the coolest feature was the way they simulated iPhone controls: by using a real iPhone as a remote. They’ve released a free app on the App Store that will connect via Wi-Fi with a copy of the development tool running on your Mac, and as you touch and turn the iPhone, the editor reacts, and sends the (slightly lower resolution) output to the iPhone’s screen. You can also make changes to your code as the game runs in that mode, so you can be playing and coding at the same time.

That was pretty impressive. Of course, Unity won’t actually help you be a game developer — like many of the tools on display at the conference this week, it’s a professional tool that can only make your ideas and art come to life, not actually create them for you.

But when you combine Unity’s compatibility across platforms (there’s even a web player that will play your Unity-created game on any web-compatible computer) with the ease of development (the app just outputs an Xcode project, so you can write an app in Javascript with the tool and output it straight to the App Store, or even edit the Xcode after the output if you want to take advantage of features that Unity doesn’t support by default), it’s definitely worth a look as an iPhone development tool. I’m not a developer, so I don’t have much insight on how the program actually works, but just in terms of creating apps for multiple platforms at the same time (”author once, deploy anywhere,” as Higgins said during his talk), Unity seems like a worthwhile solution.

The Unity platform is available as a free download, and the iPhone app either comes in source code with the rest of the platform, or can be downloaded straight from the App Store.

TUAWGDC 2010: From concept to Top Paid with Unity iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 09 Mar 2010 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Microsoft has just released updates to the 2004 and 2008 versions of Microsoft Office. According to the company, the updates, which weigh in at 9.7 MB and 221.5 MB respectively, provide “fixes for vulnerabilities that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of your computer’s memory with malicious code” as well as improvements to stability and performance.

The update for Microsoft Office 2004 can be downloaded here, while those with the 2008 version can find it at this link.

As with most Mac OS X-related updates, whether from a third party app or a system update, you should consider backing up your data before proceeding.

Keep in mind, as you install this update, that right around the corner is Microsoft Office for Mac 2011. Notable updates for the next version of the suite for the Mac include the replacement of Entourage with Outlook, the return of VBA and, gasp (or hurrah!), a more ribbon-oriented user interface, à la the Windows version of Office.

TUAWMicrosoft updates Office for Mac 20Ǩ and 2004 originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Namco is bringing the popular Tekken franchise to the iPhone. It’s not confirmed whether it’s a port of the original game — released back in 1994 in arcades, then on the PlayStation — or the current Tekken 6.

This comes a few weeks after Capcom announced the release of Street Fighter IV for the iPhone, leading to an eventual fighter game showdown in the App Store. While both games on the iPhone is pretty awesome, I’m waiting to see how they will look and play on the iPad. I also wouldn’t mind seeing even more Namco titles on the iPhone - especially selections from the Tales RPG franchise.

Namco has a number of games in the store, including classics like Galaga, which was “remixed” for the iPhone, Burger Time Deluxe, which graced arcades way back in 1982!

Here’s hoping for old-school Tekken.

[Via Gizmodo]

TUAWTekken bound for the iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Wired’s Brian X. Chen noticed that Apple’s iPad press release touts “12 new innovative apps designed especially for the iPad.” Take a look at the screenshot at right and you’ll see twelve apps: Videos, iPod, Maps, Photos, Mail, Safari, App Store, iTunes, YouTube, Contacts, Calendar and Notes. That means a few apps that ship with the iPhone — Stocks, Calculator, Clock, Weather and Voice Memos — are missing.

Thus, the mystery begins. Where are The Final Five? Chen suggests that they’ll be released as free apps in the App Store. John Gruber believes that design problems caused the team (specifically, Steve Jobs) to withhold the apps. I agree with John and Brian.

Consider the calculator app. It looks great on the iPhone, as the iPhone is about the size of a pocket calculator. If it were simply “blown up” to accommodate the iPad’s screen, it would resemble one of those dollar store calculators with the enormous buttons for older folks. Definitely not what Apple is after. Also, the press release says, “… designed especially for the iPad” (emphasis mine). The five missing apps haven’t yet received that loving attention, at least to Steve’s satisfaction.

As for getting them on the iPad, I bet they’ll be a part of the next OS release and in the App Store from then on. That way, Apple won’t be tied to the OS whenever they want to update those apps, and they’ll have time between now and then to get them just right.

TUAWiPad will lack some standard iPhone apps at launch originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 09 Mar 2010 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Seattle Times is reporting that Steve Ballmer, who notoriously laughed at the iPhone, had some good things to say about it last week in a speech he gave at the computer-science building at the University of Washington. “Apple’s done a very nice job that allows people to monetize and commercialize their intellectual property,” he said.

Ordinarily, a comment like this might not be significant, but in this case it adds fuel to the fire that Apple will replace Google with Bing as the default search engine in the next iPhone OS. Google and Apple are increasingly at odds and it’s possible that Apple may see an alliance with Microsoft as a way to stave off Google’s mobile growth.

For Microsoft, a deal that puts Bing on the iPhone would be a huge win as mobile search is becoming increasingly common. Smart phones are becoming more mainstream and the iPhone is increasingly dominating the handset market.

Currently Microsoft offers a Bing iPhone app. Whether Bing goes further on the iPhone remains to be seen because Ballmer, rather uncharacteristically, is staying mum. The Seattle Times cornered Ballmer after his speech and asked is there an “enemy of my enemy is my friend” thing going on, to which Ballmer just smiled, said he couldn’t answer and climbed into his car.

TUAWSteve Ballmer compliments Apple, Hell freezes over originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 09 Mar 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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