This is Cocoaaaaaaa!!

Once again, sorry for the extra long delay between posts ... I know how hard it must be for the five of you :P ... The usual excuse apply: Twitter, lack of time & Tiger Woods all came together to create a worm whole in which I vanished for a while ...

Anyway I finally started, two nights ago, the implementation of that game for iPhone I was talking about a while go ... Except it's not the same game! A couple of weeks ago, I completed the grunt of the work on the game engine (including the audio stuff!) and I was seized by an uncontrollable spur of creativity focused on different concept than the one I had been toying around with. Now, thanks to my paranoia, I'm not going to share much on the game itself for a little while, at least not until it is well advanced. All I can said, is that it'll be retro (graphics, sounds and concept) and hopefully fun (or so I hope). What I can talk about, however, is some of the design/implementation decisions. So stay tuned :)

Am I a PC?

Microsoft has released yesterday its new series of ads, replacing the series started a couple of weeks ago with the comic duo Gates & Seinfeld. I think they are not that bad. Sure, it doesn't said much of why using a PC (instead of a Macintosh) is better, but at least it's not as wild as the previous ads. See for yourself:

Rogue Amoeba's developer Mike Ash, has added an interesting post (one of many in fact) on his blog, regarding his iPhone development story. Very interesting and a little bit scary ... Hopefully for him, what he shared won't fall under the infamous NDA, causing him to loose his developer program seat.

Be a software slut ...

Catchy title isn't it? Obviously it's an intriguing concept that I took from the hilarious talk (video) that superstar indie Mac developer Wil Shipley (of Omni Group & Delicious Monster fame) gave at the C4 conference in August last year. If you are an indie developer, or if you would like to be, or if you think that you may want to be (but don't know if you can do it), then you most definitely must watch Wil's take on hype (and other things that could potentialy make you successful). I guess, I should also mention his blog, although I'm sure that anyone reading this will have known about it for a while ... unless you are new to the scene (oh man this soooo early 90s! Quick get the Amiga out!). Anyhow, there's a lot of (very) good stuff to learn from that talk, so make sure you have some paper and a pen handy so that you can jolt it all down. How do I know it's sound advices? Well ... he's a successful independent developer, and I'm not. Therefore, what he have to said must be good advices ... unless he's just applying his (core) principles and hyping things ... hmmm 8-o