The “iPhone Developer Program License Agreement” governs what iPhone developers can and cannot do. Now, jailbreaking, assisting in jailbreaking, and developing and distributing jailbreak apps are among the things that the latest revision of that agreement does not condone.
Anonymusing writes “Not long ago, professional video gamer Emmanuel Rodriguez earned a base K salary plus prize winnings in the Championship Gaming Series. However, with the economy suffering, sponsors like DirecTV and News Corporation are backing out, leaving Rodriguez with a more typical job for a 23-year-old: store clerk. After the demise of the CPL and the Championship Gaming Series last year, the only major pro gamer league left is Major League Gaming, though it expects to turn a profit this year — some of its players earn more than six figures from the million in prizes given throughout the season, while others are putting off college to work on their gaming careers.” A recent story in the LA Times discusses how the games industry slow-down is hitting game developers hard as well. Conversely, the used game market is seeing significant growth — it’ll be interesting to see what publishers learn from this.
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If you’re a developer looking to get ahead in your field (or in some cases, to simply stay employed), this is not a good time to be complacent. Justin James lists the skills you’ll want to work on now to maximize your future job prospects.
narramissic writes “Maybe Android and the Android Market aren’t so open after all. A developer who contributed to the WiFi Tether for Root Users app reports that Google has banned the application from the Android Market. The developer writes in his blog that Google cited a section of the developer agreement that says that Google may remove applications if they violate the device maker’s or the operator’s terms of service. T-Mobile, the only operator to offer an Android phone, expressly forbids tethering phones to a computer. This incident raises some interesting questions, the developer notes in his blog. ‘Does this mean that apps in the Market have to adhere to the ToS for only T-Mobile, even when other carriers sign on? Will all apps have to adhere to the ToS for every carrier that supports Android phones?'”
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After only two weeks from its initial release, Apple has released a second beta version of their iPhone 3.0 operating system. The new seed is available only to registered iPhone developers. The iPhone 3.0 beta was first introduced earlier this month and includes a number of enhancements.
This is not a pretty story. If you have a weak stomach for twisted tails of government witch hunts, justice gone wrong, and the bad guys winning you may not want to read any further. This is the tale of the Squatter from Hell. It is the story of Kip Macy, one of the top FreeBSD developers….
Dr_Barnowl writes “Electronic Arts has posted a SecuROM de-authorization management tool. Once downloaded, the tool will search your drives for EA games infested with the draconian online DRM system, and help you download their respective individual de-activation tools. This isn’t a perfect solution, since it’s still possible to run out of activations in the event of hardware failure or other source of data loss, but since the announcement that this particular DRM system will be dropped for The Sims 3 , it would seem that EA has had a minor epiphany about DRM.” I’m sure EA’s hand was forced in part by the FTC’s recent warning against deceptive DRM practices. Hal Halpin of the Entertainment Consumers Association commented further on the issue, suggesting to developers that such measures need to be displayed on game boxes, and that standardization of EULAs could be next on the list.
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Pickens writes “Jeff Atwood has an interesting post that begins by noting that with the Internet, whatever country you live in or language you speak, a growing percentage of the accumulated knowledge of the world can and should be available in your native language; but that the rules are different for programmers. ‘So much so that I’m going to ask the unthinkable: shouldn’t every software developer understand English?’ Atwood argues that ‘It’s nothing more than great hackers collectively realizing that sticking to English for technical discussion makes it easier to get stuff done. It’s a meritocracy of code, not language, and nobody (or at least nobody who is sane, anyway) localizes programming languages.’ Eric Raymond in his essay ‘How to be a Hacker’ says that functional English is required for true hackers and notes that ‘Linus Torvalds, a Finn, comments his code in English (it apparently never occurred to him to do otherwise). His fluency in English has been an important factor in his ability to recruit a worldwide community of developers for Linux. It’s an example worth following.’ Although it may sound like The Ugly American and be taken as a sort of cultural imperialism, ‘advocating the adoption of English as the de-facto standard language of software development is simple pragmatism, the most virtuous of all hacker traits,’ writes Atwood. ‘If that makes me an ugly American programmer, so be it.'”
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The open source Google Chromium repository now has an OS X Cocoa shell. We downloaded and compiled the latest OS X build of Google’s browser, and we talked to the developers to get a sense of how long it will be before Mac users can get their hands on a working beta.
Hugh Pickens writes “The NY Times reports that the proliferation of free or low-cost games on the Web and for phones limits how high the major game publishers can set prices, so makers are sometimes unable to charge enough to cover the cost of producing titles. The cost of making a game for the previous generation of machines was about million, not including marketing. The cost of a game for the latest consoles is over twice that — million is typical, and it can be much more. Reggie Fils-Aime, chief marketing officer for Nintendo of America, says publishers of games for its Wii console need to sell one million units of a game to turn a profit, but the majority of games, analysts said, sell no more than 150,000 copies. Developers would like to raise prices to cover development costs, but Mike McGarvey, former chief executive of Eidos and now an executive with OnLive, says that consumers have been looking at console games and saying, ‘This is too expensive and there are too many choices.’ Since makers cannot charge enough or sell enough games to cover the cost of producing most titles, video game makers have to hope for a blockbuster. ‘The model as it exists is dying,’ says McGarvey.” As we discussed recently, OnLive is trying to change that by moving a big portion of the hardware requirements to the cloud. Of course, many doubt that such a task can be accomplished in a way that doesn’t severely degrade gameplay, but it now appears that Sony is working on something similar as well.
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