Open vs. closed software platforms

March 16th, 2009 •
Tags: app store, development, Nintendo, Software, software platforms

Windows is a rare breed: an open software platform that has seen a great deal of success. Open platforms are what people tend to think of when they think of software platforms in general because they are more accessible. If I’m thinking about a software platform not as a consumer but as a development platform, I’m probably going to think of something I myself would have easy access to develop on. Openness of a platform is something of a double-edged sword as it allows more choice for developers and users while also granting that same choice to developers who would love to wreak havoc for one reason or another in the form of viruses and malware. Openness also allows for careless developers to release buggy software that can cause problems for users and give the platform in general a bad name.

The earliest platforms were probably closed. If I am a university sitting on a computer that cost millions of dollars to build, I’m unlikely to allow just anyone to come through and run whatever software they please. Although they have arguably been around longer than open platforms, closed platforms have been mostly taken for granted up until the iTunes app store launched with tremendous success nearly overnight. Closed platforms allow for tighter controls on developers and crafting of a ore unified vision for the platform as a whole.

Windows has often been criticized for the litany of malicious software that has plagued it virtually since day one. Users of closed platforms most often do not have to worry about malicious software. Controls can be put in place to test software for any malicious intent. If something happens to sneak through to users, it will most likely be found and corrected in short order. This does not apply only to malicious software but has been useful to control content for creators of platform that want to portray a squeaky-clean image. This has been used recently by Apple in denying approval to developers of apps that defend the company’s taste in some way. Nintendo also utilized this to great effect by insuring that titles released on its consoles were more family-friendly than those available on competing platforms.

This is an example of a Tengen cartridge released for the NES without Nintendo licensing.

The closed approach to the software platform also leaves companies vulnerable to backlash from both developers and users. Apple has felt this very recently on multiple occasions from initially restricting the availability of the now venerable sub-genre of mobile flatulence noise generators to their recent denial of the Twitter app Tweetie for it’s display of a swear word as a popular tag on the social network. Backlashes often create an underground of users and developers that find new ways to circumvent the closed systems and open them up. Apple has recently been on the attack against iPhone “jailbreaking“—the act of removing the iPhone’s protection against installation of unauthorized software. Jailbroken phones have recently gotten their own “app store” which provides developers and users a marketplace to buy and sell apps that, for one reason or another, went unapproved by Apple. Nintendo suffered from this as well in the late 80′s when developer Tengen reverse-engineered the NES lock-out chip to allow their games to run on NES consoles without approval.

Closed platforms allow for the party maintaining the platform to profit directly from the sale of software. Apple has deemed a charge of 30% is sufficient for their services of providing developers the tools, platform, and marketplace necessary for iPhone development. Microsoft has announced a similar mobile app store  that charges developers a yearly fee on top of a percentage of the sales revenue for apps. Gaming console makers have been charging licensing fees to software developers for many years now. In fact, game console hardware manufacturers often sell their hardware at a loss in anticipation of future software licensing revenue.

Because of the accessibility of open platforms and the lack of a centralized marketplace (although there are closed platforms without centralized marketplaces as well), software developed on open platform can have trouble gaining traction. The openness means there is a potential for much more competition which can lead to most releases being virtually invisible. This can be mitigated with beefy marketing budgets but those undermine the open nature of the marketplace. It doesn’t matter that I can develop for a platform without jumping through hoops if I then have to spend a million dollars to sell any copies of my application.

Ideologically, I much prefer the model of open software platforms for one key reason: all closed platforms to a greater or lesser degree leave developers wondering whether a piece of software to which they have devoted significant time, effort, and possibly money will, in fact, make it through the approval process so that it may be profitable. Open platforms give developers the peace of mind knowing that only the market will decide their success or failure. Closed platforms have distinct advantages, but the freedom offered to all parties by an open platform is a hard thing to sacrifice to any end.

How to resize your Boot Camp partition without reinstalling Windows

February 18th, 2009 • 10 comments
Tags: Boot Camp, Carbon Copy Cloner, mac, repartition, WinClone, Windows

If you’re a hardcore gamer, using Boot Camp to run Windows on your Mac is a fact of life. If you enjoy the MacOS, you’ll probably find yourself devoting as little of your hard disk as possible to your Windows partition. As you accumulate more games, you’re bound to hit capacity on your Windows partition. Your next step is to restore your disk to a single partition, recreate your Windows partition, and reinstall both Windows and all your games. That is certainly no fun… especially if your games have to be redownloaded from Steam or a similar service.

This method will allow you to resize your partition, and, with just a little extra work, restore everything back to it’s former state after having created your new and larger Windows partition. You’ll need some software and (possibly) some hardware to get started. Download and install both WinClone and Carbon Copy Cloner. Both of these applications are free. Have a Windows XP CD at hand (just in case). You may also need an external hard drive for one of two reasons: First, you will need enough free space to store an image of your entire Windows partition. If you have that much space on your drive already, you won’t need the external drive for that purpose. Second, you may need to repartition your entire hard drive and restore even your Mac partition from an external drive in case the MacOS is unable to recreate your Windows partition after merging the old partition back into your Mac partition (This happened to me just the last time I resized so it is not infrequent.). If you end up needing a drive for this reason and don’t have one, you may have to do without a Windows partition until you can procure a drive. If you’re OK with this, feel free to start the process without an external hard drive (assuming you have adequate free space to image the Windows partition). If you run into both issues, you may need two drives to get you through. If you’re looking to buy a drive, I like the Western Digital Passports as a nice portable external drive (500GB, 320GB, 250GB, 160GB).

Once you have the software installed and the necessary hardware at hand, you’re ready to begin.

Fire up WinClone and point it toward your existing Windows partition. You can tell you have the correct partition by the “Total size” field in the program.

Image the partition to a location on your Mac partition (if you have the space) or on your external drive. This will take a little while.

Once you have the image, go into your Boot Camp Assistant in /Applications/Utilities/’

Click “Continue” from the first screen. Next, select “Create or remove a Windows partition” and click “Continue” again. Now, it will tell you that your drive will be restored to a single Mac-formatted partition. Don’t get scared because we have an image of everything in the Windows partition that will be deleted. You won’t lose data (or savegames .

Once the restore is complete, relaunch the Boot Camp Assistant. This time you want to create a Windows partiton. Size it however you like. Start the creation process. This is where the steps will fork a bit. If it is able to create the partition, you’re in luck because you’re almost done. Just relaunch WinClone, click the “Restore” tab, click “Select image,” and find the Windows image you created earlier. Once the restore is complete, boot into Windows. It will run ScanDisk. This is normal so don’t panic. Once this is complete, you should be booted into Windows with everything you had previously… except with the addition of an extra chunk of hard disk capacity!

If Boot Camp Assistant fails to recreate the Windows partition, you’re in for a few more hours of work. First, connect your external drive. If you had to put the image of your Windows partition on an external drive, you will need a separate one for this backup.

We need to make sure it is formatted properly to be bootable on your Mac. Run Disk Utility from /Applications/Utilities/. Select your external drive (the drive not the partition) from the left-hand pane. Select the “Partition” tab on the right. Under “Volume Scheme:” select “1 Partition.” Click the “Options” button at the bottom.

If your drive is a PC-formatted drive, the “Master Boot Record” option will probably be selected. Select “GUID Partition Table” instead. This is the magic setting that makes a drive bootable on an Intel Mac. This is very important later on as this drive will not only be your backup of your entire Mac drive but the OS you will boot to in order to format and restore to your internal drive. Click the “OK” button.

Now click the “Apply” button to start the format process. Once this is complete, start up Carbon Copy Cloner.

Select your Mac partition as the source disk. The destination will be your external hard drive. Click the “Clone” button to start the process. Depending on how much data you have, this may take a while. You should probably fire up the Xbox 360 or maybe a movie or something. Maybe you could go out to eat!

Now that we have your entire drive backed up, we need to boot to the backup so we can reformat the original drive. Leave your external drive connected. Restart your Mac and hold down the “Option” key after you hear the chime. You should see your external drive among the other connected bootable drives. Click on the external drive.

The OS should boot and look just like it would if you had booted from the internal drive. Fire up Disk Utility again (/Applications/Utilities/). This time, select your internal drive from the left-hand pane. Click the “Erase” tab. Make sure the format is “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” and click the “Erase…” button. Click “Erase” in the dialog box to confim. This shouldn’t take long. Once the drive is erased, start Carbon Copy Cloner again.

This time around, the source disk is your external drive; the target is your internal drive. Click clone. This will take about as long as the initial clone.

Once the clone is completed, restart the Mac. Hold “Option” after the chime and boot to the internal drive. Now, boot to your internal drive. Start the Boot Camp Assistant (/Applications/Utilities/) and create a Windows partition. If you want your XP partition formatted NTFS, you’ll need to insert your XP disc and allow the computer to start the installer. You need only let the Windows installer format your partition. There’s no need to proceed with the install. If you just want to use the FAT32 file system created by default by Boot Camp, you can skip this step.

Boot back into MacOS. The rest of the steps are the same as the steps following a successful re-creation of the Windows partition. I will copy and paste them below for your convenience. Relaunch WinClone, click the “Restore” tab, click “Select image,” and find the Windows image you created earlier. Once the restore is complete, boot into Windows. It will run ScanDisk. This is normal so don’t panic. Once this is complete, you should be booted into Windows with everything you had previously… except with the addition of an extra chunk of hard disk capacity!

If you had to take this fork, it was a long road, but you’re here at the end. Congratulations! Now, get to installing some more games (or productivity apps if you must).

I realize there are programs to do this automatically for you, but those cost money. If you’ve just laid down $50 on that hot new game, you probably don’t have much more cash to buy a program to do something you may only ever do once or twice. This method, although convoluted, will get you there mostly for free. Do you have an easier method (or can you refine mine to make it better)? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

Console-quality iPhone games

February 17th, 2009 • 1 comment
Tags: ExZeus, Gaming, I Love Katamari, iPhone games, mobile gaming, Payback, Rolando, SimCity

Apple’s launch of the app store last year was an amazing success with games making up a large part of the catalog. However, with rumors of iPhone Flash getting hot and heavy, the need for 100 native Sudoku apps, 20 solitaire apps, and probably 1,000 variations of sliding block puzzles will diminish quickly. My suggestion is to insure that the $10 game you buy today is not going to be trumped in three months by a free Flash game three months down the line. In light of that, here are some iPhone games that really make the phone feel like a full-fledged gaming console rather than just a place I can go to pay for games that are free online.

Payback ($6.99)- Payback is a very true-to-the-original GTA clone. I’m sure many of you are only familiar with the GTA series since the third game in the series was released for PS2. This is a little different. This game is very similar to the first two GTA titles for PC (also for PSOne, I believe). The perspective is top-down. You go to phone booths, pickup missions, and complete them for points. Once you reach the point goal, you can move on to the next area. I have a couple of minor complaints. The light poles in the game do not come down even if you hit them with a tank… literally. Not only that, but they stop your vehicle immediately and completely upon impact. The cops in the game are very nonchalant. You can often steal another car in front of them, run over someone, or run into their cop car with your vehicle without raising their suspicions that you might be up to no good. In spite of this minor gripe, this game is definitely a steal. There is spoken dialog and a cool radio just like modern GTA games!

ExZeus ($5.99)- This game comes straight from Japanese arcades. The PS2 version was released only in Europe. The Dreamcast also saw a version at some point in time (probably on a continent on which I do not reside). This is a shoot ‘em up that puts the camera behind a giant mech which you move on the x and y axes using tilt control. Attacks are executed using a number of tapping gestures on the right side of the screen. Tapping the left side of the screen locks enemies for a homing-rocket attacks. It’s great fun and and very polished especially well under the $10 price point.

I Love Katamari ($7.99)- The Katamari series has held a special place in my heart since the original Katamari Damacy for PS2. This particular version was destroyed by critics upon release because of some major slowdown issues, but those were fixed shortly after with the first update. For anyone unfamiliar with the series, you play as the Prince who is sent to earth by his father, the King of the Cosmos, to roll around a giant sticky ball called a katamari and pick up objects. These objects range from paperclips and matchboxes to tables, people, and much larger objects still. While the katamari is small, it can only pick up small objects, but, as it gains mass, it can pick up much larger objects. There are a number of modes including the story mode in which the King asks you to roll up a specific object in each level and a mode which has you trying to stop rolling when your katamari reaches a given size. It is wacky, but it is simple addictive fun.

Rolando ($5.99)- Here we have a super-cute and complete platformer that uses the accelerometer to great effect. The graphics could probably be duplicated in Flash, but the tilt control upon which the game is built is uniquely its own. It also contains a level of polish that few Flash games ever achieve. Roll your Rolandos through each stage solving puzzles and overcoming obstacles to reach the exit. Some stages also have elements that you interact with directly by touch. Each Rolando has a unique personality which makes the game more endearing than most you will play on this platform. Start with the lite version and see if you like it.

SimCity ($7.99)- This is SimCity 3000 adapted for the iPhone. It is an excellent and complete version of the game. Amazing to me is that the game was not watered down for the mobile platform. This isn’t SimCity “Lite.” You’re out there zoning, placing roads and water lines, and talking with advisors just like its desktop counterpart. Maybe this experience could be reproduced in Flash, but it never has to my knowledge.

This list is not meant to be comprehensive. Nor am I trying to suggest that you should not buy simpler games on the platform; they certainly fill a need as well. However, as a hardcore gamer, there is a thirst in me that no quantity of puzzle and card games can ever quench. Lucky for me (and those like me), the iPhone offers a powerful gaming platform that developers (like those of the aforementioned titles) have really begun to exploit to the fullest. These are some of the finest examples of exactly what the iPhone is capable of in the mobile gaming space.

iPhone review: Heavy Mach.

February 16th, 2009 •
Tags: action games, arcade games, heavy mach, iPhone games, iphone gaming

I picked Heavy Mach. up after seeing the review over at TouchArcade. It illustrates one of the most fantastic aspects of the iPhone gaming marketplace in the app store: a small-time developer can make a game that, while it is obviously a high-quality game, is very simple relative to the console games of today, put a $3-$7 price on it, sell a ton of copies, and make a healthy profit to maintain a viable business. As a consumer, I don’t really have to do a lot of deliberating to decide if I should spend $3 on a game. I check the reviews on iTunes. If they are largely positive, I may look at a couple of the negative reviews first to see if the reviewer is coherent, second to see if they have a complaint I could see myself sharing. If not, I’m probably hitting the “Buy” button.

This is one such case: a game that launched to a number of good reviews including the aforementioned TouchArcade review. It looked cool enough—even slightly reminiscent of Metal Slug. If you like action arcade games, you should own this game especially considering the bargain price.

There are a number of good things to say about the game, but I will start with a few minor complaints. I believe the game could use a little more guidance. It actually took a while before I realized I was controlling the movement of the tank. The game seems to calibrate the acceleromter control such that holding the phone level moves the tank forward to the right. I thought the game was just setup so that the tank proceeded through the level automatically. It wasn’t until I reached a boss that I could not defeat in the time it would have taken me to proceed past him that I realized I could tilt to move backward or maintain my position. It also took a while to figure out how to jump. I knew I could jump after watching a video of the game in action, but it took a bit of fiddling to realize I needed to tap the lever. It also isn’t immediately obvious that the position of your tap on the screen controls the trajectory of your shot since most players will naturally tap in the direction of enemies anyway. Also, I recently discovered I have a double-jump. I discovered this after upgrading my movement so I’m not sure if this was a feature added in the upgrade or if I had just missed it before.

My only other substantive complaint is that it is a bit difficult to change weapons in the heat of battle. As it stands, the player taps on the weapon icon on the HUD to scroll through the available weapons. You can gain access to quite a few weapons at a time which makes it a bit tedious to scroll all the way through the options while also dodging fire from three or four on-screen enemies.

Others have mentioned that the in-game “Menu” button does not work which I’m sure will be fixed soon. It doesn’t really have a profound effect on the game although it would be nice to have a way to pause the action which I’m sure this button would provide.

There are far more good things to say about this game. As I mentioned, the game seems to calibrate so that holding the phone level advances your tank. You will find yourself moving forward more often than not so it is helpful to be able to hold the phone in the neutral position to accomplish this. Even the acceleromter controls are very tight. This comes from the fact that there are only three states: moving left, moving right, and not moving. It’s very easy to move around. The rest of the controls are simple. I found myself sometimes having trouble finding the jump lever while also watching the action on the screen, but this was rare.

There are two basic mechanics in the game: shooting enemies and dodging enemy fire. Shooting is simple to execute by tapping in the direction you wish to fire. Dodging is very challenging because there are often multiple enemies firing shots that take different trajectories. Although this can get a little hairy at times, it never feels cheap. You can almost always escape death by manuvering with skill. Some enemies also drop crates that contain weapons, powerups, or health pickups to get you through the tough parts.

The sound effects in the game are satisfying. Explosions, bullets, and missles all feel “large” as they should. The game doesn’t have music which makes it a bit of a bummer that it stops the music from the iPod app when you launch the game.

This is currently one of my favorite action games on the platform alongside Chopper, 2079, and Blue Attack. If you’re looking for a quick and satisfying action experience on the go, I can’t imagine Heavy Mach. would disappoint you. New levels are promised in a free update to this game that already oozes value from every orifice. Tomorrow morning, ditch Starbucks for the local convenient store coffee and spend the savings on this!

Heavy Mach. on iTunes

Get Emoji on non-jailbroken iPhones for free

February 9th, 2009 •
Tags: emoji, emoticons, hack, icons, iPhone

I recently tried a little hack using a $.99 iPhone app to enable the cute Japanese Emoji icons on my iPhone. They are definitely a novelty with limited utility as they only show up to other iPhone users, but, if you know other users, they are actually pretty cool. They sure beat Ascii emoticons. There are a ton of the things covering nearly every idea or emotion you could possibly want to convey.

Jailbroken phones have had methods for unlocking them virtually since the Emoji were added to the iPhone, but non-jailbreakers have only recently gotten a couple of somewhat convoluted ways to access them. Here is a new method that looks pretty simple. It uses an iPhone app called Spell Number (iTunes link) that is available for free. It involves entering a specific number into the app to unlock the international keyboards. Hit the link for the entire procedure.

Easter egg on Spell Number v1.03 that enable Emoji icon on non-jailbreak iPhone/iPhone Touch (via Waterworld)

Track iPhone app price drops through RSS

February 8th, 2009 •
Tags: app store, deal, iPhone, price drop, price tracker

The next time you’re on the fence about whether or not to purchase an app and price is a factor, here is a simple way to watch for a price drop. App store games and applications seem to drop in price much more quickly than most other pieces of software so it’s often worth it to wait a couple of weeks. Apps often drop $5-$10 in practically no time!

I created this Yahoo Pipe which asks for the app name and generates an RSS feed that will update whenever the price of the app decreases. I myself could probably have saved $20-30 up to this point if I weren’t so impulsive!

App store price drop tracker

Which apps should you start tracking? Of course, I have a few suggestions (in no particular order). For your convenience, I have already linked the titles to their respective price drop feeds. The feeds will appear empty unless a recent price drop has occurred.

1. Baseball Superstars- Popular baseball game available on several mobile platforms
2. Guitar Rock Tour- Rhythm game akin to Tap Tap Revenge
3. SimCity- Deep city-building simulator
4. Things- Slick task management app
5. PushupFu- Makes doing pushups a game using your iPhone
6. Touchgrind- Fingerboard simulation. Skateboard with your fingers
7. Hero of Sparta- Has been compared to God of War
8. Tweetie- Fantastic Twitter client
   

MacHeist 3 lets you legally steal software

February 7th, 2009 •
Tags: free, mac apps, MacHeist, Software

Mac users can forget about Bittorrent because the new Macheist is up. You can win free software for solving a few puzzles that aren’t too difficult. The haul for this mission is ShoveBox, KavaTunes, and some Valentines e-mail stationary. Not too bad. This is my first time participating in the Macheist, and I have to say it’s pretty cool. If you’re interested in some free Mac apps (and later a cheap bundle of Mac apps), it’s definitely worth a look.

Macbook Pro XP/Vista audio stuttering fix

February 5th, 2009 • 12 comments
Tags: audio, audio problems, drivers, Macbook Pro, stuttering, unibody, Windows Vista, Windows XP, wireless, WLAN

My PC has seen less and less of my gaming activity in recent years. It makes me a little sad, but the current generation of consoles is delivering a more cohesive and simple gaming experience than the PC ever could. The PC still has it’s strong suits: games like RTSs and FPSs that demand the fast and accurate control only a mouse can deliver or the modding communities that have sprouted around hit PC games for quite some time now. These things are still unmatched by consoles. Development is much more accessible to basement programmers as well creating a diverse indie game ecosystem.

As such, you can imagine my frustration when I found that my XP-booting Macbook Pro’s audio was stuttering every 15-30 seconds while booted into Windows. When the stuttering occurs, the action in your game slows for a couple of seconds. It may not sound like much, but four times a minute is a little excessive. Rhythm games like Audiosurf become unplayable; all games become frustrating. I set out to find the root of the problem and squelch it for good.

Some extensive Google searching revealed I was not alone in my issue. Tons of others are having the same problems. I went through pages and pages of potential fixes and nothing worked until I ran across a link to an updated WLAN driver for the Broadcom N Wireless adapter (which I have mirrored for you on my server). I installed that, and I now have no stuttering! I can game in peace and harmony once again.

As a service to all of you, I will mirror the driver that I used in this fix. Here are the steps for the fix that worked on my late 2008 unibody Macbook Pro running Windows XP SP3:

1. Download and decompress driver
2. Right-click “My Computer” and click “Properties”
3. Click the “Hardware” tab
4. Click on “Device Manager”
5. Expand the “Network Adapters” category in the pane on the right
6. Right click the Broadcom and click “Update driver”
7. Click “Install from a list or specified location” and click “Next”
8. Select “Don’t search” and click “Next”
9. Click “Have disk”
10. Browse to the location of the files you extracted earlier
11. Open the folder for your OS
12. Click the “Open” button

Once you have completed the process, you should be gaming in bliss. Keep in mind that this will not work for Macbooks with a Wireless NIC other than a Broadcom N NIC and a specific one of those at that. I’m unsure of the model of the NIC, but I would guess all the current unibody Macbook Pros produced after October 2008 have the same wireless adapter. The driver will also work for Vista according to the user who provided the link. (I would credit him, but I can’t even remember where I found it!) I think the procedure is similar for Vista, but, if anyone would like to send me the steps, I will be glad to post it. Good luck!

Collection of 351 iPhone wallpapers

February 4th, 2009 •
Tags: backgrounds, customization, iPhone, wallpaper

This is my collection of iPhone wallpapers. It includes 351 wallpapers I have collected during my six months as an iPhone user. Only the absolute best wallpapers I have found are included. This should be plenty to keep you busy customizing the look of your phone for for quite some time. Please note that I have not created any of these wallpapers, and I do not intend to take credit for them. I have merely assembled them here to make them easier to obtain.

iPhone wallpaper collection (27.48MB)

App brings MMS to iPhone

February 3rd, 2009 • 2 comments
Tags: iPhone, mms, Multimedia Messaging Service, photo, Text messaging

One of the oft requested iPhone features has come to the iPhone by way of a (currently) $4.99 app called Fetch MMS. The implementation is far from perfect. AT&T users must first change a setting through the carrier’s online messaging center. Also, it is impossible to send MMS to other iPhone users. The app uploads your photo to a remote server which then determines the carrier of the recipient based on the phone number. I assume the recipient’s e-mail address for text messages is then used to send the photo on its way. It’s not a great solution, but it may be as close as we have right now. I really hope some upcoming smart phones *cough*Pre*cough* can put the pressure on Apple to implement some of the long awaited basic features the iPhone lacks natively.