Open vs. closed 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....

How to resize your Boot Camp partition without reinstalling 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,...

Console-quality iPhone games

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...

iPhone review: Heavy Mach.

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...

Get Emoji on non-jailbroken iPhones for free

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...