The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

Macworld has published a chat with the devs of one of the much-loved Koi Pond. Of course, the weird thing about Koi Pond is that it's more of a nice iPhone demo than anything else -- but just the same, it's cool to hear from designer Bill Trost and engineer Brandon Bogle.

They used to work on MMOs for Sony (and now work with a new company called Trion, also developing MMO games), and bought their first Macs specifically to try out the iPhone development program. The program was designed as a water simulator, and the koi were added later (as opposed to many of the devs we've heard from so far, these guys were actually concerned that their app was worth less than $1). And the little stories about feedback on the app are really interesting -- apparently a therapist has used it with Alzheimer's patients as a quick form of therapy.

Unfortunately, they won't mention new projects, but they do give some good advice to other iPhone developers: don't consider the unique, device-specific functions of the iPhone secondary. We'd have to agree -- there are several ways the accelerometer and touchscreen can tweak even the most traveled genres and forms of video games and software. Just recreating old Palm and PDA apps isn't good enough -- iPhone-specific apps like Koi Pond are what will really make a splash on the App Store.