Mike Schramm has been writing and publishing both online and traditional media for almost ten years now. He's a freelance writer based in Chicago who's been published in Newcity, Time Out Chicago, and many places online, including Opium and Uber.
Currently, he is co-lead of WoW Insider and Massively, and continues to pop up in unexpected places all over the Internet talking about gaming, technology, and culture. You can track his exploits at his personal website, mikeschramm.com.
Unfortunately we don't have much more than a splash screen on this one, but Stuart Carnie sends word that he's used the Apple SDK to port a Commodore 64 emulator on to the iPhone. He has yet to put in a Save/Resume state mechanism, a way to browse for files and disks, or a virtual keyboard/joystiq to control it with, but the hard stuff is done, so by the time the App Store comes around, we may have a working C64 emu in there ready to go.
As long as it's ok with Apple. In point of fact, we have no idea how any emulators might work in the App Store -- actually, we have no idea how any apps will get in the App Store. Sure, it would be cool to play the original versions of Sim City or Maniac Mansion or Elite, but without Apple's OK to let any of those on the platform, we may not be able to do so without jailbreaking the thing anyway. We'll see -- if Carnie, once his work is done, can't get an official emulator in the App Store, maybe we'll be able to try it out and put it to use in some other, less official way.
Peter Cohen over at Macworld continues his sideline analysis of Apple's gaming chances with a post about how the brand new faster iMacs are indeed faster, but still not fast enough for gamers. And to a certain extent, he's right -- gaming on the Mac is like that old beat-up, "someday I'll fix it up" convertible your father's had in the garage covered with a tarp since you were a kid. Getting it out and putting a new engine in it might help it run better, but it's still not going to turn it into a car that anyone wants to drive around.
But (and we talked about this extensively on the Talkcast a few weeks ago with Brian Akaka from Freeverse) it's a step. A faster video card, even if it isn't blazing, will run games better than before, and it'll do a little to bring not only gaming customers but developers back to the Mac. Cohen is right -- that old convertible needs an actual mechanic to take a look at it, and it needs the seats to be reupholstered, and sooner or later it's going to need a new can of paint (not that, like your Dad's actual convertible, these things aren't ever going to happen -- we continue to hear rumblings that Apple is aiming for gamers).
But something is something -- the very fact that Apple is offering faster video cards is a sign that they're interested. And, other than simple profiles of games on their website and cameos by game execs at keynotes, that's more than we've had in a while.
The iPhone continues to impress in terms of gaming possibility. Raging Thunder isn't actually done yet on the iPhone (obviously -- judging by this video there are more glitches on this thing than a Matrix full of black cats), but once it gets rolling, the award-winning game, put together by Polarbit, looks like a pretty sweet racing experience. The accelerometer actually serves as a nice wheel (with a little help from the Wii wheel), and the graphics aren't too shabby, either.
We've already seen a few different games like this floating around at TUAW (including one from a big developer that we can't tell you about), but with a little bug fixing and optimization, the right tuning, and a horizontal mode, the iPhone could easily have a great accelerometer-controlled racing game available at launch. And that's just launch -- we can't wait to see what happens when a game like the Wii's latest Boom Blox (which lets you push and pull Jenga-type block structures around -- multitouch, anyone?) makes its way over to our little Apple handheld.
Racing Thunder is available right now on Installer.app, but this kind of stuff is what we're really looking for in the SDK when it comes out in June.
As usual, we have no idea if this is the real thing, a prototype, or just a little Photoshop fakery. The most obvious difference between what Engadget saw first and what's posted here is the color on the back, but then again, why wouldn't Apple release iPhones in different colors? They've certainly done that with iPods.
None of this guarantees anything, but I will say that if I was shopping for an iPhone, the AT&T memo would be enough for me to hold off on a purchase until mid-June at least. There is an iPhone update storm coming, and the thunder and lightning seem to be getting closer together.
Not only does being shown in an iPod commercial lead to fame and fortune for many artists, but Canadian singer Leslie Feist apparently got something else out of the deal: she got American citizenship. We have no idea how that works, but she says as much in this clip of her appearing on Stephen Colbert's show. When he mentions that she's from the Great White North, she says that she's actually a dual citizen now. Colbert asks if Steve Jobs really stepped up to make her an American and she says yes, that's pretty much how it worked: "They offered me citizenship, that was part of it."
Is she joking? Or has Jobsy actually got the ear of the government now and is giving out citizenships as part of Apple contracts? Either way, we know this: Leslie Feist rocks. We'll have her as a citizen any day, via a backroom Apple deal or otherwise.
The guys over at the Google Mac blog have dropped a new little open source application called Visigami, which serves as a more "interesting" and "fun" way to browse and play around with images online. Basically, after installing the app, you can then pull in pics from Picasa, Google Images, or Flickr (iPhoto is just a suggestion so far), and then search, animate, zoom in or out on them, and even turn them right into a screensaver.
It's a pretty neat little application -- not exactly the kind of thing that anyone has probably been hoping for (it seems more fun than utilitarian), but if you find yourself often browsing photos online, this definitely seems like a more fun way to do it. And it's one more reason to praise all the great developers working on our platform -- it's little apps like this that make the Mac user experience so much better.
Apple's Science page has a profile up for the folks over at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology -- apparently two MITers, Deb Roy and Rupal Patel, are using Macs, including "five Apple Xserves and a 4.4TB Xserve RAID," to record and track every single moment of their son's early childhood.
Not only are they assured to get his first few steps on tape, but they're also studying early development and how young children gain the skills to interact with other human beings. In order to do this, they're dealing with huge amounts of audio and video data -- about 250TB. And they're also building an analysis application on the platform called TotalRecall to scan through all the audio and video and pick out interesting parts and patterns (creating the kind of image seen above -- apparently that means something to them).
Of course, there is one thing they do that Apple can't -- when the time came to figure out how to transfer 200GB a day from the home environment to work, they eventually settled on a "sneakernet" approach, packing up the digital tapes in a case and carrying them to work. Here's hoping Apple will announce their own proprietary version of iSneakernet at the next WWDC (with a stylish design and a reasonable pricetag, of course).
John Gruber's (and my) favorite Twitter web app for the iPhone is about to get better -- if you've been on the Hahlo for iPhone homepage lately, you'll have seen that Dean Robinson is working on version 3 of Hahlo (titled, hilariously for us gamers, the Legendary Edition).
TUAW got to take a look (along with all of the other beta users) at the new software, and here's a short preview running through what the new Hahlo will look like, as well as updates to the system, including a brand new Settings page, inline replies, hashtags and searching, and lots of other cool tweaks and updates.
Jake Marsh sent along this neat screencast of an iPhone web app for MySpace that he's working on. Facebook basically seems to be the gold standard of social networking web apps these days, and this looks basically just like that one. It is cool that you can look up people right away, but the real improvements are on MySpace's Music pages -- not only can you subscribe directly from the profile, but he's also got it working to play all the music there (usually trapped in Flash, though there is a less easy way around it already). He also says that it might eventually be possible, for songs that are available for download, to get them with one click into the iPhone's iPod library.
Yes, it looks just like Facebook (in fact, it looks like a rip of the mobile site), but why fix something that's not broken? Unfortunately, Marsh is just showing off -- he says that it's just for him right now and he's aiming for an open beta in August. He should probably aim for a little sooner than that: after June, we might all be saying "what web apps?"
We posted about SuperSync last year, and we just posted about another iTunes library syncing app, Syncopation. But just in case you've been waiting to sync your music libraries not just across iTunes but also to your TiVo, the wait is over -- SuperSync version 2.3 now does just that. You can connect to a shared library with any series 2 or series 3 TiVo, and even use the remote to browse and play music.
And of course, SuperSync will still let you do all the other stuff other sync tools will let you do -- browse multiple libraries and copy music between each, transfer whole playlists, and even browse and play music over the 'net. A two-machine license (the app has to be running on both computers you use the transfer the music to and from) costs $29.
TiVo support is all well and good, but I can haz Xbox 360 support, too? Connect360 is great, and Rivet seems interesting, but if we could roll up the sync tool and the sharing tool into one app, all the better.
Apple's headed straight to the top with a bullet -- they went from 159 to 121 in last year's Fortune 500 ranking, and this year, they've pushed their way up to 103. On the list of the "20 most profitable tech companies," they are solidly at number eight -- Fortune says that the introduction of the iPhone and "record sales of Mac computers" have Apple on a rocket trajectory.
Of course, Google's sitting upstairs at number 7, and you-know-who (not the Harry Potter villain, but close) is up at number one.
But yes, there's no question that Apple has really been hitting it out of the park lately, and considering the future (the fruits of the SDK, another possible iPhone iteration, and whatever else they're brewing up in Cupertino), the trends will continue.
Bare Feats continues to pit Macs against each other in a no-holds-barred, up-against-the-wall benchmarking breakdown, and this time around it's the MacBook Pro and the MacBook Air in the octagon together. And things go about as planned -- while the solid state drive in the MBA has its advantages, the processor and GPU (what little there is of it) in the MBA don't even really compare to the MBP. Sure, it's a small, super thin, super portable computer, but not only are you paying in cash for the portability, you're paying in performance, too.
This doesn't mean the MBA is a bad computer at all -- for most tasks, it'll work just fine. But complicated 3D graphics (both Halo and Unreal Tournament 2004 were tested) will be almost unplayable in games, and there will be a substantial wait, sometimes up to minutes more, for certain processor intensive tasks. If speed is a high priority (at least higher than portability), the MBA isn't for you.
I would like to see how the MacBook compares, though. It's not surprising that the MBP is a fast machine, but where does the MBA line up compared to the cheaper model?
To counteract the isolation, Apple is reportly considering showing customers where other shoppers are in the virtual stores, and maybe even letting customers interact while shopping, via chat or other interfaces. This system would also allow for storewide announcements of special events or sales going down.
It's quite a concept -- online store as virtual space -- but the fact for me as a consumer is that I shop online mostly to avoid exactly those things (chatting with less knowledgeable customers and annoying store loudspeaker systems). Even if this idea makes it through the gauntlet and we see this type of thing in Apple's online shopping environments, I doubt the old methods of clicking and browsing by yourself are going away anytime soon.
Yes, the world famous TUAW Talkcast is back on the virtual air this evening kicking off at 10pm EST over on the Talkshoe site. Mike Rose is out of the hosting chair this week, but worry not -- I, Mike Schramm will be sitting in said chair running hosting duties as well as I can. And since I'm in charge this week, we'll of course be talking about server virtualization and security options for large scale enterprises. No, I'm kidding -- we'll be talking about games, and gaming on the Mac and iPhone.
Brian Akaka of Mac gaming giants and all-around good guys Freeverse will be on the show to chat not only about gaming on the Mac (and why it's not as big as it could be), but also what it's like to design games for the iPhone, and what kinds of things we might see coming out of Freeverse and other developer come June and the App Store. Dave Caolo and some other friendly voices from TUAW should be on as well. And of course we'll have the cast of thousandshundreds whoever joins us on the conference call, and they're very nice folks, too.
Be there at 10pm EST this evening for a talkcast to remember. Pertinent technical and sign-in info after the break. We'll see you there!
Apple Insider is reporting that the New York City Department of Education has put all shipments of Macs to schools on complete hold while they're apparently waiting for Apple to fix a Wifi connectivity issue with OS X (which should be fixed with the 10.5.3 update). And Apple is apparently scrambling to get it worked out -- they've sent an apologetic email to faculty and have asked schools to try and separate any orders of computers that won't need wireless (that will use a regular ethernet hookup) to ship now.
Unfortunately, there's no hint of exactly how many Macs we're talking about here, but if this is a substantial number of computers, and word gets out causing other organizations to delay shipments as well, Apple will feel more and more pressure to get the problem fixed ASAP. Bad news for the kids who want Macs in New York City (that's the DoE's seal on the right, in case you didn't recognize it), but good news for anyone else having this problem -- Apple's working hard on a fix.
Unfortunately we don't have much more than a splash screen on this one, but 
Peter Cohen over at Macworld continues his 
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Apple's headed straight to the top with a bullet -- they went 
Yes, the world famous TUAW Talkcast is back on the virtual air this evening kicking off at 10pm EST 
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