This is a cool interview over at Cult of Mac -- you've heard of Steve Jobs of course, you know who Jonathan Ive is, you might have heard of Rob Janoff, but do you know Ken Segall's name? He's a former creative director from TBWA\Chiat\Day, and he has two claims to Apple fame: he worked on the "Think Different" campaign, and he's responsible for coming up with the one letter that may have defined the modern-day Apple as we know it. That's right, he named the iMac.

The writeup is fascinating, even if you get the sense that we're looking through the lens of history, and things may not happened quite as stylishly as they seem. Jobs apparently showed the Bondi Blue iMac to the ad team, and while he originally "hated" the name, he obviously came around -- though Segall apparently never got the satisfaction of official approval.

He closes with an interesting sentiment about the company, too: at Apple, it's always about moving forward to the next big thing, and everything is product-centered, not number-driven. Segall says he was around for a few Jobs "flare-ups," but if there was a fit thrown, it was always in trying to keep the company moving forward as quickly as possible.

Interesting stuff. It's quite a legacy, too -- the iMac was originally called so because it was a Mac that connected to the Internet, but obviously since then, the i has become symbolic of many other things, all the way up to iLife, the iPod, and the iPhone. You tend to forget, after all of the millions of dollars and the culture and promotion, that it all came from the head of a guy in a conference room looking at a computer Jobs just pulled the cloth off of.

If you've ever played Gears of War 2 (who hasn't), or watched Desperate Housewives (we know you secretly love Mrs Van De Kamp), then chances are you've heard music composed by Pieter A. Schlosser from PaaxMusic in Los Angeles.

Pieter's been in the music business for the last five years working on a whole lot of tunes for film, TV and gaming. From CSI New York to composing in "French" for The Sims 3, he's got a wealth of experience in this field and, must be mentioned, he's an avid reader of TUAW too.

When Pieter got in touch with us regarding our 'Count The Beats' series, and sent us the above picture of his studio, suffice to say that the TUAW offices descended into a flurry of excitement (papers flying in the air and everything). What can we say, we love a picture of an inspiring setup.

The logical next step was to sit down with Pieter and talk shop. Read on to find out how the complexities of this mighty setup come together, how the iPhone works as a part of the composing journey, a little bit on DAWs, the "dream upgrade" and how to get the job done when all else is failing.

A word of warning, there is some serious music tech geekery ahead. If in doubt, just pretend that it all makes sense and slowly nod your head, then move onto the next paragraph. That's what most of us do anyway!

Tapulous COO Andrew Lacy sat down to talk with us just before the release of the software, both about how he thinks consumers will react to the new business model, and what's next for Tapulous and this series that has come so far already. Tap Tap Revenge 3 should be in the App Store very soon -- it's available for 99 cents, with extra music packs at six songs for $2.99, or two songs for 99 cents.

About a month ago we reported that the 360iDev conference was going to be held in Denver, Colorado. The event is now underway, and since I happen to live in the area, I'm attending the event that's billed as the premiere iPhone developer conference in the world.

There are certainly a good number of iPhone developers on hand -- Tom Ortega of 360|Conferences, the group that's running the event, mentioned that the registration was at 225 developers, more than attended the last event in San Jose, CA.

The sessions last for the next day and a half, and there are plenty of opportunities for developers to learn, meet, and party. Stay tuned to TUAW for short interviews and more info from 360iDev.

We covered Jason Rohrer's Primrose when it first came out -- the creator of Passage, a critically-acclaimed indie game, had taken his first steps onto the iPhone with an abstract puzzle game, and in this latest interview with Edge, Rohrer says he's on the iPhone to stay. He says that when he first moved from strictly art/indie games to more commercial development on the iPhone, he worried that he was selling out: he wasn't a fan of cell phones at all or any Chinese-made gadgets sold by American companies, and yet the iPhone's platform seemed most "palatable" to him in terms of making games and a little money from them.

And yet he says the iPhone still has pros and cons -- even in an "open source, free software" world, Apple's system offers a choice: you can buy a packaged-up version of the software and throw a little money back to the developer (not a ton -- he says you've still got a better chance at making a living from Vegas than you do from the App Store), or you can still try building and installing your own version on your iPhone. As an open-source developer selling apps on the App Store, he says, "you're charging for the service and convenience, not the content."

Still, he echoes the sentiments of lots of other developers: "There is no quality filter, except for the whims of the masses." Apple's App Store offers up an intriguing system for many indie developers like Rohrer, who want to earn a little money for their games without setting up all of the complexity and burdens of a more traditional publishing channel, but it's still tough to keep from getting lost in the mix.

Danielle Cassley and Jason Citron are the folks with their names on Aurora Feint, but as Danielle told us in an interview a while ago, Peter Relan is the real mastermind behind the growing Feint empire. Not only did he put the two together in an idea lab, but he's one of the driving forces behind the OpenFeint enterprise. Under his oversight, the Feint folks have swelled to become one of the major forces behind iPhone gaming (and thus, behind the iPhone's app ecosystem itself).

Netanel "Net" Jacobsson is a newer addition -- he's previously worked with Sony Ericsson on their mobile devices and Facebook on their own growing app empire, and now he's arrived at OpenFeint to help them use the lessons he's learned at the biggest online social networks around on their social software. Get the sense of how big this is yet? Relan, Jacobsen, and Citron all have pretty big ideas about where iPhone gaming is going, and as 3.0 comes down the pike and introduces a whole set of new features from Apple, they're in the best seat they can be in to do exactly what they want to do.

TUAW sat down with the three last week, and chatted about iPhone 3.0 and why it's such a big deal for developers, how they're going to approach microtransactions (carefully), and what's coming next for OpenFeint now that they've rounded up a whole stable full of developers implementing their backbone. Click "read more" to continue.

Have you seen anything like that already, where developers have said, well we thought about doing it this way, but we're going another way?

PR: Too early. The phones aren't even out yet, user experience hasn't occurred yet. I would say July, we'll get a lot of feedback once these games come out with push notifications. The other thing that's kind of interesting, by the way, is that OpenFeint is working on cross-compatibility, because if I have a 2.2 iPhone and you have a 3.0 iPhone, and you send me a social challenge, in my app on 2.2, it won't show up as a push notification, right, because I don't have the 3.0 iPhone. So we are support the concept of push notifications in the plumbing and infrastructure of OpenFeint, however on a 2.2 phone, whenever the user next opens the app, they would see a screen that is an OpenFeint screen that would have a notification saying "you've got to beat my score," as opposed to seeing it on the iPhone icon, as a number, like the Mail thing, where it says you have notes waiting for you.

So I think as a user experience, the jury's still out, because the platforms are just getting ready, right? So the key here is to say that we're going to make it trivial by continuing our tradition, which is no servers, very easy to integrate, and some big games will launch in July with push notifications and then we'll go from there.

I think, to a certain extent, the same thing will happen on the microtransactions side. It already has happened with Xbox Live -- I don't know if you remember the story of horse armor, where everyone says "how can you release a different graphic and ask us to pay for it?" Have you seen examples yet of how developers want to use microtransactions? Are they aware of that danger or are they fearful of that at all?

PR: So I think the obvious one, just because I have, as I said, investments in companies in the Facebook app space, the big reason for microtransactions is virtual goods. So any kind of virtual world, avatar apps, some of these Mafia iMob apps, you can assume that there will be virtual goods unlocking with microtransactions. That one I think will translate over fairly well, in fact Net is going next week to China, where he's a keynote speaker at Tencent's annual conference. Tencent is an Asian company which does a billion dollars in microtransactions, all of it virtual goods. So I think that microtransactions, as we see them on social networks today, will come pretty much that way onto the iPhone social network, or the iPhone gaming network.

NJ: I also think that it will actually lead to the pricing, might even drop dramatically, but those who are charging for applications are going to go free, because they're going to earn much more by making it free and leveraging microtransactions.

Yeah, if you're charging $4 for an app and can sell four levels for $1 each, that's the way to go.

NJ: The user starts playing, gets very engaged, and wants to get to the next level and make the purchase, and it's very difficult not to make the purchase if you're engaged and you want to continue the game.

PR: The thing that's a little trickier, I think, is when you have microtransactions that aren't directly virtual goods, because virtual goods don't fit the theme. But are like chapters, or just additional content in the game. Then, I think, the business model is a little trickier, because that's your content update strategy, and to some extent, the iPhone user is used to -- like, if you look at the success of Pocket God, it's a double edged sword. If you talk to the Pocket God guys, their game is one of the few games that stays in the top five constantly. It's just always in the top five. And they use OpenFeint, and they're going to use push notifications, but when we spoke to him about microtransactions, he said, I have to figure that out, because their commitment to their userbase is, every week you're going to get an update with more content. So given that he's already committed that on the current price point, how does he unlock more content with microtransactions? So he was the first to say I definitely want to do push notifications, but I have to think hard about how I could incorporate microtransactions into Pocket God. So I do think there's a little more complexity there, especially when it's not just direct virtual goods. But I think they'll crack it. I think some other people we're talking to are certainly thinking of Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, three microtransactions. And certainly the virtual goods guys are like no questions how they'll do it.

And there are definitely precedents for both, in terms of episodic gaming on other services. Jason maybe you can talk about this, too, as a developer -- I'm really interested in the balance between making sure that what you're selling people is worth it, or something that's not. If you're asking to pay a dollar for a gun that's just a re-skin, people won't go for that. What do you think of that?

JC: I think, as a game designer, what you have to really think about is the motivations for why people will want to purchase this content. Whether it's a re-skin or not is less important than what it will allow you to do in the game. And the reason why I think virtual goods have done so well on social networks is that social pressure is a huge motivator to getting people to do things, and if part of that social pressure results in you engaging and buying virtual content, people are much more likely to do it. I mean, if you just have another gun that allows you to increase your DPS by two points, that's not terribly interesting to anyone but the ultra hardcore gamer, and then they'll probably just be pissed off that they have to pay for it. So that's not really an appropriate way to go about it. As a traditional gamer, buying episodic content or buying level packs, or substantially new gameplay experience, fits with my head, and then virtual goods, I think, have to be motivated through social pressure.

And the last question I have is just about the future of OpenFeint. I have to give it you guys -- there were quite a few, and there still are, services poking around that want to do the kind of stuff that you're doing. And just in terms of size and influence right now, you're kind of the top of the heap. So what's next, are you planning to kind of sit on the heap and just keep things set, or are you still aiming to improve here?

PR: I think that definitely we will continue to innovate and add more services to the platform -- there's no question that it's a platform play, and that we will continue to add features and additional things. I would say two things: one is, we will publish games, always, on top of our own platform technology, that will really kind of push the borders of gameplay design around the OpenFeint platform, to sort of demostrate and lead the way. So in the last announcement, we did hint at a new game coming out this summer based around push notifications and microtransactions, where we want to lead the industry. Because we never think that by being in front today, that we will be always in front. So we want OpenFeint to be the premiere platform, we agree that today, we certainly feel like it's way up there, but we feel like you constantly have to build new product on top of your platform to really make a world class platform. Because otherwise you're just sort of opining and thinking oh, this is good stuff. So we always want to test our own platform, and expect a title this summer based on OS 3.0 and OpenFeint features.

The second thing, which is, I think we're really doing something different around the business model. Ngmoco announced their Plus+ platform this week, and it's really a publishing tool rather than an open platform, and we're pretty proud of the fact that we're sort of the biggest player who is really able to provide an open platform where a developer does not have to make a publishing deal with us in order to get access to the platform. Ngmoco's platform is hey, we have this platform, it's part of our publishing network, and if you want to publish games with us, that's how you get the platform, and obviously you know the economics of the publishing business in the game industry, right? There's revenue that has to be sacrificed there. So I think as a guiding strategy, we will never make our platform related to anything with our publishing because it's our belief that this OpenFeint thing does two things that we will always have to provide for publishers: no servers, because 90% of developers have no experience building servers, they build great console games, client side stuff, C, C++ programming, all this stuff, but they really don't have any backend experience. And two, we're not going to take rev share, in terms of publishing deals. And those two things, I think, are sort of our long-term guides. The third thing is to build our own games constantly, so we can use Danielle and Jason's game design and knowledge to say here's the kind of games we can do. So if we can do that and execute, I think, with some fingers crossed, with some luck, we'll emerge as the de facto standard, which is our goal.

I had talked to Danielle a little about pricing already, but I wanted to ask about microtransactions as well -- when you do that stuff, are you not skimming off revenue as it comes through, or what is the pricing scheme there?

PR: Well even today, we have cross promotion inside OpenFeint 2, even before microtransactions, where if two players meet in a lobby, and they're from different games, then one player clicks on the other player's game, and you go to the App Store and you buy that other player's game? That's what you call our one-touch iPromote product inside of OpenFeint, it's a big draw for a lot of developers, because our community is now three million and growing -- we call it our social bazaar, because the App Store is so cluttered now that it's hard to differentiate. So you use OpenFeint and get your game in front of three million people in these lobbies. That revenue, when someone buys a game using OpenFeint's cross promotion feature, doesn't come from the developer, it comes from Apple. Because we are an Apple affiliate, through BigShare. So we take the user into a webview, which is our own catalog, where you can buy games off the App Store, and then Apple actually pays us. So that's hopefully -- this is the same thing, the whole idea is to get Apple to pay us every time there's a purchase in the App Store, including in-app purchases, as opposed to the outside.

Great. That's pretty much everything I had to ask, was there anything else you wanted to share? I guess we'll keep an eye on the game coming out this summer.

JC: Yeah, I guess the only other thing worth mentioning is that OpenFeint is available now -- it can be downloaded by anyone from our website. It's real.

Cool. Thanks very much.

iTreadmill (App Store link) is a pedometer app for your iPhone or iPod touch. I spoke with the developer, who demoed the app for us at WWDC. It looks nice, appears to perform well, and features a respectable number of ways to customize and tune the readings. Pedometer apps may not save the world, but if you're looking for something much less expensive than the Nike+iPod device, this will do in a pinch. There's also a Lite version (App Store link) if you want to try it yourself.

The guys over at the RetroMacCast sent us a link to their latest episode, featuring an interview with none other than Rob Janoff, the designer of Apple's old rainbow Mac logo. The interview starts a little less than halfway into the show, and it's cool to hear a voice right out of Apple's past.

They talk about the inception of the logo -- how Apple came to Janoff's firm and what they originally asked for in terms of a design. He actually had very little guidance when first creating the logo, and in fact hadn't seen any of Apple's branding or even heard of the company before he created the now-iconic image. He also talks about how lucky he was in choosing the image -- he saw it as a pretty obvious choice to use a picture of fruit for a company named after said fruit, but like any great logo, there ended up being layers of meaning behind that apple bite (or byte, as he points out).

Nothing really earthshaking in the interview (he hasn't had contact with Apple since, and even he says that the mythology behind the company has much more to do than just the familiar logo), but hey, if you're hanging out today during Memorial Day and need something interesting to listen to while barbecuing, you can tune in and learn a little bit about Apple's corporate history.

Danielle Cassley took one of the strangest paths you might find to game designer -- just out of a computer science degree at Berkeley, she was trying to get a job as a babysitter when she met Peter Relan of the YouWeb Incubator. And rather than have her take care of his kids, he decided instead to put her in an idea farm and see what happened.

Aurora Feint was what happened -- she and Jason Citron, full of ideas, created a game in just ten weeks that took over the App Store out of nowhere in its infancy. The game originally released for free, and while it promised to be an MMO, it started out as a puzzle/RPG game -- people didn't quite understand what it was, but they liked it anyway.

Almost a year later, Aurora Feint has spawned four different versions and even a social platform, and Danielle and Jason are still full of ideas. In this exclusive interview with TUAW, she talks about how Aurora Feint came to be, what she thinks of the App Store so far (and if developers will ever be able to charge the prices they want), and what's next for the Aurora Feint series (they've just released a new version of The Arena called Daemons) and the iPhone platform. Click the link below to read on.

ZLOK has re-posted an article (originally meant for the defunct Sync Magazine) about Rob Janoff, a designer who's credited with coming up with the iconic-as-they-come Apple logo. It's actually a really short piece, but he does talk pretty candidly about where he got the idea: by buying a bag of apples and slicing them up in different ways.

And the original design was just a single color Apple (which, of course, Apple has used versions of since), but Jobs thought the design should be more colorful, so the logo got its familiar colored bands. Janoff says he just threw the colors in where he thought they might fit, which makes sense -- they don't match up with the physical spectrum at all, they're just sort of in there.

Cool to see that something now so well known started off so simply. Janoff did the work for a design firm, and says that nowadays, he gets "not even a holiday card" for his invention. Apple does take their time recognizing inventors, though -- maybe the card's in the mail.

[via Cult of Mac]

Our good friends at Joystiq recently spoke to id games' John Carmack (the man behind games like Quake and Doom, and fervent supporter of Mac gaming), and heard that id's new product, Quake Live, is headed to our OS just as soon as they can get it there.

Quake Live is a free, browser-based, multiplayer-only version of the popular first-person shooter, and it's Windows-only at the moment and packed -- I've tried to play, but have been locked out by thousands of people ahead of me in server queues. Even some of the developers at id are having issues. One of them (a Mac user, apparently) complains that even he has to jump into Boot Camp just to play his own game.

A little more significantly, Carmack says he recognizes that while there are lots of other choices for PC gamers, a game like Quake Live could make a much bigger splash on Mac and Linux, where there aren't as many other developers and titles grabbing for attention. We've heard that before -- while developers claim there's not a big enough base for them on OS X and Linux, the truth is that some of your best and most loyal customers will use Macs.

Good to see that Carmack recognizes there's an audience here who want to shoot each other online, too. Hopefully we'll see Quake Live running on our machines sooner rather than later.

The cutest Beatle, Sir Paul McCartney, did an interview with Entertainment Weekly recently for his new album, and the long-running subject of the Beatles on iTunes came up right at the last question. At this point, this is probably our favorite Apple failure -- they've reinvented the way we listen to music, they've made smartphones mainstream, they've constantly re-created and revolutionized the personal computer, and yet they've never been able to get the best band in history on their iTunes service.

Not for lack of trying, says Sir Paul. He says that he's down with it, and that both sides are still trying to come to an agreement, but that "we" (presuming that means the band themselves) definitely "want it to happen." But he also says that "the record company" (presumably Apple Records, who have had their troubles with Apple Computers in the past)
"was taken over by new people quite recently, so there is a gridlock of sorts." So we continue to wait for The Beatles to show up on iTunes.

Meanwhile, they are apparently going ahead with the Rock Band version featuring The Beatles -- McCartney says that Harmonix is still planning to put the music in the console videogame/band simulator, and that they're going to feature The Beatles in different eras: "early days, Liverpool, then psychedelic, and on from there. It's very cool." Sounds like it -- even if we can't play the White Album from AppleTV, at least we'll be able to do it from the Xbox.

Dan Moren over at Macworld has picked up the App Store pricing gauntlet yet again. He somehow equates the iPhone's price dropping to $199 as a symbol that cheap people are shopping the App Store -- as if anyone who's interested in spending $199 on a phone can be called cheap. But he's starting from the right place: from AppCubby's donationware scheme (they sell apps for 99 cents and ask people to donate more on their site) to the Sound Grenade developer (he made a self-described "terrible" app in 20 minutes and threw it up on the App Store -- only to get hundreds of thousands of downloads), something is very weird in the world of apps for the iPhone and iPod touch.

Moren's final point seems to be that an excess of 99 cent apps is pushing the really talented developers out of business (because they can't make back what they put into the software by selling it for 99 cents), but there's still something wrong there. If someone can sell 100,000 copies of an app for a buck apiece (walking away with $70,000 after Apple's cut), why are the talented developers leaving? Surely you can make a quality app for less than $70,000, right?

We're obviously still closer to the beginning of how the App Store will eventually shape up rather than the end. It sure seems like developers who create worthwhile apps would find a way to pay for them, but if they can't, then yes, it might be worth another look at the pricing setup from Apple end.