Opensource Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Apple approves Canabalt clone

by Kelly Hodgkins (May 5th, 2011)

Late last year, the developer who created popular indie game Canabalt released the game's source code under an MIT open source license. This license lets other developers use the underlying game engine to power their own games for either private or commercial distribution. While the underlying ...

Is Android forked? Give Amazon a chance

by Richard Gaywood (Apr 7th, 2011)

For such a seemingly simple concept, "open" sure is a contentious term these days. I've previously written at length on TUAW about the topic of Android's openness and, semi-relatedly, the GNU Public License. Last week, news came that Google is making serious changes in how it manages the ...

Counterfeit version of open source game Lugaru HD being sold on Mac App Store

by Mike Schramm (Feb 3rd, 2011)

Another developer is offering Wolfire Game's Lugaru HD title on the Mac App Store for 1/5 of what the official game is selling for. How? As per the terms of the Humble Indie Bundle a while back, Wolfire decided to open source the game, though not its assets or characters, and the other version on ...

Hunting for open GameKit solutions

by Erica Sadun (Feb 1st, 2011)

On iOS, GameKit offers a simple way for applications to connect to each other using ad-hoc peer-to-peer communication without having to be connected to a common network. Despite its name, GameKit has been used for many non-gaming purposes as well as for games. These include contact information ...

Popular indie game Canabalt goes open source

by Kelly Hodgkins (Dec 31st, 2010)

The developers behind Canabalt confirmed that the game's source code will be made available as part of an open source project. The game will be licensed under the MIT Open Source license, which will let other developers use the engine source code in its entirety for both personal and commercial ...

Notational Velocity ALT adds Markdown support and widescreen view

by Richard Gaywood (Dec 12th, 2010)

The runaway success of the iPad has provoked significant demand amongst people who want to seamlessly edit cloud-synced files across their iOS devices and their computers. We've seen a lot of apps vying to be the iOS part of that solution (such as SimpleNote, Elements, WriteRoom, Edito and a whole ...

iPad may soon run Android via OpeniBoot

by David Quilty (Nov 12th, 2010)

Not entirely psyched about your iPad because of its lack of Adobe Flash support, or unhappy with the iOS operating system itself? How about installing Android on it instead? OpeniBoot, an open source implementation of iBoot for Apple iOS devices, is on a mission to bring the Android OS to the iPad ...

Dissecting Android's openness

by Richard Gaywood (Nov 8th, 2010)

Oh, Steve Jobs, you certainly do know how to get tongues wagging. During last quarter's earnings call he attacked Google's stance that Android is the superior mobile OS because it is "open," restating the debate into terms of "integrated versus fragmented" instead -- with iOS on the integrated ...

Does open matter?

by Victor Agreda, Jr. (Oct 19th, 2010)

Much has been made of Steve Jobs' presence on the earnings call yesterday. In particular, there's a little nerd slapfight going on between Apple and Google around the "openness" of their platforms. As Steve said yesterday, "open doesn't always win." Andy Rubin, the father of Android at Google, ...

PPC Macs 'likely' to be unsupported by Firefox 4

by Michael Rose (Aug 26th, 2010)

While it may not come as much of a surprise, it's still going to aggravate owners of aging PPC Macs that the upcoming Firefox 4 browser is probably going to drop support for the older architecture. Mozilla program manager Mike Beltzner noted that the next version of the open-source browser, ...

Facebook for iPhone's new 'pull to refresh' looked a little familiar

by Chris Rawson (Aug 20th, 2010)

While the new "Places" GPS check-in feature got most of the attention in Facebook for iPhone's latest update, a more subtle feature made its way into the app's interface: pull to refresh. Users of the official Twitter for iPhone app, previously known as Tweetie, will recognize this UI feature right ...

Open source BitTorrent application Transmission updated to 2.0

by Chris White (Jun 25th, 2010)

Transmission, the lightweight, open source, and free BitTorrent client we've written about in the past, recently released version 2.0. Transmission was already one of the leanest BitTorrent clients on OS X, and the new version makes it even faster, with improvements to startup time, local data ...

Mac 101: Checking in on CUPS

by Erica Sadun (Jun 1st, 2010)

More Mac 101, tips and tricks for new Mac users. Ever wonder how your documents go from screen pixels to paper printouts? CUPS is the open source printing system that powers Mac OS X output, built for a variety of UNIX systems and now developed (or at least assimilated) by Apple. It provides ...

Data Robotics gives Drobo FS full Time Machine compatibility

by Steven Sande (May 20th, 2010)

When Data Robotics announced the Drobo FS last month, one common complaint among potential buyers was that it doesn't offer native support for doing networked Time Machine backups. Just connecting a Drobo FS to a network of Macs could cause issues for Time Machine backups, since the built-in backup ...

reMail may be reIncarnated as it goes open source

by Sang Tang (Mar 7th, 2010)

Several weeks back, we noted that Google had acquired reMail, and had placed founder Gabor Cselle and others from the reMail team on other Google projects. The reMail app distinguished itself from the iPhone's built-in Mail.app in several ways: It could download all of your emails in a way that ...