Platform Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Sword and Sworcery's Nathan Vella on returning to iOS: 'Absolutely'

by Mike Schramm (Jun 18th, 2012)

Nathan Vella is the co-founder of Capybara Games, the company that worked with musician Jim Guthrie and the artist Superbrothers to put together the extremely popular and critically acclaimed Sword and Sworcery EP, originally released on iOS. Capy, as it's sometimes called, is a Toronto-based ...

Daily iPhone App: Sketch Nation Studio opens up game dev on the App Store

by Mike Schramm (Apr 20th, 2012)

Sketch Nation Studio started out as Sketch Nation Shooter last year, a "game" on the App Store that actually let you make your own shooter game by using scanned-in pictures and a few scripted sets of rules. As creator Nitzan Wilnai told me at GDC earlier this year, he heard from a lot of users ...

Sketch Nation Studio allows to make your own game, and sell it

by Mike Schramm (Mar 6th, 2012)

I've met with Nitzan Wilnai at the annual Game Developers Conference (GDC) several times. His Engineous Games has grown over the years. The group recently released Sketch Nation Shooter to great success. It lets you build a shooter title by uploading or drawing your own art. As of this writing, it ...

Zynga announces HTML 5 games, will run on Facebook for iPad

by Mike Schramm (Oct 11th, 2011)

Social game giant Zynga is holding a press conference in San Francisco right now, and the company has announced that it will be releasing a series of new games for Facebook, all built in HTML 5 rather than Flash. That's especially interesting for us iPad users, because it means that those games ...

Objective-C rocketing up the TIOBE charts

by Mike Schramm (Sep 6th, 2011)

The TIOBE index is a chart of what have been rated as the most popular programming languages in the world, according to various searches online, the number of experts in those languages, and even software output (though it is very certainly not a strict chart of "most lines written"). ...

WWDC Interview: Orbotix

by Victor Agreda, Jr. (Jun 30th, 2011)

Victor Agreda, Jr. (Editor-in-Chief, The Unofficial Apple Weblog) interviews Brian Smith of Orbotix Inc. at WWDC 2011. You may remember Orbotix from CES. Brian was kind enough to tell us about their thoughts on the announcements on WWDC, and how it will affect their plans moving ...

DeNA bringing Infinity Blade X to Japan's Mobage platform

by Mike Schramm (Jun 22nd, 2011)

DeNA's been on the iOS hunt for about a year now -- I saw them at GDC Online last fall asking developers to create games for their Mobage mobile platform in Japan, and then they outright purchased popular iOS developer ngmoco not long after that. Now they've put together plans to bring another ...

Ad network revenue shows iOS and Android are almost tied

by Kelly Hodgkins (Jun 15th, 2011)

A monthly report from Mobile ad network Millennial Media paints a familiar picture of the smartphone market. According to impressions data, the iPhone is the top individual phone on the ad network, while the iPad is on the rise with a 29% jump in impressions from last month. Apple was the top ...

Found Footage: Rage for iOS running in WebGL

by Mike Schramm (May 18th, 2011)

The video on the next page shows a pretty mean feat of coding. Developer Brandon Jones has taken files from the iOS version of id's Rage game, which came out for iOS a little while ago, and tweaked them to display in WebGL, a library for JavaScript that can generate 3D graphics in a compatible ...

Rumor: Steam looking at iOS integration

by Mike Schramm (Mar 22nd, 2011)

This is interesting -- according to a Steam user who got to Valve headquarters in Washington, the popular game network may be looking at extending itself out onto the iOS platform. That doesn't necessarily mean that there would be a straight-up Steam client for the iPhone and the iPad (although ...

Distimo finds higher prices, slower growth in the Mac App Store

by Mike Schramm (Mar 21st, 2011)

Distimo has released its latest publication, containing an overview of the various app stores currently running, and the findings about the Mac App Store are quite interesting. While Apple's newest App Store is not quite up to the speed of the mobile platform, it's growing quickly -- the ...

Bump study: 90% of iOS users run 4.X

by Mike Schramm (Jan 17th, 2011)

Bump, the folks behind that iPhone app that allows you to quickly and easily exchange contacts, released a set of stats about its users that says almost 90% of iOS device owners are already running some version of iOS 4.0 or above. Bump reportedly has over 25 million downloads, so we are talking ...

Band streams concert live via iOS app

by Mike Schramm (Dec 15th, 2010)

A band named Everything, Everything is streaming a concert live today from London, and they're sharing that content on the App Store. NME says that the Manchester band has released a free app for iOS that will not only stream the show live, but will eventually have an archive of the show available, ...

Google Latitude app shows up, disappears from Japanese App Store

by Mike Schramm (Dec 8th, 2010)

An app for Google Latitude briefly appeared on the Japanese iOS App Store yesterday, only to disappear a few hours later. Latitude is, of course, Google's persistent location-based service, allowing you to see where your friends are at on a map and share your own location in real time. There are ...

River of News' real money returns

by Mike Schramm (Oct 15th, 2010)

Developer Dylan Ginsburg has noticed that a lot of iPhone companies (including most of the folks I spoke with at GDC last week) don't like to talk about exactly how much money they've made on the App Store. But he has no such compunctions, so he's written up a nice post on his blog about how much ...