Iestyn Lloyd (a different one! @iestynx) interviewed me over email on my thoughts on the iPad, iPhone and Flash for a Welsh speaking tech blog.
You can have a read here if you’re interested (and speak Welsh).
Archive for the 'iphone' Category
Amongst other exciting announcements at the Adobe Max conference they’ve just announced Flash Apps for iPhone!
This is absolutely awesome news – ActionScript programmers can create apps for the iPhone. There’s more information here.
A few questions spring to mind:
- What will performance be like?
- Can we take advantage of all the hardware, such as accelerometers, GPS, etc?
- When can I get my hands on it!?
For a while I’d been saying this was the most logical thing for Adobe to do, but I never thought they’d actually do it..
Yey!
[UPDATE]
Funnily enough, all my questions are answered in the Developer FAQ!
Performance:
The iPhone and iPod touch have processors significantly slower than those found on most desktop PCs and Macs. Thus, content may run slower than it does when running on a desktop personal computer. However, the exact differences will depend on the specific content.
In addition, the hardware specifications vary greatly between different versions of the iPhone and iPod touch. Because of this, it is important that you test your content early and often across all devices which you plan to target.
The hardware that’s supported:
- MultiTouch
- Screen Orientation
- Saving images to Photo Library
- Accelerometer
- Geo-location
- Cut / Copy / Paste
Additionally, we can take advantage of OpenGL ES. This could be extremely important for games!
In order to make development of high-performance applications easier, applications built for the iPhone also can take advantage of an augmented rendering pipeline that uses OpenGL ES. This augmented rendering pipeline enhances the Flash rendering model to allow developers to take advantage of the GPU on iPhones. By enabling this rendering path, you have the ability to modify your display objects to put them on a hardware surface
Flash suddenly got a lot more exciting.
Toki Tori is a cutesy puzzle game where you touch the screen to move the the fluffy yellow protagonist around a graphically pleasing environment, avoiding Bad Things, and collecting a number of Good Things. When you have collected all of the Good Things, some kind of wierd yellow portal appears (for reasons I have not yet fathomed), and sucks away your character, ending the level.
It’s not a bad puzzle game actually. There’s several environments, each with several levels. You are given a number of special moves per level, such as teleportation, building bridges, moving blocks, freezing bad guys, and no doubt more I’ve yet to discover. In some ways it reminds me of Lemmings. Oh how I loved Lemmings..
It’s currently only £1.19, which seems a bargain for a game that’s polished this well. It’s a small sum considering this game has given me a good few hours of gameplay so far, and I’m only about half way through.
IGN gave this 8.5, and an editors’ choice award. I’d have to roughly agree with that; it’s definitely one of the better games I’ve played on the iPhone, but it’s just a little bit too cutesy for me.
F.A.S.T (Fleet Air Superiority Training) is a dogfighting game for the iPhone that I downloaded a few weeks back. It’s got some pretty good visuals for an iPhone game, and the controls seem to work reasonably well, using the accelerometer for movement.
However, I’m really really bad at it, and regardless of how many times I play it, I just can’t seem to stop getting blown to smithereens by enemies missiles. God alone knows how you’re ever meant to get close enough to fire the cannon.
Ah well, it does seem like a good game, if only I could get past the 3rd level. I’d say this is mainly due to my incompetence, rather than bad game design or controls 
It’s currently on the appstore for only £1.19 – definitely worth it if you like this genre.
TechCrunch reports it’s earned $1,000,000 in the first 6 weeks. Impressive going, SGN!
Since I was young I’ve always been interested in the weather, no doubt instilled by my father’s experience at the Met Office. I fondly remember poring over cloud charts, and having isobars, warm fronts, and cold fronts explained, although I must admit I haven’t retained much knowledge of that. When a storm-chasing colleage of mine recently showed me Weather Pro, I was rather taken by the satellite and radar views of Europe. Sadly no isobars here, but there are rather nice animated satellite and radar maps:
It’s also a pretty handy gague of the weather each day, with a forecast for your location every 3 hours:
I’ve recently found this app very handy, what with our typical unsettled British summer! My iPhone wakes me up in the morning, I check Twitter, check BBC News, check my email, check the weather so I know what to wear, then get up. I’d be lost without my iPhone..
So in summary, Weather pro is OK. It’s nothing special, only covers Europe, and the satellite and radar views are chronologcally a little short. It does the job though. I wouldn’t mind finding a better weather app. If you know of one, let me know!
I have a real soft spot for scrolling shooters, even more so for ones with spaceships and big explosions. I think this comes from playing Xenon 2: Megablast literally hundreds of times when I was young – it was the most impressive game for my Dell 316SX – a 386 running at an almighty 16Mhz with 640K RAM. The music was divine – considering my computer didn’t have a soundcard, just the onboard speaker. I’m still amazed how they managed to get Xenon 2 running on a machine like that. The Bitmap Brothers were real heroes of mine; Gods of game programming.
Anyway, this post isn’t about Xenon 2, it’s about the absurdly named “Space Deadbeef“, a side-scrolling shooter by Yuri Yashuhara of IDP. It’s a great looking game, and the gameplay is reasonably satisfying. Where it fails is the control of the player ship. I like the idea behind the mechanism, but it doesn’t quite work. Movement is dictated by the vertical position of your finger on the screen; you can only move vertically, which is rather odd. Firing depends where you touch the screen – if your finger is over your ship, you can build up a powerful blast (similar to R-Type), or if you swipe your finger over enemies, it locks on a number of missiles that are then fired when you release your finger. It kind of works – but doesn’t feel 100% right. The game is also too short, it’s just one stage which you can play over and over again, with it getting tougher each time.
Despite the negative comments about the control of the ship, it’s definitely worth downloading, as it’s absolutely free, and a good taste of what’s to come on the iPhone.
On a final note, I honestly think the iPhone would really benefit from an additonal controller for gaming, as some types of games just don’t work well on the iPhone. I hope we’ll see an official one soon – perhaps it could include an extra battery too..
Here’s another great game for the iPhone: iBomber! You play the part of a bomber in the Pacific in 1943. It’s top-down, and movement is controlled by tilting the iPhone. Bombs are dropped by hitting the ‘Bombs Away’ button. There’s a number of different powerups you can collect by touching them. The aim is to destroy pretty much everything. Ships, submarines, aircraft carriers, planes, AA guns, fuel dumps and so on.
There’s several levels, with achievements for each one. I’ve played a good few hours of it, and it’s definitely worth a paltry £1.19.
If you’re a fan of tower defense games, then I can highly recommend Star Defense for the iPhone. You know the drill: Different types of turret, upgrades, waves of different enemies – it’s not deviating from the standard formula at all, but it’s presented nicely, seems quite balanced, and the 3D graphics are quite impresive for an iPhone. It’s definitely worth £3.49 – and it absolutely kills train journeys.
Here’s a quick comparison of the iPhone 3GS camera versus the old 3G camera. The 3GS has a macro function, so it’s not a fair test by any means
New iPhone 3GS:
…and here’s a shot from the old 3G:
That’s quite a difference!
However, it’s nowhere near as good as the camera on the N95, and there are some great photos taken with that phone. Still, it’s a vast, welcome improvement.
Rachel pointed me at Flight Control for the iPhone. It’s a fun, relatively simple game where you need to direct planes to runways by controlling their flightpath, which is done by dragging your finger on the screen.
At £0.60, you can’t go wrong..
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