Filed under: iOS

The iControlPad project seems to have fizzled out, so another group is trying to bring the dream of a hardware iPhone button-based controller to life. Controller or Bust is a new project trying to move through the long list of steps required to get a hardware controller into production. The blog is the work of Benjamin Morisse, who is looking for all kinds of help from the community to get an actual controller off the ground. "This is ridiculous," he writes. "The iPhone was introduced over three years ago and there still isn't a game controller peripheral available to the masses. I've seen several prototypes that have kicked around the internet for some time now, but nobody has stepped up to the plate and actually delivered." All true, and Morisse hopes to change that himself.

One big issue is getting approved by Apple -- in order to run a peripheral that actually connects to the iPhone hardware, the project will have to be approved in the "Made for iPhone/iPad" program, and that's been the biggest obstacle for developers so far. But Morisse is working on that already, along with iterating on product designs, so hopefully he'll accomplish that goal quickly.

In the meantime, we'll wait and see. There's certainly a demand for such a device at a reasonable price -- Steve Jobs may not like buttons, but most gamers do, so the first actual production device to go on sale in this market will probably find plenty of buyers.

Stuart Dredge of MobileEntertainment did some digging into the paperwork behind the Ngmoco sale, and came back with some interesting figures about the company's financials. Turns out that rumored $403 million purchase price is true -- kind of. The deal includes a $100 million bonus, if Ngmoco keeps its numbers up to certain standards. The actual payment now is $303 million, which consists of $146 million in common stocks, $27 million in DeNA investments, and $128 million cash. That cash payment, Dredge reports, is about a third of DeNA's total cash balance, so this is a significant deal for both companies.

Meanwhile, the documents state that Ngmoco has seen 50 million downloads on the App Store as of last month, and has 12 million users on the Plus+ network across 119 games (as a comparison, OpenFeint announced 25 million users this year, although of course that service is spread across many more titles).

And perhaps most interesting, Ngmoco is growing, but has spent a lot of money for that growth. In 2008, its revenues were only $484,000, and it lost $2.46 million. 2009 went better on the revenue side, jumping up to $3.16 million, but the company's losses came out to a whopping $10.89 million. Pretty amazing that financials like that led to a sale of $403 million -- both Ngmoco and DeNA must expect a lot from this partnership in the future.

Ever the kid-friendly outfit, Apple filed a patent in 2008 that aims to make text messaging safer for the children. TechCrunch reports that today, the US Patent and Trademark office awarded Apple a patent which puts a ban on sending obscene text messages sometimes called "sexting."

The technology will prevent an "administered device" -- such as an iPhone, maybe? -- from sending or receiving objectionable messages. The overall strictness of the filter is determined by the administrator of the device and would include settings by age or grade level.

In addition to offensive language filtering, the technology includes a method for requiring users to communicate in a specific language. For example, a specified number of foreign-language words could be required for each outbound message. This is an interesting tool for anyone, including children, trying to learn another language.

Even though this patent was filed in 2008, its promises have yet to be fulfilled. It is not uncommon for Apple to file patents for technology (hardware or software) on which they are currently working. Sometimes these patents result in cool new products or features and sometimes not.

Whether this technology ends up in iOS 5, or some other Apple product, remains unclear. What is certain, is that if it is implemented, it won't take long for people to start hunting for ways to communicate that the device won't be able to filter.

[via CNN]

This past weekend at IndieCade 2010 in Los Angeles, I bumped into our old buddy Steph Thirion. He's the creator of the great Eliss iPhone app and a title that he's still working on called Faraway, which despite still being in development, was actually chosen as an IndieCade finalist this year. He introduced me to a developer named Marek Plichta, whose German company, Spaces of Play, was showing off another iPhone finalist called Spirits. I asked for a quick demo and got to check out the game in progress.

Spirits will instantly be intriguing to anyone who's a fan of the old Lemmings title (which hasn't officially made it to the App Store yet, though there are a few games like it). Spirits' basic gameplay is the same as Lemmings'. A set of creatures slowly enters an environment, and it's your job to guide those creatures (or at least some number of them) to an exit by using certain abilities that they have. Where Spirits really innovates is in its look and feel. Rather than little cartoony, pixelated creatures, you feel like you're controlling beautiful little beings. When the wind physics start to do their thing, the experience is pretty magical.

Tripolar makes a big point of saying that it's not a match-3 game, and though the grid looks similar to that matching genre, it's really not. But it is a puzzle game. The idea is that you have pieces coming in on top of the board, and touching anywhere on the grid will insert that piece and delete any like-colored pieces around it. Any pieces of a different color will switch to the next color in order. It sounds a little confusing, but in practice, it works pretty well.

There's a timed mode, which challenges you to score as many points as possible in a certain amount of time, and a puzzle mode, which requires you to clear 50 different boards by putting the right pieces in the right places. Unfortunately, the gameplay is a little simple. Because you're dropping one piece in at a time, there are no real opportunities for building up combos, which is where the real fun is in these types of puzzle games. And unfortunately, there's no Game Center integration or leaderboards, though there is a high-score board for your phone itself.

It is well-made and entertaining for what it is, and it's worth the US$0.99 price if this kind of game appeals to you.

If there's anything I love to read, it's analysis of the commonplace items in our lives by physicists, engineers, and mathematicians. That's why I was attracted to a recent Wired Dot Physics post by physicist Rhett Allain in which he did a Tracker video analysis of the most important characters in Angry Birds -- the birds.

By using the official Angry Birds walkthrough videos on YouTube with Tracker, Allain was able to determine several important factors -- that the birds exist in a drag-free world (no air resistance), that the sling shot is huge (5 meters -- 16 feet) tall, and the birds are good-sized as well. Y'know that little red bird? He's about 70 cm (27.6 inches) tall. That's a big bird!

To see how Allain used Tracker to plot the horizontal and vertical motion of the birds in flight, follow his analysis, and review his assumptions, be sure check out the original post.

We've posted about GameSalad here before -- the company offers up a third-party development and publishing solution that allows anyone, even non-coders, to jump into the GS SDK, make a game, and then quickly publish it out to the web or platforms like Apple's App Store. The company has been narrowing its focus recently after a round of funding -- last week at GDC, it announced that the Gendai Games brand was no more, and instead it would be consolidating everything under the name "GameSalad."

This week GameSalad continued in that focus with a service called GameSalad Direct. Previously, developers could pay a fee to simply remove GameSalad's branding from apps created with the software, and sell those apps on the App Store under their own Apple developer accounts. That will still work for GameSalad developers for now, but when those accounts expire, everything will move to GameSalad Direct, which instead will either be free for devs publishing free games, or part of a revenue share for publishers wanting to sell paid apps.

That means GameSalad game devs won't use their own Apple accounts any more -- presumably, everything created by GameSalad in the store will need to be published under the GameSalad banner. That has raised some hackles on GameSalad's forums, and Apple might not be too happy with it either (since if developers do sign with GameSalad, that's potentially a lost developer connection). We've contacted GameSalad to get some more information on the change and an official perspective on the reaction to the news.

Apple has posted an updated beta for the iOS 4.2 SDK. iOS 4.2 is expected to debut "in November" for general consumption. If you are part of the developer program, you can head on over to the dev center now, authenticate with your credentials and download the newest release.

As always, beta SDKs remain behind an NDA wall, so we cannot post specific details about changes. Developers will find full release notes and update read-me's at the site itself.

A final warning: If you plan to seek alternate means of acquiring and installing 4.2 beta firmware for iDevices, don't. You may very well render your iPhone or iPad inoperative. The OS will not work without an accompanying developer certificate.

Good luck and happy developing.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in.

I'm always on the lookout for solid family-friendly applications. I particularly appreciate titles that aren't specifically made for children but that nonetheless engage and entertain. The following list is made up of kid-tested & approved iOS applications.

None of these apps are child-specific; in fact, many of them are marketed towards adults. And yet, all of these applications deliver long-term entertainment value for what will likely be an appreciative audience. So don't let your purchases be hobbled by a lack of kid-friendly marketing. These apps provide great family fun.

In the battle for viewer eyes, Apple appears to be making some huge strides. How huge? Well, ad group Flurry says that socially aware iOS apps now have a larger audience share than some of the top TV shows.

Flurry estimated that 19 million iOS device owners are connecting for more than 22 minutes -- the length of an average prime-time TV show, minus ads. That puts iOS viewing on a par with such popular shows as ABC's "Dancing with the Stars" and NBC's Sunday Night Football.

Researchers at Flurry say that their study is simply an extrapolation, since only about 50,000 of the total 250,000+ apps in the App Store contain Flurry components. There are other ad platforms used in some wildly popular iOS apps, so the total number of viewers / users could top even the highest-rated TV shows such as American Idol.

The point of the Flurry research seems to be that advertisers should take heed of mobile apps and spend more of their advertising budgets in that market, since that is where the eyes are moving. When you consider that the App Store has only been around for a little over two years and iOS apps are already competing with the decades-old entrenched television ad market, it's a sign that some very big changes are in store for the advertising industry.

Japanese gaming company DeNA has announced plans to purchase Ngmoco for a cool US$400 million. This purchase sets quite a precedent as it represents one of the highest amounts ever paid for an iPhone application development firm.

DeNA sees the mobile social gaming market heating up rapidly. The company's founder and chief executive Tomoko Namba described his aggressive, forward-thinking vision to the New York Times: "The big tide in social gaming is coming, right now. We'd like to capture it and quickly become the world's No. 1 mobile gaming platform...We want to enable developers to go cross-device and to go cross-border. And we need this to happen quickly, in about the next one or two years."

Presently, DeNA runs Mobage Town, a wildly popular social gaming platform that is unique to Japan. The pricing model is interesting: the games are free but require users to create avatars that can be used to interact with each other. DeNA then sells clothes and other goodies for the avatars.

Good luck to DeNA and congratulations to Ngmoco. We're eager to see what the next chapter will bring.

[Via the New York Times]

I first saw Superbrothers' Sword and Sworcery in person back at GDC earlier this year. This past weekend, developer Capy's Nathan Vella met up with me at the IndieCade festival in Culver City, California to show off the latest build of the game. It's much farther along in development these days. While the GDC demo was more of a working prototype, Vella said the title is basically content-complete, and the creators are just polishing out the kinks at this point.

What they've created is one heck of an experience. The concentrated story that I saw at GDC has grown into a gorgeous, expanded universe for your Superbrothers-style warrior to explore and interact with, and the game plays like an interactive piece of art, with mystery and magic around every turn. It's a game that's hard to categorize; there's not much text, and what's there is pretty incoherent, with phrases like "she knew whence we had come," and a quest for a book called the Megatome. When I asked Vella what genre he considered the game to be, he said it was "inspired by old-school adventure gaming, but we call it an exploration and experience."

The basic mechanic is this: touch. Almost everything you touch in the world reacts in some way -- if you touch plants or animals, they will shake or run and hide. You can drag to move your character, or double-tap to send him around the screens. The general theme is exploration -- find caves, meet people, and learn about the world you exist in.

A little while back, I wrote about an app called Corkbin -- it helped you track and share the various wines that you tasted while out and about. A few commenters asked for something similar for beer, and onTap is exactly that. It's made by the same company, and it serves the same purpose. When trying out a brand new beer (or an old favorite), you can snap a picture of it with your iPhone, log it, and even share it across Facebook or Twitter.

Just for fun, the app also has a dictionary of some beer terms, and you can also browse and view brews from around your area in order to see what people are drinking nearby. Just like Corkbin, it's a solid app, especially for those of us who enjoy a tasty beverage and trying some new variants from time to time.

Plus, you know, it's completely free. It's a great app to help you get the most out of exploring your favorite beers around town.

Via Twitter, MuscleNerd announced the release of the Chronic Dev Team's iOS4 jailbreaking tool, greenpois0n. This follows some controversy in the jailbreaking community, after George "geohot" Hotz released his limera1in jailbreak tool one day before greenpois0n was due to be released, using a different hole in Apple's security.

Chronic Team members chose to halt the release of their own tool and change it to use the security hole Hotz discovered. This way, they still have the "SHAtter" exploit they previously discovered and initially based greenpois0n on. There's a chance that when Apple closes Hotz's exploit, SHAtter will still work.

At present, the tool is Windows-only; the "Mac" download button on the page doesn't go anywhere. The team promises a release "soon" for OS X and Linux. Currently, it supports iPhone 3GS/4, iPod Touch 3G and 4G, and the iPad. Apple TV 2G and iPod Touch 2G support will come in a later release.

Our intrepid Kiwi reporter, Chris Rawson, recently told TUAW readers about a mysterious bug that hit his iPhone on the morning of September 25th when New Zealand switched to Daylight Saving Time. iOS users in Australian time zones that follow Daylight Saving Time had a similarly rude awakening on the morning of October 3rd when recurring alarms in the iOS Alarm Clock app went off an hour early.

What's happening? There's a bug in the Alarm Clock app that has been affecting users when a change to DST occurs. Other iOS users in Queensland, Austraila also reported that their alarm clocks adjusted to the Daylight Saving Time change on the 3rd, despite the fact that they're not in a DST zone.

There are workarounds available -- users can set the alarm for one hour after the time they actually want to wake up, or they can turn off the recurring alarm and set a non-recurring alarm every day.

Apple Australia apparently told ZDNet Australian Edition that they were aware of the problem and have developed a fix that will be included as part of an upcoming software update. It's expected that the update will appear before daylight saving time changes happen in other parts of the world, including November 6th (USA) and October 30th (EU). That means that we may see another interim iOS release prior to the expected arrival of iOS 4.2 in late November.

[via AppleInsider]