Our new Indie Games subforum is now open for business in G&T. Go and check it out, you might land a code for a free game. If you're developing an indie game and want to post about it,
follow these directions. If you don't, he'll break your legs! Hahaha! Seriously though.
Our rules have been updated and given
their own forum. Go and look at them! They are nice, and there may be new ones that you didn't know about! Hooray for rules! Hooray for The System! Hooray for Conforming!
Apple To Developers: Fuck You
Posts
Hrm.
I would guess that the majority of the paying iTunes customers don't fit your model, McDermott. Not that your idea isn't good, because it is, and I'd be surprised if something like that didn't happen in a year or so, given enough industry support.
Unfortunately, I don't think Apple is thinking too much about the "people who buy things of which they have no idea what those things are like" niche.
I might agree, except that when I buy a track the iTunes store automatically suggests six or so random-ass songs I've often never heard before that I might also enjoy.
One would assume they expect me to, you know, preview those tracks to determine if I like them.
And it would be silly to assume that I've heard all of them previously.
It would surprise me if they didn't create some sort of analogue to pandora in the near future, tied into iTunes. I never used lala, so i don't really know the deal with it, but it strikes me that apple wants to have a hand in everything that is going on wrt music and the internet. It would shock me if they bought lala just to shut it down. Either they're integrating the functionality or they just decided it wasn't really viable.
Well, if your Genius is anything like mine, you wouldn't like those songs anyway.
Seriously, my Genius is retarded.
"I see that you're a big fan of Natalie Merchant, Cowboy Junkies, and Tom Waites. Might I suggest some Korn or Lady Gaga?"
Thought this was relevant.
It doesn't sell music, but I preview music on Grooveshark
I never use itunes, much less buy anything from them, but I went ahead and updated to the new version because I heard people say great things about Genius. So far, my experience has been that it's total crap.
Genius works really well with
1) Music you bought through iTunes
2) Music you spent a great deal of time tagging like the music from iTunes.
Outside of that, it is kind of rubbish.
After tagging my shit completely, I became happy with its performance... but that is a process I do not expect most people want to do.
Once you get used to it, it's hard to go back. For example it's useful when you hear some music from someone and want to listen to the rest of their stuff and pick out the songs/albums you like. Or if you're buying music from a movie soundtrack and don't really know which tracks have all the good stuff in them. 30 seconds doesn't give you a very accurate picture of what the song is like.
There may be other ways to get song previews but it's a pain to find the same song twice on two different services.
Anyway, I don't get the thinking behind the 30 second restriction. They think people are going to be content to listen to a song once, enjoy it, then never hear it again?
Good to see they're looking into it.
Gee, who would have thunk it? The government might see Apple's move as potentially anti-competitive and look to investigate?
That's how it's supposed to work. Nice to see it do.
And people said there were no grounds to do so...
No, they said there aren't grounds for a conviction. I, for one, am all for an investigation.
Actually the fact is that the FTC doesn't have authority over the financial sector because that part of the economy has its own specific Federal watchdog (namely, the SEC).
It probably also has to do with Apple's marketshare, and the relative importance of a cellphone compared to a video game in day-to-day life.
The importance of the market doesn't matter as far as competition law goes, and the only way the marketshare matters is if they're doing shady things to gain that marketshare (like price fixing), as opposed to offering a good, popular product.
An inquiry isn't a big deal, and as big as they've gotten in the cell phone market it's probably inevitable, I'd be very surprised if charges were actually brought.
Well, you really only have to have Artist/Album/Track (or just Artist/Track) tags, and they need to be relatively accurate.
But yeah, once you do that it works well. Though that still depends both on how mainstream the track you're working from is, and how much music you have in your library that complements it.
Good. The sooner Flash disappears, the better.
importance matters in terms of whether or not they bother to look in to it.
it doesn't change the law, it changes the reaction
No surprise there. The reason I stopped using Opera (many years ago) was when every Flash object that loaded up crashed the whole browser. I assume it's gotten better since then, but I'm sure they'd like it to die.
Yeah, it's pretty clear that DanHibiki doesn't know what the hell he's talking about.
The fact is this: Flash has to go. Everyone knows it, but only a few companies are brave enough to actually say it. Microsoft, Apple, Opera, etc. They others... they are quite happy to ride on the shoulders of a broken, insecure, unstable platform. They can rot in hell along with Flash.
I guess that's why Jobs is the head of a giant company instead of me.
So far as my own personal experiences, it's cut from the exact same cloth as Flash, but I don't know if what I've seen was the norm or not. Nor have I ever used it on a mobile device*...just websites (which is the same as my flash experiences). The only redeeming feature to me was that it hadn't really caught on (although need to use it for netflix's instant watch on PC)
*It already runs on SymbianOS now, so far as I've heard. It also sounds like it'll be on the "Windows 7" phone.
Jobs also did a very good job of taking what is basically a derailment and turning that into the talking point. Flash isn't popular because it is a better video or game delivery mechanism. It is popular because they built a fairly good development environment that some media production sites use quite effectively. Someone linked to the webby's before. Basically, there are a slew of very well made websites. A disproportionate number of them use flash. Again, to think they do this because it is a better delivery tool is misplaced. It is the authoring that is the true gem there.
Hell, even the flash games that are done are by people that likely couldn't get as much done in another environment as quickly. To downplay that is a lie. The tactic here is to bolster the marketshare of the Apple dev kit not on its virtues, but by requiring it.
It's better than Flash and has a lot of backend integration with other microsoft products.
Silverlight
This could get interesting.
It'd be more interesting with links.
Link?
Not particularly surprising; Nintendo has been sitting pretty on the top of the handheld gaming industry for... well, pretty much ever since the Game Boy came out. Apple hasn't been making any secret of the fact that they're gunning for handheld gaming marketshare since the new iPods came out, and now they're trying to launch an Xbox Live-style gaming network.
like, instead of nintendos next competitor in the handheld space, they are the enemy of progress.