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I'm still in the honeymoon phase. I just discovered that I could add Phit as a widget in the Mac Dashboard and play it any old time just by touching a button. Now that's good mashup.Last night I discovered what Apple means when it talks about an "always on" policy, and again it has made me sad for the PC. On the PC, "sleeping" your system involves several seconds of the system semi-shutting down. Waking the system takes several seconds, and then you have to log back in. On my Mac, sleeping takes no time, and waking up takes no time. I close the lid of the laptop, it's asleep; I open the lid, it's awake. Why can't the PC do this?
I'm searching for a good alternative to Office 2007. Mellel and Nisus both look tolerable. We'll see.
It sounds like I'll need to use OpenGL ES as the drawing system for iPhit. Apparently it's the fastest option for games. I'm well familiar with OpenGL (I teach OpenGL at the Guildhall), so this should be a quick point of entry for me. But I'll run some performance tests early on to verify that I can get 30fps (that seems to be iPhone's max frame rate) with as many moving elements as Phit uses.
I also had a game design thought for iPhit. What if the user could tilt the iPhone in order to make all the pieces "fall" toward gravity? Obviously this would need to be something the user could enable or disable quickly—otherwise it would be too easy to screw up your game with an accidental tilt. But assuming it was controllable, it might offer a neat way to quickly shunt all the pieces off to one side of the board, or to reset the level by sliding everything up toward its starting position. Just a thought.
Labels: games, iPhone, Mac, technology
..posted at 10:24 AM
