Microsoft released another Windows Marketplace update a few days ago, and I’m excited to share that we were part of the announcment! As you can see from the article, we are working closely with Microsoft as they get ready for launch. I thought I’d take a second to share an insider’s perspective.
Read on for my two cents on the Marketplace! [Read more…] about Windows Marketplace News
Just iPhone Art is a great new site our friends over at JAMM have launched. I’m fascinated by the incredible art people are producing on their iPhones. The JAMM team’s new site delves into this phenomenon and focuses on this cool new artisitc medium.
Definitely pop over and check it out!
If any casual game iPhone developers are listening I gotta rant a sec. Hey, guys! Show the clock! I play casual quick games when I have a few minutes to spare but don’t want to dig into anything too complex. If you hide the clock (the Status Bar if you want the technical name) it means I have to exit the application to see if my few minutes are up.
The Status Bar really doesn’t take up that much screen real estate, and it isn’t going to detract from your really sweet graphics. And don’t worry about whether this will limit how immersed in the game I get – I don’t play casual games for immersion – I play them for a quick bit of entertainment when I’ve got 5 minutes to kill.
And if for some reason you really, really, really can’t show the Status Bar, at the VERY least, save my state when I hop out to check the time. Besides being one of the HIG guidelines, it’s just good development. Trust me. If I lose my progress too many times because of a phone call or checking the time, the game isn’t going to have much of a lifespan on my device.
OK – my rant is complete. You can return to your casual gaming.
Endgadget reported that BlackBerry’s AppWorld now has 2,000 apps in it. Unfortunately, eWallet isn’t one of them. We submitted eWallet, but it turns out AppWorld won’t accept any applications that encrypt files. You got it – according to the terms of their contract, we can’t get eWallet into the BlackBerry AppWorld store.
Note – you can get eWallet for Blackberry – just not in RIM’s AppWorld. Get it directly from us here.
We definitely tried. We bent over backwards to get it in. We even had a number of protracted phone calls with RIM (with their lawyers even!)
No go. We’re locked out.
I’m not sure what the reasoning is for this. It sounds like there’s a concern about the export restrictions on the strong encryption we use. We hope it will change. But it certainly doesn’t make me want to go through a lot of trouble making more BlackBerry applications.
This isn’t how you woo developers RIM! In this market, there isn’t room for this sort of thing. Revise those guidelines!
If you’re using our free Screen Capture utility for Windows Mobile , we just released an update to it. The main goal was to bring the UI up to date with the latest version of the Windows Mobile OS. We also made a few tweaks to fix a couple bugs we found, and we gave it a new icon (woo hoo!) Yes, I know the MS Paint style icon we had before was super retro cool, but we figured it was time.
For those of you new to the application, Screen Capture is a free utility for Windows Mobile. We first built it as an internal utility back in the days when there weren’t any screen capture apps. After sending it to a couple folks for support purposes (“Can you do a screen capture of that error message?”) we found that people liked it. We decided we’d share it.
You can find the free download of Screen Capture here!
Good news! It only took three weeks (ack!) but the eWallet update is approved! The point of the update was to tweak a few things that cropped up after 3.0 was released. As you probably know, Apple is retesting every app under 3.0 so we wanted to make sure that there were no problems. Even the things we did fix are so minor I bet most folks never would have seen them (like a funky keyboard appearance where is popped up instead of slid up with animation.)
Oh – and since it will surely come up – yes, we have plans underway to include some of the new 3.0 OS features in eWallet. As some of you already know, I am not a fan of predicting release dates but suffice it to say there will be updates that embrace 3.0 in the future!
If you already own eWallet you can get it through the usual Application Upgrade process on your phone or in iTunes. If you don’t own eWallet yet, you definitely want to get a copy! It’s a fantastic application! You can check it out here.
