Home Of Serendipity

Well I made the arduous journey to Austin, Texas for the South by South West Festival. I’ll be taking part in the interactive section, and my just take a peek at the music side of things as well.

I’ll be mostly found swanning around the conference floors, or at the Digital Mission stand, and as always, don’t be shy. Come up and say hi, and if your looking for a demonstration of some really cool iPhone/iPod development stuff, then just say so.

Of course if you really want to know what we’re up to and want to let loose some cash, then we’re open for business.

More updates from the front, as and when I get them.

I’m currently on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and my.SXSW

South by South West Interactive, or SXSWi, kicks off this Thursday 13th March for 10 days, at the Austin Convention Center in Texas. I’m heading out there for the first 6 days that cover the interactive and music festivals.

We were selected to be part of the Digital Mission from the U.K. to represent Briton in all things in the interactive arena.

My part is with our business Infurious, and promoting the mobile comic reader application to anyone who’ll listen.

I’ll post more details in the next few days.

There is a lot, as usual, speculation over what will be announced at this years MacWorld. I believe that it will have more to do with performance gains than actual products.

With Snow Leopard, no secret there, we should see gains on everyday computer usage, and as a developer and having access to Snow Leopard, this is certainly the case. Though I still wouldn’t use it as my main OS just yet. Using the graphics chips to do very fast calculations can certainly speed things up a bit.

Another, and IMO more useful, is the use of silver-zinc batteries in the laptop range. When you take your computer everywhere, getting the most out of its battery life is paramount and if news reports are anything to go by ZPower may be providing the juice for these laptops in the future. Have been reading up on ZPowers statements, and their news article in the New York Times.

The way I see it, this will be used across the range of laptops and filtering its way down to the iPods and iPhones.

The MacBook Air will get a 50-60% more battery life and still be non-replaceable, but stay the same size and weight. The MacBook will go the way of the Air and have a sealed battery compartment, eventually, though not yet. This will enable a light and longer lasting battery giving gains of 25-40% extra runtime. The McBookPro will still have a replaceable battery, but will be smaller and hence lighter. Maybe adding an extra 10-20% longer battery time. If the 17″ went to the likes of OLED displays then the increase would be more like 18-30%.

This isn’t going to be just a single product but a hugh announcement with regards to all products and with a 95% recycle rate.

As ZPower puts it: “The primary materials of ZPower batteries (i.e. silver and zinc) are fully recyclable. That means that the materials derived from recycling process are of the same quality as the materials that went into the initial creation of the battery.” Hugh+ for Apple with Greenpeace.

Still looking forward to the Apple event, even if Jobs reality distortion field isn’t on stage, I reckon his presence will still be felt.

Have managed to get this blog updated and centralised all the graphics into a single directory structure on the backbone of the internet. Now looking to get the Blue Pilot Software website brought up to date and a few redesign changes. Will need to keep this updated.

Blue Pilot Software is mainly for our comic, educational and light entertainment games. Currently only the comic stuff is up there but looking to change this soon.

The current 2 comic issues, Masked Marshal and Beatnik High, shown on the right column, are to get updated with extra colouring panels and a linking system to other comics that we will keep in a centralised location and updated each time the comic is used. This will provide helpful links to new issues and/or other applications by Blue Pilot Software.

So, first up is the Blue Pilot Software website. Once changed I’ll post and tweet the changes.

Talk again soon.

Infurious, the company I an currently one of the directors with, was entered into an All Ireland competition of emerging companies and we came runners up in our field. We didn’t actually win anything, but can look forward to a great dinner at the Ramada Hotel in Belfast and got our photos taken. Not a bad day out.

P.S. I’m the handsome one at the back

Also pictured are Paul Holden and Sarah Bearder from Datactics Ltd, one of the Seedcorn judges

So having told everyone that the new comic application Murderdrome has been sent off to Apple for evaluation, it would seem that they aren’t too happy with it.

The application was rejected on the grounds that the content was too violent. Nothing wrong with the application itself, just its content.

There isn’t much we can do here as it’s trying to tell a story, although maybe somewhat gruesome, but nothing that the like of 2000AD wouldn’t publish which gets sold the world over to many a teenage kid. We are looking at how to salvage this and get the comic application and its comic reader engine up there.

Here is a YouTube video of Paul demonstrating the comic reader and the Murderdrome comic application, enjoy.

Now that the new 3G iPhone has been released into the wild, selling over 1 million phones over the weekend, a number of the NDAs, non-disclosure agreements, have been lifted, and we are free to talk about certain aspects of the iPhone and its development.

I am in the process of implementing an educational game for the iPhone, see below, and releasing it to the AppStore on iTunes.

The AppStore is Apples way of controlling how applications are purchased and transferred to your iPhone or iPod Touch. One great advantage of this concept is that you only have one point of call for all your application needs, though does involve the habit of, “Oh look, I like that”, purchase.

Another, slightly more controversial, approach is in Apple takeing all the cash generated from the AppStore and paying the companies once per month, allowing Apple to get interest on any money generated. It does however freely publish shareware applications for, free.

Individuals or companies looking to sell their product must select from a price band and get to keep 70% on the value of their app and Apple takes 30%. This is to help cover the cost of hosting your aplication and credit card transfers. I think it’s a great deal as it helps put the smaller companies and individuals in the same league as larger companies with hugh budgets.

I’ll keep you all posted on the development

Images of my current educational game, more on this later.

This server has been running under beta mode for several months and 2 days ago I took the plunge to update it. We are now running the full Leopard Server 10.5.2. While I was at it I took the opportunity to update WordPress to the latest version and now all is working happily.

Also new with this version I’m trying out backing up the Server with Apples Time Machine and so far it seems to be doing its job.

Will be adding more Virtual Hosts on here soon using Apples wiki and blog posts. Will keep you updated.

Looking at the WWDC, World Wide Developers Conference, section on Apples website you’ll see the logo to the left of this blog post. This, according to MacWorld.com, is the first time that the conference, which is held every year, has actually sold out. I know a number of people have been holding out for a bit and may be so disappointed.

I, on the other hand, am so glad that I managed to get my ticket just shortly after they were released. I have to admit that I’m really looking forward to this, though it seems that if you want to get in and see the Steve Jobs Keynote, you will need to be there queueing from 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning. I’ll try my best.