Apple Snags Former Xbox Exec 190
nandemoari sends along word that Apple has picked up Richard Teversham, a senior Executive from Microsoft's European Xbox operations, ending his 15 years of service to Redmond. Some press accounts assume that Teversham's role may lie in beefing up the games scene on the iPhone and iPod Touch. Forbes goes farther, opining that Apple "appears to be preparing an all-out assault on the handheld gaming market." Other reporting associates the hire with Apple's recent buildout of chip-design expertise.
Re:remember the atari lynx? (Score:5, Informative)
...and a battery life of about an hour.
Not so simple Richard this time around (Score:4, Informative)
Re:This just in.. (Score:4, Informative)
Forgetting that both iPhone and Mac can be programmed with C/C++ and OpenGL for games...
Oh, you mean like id games:
http://www.joystiq.com/2009/02/25/carmack-quake-live-on-mac-linux-high-on-my-priority-list/ [joystiq.com]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_engine [wikipedia.org] "Originally developed on NeXT computers"
Or maybe you meant http://www.stepwise.com/Articles/Business/NuclearStrike.html [stepwise.com]
There doesn't seem to be a shortage iPhone games...
Plus, Objective-C and Cocoa are Awesome(tm)
Game Gear was worse (Score:5, Informative)
The Sega GameGear was way worse, that thing would suck 6 AA batteries dry in under 30 mins.
It used to annoy my friend no end when I would be playing my Gameboy every where while he had to be in the vicinity of a power outlet and have to carry the adapter around.
Turning over a new leaf? (Score:0, Informative)
Considering Apples past history with computer games, this doesn't seem like a stable relationship. From what I've read, most games on the Mac were done almost completely by the studio and publisher with little or no support at all from Apple.
Harold Ryan (Bungie Studio): "But the chance to work on Xbox, the chance to work with a company that took the games seriously. Before that we worried that we'd get bought by someone who just wanted Mac ports or didn't have a clue."
http://www.developmag.com/interviews/95/Single-Player
John Carmack (id Software): "The truth is Steve Jobs doesn't care about games ... It's difficult to ask somebody to get behind something they don't really believe in"
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/id-softwares-john-carmack-interview
Gabe Newell (Valve Software): "we have this pattern with Apple, where we meet with them, people there go 'wow, gaming is incredibly important, we should do something with gaming.' And then we'll say, 'Okay, here are three things you could do to make that better,' and then they say 'Okay,' and then we never see them again"
http://games.kikizo.com/features/gabenewell_valve_iv_sep07_p1.asp
Re:This just in.. (Score:1, Informative)
Oh my god! Help me, I'm dying! Or did you mean the handling of it in the object's init method?
- (id) init
{
if (self = [super init])
{
}
return self;
}
I can't feel my leg! I CAN'T FEEL MY LEG!!! I admit other languages are slightly less awkward, but it's not that bad and it also happens to make some sense. The kids who don't like memory management usually have the alloc+init calls replaced by a single call.
What exactly is the language that Objective-C should aspire towards? What's the language with a great standard API, good syntax and semantics, where there's nothing questionable about it at all? I've used a bunch of languages and they're all messy, miss some easy shit, or do something horrible in the name of cleverness. Lisp is retarded for most real-world use, Ruby's main purpose is to be trendy, Python is silly from the get-go with the indentation schtick (along with other problems), C++ is a huge-ass clusterfuck, C stays low level and it still manages to get some of the big issues wrong, Haskell is niche, Java doesn't allow manual memory control and still has bugs in its base APIs that I reported eight years ago, perl is good in the sense that it provides job security because no one else will be able to read your code... So yeah, what's out there that should be held up as a paragon of programming languages and APIs both in its design and in real world use?
I don't think Objective-C is the end-all, be-all by far. It was apparently designed by hippies -- everything is open, free, dynamic, and almost nothing you do is wrong. When it is wrong you often don't know it until the program's crashed, except in the case of calling methods on NULL - or nil, as they want you to say for no apparent reason - where you might not know about a problem until much later on. I think some of the OOD and grammar is hurt by its relationship with C, though I like the interoperability of it with C. I also disdain the "hide the code, make it impossible to debug" nature of Interface Builder, but that's pretty far outside of the scope of the language itself; it's more like a crappy add-on IDE.
It's definitely personal and subjective, but I would say that the amount of things Obj-C has wrong is in the same ballpark as all the other good languages I've used. In real world use, I've yet to think "Damn, I really wish this project was written in X" and I've written hundreds of thousands of lines in Obj-C by now. Now that I'm mixing OpenGL and likely soon some assembly code in to my current project, I'm not sure what else I'd want to use if I had the chance.
Re:This just in.. (Score:1, Informative)
You just haven't drunk enough of the apple cool-ade yet... :)
I use both Visual C on PC and Object-C on my iphone, and have to say that based on C thing is a pain. I'd also take issue with the 'learn it in a day' comment - it isn't true either. Sure you can compile and write hello world in a day. But it takes a while to get used to the fact that some objects are mutable/immutable, there are some arbitrary rules as to object ownership, and then remembering to use C-isms instead of C++-isms will cause lots of little gotchas as you go.
The one thing I will argue is that trying to debug/figure out why calling cleanup on your pooled allocator crashes your app can be an exercise in amazingly painful detective work. You might 'learn it in a day' but you won't be proficient for about a week or so. It requires changing some of your thought patterns.
'Dereferencing' NULL and not crashing is an interesting *design choice*. One I've been thinking about. I don't think that it's inherently a bad choice. I'd put that fact alone down as the #1 reason why mac's don't crash 'as often' (aka in the same ways) that a win PC does. However it does link itself with interesting tradeoffs in the general way they use objects/memory.