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.
This just in.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Hurricane Ballmer hits conference room. Scores of chairs injured and missing.
Maybe Apple will launch an attack on the console market next?! I wouldn't pout it past them, they move so quietly you don't know till it's too late! Imagine a console that is top of the line, but has all the games distributed directly to the console with Apple store, eliminating the retail and the distribution networks.
another possibility (Score:2, Interesting)
With Jobs on the sidelines, we're back to the Sculley era at Apple, where senior executives and high-level techies are hired away from competitors to make a splash in the press and foster buzz around the stealth-mode projects. And incidentally rescue some careers that may have been in trouble.
Too bad that's not what creates great products. Usually what it does is create layers of non-accountability somewhere in the clouds above where the engineers and UI designers work.
Re:Dangerous Moves (Score:4, Interesting)
Unless Apple can come out with a hardware and software solution to the parallel programming crisis
They're working on it. Check out "Grand Central" and "OpenCL".
-jcr
Re:This just in.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Already exists, more or less. It's called AppleTV. It's a console in somewhat the same way that the XBox is basically a desktop computer. All that's missing is a controller and a software update allowing game downloads from the App Store.
Re:Interesting possibilities... (Score:1, Interesting)
The iPhone is great for time killing. I use the iPod Touch, but its the same experience. If you have 15 minutes to burn sit down for a couple of rounds of online poker, play an action game or a puzzle game. The device isn't a hardcore gamer device, but then again most of the population are not hardcore gamers so maybe its good to cater to the masses. The Wii worked well and this seems to be going along the same path.
I really do think the iPhone has potential to kick ass in the games area if they add just a couple of physical buttons to the device. Sometimes you need the tactile response you get from physical buttons to play games. Also my fingers get in the way of the screen on some action games, making it nearly impossible to play them.
It wasn't designed to be a pure gaming device but with a few changes it has the power to begin dominating the market... if those changes are implemented.
Re:Interesting possibilities... (Score:5, Interesting)
Plus with the DS, PSP, etc. you can have things like spare batteries.
Re:Meh Assassin's Creed on iPhone vs DS version. (Score:1, Interesting)
That's highly unlikely. The iPod Touch/iPhone market* has a lot of downward pressure on pricing coming directly from the customer base. It's a very strange market from the many articles and sales figures I've read; it seems customers are willing to buy lots of apps but they are very price sensitive. When the store was in its first few months, companies priced products like they did for other cell phones and they simply didn't get sales.
Apple contributes to the pricing pressure, but I think it's from poor design rather than intention. The App Store is both the main retail venue and the main form of advertising most apps have, and getting on either the store's front page or a category's front page makes a tremendous difference in sales -- the difference between a total failure and a success. The main way to get on the front page is to rank in the top sales, and more expensive apps are going to tend to have fewer sales. Naturally this tend to favor lower prices. The reason why I believe this is unintentional is because Apple initially didn't even think to separate out free apps from paid apps in their list of top downloads. What's more, frankly the iTunes and App Stores are terrible at helping customers find products they want or might like.
As a point of comparison, I've read that people who organized friends and followers to get their book on the top of the sales charts for Amazon ultimately didn't get a noticeable boost from it. The difference being that Amazon's site is well-designed, with a pretty good search mechanism, good methods for browsing, a decent recommendation system, and various other goodies. On the App Store you can't even limit your search to the App Store, much less to a particular category. There's no attempt to help you find apps you might like with a recommendation system, the browsing has minimal options. It's really just crap by modern standards
*While the iPhone gets all the press, the iPod Touch unit sales are roughly two and a half times more than the iPhone's.
Re:This just in.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Generally, in order of preference I'd look at D, C# and then Java as what Objective-C should aspire to. But it'd have to change so radically why bother? If Apple insist on an obscure language with poor toolchain support D at least has the advantage of being a really well designed language, with lots of useful features.
Re:This just in.. (Score:3, Interesting)
And this is a fallacy that gets repeated a lot. Just because something is popular (computer language, video tape format, currency, etc.) doesn't mean it's good, or that it's good for you. Things become popular through a combination of factors, and dumb luck seems to be pretty high on the list. There are many cases where the "best" solution loses out to the cheaper solution that's "good enough."
Another thing to consider is what you mean by "good" (or "great" to use your wording). If you're doing government contract work and you're asked to write software, you may be forced to use ADA (or some other DOD approved language) because nothing else meets the stringent requirements of your employer. In short, nothing else is "good enough."
Arguing from popularity is a common logical fallacy. As it stands, it seems clear that the popularity of Objective C (or the lack of popularity) is due to a lack of traction with popular operating systems (i.e., Windows), and the only reason developers are even looking at Objective C now is that Apple has effectively forced iPhone developers to use Objective C -- in other words, the iPhone's popularity has forced developers to take a look (or a second look). Since there's nothing stopping developers from incorporating C and C++ code and libraries into their Objective C applications, I don't see what the big deal is?