And counting…

I will no longer be talking about Apple, Apple products, Apple technologies or technologies and standards as they related to Apple on this blog anymore, since I am now an Apple employee.

I will not be removing previous entries however, since they were written and published in the past.

The recent introduction of the iPhone SDK got me thinking about the future of Riven X. And I came to the conclusion there was no future for a slideshow on modern desktops. However, plenty of people will want some games on their iPhones, and Riven certainly would be great with that touch UI. So I’m officially announcing I’m stopping development of Riven X for Mac OS X and will be working exclusively for the iPhone. Expect daily builds in a month or so.

I hope you’re as excited as I am about this. When you solve that puzzle at 4 PM riding the bus home or being jammed in traffic, you won’t have to wait anymore! Just slide that unlock slider, punch the Riven icon and off you go on an adventure.

Blake has decided to move to Microsoft (http://yamacdev.blogspot.com/2008/04/resistance-is-futile.html). I understand his choice, after all C# has none of that square bracket non-sense. I just can’t understand how someone can tolerate Seattle after living in the bay area.

Brad Wardell published an insightful “op-ed” on the PC game market, particularly concerning how piracy has become the scapegoat to explain away disappointing sales, when the real reason is simply that if you make a product very few people can or want to buy, then you just won’t sell many of them.

Riven X 0.5 is now available. The most important new feature is the edition manager, which will allow owners of the CD edition as well as owners of the various DVD editions to use Riven X. It should be noted that optical disc swapping is not supported yet, which means that CD edition owners should do a full install for the time being. Other changes include performance improvements and a large amount of bug fixes.

There is a number of outstanding issues in this version, namely one that will badly affect single-processor machines (see bug #70. I will try to remedy this in the early 0.6 builds, which will become available through Sparkle.

Riven X 0.6 will be a more interesting releasing focusing on missing engine features, such as transitions, cursors and so forth. For detailed information, see the 0.6 milestone page.

Download Riven X 0.5.

MPQDraft 1.1 is now available. This release basically adds proper support for Mach-O PowerPC and Intel programs. The download link is available from the sidebar, or you can update via Sparkle.

Update: I initially had stated that LLVM was the future of Apple compiler technologies. This is the case in-so-far as I believe LLVM is the future of the gcc compiler backend. This is a personal blog and I’m obviously not speaking for anyone but myself.

While watching the iPhone SDK announcement video, I noticed some odd things in my beloved Xcode. Some UI elements were looking different. And indeed, the iPhone SDK includes a new version of Xcode (and many other dev tools) which may be of interest for anyone doing Mac OS X development. Some of the highlights:

• Brand-new “New Project” and “New File” dialogs. I really like them, and the new templates make more sense.
• Multi-platform support. Each platform can provide its own set of tools and SDKs. This was obviously added to support the iPhone. So the big picture now is Platforms > SDKs > Architectures.
• Preview of gcc-4.2 and llvm-gcc-4.2. I am really excited to check this two out, particularly the LLVM powered compiler, which brings to Mac OS X developers modern link-time optimization that Microsoft Visual Studio and Intel CC customers have enjoyed for many years now. LLVM is the future of gcc compiler technologies, and it’s great to start seeing that get out into a lot of people’s hands.
• Improved support for conditional build settings (AKA per-architecture build settings).

I hope to see the final version of Xcode 3.1 to be released at this year’s WWDC, if not some manner of new beta release.

Apparently, a lot of people wanted the iPhone SDK, and for the first time that I can remember in the past 10 years, developer.apple.com died. I think it’s mostly a good thing, but it sure is making programming a little bit more tedious this evening. At least there’s the built-in documentation.

DropMPQ 0.7.1 has been released. It adds support for dropping folders on DropMPQ’s icon in Finder or the Dock.

This is a relatively small but critical update for DropMPQ. The highlights are:

• Fixed a bug in MPQKit that caused invalid MPQ archives to be created on Intel Macs.
• Added support for the bzip2 compressor and updated the compression settings for zlib and ADPCM.
• Added Sparkle for easy updating.

I was also made aware that the previous archive didn’t execute on Leopard (and in fact might have simply been corrupted), so this update also resolves that particular (and somewhat embarrassing) issue.

It should be noted that if you’ve used DropMPQ previously, the import preferences will most likely be reset because the internal format has changed significantly. Speaking of which, I’ve added additional default import settings for some new file types, including ogg, mp4, mov and smk.

Download DropMPQ 0.7.1.