News

Has the iPhone started WIIing on the games market?

The iPhone isn't the only mobile device around which can tell which way is up; many cameras have attitude sensors* to distinguish between portrait and landscape. But it may be the first for which games are being written to take advantage of these sensors, in a primitive sort of emulation of the Wii wand.

May Wong attended the iPhoneDevCamp last week, and produced an AP report about sixty new Safari-powered applications, including games. She wrote:

Sudoku and Tetris-like puzzles were bound to appear but the creative juices — fueled by bagels, pizza, wine and beer over the three-day event — also led to programs taking advantage of the iPhone's special features, such as its position sensor or the touch screen that responds to two fingers at once. With a game called "Tilt," players rotate the phone to control a creature who likes to eat falling leaves and butterflies.

Games weren't the top of the list, apparently. Blogger Andrew Mager (view this on a BIG display!) was most impressed with a file navigation hack [picture top, left] called "Joe’s liguid navigation hack" which, Mager says, was used by "almost 25% of all apps presented at iPhoneDevCamp."

You can get some idea of how that works on Joe Hewitt's site. On the iPhone it's rather different in appearance.

As for Mophaic, it's hard to disagree with Mager: "moPhaic is kinda useless, but it received the most attention at iPhoneDevCamp" - [see picture right] - but why? It's not because of its utility: it's just a scrolling text marquee which moves from iPhone to iPhone. "At the end of the day Sunday, the developers of moPhaic gathered everybody with an iPhone willing to participate in creating the longest iPhone marquee."

Wired thought it was cool, with "each iPhone forming a pixel, similar to the Samsung co-ordinated dance" - which you do have to watch

But Wired's blogger thought gOffice, which creates Word documents on the iPhone, was cooler. It's from Kevin Warnock - a name to watch if it's new to you. gOffice was first announced two years ago.

Not everybody was cool or hot. The keynote made it clear that the restrictions imposed on developers are resented, not to say strange. The list of "things to avoid" in developing iPhone apps, as listed by keynote presenter Chris Allen, went:

Flash

SVG (scalable vector graphics)

Java applets

plug-in installation

embedded video

custom X.509 certificates.

The complete keynote display materials that Chris Allen used can be seen here

You can do your own followup research at the iPhone Dev Camp site

*No, not that sort of Attitude!