Tommystorm

Steve Job’s press conference today about the iPhone Software Development Kit was to me better than I had hoped in many ways.

• Going after the Enterprise. Apple is making iPhone interoperate with Microsoft Exchange server. A huge factor in making the iPhone viable for business users.
• An awesome desktop simulator, for developing, testing, debugging iPhone apps, including an excellent performance metric tool.
• Availability of the Cocoa API.
• Excellent support for games, and alliances with Games publishers (Is iPhone going after the NDS and PSP?)
• Apple will be providing marketing, distribution and deployment services for a 30% cut for all applications, and for free, for Freeware applications, through their AppStore.

Check out Apple’s iPhone Dev Center

Freeverse software is offering a 20% discount on all of their products today only, in celebration of leap-day. To get the discount, use the coupon code leapyear when you check out.

My podcast site is now function properly in iTunes. After being broken for quite some time.

Let me tell you why. Its because of Apple’s iWeb application. I chose to use iWeb to manage my podcast because of its superior handling of media, and its “intelligence” about which media items have changed or not when doing each update to the site. Problem is, unless you use .Mac, it is pretty broken. I formerly used a WebDAV mounted partition at my web hosting provider’s site, and had iWeb just save the site to this WebDAV volume. But, as many of you know, the iTunes links to the podcast were “off.”

Short version: iWeb is awkward, unless you use .Mac

From Wired.

SAN FRANCISCO — LEGO Universe, the upcoming LEGO-branded MMO, can best be described as “LEGO Star Wars multiplied by a million,” according to Mark Hansen, the Director of Business Development for the LEGO Group.
Tentatively set for release in 2009, LEGO Universe seeks to provide gamers with “a virtual extension of the real-world LEGO” gameplay, by allowing MMO fans a chance to virtually live among each of the thousands of LEGO sets that have been created over the years.

Most impressive in this quest is LEGO’s plan to integrate fabrication of objects directly into the title.

Any structure or vehicle you may construct out of the MMOs virtual blocks, you can also export to LEGO who will allow you to purchase traditional LEGO sets that are exact replicas of what you’ve created in-game.

The biggest hurdle to LEGO in creating LEGO Universe is the challenge of transitioning a toy designed to assist people in furthering their own creativity through multi-colored bricks.
To draw an analogue to the issue they face, it’s almost a plastic brick version of what Will Wright had to do to create every title since SimCity.

According to Hansen, though, the creation system is only half of the title’s design.
The game will also include a traditional MMO-style plot which reflects the barebones ideas presented in the firm’s real-world brick sets: LEGO Knights vs Dragons, LEGO Sailors vs Pirates, and so on.
The title’s release is roughly a year off, but Hansen did reveal the fact that the game’s key trailer should hit the ‘net near the end of 2008.

Certainly it is still too early to judge the game entirely, but as long as LEGO maintains their trademark attention to detail and appeases the rabid fanbase they’ve created in the preceding 70 years, LEGO Universe could be the Wii of MMOs; It certainly bucks trends, but it does so with such confidence that players may very well adore a fresh take on the stale, overcrowded genre.

Antidepressants Work No Better Than a Placebo: “Matthew Whalley writes ‘Researchers got hold of published and unpublished data from drug companies regarding the effectiveness of the most common antidepressant drugs. Previously, when meta-analyses have been conducted on only the published data, the drugs were shown to have a clinically significant effect. However, when the unpublished data is taken into account the difference between the effects of drug and placebo becomes clinically meaningless — just a 1 or 2 point difference on a 30-point depression rating scale — except for the most severely depressed patients. Doctors do not recommend that patients come off antidepressant drugs without support, but this study is likely to lead to a rethink regarding how the drugs are licensed and prescribed.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Via Slashdot.)

New versions of the MacBook Pro have been released today. They come loaded with up to 2.6GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Penryn processors, and the MacBook Air’s trackpad which allows for multi-touch gestures. The low-end MacBook has also been upgraded. Full specs and prices after the jump.

Check out the Apple Store.

The Adobe® AIR™ runtime lets developers use proven web technologies to build rich Internet applications that deploy to the desktop and run across operating systems.

The target developer audience is those who use AJAX, Adobe Flex or Adobe Flash

This appears to be some sort of API that allows integration with IDE’s (like Dreamweaver, I guess), WebKit, ECMAScript, and SQL. A test-drive of it will show its true usefulness. Stay tuned.

Adobe describes it here.

MGTwitterEngine is a Objective-C class which lets you integrate Twitter support into your Cocoa application, by making use of the Twitter API. The entire API is covered, and appropriate data is returned as simple native Cocoa objects (NSArrays, NSDictionarys, NSStrings, NSDates and so on), for very easy integration into your own application. MGTwitterEngine is designed for Leopard, but should be just fine on Tiger too.

A neuro-headset which interprets the interaction of neurons in the brain will go on sale later this year.

“It picks up electrical activity from the brain and sends wireless signals to a computer,” said Tan Le, president of US/Australian firm Emotiv.

“It allows the user to manipulate a game or virtual environment naturally and intuitively,” she added.

The brain is made up of about 100 billion nerve cells, or neurons, which emit an electrical impulse when interacting. The headset implements a technology known as non-invasive electroencephalography (EEG) to read the neural activity.

Read the article at bbc.co.uk.

Direct download link (MacOS GUI version): Download Handbrake 0.9.2

HandBrake’s Website: here for more flavors and platforms of this release.