Posts tagged with "developers"

The Backlash Over Apple’s Subscription Service Begins

Less than a day since Apple unveiled it’s somewhat new subscription rules and unsurprisingly there is already some backlash from publishers and suggestions of possible antitrust investigations. The most prominent content provider that has spoken out so far is Rhapsody, effectively signaling that Apple’s 30% is not economically viable for them after paying music publishers and as a result will not be implementing the new subscription service and policy.

Rhapsody’s president Jon Irwin issued a statement and amongst noting that it would be “economically untenable,” he also noted that they will be “collaborating with our market peers in determining an appropriate legal and business response to this latest development.” This certainly gives the impression of possible legal action if that avenue is open to them and interestingly enough The Wall Street Journal contacted several law professors and reported that Apple’s new policy could potentially “draw antitrust scrutiny”.

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Fourth Beta Of 10.6.7 (10J855 ) Seeded To Developers

Earlier today Apple released a new developer beta of OS X 10.6.7. The build is the fourth since January, carrying number 10J855.

No known issues are reported in the seed notes, focus areas still include Mac App Store, AirPort, Bonjour, SMB and Graphics Drivers. At this point, it appears that the public release of OS X is getting closer, as Apple has been releasing new betas every week and the initial issues have been fixed and no new ones have been reported.

The third beta (10J850) was released on February 1st.

[Thanks, Bastian]

Want To Work On The Next Angry Birds? Speak Finnish? Join The Rovio Academy

Rovio reminds me of Nintendo back in the late 80’s and early 90’s: you can’t stop them. Not only did they achieve worldwide success with iOS games and consequent spin-offs (Angry Birds Seasons), they ported the franchise to a plethora of other platforms (including Sony’s PSP) and even announced a partnership with Hollywood studio Fox to create a special version of Angry Birds featuring the characters from the upcoming Rio animated film. Not to mention their own payment system, the Super Bowl, or the gaming network rumors.

Rovio is a fully-working, perfectly functional machine right now. And they need new employees. Who, this is the downside, will have to be able to speak Finnish. So if you happen to live in Finland (or know how to speak the language for some reason) and you want to be part of the Angry Birds bandwagon by, you know, joining the team, you should take a look at Rovio’s latest initiative, the Rovio Academy.

Game developers who speak Finnish and have C++ experience can take part in the six month training and recruitment program organized by Rovio Mobile, Saranen Consulting, and the Finnish Employment and Economic Administration.

Our goal is to take ten new talents on board, provide them with training by experienced experts from the industry, and hire all trainees as game programmers at Rovio. The program consists of altogether 26 training days; both theoretical teaching, guided on-the-job learning and on-the-job training. The application period lasts until February 20th, and the training begins at the beginning of April 2011,” explained Rovio Mobile.

Sounds interesting to you? Head over the official website, and try to become the next Angry Birds developer. [iPadevice via FindMySoft]

Developers: Xcode 4 Will Drop Support for 10.5 SDK

A notable change in the Xcode 4 GM seed Apple released last week is the lack of support for OS X 10.5 SDK, Leopard. Several developers on Twitter and Apple’s Discussion Boards have noted that the latest release doesn’t come with the 10.5 SDK installed by default, and even though it appears that it can be enabled with a Terminal hack, an Apple engineer confirmed on Apple Discussions that Xcode 4 final won’t support building apps for 10.5:

Xcode 4 does not support building for Mac OS X 10.5. If you want to build for Mac OS X 10.5 (obviously a valid thing to want to do), you need to keep a copy of Xcode 3 around. For example installing a copy of the latest version of Xcode 3 into “/Xcode3”.

The 10.5 SDK is still included in the Xcode 4 Preview 6 Apple seeded in January. Many developers who still need to build apps for 10.5 Leopard will likely keep Preview 6 or Xcode 3 on their computers in a different location, but admittedly Apple’s move to drop the 10.5 SDK within Xcode makes sense considering we’ll soon move forward to OS X Lion.

Xcode 4 development seems to be moving steadily with new developer builds released every few weeks, so we guess it’s possible that we’ll see the suite becoming available before the WWDC in June.

Developers: You Can Now Generate Promo Codes for Mac Apps

An update in iTunes Connect shows that developers can now generate promo codes for apps sold in the Mac App Store:

You can now generate promo codes for your Mac apps in iTunes Connect. These promo codes can be redeemed in any Mac App Store worldwide. For each version of your app, you can request up to 50 promo codes.

Up until today, Apple didn’t allow developers to generate promo codes for Mac apps. The also-updated iTunes Connect Developer guide further explains:

Promo codes can now be generated for Mac OS X apps and redeemed through any Mac App Store internationally.

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Apple Releases Xcode 4 GM

Apple just released a GM seed of Xcode 4. It’s available now in the iOS and Mac dev centers. The release of the GM seed means the final version of Xcode 4 is nearing completion and should be available soon.

Xcode 4 is a major new version of Apple’s development suite which sports lots of new features and a new single-windowed UI. The first version of Xcode 4 preview was released during the WWDC in June, the second build was seeded in late July, Preview 3 was made available on September 2, Preview 4 was released in October. The latest developer seed, preview 6, was released on January 10.

From the release notes:

Xcode 4 GM seed can now be used to submit iOS and Mac apps to the App Store.

Xcode 4 GM seed includes the iOS SDK 4.2 and Mac OS X SDK 10.6.

The ReadMe file of the GM seed also comes with an interesting notice:

Xcode 4 requires an Intel-based Mac running Mac OS X 10.7 Lion or later.

Which we’re sure is just a mistake on the release notes.

Update: it appears that Apple has pulled the GM seed from the developer center, which shows Preview 6 again. Perhaps a bug was found at the last minute, so we guess it should be back shortly.

Update #2: the GM seed is available again in the Dev Center. The OS X 10.7 mention has been removed:

Xcode 4 requires an Intel-based Mac running Mac OS X 10.6.6 or later. See the installation notes below for additional information.

Third Build of OS X 10.6.7 Seeded to Developers

A new build of Mac OS X 10.6.7 hit the Developer Center last night, the third one since Apple started seeding 10.6.7 to developers three weeks ago. Build 10J850 mentions, again, Mac App Store, AirPort, Bonjour, SMB and Graphics Drivers as focus areas for developers to test.

The second build of 10.6.7 was released on January 25th, and it appears that Apple is quickly issuing new builds with the same focus areas and no “known issues”.

Apple Releases iOS 4.3 Beta 3

A few minutes ago Apple seeded the third beta of iOS 4.3 to developers. It’s available now in the iOS Dev Center. Build number is 8F5166b . Updated versions of the iOS SDK and Apple TV pre-release software have been released as well. The release comes after nearly two weeks after the previous beta; iOS 4.3 beta 1 was seeded to developers on January 12. iOS 4.3 is expected to introduce a rather small set of new features like AirPlay video streaming for third-party apps, HTTP live streaming statistics and full-screen iAds. In the developer betas Apple also enabled support for multitasking gestures on the iPad, although the feature won’t be part of the public release of iOS 4.3. The software update has also been rumored to carry support for the iTunes subscriptions that will power The Daily, but no references of such functionality have been found in the SDK so far.

Last week, several reports indicated that Apple is already accepting iOS 4.3-compatible apps in the App Store. We will update this story as we find out more about the new beta. Read more