Well… I was going to write a blog post on this before it came out, but ‘lo and behold, it came out a few minutes ago.

The Mac App Store

I’m downloading it now, but in the meantime, I’d like to just put out my own thoughts on what I think about it:

In my opinion, if it’s executed well, it might be a good idea, but knowing Apple’s philosophy, I think it might already be doomed for failure.

The concept of the Mac App Store seems pretty cool; it’s just like Steam but for everything! XD
It can provide a central hub accessible to all where any number of apps can be very easily located and downloaded. These apps can then be automatically updated as new versions come out.

Given my own experience when writing and marketing my Twitter utility, DesktopTweet, this is a totally awesome concept.
I was running around the internet trying to find Twitter related blogs and wikis that would let me post an article about DesktopTweet (On that note, nearly ALL of my traffic is coming from the official Twitter Apps wiki) in an attempt to market, and even still, I doubt I made much of an impression. Secondly, I had to write my own series of metrics and update tracking code for it so I could see what kind of people were downloading it, and so I could automatically inform them when an update came out. If my experience with the iOS Store is anything to go on, all of this stuff is provided straight from the start.

So, with that being said, I’d say the concept of the Mac App Store is totally awesome, and I may even go so far as to say it’s a potential game-changer for software on the micro-computer platform.

But, with all that being said and done, I do have a few reservations about it:

If the Mac App Store is anything like the iOS App Store, it may be doomed to failure.

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I was thinking about not writing one of these this year. They’re a bit cheesy and maybe a slight bit of an ego-trip. ^_^;
But I figured what the hell. It’s good to reflect on what you’ve done in a year and I’ll have forgotten this all by this time next year.. XD

So… without a doubt, I think 2010 has been the most awesome year of my life, thus far. ^_^

A few things I’ve done this year included:

• Volunteering at 3 separate community events (Waicon, Supanova, RFLAN) and making a pile of new mates and contacts in the process.
• Released my first iPhone app and started work on two more.
• Went to my first ever developers conference and had an absolute blast
• Went to Japan, made more friends, and saw some parts I’d never seen before (Roppongi. 3AM. XD)
• Generally, gone out and partied way more than any other year. XD

Suffice it to say, I feel like I went and got out there a bit more than any other year thus far. And enjoyed every minute of it. ^_^

To all my mates, have a very Happy New Year. All the best for 2011, and have a safe, responsible and fun time tonight. 😉

-Tim

Since 2007, I’ve been volunteering as an admin at Western Australia’s largest quarterly LAN party known as Redflag Lanfest. Our last event was about a week ago, and it was extra awesome as we had a whole cohort from the ASUS Republic of Gamers show up and provide us with hardcore CPU overclocking demonstrations, selling discounted gaming equipment, and sponsoring prizes up for grabs in competitions.

To that end, this time around, I decided to petition the other admins to let me host a Super Meat Boy competition with a few prizes up for grabs. I’ve been having so much fun with Super Meat Boy lately on both my PC and 360 that I easily figured there’d be a few other gamers out there who are doing the same. ^_^

The other admins were initially a little apprehensive. After all, SMB is still extremely new compared to the other games we run with, so it was a bit of a gamble that we weren’t just giving prizes away to one or two guys. So we opened up the competition and hoped for the best….

… and we were pleasantly surprised. About 15 people signed up.  A perfect number for a competition. ^_^

After a bit of quick thinking, I decided to set up the competition in this format: We play the last level of each chapter (The Forest through to The Rapture), and we judge people on whether they can actually get through it or not in 10 tries or less. And in the event that more than 1 person successfully makes it through, then it becomes a time trial on who can make it through the quickest.

Suffice it to say, the first condition of the competition was unnecessary; everyone was easily able to make it through all the levels alive. XD So it then came down to a pretty damn brutal time trial, with each entrant usually being able to shave a few seconds off the last. XD The comp lasted for about 2 hours, but we finally managed to whittle down the numbers to 2 winners. The people who missed out vowed revenge, and told me they want another Super Meat Boy competition next time.

Needless to say, I think the competition was a great success. It’s obvious that Super Meat Boy is here to stay. A lot of people who had never seen the game before were walking away totally sold on it and I hope they do end up picking up their own copy of it.

As for me, I plan to spend my holiday trying to finally beat it. XD

To Edward McMillen and Tommy Refenes, I say: Thanks for making such an awesome game!!

So, if you’ve been following my Twitter lately, you probably noticed a flurry of tweets involving an iPhone app I’ve been working on. I got a bit worked up into a frenzy since Apple sent me an email saying if I didn’t upload something soon, I’d lose the name. Anyway, all that is okay now, so I thought I’d just back up and actually write what it is that I’m doing here. XD

Back when Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver came out in Japan, my Japanese teacher was able to get me a copy when she went over there for a bit. One thing I noticed while playing it though, was that although the Japanese dialog itself was pretty easy to follow (it’s a kids game after all XD), trying to remember the names of all of the Pokémon and their moves and their items and stuff all in Japanese was actually fricken’ difficult. ^_^; Now, while I found some totally awesome sites online that provide all this info (Bulbapedia, Serebii, Veekun etc), I usually play Pokémon on the train, and trying to load those pages down in Safari on my iPhone is often pretty tricky and time-consuming. I got to thinking, a fully offline, mobile Pokédex app for the iPhone would be pretty darn sweet.

And so, the concept of iPokédex was born. ^_^

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Well, AUC dev/world/ 2010 is finished and I’ve finally found a bit of time to update my blog hehe. XD

So I just wanted to say, it was really awesome. I’d never attended a programmer-centric conference before and the whole experience was pretty epic.

Of some of the presentations/activities that were going on, some I attended included:

• A day long session on programming with Cocoa on OS X and iOS, starting from scratch.
• A primer to using Core Data in iOS app development
• A quick and dirty to using git and the new paradigms it introduces in contrast to earlier version control systems.
• A quick look at another university’s dedicated iPhone app, and the geo-location services it provides.
• How to program using blocks on iOS 4.
• Optimizing code to run faster on the iOS platforms.
• Tips and tricks to help develop apps in a business.

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I’m sitting in the domestic Qantas club now. 20 minutes until the gate opens so I thought I’d write a quick blog.

There’s an extremely interesting schedule lined up including a day long primer on Cocoa, a cool sounding talk on git as well as a lot of cool Apple-centric presentations in general.

Just like my trip to Japan, I’m not sure how much blog time I’ll get, but I’ll try my best to post any cool stuff I learn on Twitter.

To all the folks in Perth, enjoy the Royal Show!