Code in the beta software makes reference to an iPad 2.4, which follows the coding convention by which Apple refers to its products but isn’t yet represented by a shipping device. It could be the Sprint iPad some have suggested is on the way, says 9t05Mac, which also holds that if it is a dedicated Sprint device, it might support WiMAX. The code also references an iPad 3.3, which joins existing references to an iPad 3.1 and iPad 3.2, all of which are thought to refer to Apple’s next-gen tablet, reportedly planned for release early next year.

Other new products suggested in the code include a new Apple TV, referenced as J33, and a new iPhone, code-named iPhone 5.1. The iPhone 5 has been rumored for release next year, but the inclusion of it in Apple code means it’s almost definitely being tested internally with this latest software update.

Hints in the code are only one side of the iOS 5.1 coin. There are also a couple of relatively small but very practical changes in how the iPad manages network data and power for those who fear battery-busting drain from certain services. There is now a switch to control whether or not iTunes Match is allowed to use cellular data to do its download and streaming thing, which is a welcome addition for folks on a limited data plan.

There is also a new indicator for location services use. It’s an outlined version of the little purple arrow that appears next to items in your list of apps under the Location Services settings screen (or in your status bar) to show an app that is using a geofence. A geofence is what Reminders uses to make location-aware to-dos work, and it uses less power than an app that is currently actively using your location information. It makes the location services notification system slightly more complicated, but it should help users better predict how long their batteries will last as well as be more aware of exactly what data their phone is using at any given time.

Finally, there is a new voice dictation feature that developers will be able to take advantage of, which seems to allow them to code responses to recognized phrases. So, basically, it looks like apps might be able to have very basic and preprogrammed “conversations” with users under iOS 5.1, as long as everyone sticks to the script.

There doesn’t appear to be any reference to additional voice command options with Siri that would allow you to do things like turn off Wi-Fi, as was rumored for iOS 5.1 earlier in the month. Still, it’s early days yet for the beta, so we’re not counting anything out completely.

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The Tech Talk World Tour 2011 will take place in nine cities in seven countries, starting in November and ending in January. Anyone registered as an iOS developer through Apple’s official Developer Program can attend the events, but space is limited and priority will be given to developers who actually have an app listed for sale in the App Store. Interest will no doubt be high, considering how much more quickly Apple’s annual Worldwide Developer’s Conference has sold out in recent years.

Developers who are interested can register via Apple’s official Tech Talk page at its developer site. The agenda for the one-day event has already been posted at the site, too, and is available for download as a PDF, too. Since the event is focused on iOS 5, topics include using iCloud storage, AirPlay, turn-based gaming in Game Center, and others related to feature additions made to the mobile OS in the new update.

Here’s a list of when and where the Tech Talks will take place:

• Berlin, Germany – Nov. 2, Maritim ProArte Hotel Berlin
• London, U.K. — Nov. 7, Kings Place
• Rome, Italy – Nov. 9, Rome Marriott Park Hotel
• Beijing, China – Dec. 5, Renaissance Beijing Capital Hotel
• Seoul, South Korea – Dec. 8, Kintex
• São Paolo, Brazil – Jan. 9, Sheraton São Paulo WTC
• New York City, New York — Jan. 13, Millennium Broadway Hotel Times Square
• Seattle, Washington – Jan. 18, Hilton Seattle Airport and Conference Center
• Austin, Texas – Jan. 23, Austin Convention Center

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Jonathan “Wolf” Rentzsch has, apparently, cancelled his incredible C4 conference. In a recent blog post, Rentzsh states…

C4 was my attempt to push on the Apple community from the bottom-up.
With that background in place, I hope you can understand how Section 3.3.1 has broken my sprit.

Section 3.3.1 that he is referring to is a change made to the iPhone Developers License Agreement, declaring that any app that runs on the iPhone needs to have been originally developed using the iPhone SDK and the Objective-C, C, or C++ programming languages. What that means for developers is that they are not allowed to use Adobe’s Flash CS5 or any other language or development environment to create their apps. What that means for Apple is that it keeps complete control over its platform. What that means for consumers is less choice, and fewer apps. Then again, considering the wealth of applications available on Windows, and the general level of quality of those applications, maybe it’s not all that bad after all.

The change to Section 3.3.1 happened several weeks ago, but Rentzsch has just posted his goodbye to C4. He didn’t take this decision lightly. Rentzsch is a leader in the developer community, to see his conference go is a huge loss. If he is right or wrong is up to him to decide, but I honestly hope that other developers do not follow his lead. Apple has built a brand on solid hardware and amazing applications, on the iPhone OS and Mac OS X. To see some of the best minds abandoning or taking away from the platform, if that is indeed what Rentzsch is doing, is worrying to say the least.

I hope that if any good can come out of the loss of C4, it will be for Apple to hear their wake up call, and realize that perhaps this time they’ve taken the change a little too far.

Image courtesy of Flickr user somegeekintn

The acquisition brings together two of the most significant developers in App Store history, both of which have built their considerable reputations exclusively through their efforts with the iPhone and iPod touch. It’s a step that represents a big milestone in the life of the App Store’s maturing ecosystem.

On the surface, it doesn’t appear at this point as though the merger will affect what most App Store users see. According to ngmoco’s CEO Neil Young:

Freeverse, much like us, is comprised of true game-makers. Now with our combined forces, their titles can reach more people and the talented folks at Freeverse can keep doing what they do best, which is making great games.

Freeverse won’t undergo any changes in terms of its name, branding or management now that its owned by ngmoco. All Freeverse games will likely now include Plus+ network features, which allow gamers to have a more social experience akin to an Xbox live for iPhone users. Freeverse was already a partner involved in that ngmoco-started endeavor, beginning with Flick Fishing.

Even if the effects of this acquisition aren’t immediately apparent or even visible to the average consumer, that doesn’t mean this doesn’t represent a significant change in how the App Store operates. Freeverse is just the beginning for ngmoco, and a way to diversify its brand. The maker of Eliminate Pro and Touch Pets Dogs has itself acknowledged a shift towards producing primarily free-to-play games in the press release announcing the acquisition, which depend on additional purchases of in-app content to generate revenue:

Last year ngmoco added top executives from the games, platform technology and web sectors and launched its leading player network, Plus+. The company shifted its production structures to build free-to-play games.

Now it can offer more traditional single-purchase games via Freeverse to get the best of both worlds while establishing strong, coherent brand identity. It will also quite easily be able to adopt and implement one model over the other if either one becomes much more obviously profitable or preferable to consumers.

Mergers and acquisitions will help smaller studios like ngmoco that made their name on the App Store go toe-to-toe with big production studios like EA Mobile and Gameloft, which were established players long before Apple’s mobile gaming device lineup ever existed. It’s good news for App Store shoppers, since ngmoco has been nothing but innovative to date and should now be better able to continue bringing quality titles to market.

But it’s also a sign that the tumultuous, super-heated forge that was the App Store in its inception is cooling, and that the landscape is taking on a much more static guise. A status quo is asserting itself, and with that, a definite aristocracy of content providers that will become harder and harder to knock off their perches. Games will become more less varied and surprising, but quality will improve.

I hesitate to comment on whether or not this is ultimately a good thing for iPhone users, but I think it is. As with any new market, the frontier days are fun, but maturity and establishment brings with it more focused efforts at improving quality and lowering cost for consumers. It’s time the App Store started getting much better at what it does well, even if some innovation is lost in the bargain.

Related GigaOM Pro Research: Is There Any Demand For a True Gaming Phone?

But as the Philosopher Jagger so wisely put it, “You can’t always get what you want.” And, as someone else once quipped, “If you can’t beat ‘em, join, ‘em.” To that end, Apple is advertising a job opening for a “Game/Media Software Engineer.” Based at its Cupertino hive mind headquarters, it’s a full-time position, and it sounds like Apple is taking it really very seriously;

The interactive media group is looking for a skilled software engineer who wants to work as part of a small highly motivated team to work on interactive multimedia experiences on the iPhone and iPod touch.

OK, sounds like gaming, right? I mean, sure, it could be the start of iLife for iPhone, but I doubt that. I suspect this is more likely the beginning of some home-grown games. It has done it before (it’s just, no one cared).

The position on the team is to help design and implement interactive multimedia experiences on the iPhone and iPod touch. The position also requires a creative thinker who can contribute and comment on the design process as well as being flexible enough to aid in all aspects of production such as asset management and able to work to a deadline.

Yeah, definitely sounds like gaming. What other medium is best described as “interactive multimedia?” (Don’t answer that, I know there are loads of genres, I’m just being glib, mmkay?)

The posting adds that applicants must have strong C / C++ / Objective-C skills, while an iPhone development background “is preferred.” In addition, Apple requires its shiny new game interactive multimedia code-monkey to have at least three years of videogame development experience, which includes having shipped “…at least one AAA title.”

So the question now is…why now? It was pretty obvious in the months following the launch of the App Store that games were the hot favorite of pretty much every iPhone/iPod touch owner. (Well, Games and Fart Apps. I once sat in a room drinking beer with some nerdy buddies and one of them started showing off his fart apps. No more than ten minutes later we had purchased and installed half a dozen such apps each. It seemed like such a good idea at the time. Yes, I’m ashamed.)

Unlike Fart Apps, public demand for games has a habit of persisting. (Insert Fart-App-related “bad smell” joke here.) So, if Games are here to stay, might as well get in on it, right Apple? At the very least, there’s money to be made.

More Than Just the Money

Of course, there’s another possibility here. Much has been said of the rumored iTablet and the challenges of making iPhone OS applications “scalable” — that is, adapted to run on the tablet’s much larger, higher-resolution screen. Assuming the iTablet also takes advantage of a custom chip architecture (courtesy of Apple’s purchase of PA Semi) we have a unique hardware platform in the pipeline. And when Apple has something new to show-off, there’s a very strictly observed custom to keep in mind…

When Microsoft shows off a new technology, it traditionally does so with the help of a hardware partner. On stage during a keynote, Ozzie will say something like “We’ve worked closely with HP for ten thousand years and here’s their President of Keynote Demos to show off the new widget…” So then some exec in a shirt and tie comes on stage and fumbles around on a PC for 15 minutes talking about “platform integration” and “line-of-business opportunity” or, whatever.

When Apple shows off a new technology, it traditionally takes all the credit for it, from inception to execution and every step in between. After Steve wows us with a 50 foot tall, all-graphics slideshow, Scott Forstall introduces a jeans-and-tshirt-wearing execu-dude, “We are so proud of this amazing brilliant incredible new widget… so we gave it to EA’s developers to play with for only six seconds and they produced this new game they’re gonna demo now…”

Showmanship differences aside, the point here is that Microsoft never tells us how it should be done. Apple, on the other hand, always does.

So perhaps (in the context of taking advantage of the potential offered by an entirely new platform) this job posting makes perfect sense; whether it likes it or not, the iPhone/iPod touch have demonstrated that gaming is an important part of today’s mobile lifestyle. Making them work properly on the tablet will be a new challenge, and one Apple will be keen to demonstrate from day one. If it is going to stick to the Apple tradition of showing everyone “how it’s done,” it makes sense it will want to develop a demo in-house.

If you fancy applying, you can read the posting right here. I wonder if Joe Hewitt should consider applying, y’know, just for giggles?

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ngmoco’s Plus+

The company who dazzled your iPhone with hits like Rolando, Rolando 2, Topple (my favorite) and others, recently introduced their service called Plus+. This service allows users to challenge your friends on the network (or via Twitter) and track awards and top scores on leaderboards.

For more information, check out Darrell’s review of the service. From what I have been able to find, the Plus+ service is not open to outside developers at this time.

OpenFeint

If you are a fan of Aurora Feint, you’ve likely heard of their social gaming service called OpenFeint. This service allows users to interact similarly to Plus+, but is based around a concept they call “social discovery.” Some unique features to OpenFeint-enabled games include chat rooms for more open social discussion, the ability to see what other OpenFeint-enabled games your friends might be playing (and buy them from within the app), and the largest user base of games supporting its service, with over 100 games based on OpenFeint.

For developers, if you’re interested in integrating OpenFeint into your next masterpiece, its SDK is free to try and is available here. The size of your user base, or if an app is paid vs. free, determines the cost per user for developers to integrate OpenFeint’s service into their applications.

Scoreloop

Another service to enter this market is Scoreloop, a company and service formed by previous Apple and NeXT employees. Scoreloop is based around the simple objectives of global high scores and player challenges. Much like the other services, it also features integration with social networks such as Facebook, and allows for custom avatars and personalized profiles for tracking records and high scores. Scoreloop’s “economy” is based around coins, which helps to provide a unified scoring system between games, allowing users to maintain their collection of coins and gain or lose more via challenging other players.

While perhaps not as fully featured as other services, like OpenFeint, Scoreloop is, however, the first to announce that it is working to release its service on other devices, such as the Android platform. With a larger target market and a cheaper cost of entry for developers, Scoreloop could easily become more popular than OpenFeint (not to mention it’s user interface is more customizable to fit your application). For developers interested in Scoreloop, check out their free SDK here. Bug Landing, by the Scoreloop developers, is also a free application that features integration with this service.

Will one rise above the rest?

As Twitter became popular, we saw a plethora of competitors enter the market, from Plurk to Jaiku to Pownce. At the moment, a similar effect is starting to happen among these social networking services. Where on the console platform, each manufacturer has produced their own service, Apple has yet to bring any sort of unified service to its users. Since we all have an Apple ID for iTunes, Apple could easily integrate a beautiful solution so you can keep one central list of your gaming friends, awards and achievements.

Will Apple continue to stand by and allow multiple social gaming network services to evolve on the iPhone platform, or will they step in to offer their own service?

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In this week’s enlightening installment of the App Developer Diary, I pitch my game concept to the coders, preach the gospel of the Game Bible and muse upon the possibility of the project imploding.

Straight after submitting last week’s App Developer Diary, I packed up my MacBook Pro and headed down to Nolla, a local bar and Scandinavian restaurant. I was to meet with Markus, one of the project’s coders, and pitch my game concept to him.

Hailing from Finland, Markus Piipari is one of the three coders who invited me on board to make the game. Together, with his brother Matias and Benjamin Schuster-Böckler, the trio formed Pear Computers, a dev studio specializing in mobile development.

When I arrived at Nolla, Markus was hunched over his MacBook (one of the old white models, which was sealed, I noted, in a scruffy faux-leather hard cover). He glanced up, headphones in ear, and although he acknowledged me with a quick nod, had that glazed look of somebody whose mind is elsewhere.

The pitch process is a fundamental component of having your idea become a reality. It’s the first hurdle, as not only should it be a clear and concise outline of your concept, it should also enthuse the rest of the team. As they say in the industry, you need your team’s buy-in — if the team hasn’t bought in to the concept from the very start, then the project is almost certainly doomed to failure.

I was already nervous enough, pitching a concept that I believed in so firmly, and yet Markus seemed to want to make me sweat more than a chubby man in a Finnish sauna. Perhaps this was a Scandinavian tactic to pile on the pressure and make pitching an even more tense affair? Or maybe Markus was living up to the stereotype of a hardcore programmer: King of the Code, cold and focused.

Setting Up My Pitch

Markus uttered a few words in Finnish, clicked around on his MacBook, and the glazed look dissolved into a warm smile. He wasn’t cold or emotionless, he was just chatting to his brother, Matias, on Skype. And now he was back in the room, ushering me to sit down, already offering me a steaming glass of black coffee — a staple beverage for Finns throughout the year.

Awkwardness over, I booted up my MacBook Pro and opened Apple’s Keynote. Rather than bewilder Markus with the entire game design in one go, I’d prepared a short Steve Jobs-style presentation, explaining the multiplayer component of my game concept. The game was to be a multiplayer bat-and-ball game, featuring novel physics-based power-ups for an added twist.

The images that I’d prepared were mockups of the game screen, featuring arrows and captions pointing to the most important elements — describing the game-flow, control mechanic and graphical style. Markus loved the concept and insisted on immediately contacting Matias and Benjamin to enthusiastically pitch the idea to his team. The coders were on board; I had buy-in. Boom!

The Gospel of Games

With the team bought into the concept, the next step for me would be to produce what’s known as a GDD, a Game Design Document. This document is sometimes referred to as a Game Bible as, once written, it’s the point of reference for every single detail within the game.

Produced during the pre-production phase of a project, the GDD is a key asset during the game’s actual production. It provides guidelines for gameplay, user interface and menu flow, scoring and game rules. It will even include the game’s story, characters and location. Essentially, every detail of the game, no matter how seemingly inconsequential, is mapped out in this document before starting production.

The GDD defines the features and scope of the project; ideally, once production has begun, the GDD won’t change and will serve as a blueprint for the game’s development. Games being what they are — entire populated virtual worlds with their own distinct rules — they are particularly susceptible to feature creep. This project management issue occurs when new features creep in to the product design during the production phase — it drags out development, costing both time and money.

Feeling Doubtful

Over the past few days, since my meeting with Markus, my thoughts have been a flurry of game-related ideas, ready to throw in to the GDD before we begin production. It’s really happening and it’s so exciting to be part of the process. The team — Markus, Matias and Benjamin — are passionate about coding, so accomplished in their abilities, I feel lucky to be working with them.

However, my mind keeps returning to one question: Will this app really make it the App Store? It’s an exciting project indeed, but it’s such a massive undertaking and all the more intense because I’m documenting it in public, right here. It seems like an irrational doubt, but, we could be setting ourselves up for a big fall.

Gomi is a forthcoming iPhone game that blends Katamari Damacy with Mario Galaxy, rolling a recycling blob creature around tiny planets to clean up the trash. Based on the preview videos, the game looks fantastic, yet its release has been delayed for several months now.

My worry is that if one element goes awry (we lose a coder, the game mechanic isn’t fun, the scope is unrealistic, our project planning is off) we could end up delaying, or worse, shutting down the project. Everything seems to have run smoothly so far, but once we get into the nitty gritty of pre-production, I wonder if that will still be the case.

Next time: Marvel at the visual delights as I unveil my conceptual character artwork, delve in to the details of gameplay mechanics and discover what happens when a hardcore coder disagrees with a journalist-cum-designer. It’s all in the next thrilling installment of TheAppleBlog’s App Developer Diary.

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Following closely on the official release of iPhone OS 3.0, Apple has seeded a developer build of version 3.1, build 7C97D, along with the SDK.

The point release appears to be more than bug fixes, too. A number of sites, including Gizmodo, are reporting features like:

• Faster boot time
• Bluetooth voice control
• Access to video editing through APIs for third-party developers
• Non-destructive editing of video by allowing saving of copies
• Fraud Protection, or phishing warnings, as an option in preferences for Safari

This discussion at MacRumors also has an interesting list of new features:

• A carrier selection preference, though apparently not for AT&T customers
• An MMS option, though again this does not apply to AT&T customers yet
• Saving video sent in e-mail to the camera roll
• Direct copying and pasting in the address book, no need to select edit first
• Copy and paste phone numbers to and from the phone keypad
• Canceling text messages as they are sent
• Choose picture size/quality for MMS video, where MMS is an option

As for fixes, the biggest problem, so far, relates to hardware of the iPhone 3GS, not the OS. Whether the new firmware helps with overheating issues has not been reported yet.

The speed at which Apple is updating the iPhone firmware is intriguing. From the final of version of 1.0 to 1.1, over two months passed, and nearly that much time from 2.0 to 2.1 and 2.1 to 2.2. Of course, this latest version of the iPhone OS is a beta, but it’s hard to imagine two more months will pass before iPhone OS 3.1 is officially released. One possible explanation might be that with the apparent early success of the Palm Pre, Apple feels the need to compete a little more aggressively. If so, bring on Windows Mobile 7.

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This is the first installment of one journalist’s diary designing a game. It is a genuine, behind-the-scenes look at what it’s like to develop an app, from conception to release, for Apple’s iPhone.

This isn’t your regular developer diary. There’ll be no talk of code and classes, no discussion of the intricacy of integers or vileness of variables. In fact, before we begin my journey into game design, I’ll take a moment to set the scene.

Late last year, I hit the 3-year mark working at a big name mobile game publisher. My grand scheme, after graduating from college — studying for a degree in “Computer & Video Games” — was to take a job at an established game studio, learn my trade, garner some valuable industry experience and then go solo. Deep down, I wanted to make the kind of games that weren’t being made enough: Katamari Damacy, Rez, Jet Set Radio Future and Vib Ribbon.

I wasn’t exactly sure what going solo entailed, but I knew it involved me ploughing my own creative furrow. More importantly, after doing the full-time thing, I also knew that my solo endeavors wouldn’t involve a regular 9-to-5: I work best during night hours, while the city sleeps, like Batman, but with less scowling and cape swishing.

Fresh from college, when many of my peers were jobless, or asking their ‘clients’ if they wanted to supersize, or, worse still, working in QA for a game developer, I landed myself a producer role at a big-name mobile publisher. In just my first year as producer, I found myself working on projects for hit Hollywood movies and my favorite comic book characters.

A New Beginning

For three years I rolled around the company, shifting job titles and launching products, hoarding experience like a demented katamari. When the time came, though, I packed up my Mac mini — the only Apple device in the office — and moved on.

And here I am now, a freelancer, doing what I love — being a creative consultant, journalist, musician. Except that in the process of working for that game publisher, disillusionment set in. I still love playing and talking about games, but those three years sitting behind the wizard’s curtain utterly dissolved my passion for creating games.

Until last week, that is, when I was approached by an iPhone development studio to get involved with their latest project. The three-man team, located in Barcelona, the UK and Finland, had developed a game engine prototype for iPhone.

Breaking Out From the Mold

The dev team’s prototype takes a traditional bat-and-ball game and injects it with physics. They need me to introduce some depth to the game’s design, though, working on everything from the gameplay mechanic and fundamental rules to artwork and sound effects.

As a game concept, though, bat and ball is a dead donkey that has been flogged, with the bat, until only dust remains and then the dust has been flogged some more, just to be sure. And then somebody set fire to the dust. A quick search for Breakout on the App Store reveals a torrent of bat-and-ball games, all reiterating the same concept.

There are some exceptions, however. Paper Breaker takes the breakout concept back to the drawing board, literally. It’s got a hand-drawn aesthetic that, although it doesn’t introduce any notable new twists on the genre, still feels good to play.

Most of the clones aren’t as imaginative as Paper Breaker, though. They seem more like thinly veiled attempts to quickly cash in at the App Store before the bubble bursts. But I’ve got an idea, something that’s going to take the traditional bat-and-ball genre and twist it into something utterly new. Now I just need to convince those clever coders to make it.

Next time: Olly pitches the concept to the coders. Is it really a new twist to an old genre? And do the coders even like his idea? Find out in the next thrilling installment of TheAppleBlog’s App Developer Diary.

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What we will see June 8, if AppleInsider’s source is to be believed, is a major developer update to Snow Leopard that will be the first release to be “feature complete,” including all interface changes and functionality additions withheld from prior builds. In other words, they’ll be able to show off a product at WWDC that will look pretty much like what consumers will be getting two months later.

Between now and then, there should be one more build, which will bring “major updates” to what we’ve already seen. Then, after the release at WWDC, we should see one more release prior to the Gold Master build in order to work out any remaining kinks.

All of this means you won’t be able to get your hands on Snow Leopard until late summer or fall of 2009, when Apple generally releases hardware updates. Which in turn means that if you’re waiting to pull the trigger on a new computer purchase, you have to be willing to wait almost 6 months. It also means that Snow Leopard will drop much closer to the projected release date of Windows 7, so we could be in for quite the OS grudge match.

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