For example when you want to watch a movie, you shouldn’t have to program 6 different devices in your home to tell them what they should do when you toggle on your movie setting, your devices should have some sense of what they are capable of and how to enter a set mode. As he did in his chat in February at our San Francisco Internet of Things meetup, Kuniavsky, likened this device behavior to video games like Minecraft or Lemmings, where preset general behaviors determines how the game unfolded as opposed to rigid and specific actions. He explains all this and more in the podcast. Check it out.

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Show notes:
Host: Stacey Higginbotham

• How many connected devices will we need and how do we choose the ones we want?
• Information processing is now cheap enough that it’s just another line item to consider when building a physical product.
• What does the future of programming for the internet of things look like?

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Minecraft Number of Reported Issues by Date

The game has grown into a farming and hunting game where players spend a considerable amount of time growing and expanding their worlds: so much time, in fact, that knowing how to save and back up your worlds should become a routine part of your Minecraft gaming experience. While there are plenty of online forums, wikis and guides that can walk you through steps to set up and maintain online servers for the computer version of the game, there is not much information on how to preserver and maintain the mobile version of the game.

The following guide will outline the steps necessary to preserver older versions of Minecraft Pocket Edition for iOS that you have purchased from the Apple App Store, back up the worlds you have created when playing, and restore both prior version fo the game as well as the worlds that you created with that version of the game. Before you perform any of these steps, it is highly recommended that you backup your device to over the wire to iCloud or locally to iTunes.

Back up your app from iTunes

The apps that you have purchased from the App Store are downloaded to your Mac and stored as part of your iTunes Library in what is called an IPA file. To locate the IPA file on your Mac simply option + click on the app in iTunes and select “Show in Finder.” This will take you to the Mobile Applications folder located in your iTunes Library under at ~/iTunes Library/iTunes Music/Mobile Applications. Here you will want to copy the version of Minecraft that you may later want to restore.

Since version 0.6.0 just came out this week, it is a good idea that you make a backup copy of version 0.5.0 before you download the new version. If you have already downloaded the latest version, use Time Machine to go back and restore the previous version.  You must use the same IPA file that you downloaded from the App Store with your iTunes account, you cannot use someone else’s backed up copy.

Copy your worlds with PhoneView

PhoneView ($29.95 Mac) from ecamm, the makers of Printopia, is an application that can access your iOS devices filesystem in order to access the information stored on your device. This includes the documents that are created by each app on your device. It just so happens that for Minecraft PE, the world files are stored in a manner that is easy to back up and restore. You do not need to jailbreak your device in order to use PhoneView to back up and restore your Minecraft PE worlds.

Before you get started, make sure Minecraft is not actively running on your device. Then using PhoneView, navigate to the Minecraft PE app located under the list of apps you have installed on the device. Here you will see a folder structure that looks something like ./Documents/games/com.mojang/minecraftWorlds. Located within the folder titled MinecraftWorlds are each of the worlds you have created. Each world is stored in its own folder. You can copy all of your worlds onto your Mac by simply dragging and dropping each folder.  Be sure you copy the entire folder.

Restore your app and worlds

The restoration process is just as simple as the backup, only in reverse.  Before you can restore the prior version of an app using iTunes, you must first remove the latest version from your iTunes Library and your device. Once removed, you must shut down iTunes and copy the previous version of the app back into the same Mobile Applications folder you originally backed it up from using the Finder. Restart iTunes and you will see Minecraft PE in your list of apps once again. Now all you need to do is attach your device to your Mac and drag and drop the app from within iTunes back on to your device.

In order to restore your worlds, you will just drag and drop the backed up folders located on your Mac back onto your device using Phone View. Again you will navigate to the Minecraft PE app located under the list of apps you have installed on the device and locate the same MinecraftWorlds folder you originally copied the backed up worlds from. Then you simply drag and drop them back on to your device.

This technique does not require you to jailbreak your iOS device, and cannot be used to copy someone else’s IPA files onto your device.  It will only work with IPA files that you used your devices iTunes account to purchase.  I would not recommend mixing and matching worlds that you create in more recent versions of Minecraft, with restored backups of games from earlier versions of Minecraft. Worlds that you have created or modified in version 0.6.0 of Minecraft PE should only be accessed by version 0.6.0 and later. It is therefore a good idea to keep each backup in a folder that you can clearly identify which version of Minecraft was used to modify it.  This technique will help you keep the Minecraft PE worlds you spent so much time creating.

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For those who need reminding, Minecraft is to digital gaming as Lego is to physical gaming – a sandbox effort that lends itself as much to the demonstration of engineering prowess as it does to standard gameplay. 13th Lab, which also hails from Sweden, is an augmented reality outfit that uses a technique called simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), also employed in autonomous vehicles such as the Mars Rover.

Minecraft Reality isn’t the first attempt to bring Minecraft worlds into the real world through augmented reality, but it’s certainly the most advanced. As this video shows, Minecraft addicts can insert their creations into their environment in a pretty fixed, non-floaty way – all the way from small objects up to entire buildings:

The $1.99 app comes with some Minecraft creations preloaded, but people can upload their own for other users to see when they pass the chosen location.

Now, this isn’t just a one-off for 13th Lab. Indeed, in many ways it’s a demonstration of the company’s new Pointcloud SDK, also launched on Saturday. The SDK is free to download for any developer who wants to build this kind of AR functionality into their iOS app (Android’s on the horizon too) and, according to 13th Lab CEO Petter Ivmark, it’s a vast improvement on the previous iteration.

“Before we had a version which is pretty limited in scale and performance compared to this new one,” Ivmark told me. “We’ve taken everything up a notch, in terms of how big an area you can map. Now we can do full rooms, big areas like that. We’re working to scale this indefinitely, basically. There are a lot of valuable things you can think about if you’ve got sub-centimeter accuracy in the real world.”

The company, which also produces a Pointcloud browser for iOS, has pretty big ambitions. Ivmark talks of making a mobile device’s camera even more important than the GPS chip when it comes to navigating the world. The technology certainly must have impressed Mojang – there have been very few partnerships around Minecraft, despite the game’s extreme popularity. (One, amazingly, is with the United Nations.)

And if this tie-in can get people using augmented reality for more than just marketing-related stuff, all the better.

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If you wanted to play Minecraft and ran into this instead, you'd be very disappointed and out $1.

Browsing recent App Store releases, I came across “Minecraft – Pocket Edition,” with a version 1.0 update. Thinking it might be the update that finally brings combat and additional block types to Mojang’s free-form world creation game, I quickly clicked through — only to find a completely different app that’s obviously trying to lure customers who aren’t paying close attention.

The Minecraft – Pocket Edition released Jan. 26 is from developer Onliance, not Mojang, and despite having exactly the same name as the original, and using screenshots from the full release desktop version of the game, actually isn’t a game at all: it’s a guide or recipe list for use with the PC title (and doesn’t even really apply to the genuine Pocket Edition in its current form), but customers searching for the original would be hard-pressed to discover that at a glance.

Here’s the introductory paragraph for Onliance’s app description:

Minecraft is focused on creativity and building, allowing players to build constructions out of textured cubes in a 3D world. Gameplay in its commercial release has two principal modes: Survival, which requires players to acquire resources themselves and maintain their health and hunger; and Creative, where the player has an unlimited supply of resources, the ability to fly, and no concept of health or hunger. A third gameplay mode, named Hardcore, ratchets up the difficulty of surviving and forces the player to delete his or her world upon death. An outdated Classic version is also available for free, although it is no longer being developed. Creative Minecraft resembles Classic, but with many more features.

Before clicking through to “…More” in the iTunes page for the app, you actually see only about the first sentence of that, but the real purpose of the app is buried much deeper still. Much later on, the description does say the following, but it’s the kind of information that should be right up top, and it still doesn’t convey clearly that this title contains only supporting material, and not the game itself:

This app will help you get to know the basic building commands used within the game and help you fight off those nasty creepers!!

Not sure how this one snuck past Apple’s review process (we dropped them a line to let them know and will update with comments if we receive any), but this is a pretty bald attempt to mislead customers and profit from the success of Mojang’s innovative title. Here’s hoping the game quickly gets taken down, or at least changes its name, description and screenshots to something more representative of its actual function.

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That means Android enthusiasts and developers will have to wait for Ice Cream Sandwich, the version of Android intended to unify the platform between smartphones and tablets. The anticipated Nexus Prime should feature the updated software. But instead of a new phone introduction next week, we’re left with leaked specifications and a video demonstration of the alleged handset for now.

If the rumors hold true, the handset will have a 4.65-inch curved touchscreen display with 1280×720 resolution and be powered by a speedy dual-core chip. The specifications generally make sense to me, as the Nexus line of Google phones is meant to be a reference design to illustrate the advancement in the software. While I generally don’t place much stock in leaked videos, the one that surfaced this week appears to be the real deal, based on the look of the phone and user interface.

We’ll have to wait for the official unveiling of Ice Cream Sandwich and the Nexus Prime, but in the meantime, most Android phone owners can now play Minecraft on the go. The popular indie game with retro-graphics originally debuted for the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play, but this week it became available for all Android phones. There’s a free demo version in the Android Market and a paid version that costs $6.99. Having played Minecraft on the desktop, I find that the mobile experience is a fairly good port, even if it’s not as elaborate as the computer-based edition.

This week may have been bigger for iOS than Android, given Apple’s launch of iCloud, iOS 5 and the new iPhone 4S. Why mention these in a column devoted to Android? Because there’s room for both successful platforms, for one. More to the point, I left iOS for Android some 22 months ago.

The new iPhone 4S let down some but generally compares well with the latest Android hardware. Even more importantly, iOS 5 addresses some of the issues I had with the platform. I’ve used the beta of iOS 5 on an iPod touch since July and find the platform to be much improved. While Android still offers much greater flexibility and has been improving in its own right, iOS 5 is well worth the look. After all, the best phone and mobile platform is the one that meets your needs, regardless of who makes it.

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Want proof? Look at Minecraft. Explaining the game can be tricky: it’s a crude 3D sandbox building game that lets you construct worlds on your own or with other players. Imagine if Doom went on a romantic date with a box of LEGO bricks and got drunk, and you might be halfway there. It runs in the browser, and is incredibly collaborative, addictive and expansive — with people building all kinds of crazy stuff inside the game.

It’s become an underground hit, despite the fact that it’s largely the work of a single Swedish programmer, Markus “Notch” Persson, and still being officially in beta (the first full version will be out in November). In fact, “hit” doesn’t really start to describe it.

Mojang (Persson’s compny) said the game passed 1 million sales in January, but now Notch has explained exactly how much money is coming in from his creation. In a great AMA (Ask Me Anything) thread on Reddit, he explained precisely what revenues were.

How much does he make?

“A lot. It all ends up in an account somewhere, and I try not to look at it. I get a normal salary these days for day to day stuff, but there’s a big pile somewhere.

The game sold about 800,000 copies at 9.95 euro and then so far 1 million more at 14.95 euro. PayPal takes a cut, there are taxes, and such, but it’s still a huge wad of money.”

It adds up to almost €23 million in revenues — and at today’s exchange rate that’s more than $33 million. That’s for a team that Wikipedia says now consists of eight people, and has had to deal with its share of unauthorized copying. That’s serious stuff, and makes Mojang one of the most efficient companies in the world — more profitable per employee than the usual leading contenders, Nintendo and Goldman Sachs.

If you’re interested in his outlook on things, it’s worth reading the rest of the thread.

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