4Q Interview: Gameloft – Rogue Planet

We first saw Agharta’s Rogue Planet at WWDC, but then it vanished into thin air. What was once expected to be a July release soon became a question mark, but behind the scenes, Agharta and Gameloft were getting together to make Rogue Planet all that it could be. Well now that the possibly soon to be classic turn based strategy game is soon to be released, we talked to Aurelien Kerbeci, CEO of Agharta Studios, about the game and and all the buzz around it. Enjoy the interview!
Continue reading 4Q Interview: Gameloft – Rogue Planet »

Apple Announces iPhone Winners of the Apple Design Awards

On the second night of it’s 2009 World Wide Developer Conference, Apple announced the winners of the this years Apple Design Awards. The winners are split amongst the Mac and iPhone applications submitted by their developers for the competition. Winning applications are considered to be the pinnacle of design and user experience and recognize technical excellence, innovation, and outstanding achievement. This year’s iPhone application winners along with their award descriptions are:

iPhone Developer Showcase

MLB.com At Bat 2009 version 1.0.1 from MLB.com (app info)

MLB At Bat 2009 is an innovative, highly connected app that sets a great standard for all other iPhone sports apps to follow.

At Bat 2009 is the fastest, most detailed way to follow baseball on an iPhone or iPod touch. Users can listen live to every regular and postseason game with no blackout restrictions, see real-time scores, play highlights, and stream audio of all games At Bat 2009 uses MediaPlayer for in-game video highlights, AudioToolbox for streaming audio, QuartzCore, CoreGraphics, UIKit, and Core Animation to optimize the user experience, SQLite for data caching and tracking video view history, and SystemConfiguration for reach-ability.

Postage version 1.0.1 from Rogue Sheep (app info)

Postage sets a new standard for attractiveness and ease of use in an iPhone app.

With Postage you create and send beautiful, personalized digital postcards using the built-in camera and Photo Library. Core Animation provides smooth transitions and eye-catching effects while Quartz provides high quality graphics, effects, and text display. With 3G/Edge/Wi-Fi networking, you have connectivity virtually everywhere. And you can easily select recipients of your Postage postcards with Address Book integration.

Topple 2 version 1.1 from ngmoco:) (app info)

Topple 2 is an ideal model for excellent iPhone game and game sequel design, technology adoption, performance, connectedness, and localization.

Topple 2 combines the features of multitouch and the accelerometer to create a game about stacking blocks and keeping them from toppling over. Local WiFi multiplayer mode enables game play between two players, and a challenge mode where recorded sessions can be sent to others players via email, twitter or facebook. Localized for English, French, German, Japanese, and Spanish, Topple 2 uses multiple iPhone SDK technologies including UIKit, OpenGL ES, Bonjour, CFNetwork, Multi-Touch, Accelerometer, Email, and Twitter and Facebook integration.
Continue reading Apple Announces iPhone Winners of the Apple Design Awards »

Liveblog from the 2009 WWDC Keynote

We’ll be blogging live from the 2009 WWDC Keynote (come on new iPhone!). Powered by Friendfeed, you can watch the news here, or head on over directly to our special group set up on Friendfeed: WWDC 2009 Keynote Group. If you have a Friendfeed account you can comment and join in on the conversation.

Continue reading Liveblog from the 2009 WWDC Keynote »

New iPhone Coming Monday? We’ll Report Live From the Keynote!

Come Monday morning at 10am Pacific time, Phil Schiller will hit the stage at WWDC to put and end to all of the rumors about the next iPhone. We hope so anyway. I hope that a new iPhone, or maybe multiple iPhones, will be unveiled then. We know that at least OS 3.0 will be discussed heavily.

What features will the next iPhone have? Higher resolution camera? Video capabilities? More memory? There are so many rumors that it’s hard to keep up. There have been a few very interesting and convincing looking rumors the last couple days.

We’ll also, hopefully, get some more details on OS 3.0 and it’s release date.

I’ll be at the keynote on Monday and I’ll try to tweet the major announcements to our Twitter stream (@148apps). If Twitter fails under the load, we’ll move over to our Friendfeed stream. Scratch all that. After further testing, I think the best option is going to be a special FriendFeed group, set up and ready to go with details right here.

You can still get in on our Design The Next iPhone Contest with some great prizes from Griffin Technology. The first prize is valued at an amazing $210. Hurry up though, the entries close at 9am on Monday!

This should be a good keynote!

Design The Next iPhone Contest – Enter Now!

I think we’re all expecting (and hoping) a new iPhone will be announced at the keynote presentation at WWDC in a few weeks. But the rumors as to what features that iPhone will have are all over the place.

Starting today and through the morning of the keynote, we invite you to guess what the features of the next iPhone will be. The three people with the top scores overall will win some great prizes from Griffin Technology with a total retail value of over $250!

Here’s how the contest will work. We’ve gathered a bunch of the rumors we’ve heard and read about the new iPhone and put them in a pick list and assigned points to each based on how unlikely we think each feature is. To enter the contest, you guess which ones are correct. You will get points for each correct feature you guess and lose the points listed for each incorrect feature you choose.

Read on for the full list of prizes and more on how to enter.

Continue reading Design The Next iPhone Contest – Enter Now! »

Here Come E3 and WWDC! Going? Let’s Meet Up!

The next few weeks are going to be exciting for the iPhone community. First up we have E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo in LA. This huge video game conference is where all of the great hardware and games get announced for the year. While the iPhone isn’t going to play a major role in this show, it will likely make a larger showing than any other mobile phone has in the past. We’ll be reporting from the show any fantastic things we come across.

The week following that, WWDC will be in San Francisco. This yearly developers conference hosted by Apple is where all the big iPhone news comes out. Or at least it has in the past. While rumors are mixed, we could see the release of the 3.0 OS, and maybe even a new iPhone or two. We’ll keep you posted.

148Apps will be a sponsor the the second iPhone Developers Union meet up at WWDC. The event will be held at Jillians in the Metreon on Monday night, June 8th at 7pm. For more information, see the @iPhoneDevUnion Twitter stream.

If you’re an iPhone developer, we’d love to meet up with you at either conference and see what you are working on. Just let us know what time is good for you. Send us an email or hit us up on Twitter.