It is safer to play the "wait and one up" game but the publicity goes to the innovator.

Right now the innovation and engineering is coming out of Cupertino so they garner all of the attention. Everyone else, in the table/mobile market, is playing wait and see whats good and copy/one up.

If the people your are teaching this to don't already know programming and logic and your are dead set on electronic games then your are going to need a drag and drop style interface for your coding task. You are also going to need integrated physics,some sort of simple ai manipulation, integrated controller input management, some sort of asset management pipeline. This will allow them to focus on the actual design and iterate on a design. I suggest a 2 course approach. 1st course is real game design research and instruction. This course would be about brainstorming, studying what makes certain types of games fun, categorizing games etc. Rulesets, writing, game mechanics, level design etc. This class is not tied to programming it is about designing a game. During this course you may want to prime the pump by having them do independent research on programming languages and game engines in preperation for course 2 but the course it self is not about software. Course 2 is about software,scale and development and trade offs etc that are associated to electronic game development. Its about frustration and things not working right the first time. it is about iteration on a product. The finished project should come out of this process. You will have provide some sort of game engine, project control/versioning system for assets and such. You will be pushing whoever takes these classes because the task of developing games is multi discipline. The part that makes the project a game is going to be off discipline for your art majors. Good luck

mod +1

Most of black America thought the whole thing was ridiculous. I remember my parents sadly chuckling about the idiocy and self righteous nature of the educators suggesting that the slang of that area be given a name. A really racist name at that!! The fact that we are still talking about it in 2010 is even more ridiculous.

Normally I would be all over trying to persuade everyone else not to give in to this ignorance. I'm gonna let this one ride as I think its more entertaining to read the low score, low brow, flat out racist comments that are sure to flutter around this topic like moths to fire.

This is a great point. Non developers probably wont spend the time to make a good app and developers wont want to use the tool if it is too limiting. Maybe for high school programming courses or other small hobby task it will be great but anyone wanting to offer real high production apps will be using the android api, java and eclipse to do development. When it comes down to it Google will do more damage to 3rd party developers on there own platform than to Apple with this.

Regardless of our opinion of them as a company, this is a smart move. Backwards compatibility would add "rocks to the rucksack". If they are going to compete in the mobile market a lot of the dogma they have stuck by will have to fall away.

On the short its an api and not for general user consumption.

The fact that non developers are even talking about this is a problematic symptom of our industry's current overexposure with respect libraries, OSs, dev tools etc....

We have invited the media and everyone else to our internal conflict over things that they should really have no interest in with our current infighting and ranting about mobile tech and the mobile market.

Its are fault that non technical people are commenting on whether or not apis are "user friendly". We invited the world to our dysfunction.

Of course HTML5 is not ready to take over for the myriad of niches that flash fills on the web "right now". The big push is to get developer mindset looking and leaning in the HTML5 direction. Tools need to be written, demos need to inspire, and books need to be written. None of will happen really until a real buzz is generated. The buzz is building, but associated more to Flash controversy than HTML 5 technical merit. We need some good solid analogous material to compare and contrast these technologies.

The more I read and talk to people (developers other than myself) about this issue the more I am beginning to realize that the outrage is more from companies who develop content for other larger companies than from developers. Most developers realize that they will have to learn new technologies, APIs, languages, paradigms, etc in there professional careers. In fact most developers expect things to change. From C to C++, Win32/MFC to .NET, Carbon to Cocoa (the list could go on) developers have been updating and reinventing themselves constantly to maintain viability.

I think the outrage and expectation is coming from the media design and development companies used by large commercial companies to create web and kiosk applications. They do not want to spend the dollars to train there current staff on the new technologies and do not want to hire the talent necessary to move forward in the new platform ecosystem. They want the current set of technical expertise they have to remain eternally viable. Flash is the crutch that many of these types of companies lean on. It allows them the biggest bang for there buck and reduces the risk to them. These companies have nice work flows set up around flash and a huge set of already written action script code on which the can leverage new product on regardless of platform quickly.

I think, the complaining and outrage will continue for the near future as these companies reorganize and rebuild there cpodebases to leverage the new technologies and platforms.

Bingo!! So many people throw this issue around like it is an emotional or philosophical thing between Adobe, Apple and M$.

The point is that Flash (even before Adobe bought it) eroded OS specific (lock in) software sales in every domain there was a flash solution floating around. The technology allows commoditization of hardware/OS. IMHO, if the sponsored IDE had stayed as cheap as it once was most consumer software would be written using Flash, and all big OS vendors would be beholden to it. This was the dream of the java runtime developers at one point and Flash almost realized that dream.

I think Flash as a technology would be much farther along without Adobe, controlled by a small company that was driving it to work well on all of the platforms it is deployed to.

On a side note lots of people are applauding the Google, Adobe cooperation like it is about brotherly luv and providing the user with choice. I don't buy it. Google needs a differentiating factor and having flash support is a big one. Google doesn't care about online store revenue and is not courting developers in the same way as Apple. There business model is different and doesn't depend on those things. They will and should take advantage of the current anti Apple blog climate to emphasis this difference.

Yep. Lots of us tech heads forget that its about the users. I don't have a problem developing for iPhone or Android. I just following the money/users. I want to put products out that people outside of my peer group will use.