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iPhone App Developed To Control NASA Robot 26

Posted by Soulskill from the where-do-i-download dept.
andylim writes "At EclipseCon 2010 attendees were challenged to create a robotic control system to drive a NASA-provided robot across a prototypical Mars landscape. To win the EclipseCon e4-rover Mars challenge, developers could either prove their e4 programming skills by creating the best e4-Rover client, or use an e4 client to operate the Rover through a series of tasks to collect points. Software architects Peter Friese and Heiko Behrens built an iPhone client for the EclipseCon challenge which controls the robot around NASA's Mars landscape using the iPhone's accelerometer."
Idle

Steampunk Con Mixes In More Maker Fun 50

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the rebuttal-of-disposable-culture dept.
California has once again been blessed with another steampunk convention, this time to be held in Emeryville, CA on March 12-14 as the "Nova Albion Steampunk Exhibition." This year's event promises to mix in much more of the DIY/maker flavor for a greater hands-on feel. Steampunk has been gaining much broader appeal in recent months with the continued growth of maker communities, and the many delightful varieties of music and literature. The con will feature, among other things, a 2 day track of 2-hour how-to, hands-on, and interactive workshops gear towards makers, DIY-ers, mad scientists, and evil geniuses. Of course, if you are an evil genius you probably don't need a workshop except as a gathering for potential test subjects.
Apple

Has Apple Created the Perfect Board Game Platform? 531

Posted by kdawson from the triple-word-score dept.
andylim writes "recombu.com is running an interesting piece about how Apple has created a 'Jumanji (board game) platform.' The 9.7-inch multi-touch screen is perfect for playing board games at home, and you could use Wi-Fi or 3G to play against other people when you're on your own. What would be really interesting is if you could pair the iPad with iPhones, 'Imagine a Scrabble iPad game that used iPhones as letter holders. You could hold up your iPhone so that no one else could see your letters and when you were ready to make a word on the Scrabble iPad board, you could slide them on to the board by flicking the word tiles off your iPhone.' Now that would be cool."

Comment Re:Frustrating For Developers (Score 1) 149

by LurkingAbout (#28706795) Attached to: Staying Afloat In a Sea of iPhone Apps

I can second this with some recent, hard info.

My partner and I spent the past 3 months developing an iPhone word game named Bon Mot! We are confident in it's quality and originality. Apple's review process took exactly two weeks, which meant that by the time Bon Mot! was accepted to the iTunes App Store (July 10th), it appeared on PAGE 6 of newly released word game apps (as viewed in iTunes on a computer, not on an iPhone). As best we can tell, Bon Mot! never appeared on any front page of the app store due to the volume of incoming apps (2 to 10 word games per day -- many of which were accepted more quickly than ours).

We're following all of the advice of the "get your app noticed" experts (i.e. creating demo videos on YouTube, submitting review requests to the various app review sites, and participating in every discussion we can find -- like this one). We'll see... but my sense is that the iPhone app marketplace is simply too saturated for a small-time entry to be noticed.

[Shameless Plug]: theapporchard.com

Comment Re:But give them credit where credit is due... (Score 1) 814

by LurkingAbout (#23329474) Attached to: How Microsoft Dropped the Ball With Developers
> ... nothing comes close to Visual Studio in terms of functionality, quality, and just being solid. Ha! I'm busting a gut string on this one. VC++ 2008 is hardly solid. We have to disable "browse information" just to keep it from crapping out on large builds. It doesn't support basic C99 standard headers like stdint.h. Hell, it doesn't even give me useful build progress info such as "compiled 89 out of 344 files." VC++ 2008 is as mediocre as every version of VC++ that came before it. Xcode, on the other hand, leaps ahead with each major version. Just like the OS it runs on. I work full-time in Xcode and VC++ writing cross-platform commercial apps. Xcode blows VC++ out of the water. Beyond that, finding technical info. at developer.apple.com beats the crap out of msdn.microsoft.com every time. This is as important as the tools. Like the author of the article says, developing for Windows is like suffering "a death of a thousand cuts."

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