Unreal Engine 3 To Power Four Gameloft Games In 2011 And 2012

By Graham Spencer

Gameloft has today announced that they have partnered with Epic Games to bring four games to mobile devices using Unreal Engine 3. The game engine will power two games this year and two aimed for release in 2012.

Unreal Engine 3, which was released late last year, was the game engine that powered the tech demo of Epic Citadel as well as Epic Games very succesful Infinity Blade. The Unreal Development Kit is free for developers to download and try, but if used they must pay a $99 licensing fee and a 25% royalty fee after the first $50,000 in sales.

Boot Camp Only Supports Windows 7 For New MacBook Pros

By Graham Spencer

An Apple support note released on Friday has revealed that Boot Camp will only work with Windows 7 on the new MacBook Pros that were released last week, with drivers for Windows XP and Vista not supplied.

This follows a trend that was set by the Late 2010 MacBook Air that likewise didn’t include drivers for Windows XP and Vista. It would be assumed that Apple has stopped developing Boot Camp drivers for XP and Vista and all new Macs will solely support Windows 7.

[Via ZDNet]

Lion’s Podcast Publisher Is Podcasting Made Dead Simple

By Graham Spencer

Apple has a pretty diverse set of content creation applications from the much loved iLife consumer suite of applications to the more professional packages such as Final Cut Pro and Logic Studio. In OS X Lion, they have added Podcast Publisher, it’s a really simple and handy utility that will allow anyone to quickly make an audio or video Podcast and share it with the world.

Podcast Publisher lets you create video or audio podcasts; you can either import the audio or video or choose to record it from within the app. If you choose to record from within the app it gives you the options of recording from your Mac’s iSight camera, recording a screencast or recording audio from a microphone. Once the video or audio is captured you have the basic ability to trim the audio or video.

Once an episode of the Podcast has been completed it can be exported to your desktop, iTunes library, shared through Mail or sent to a Podcast library server or remote workflow. Jump the break for some more pictures of Podcast Producer.

[Via 9to5 Mac]

Lion’s Migration Assistant Allows Set Up From A Networked PC

By Graham Spencer

Another new feature discovered in the developer preview of OS X Lion is the ability to set up a Mac from a networked Windows PC as part of the Migration Assistant utility. Traditionally the only way to set up a new Mac and import all your files and settings was to use FireWire’s Target Disk Mode and hook up the old Mac or PC to the new Mac or use a Time Machine disk.

When Apple removed the FireWire port on some of its Macs it added the ability for Migration Assistant to import from a networked Mac, but not a PC. The Migration Assistant in the developer preview of OS X 10.7 Lion now brings the ability for new Mac users to set up Lion with data and settings from an existing Windows-based PC. The only caveat being that it requires a Migration Assistant helper client to be running on the Windows machine. For developers wishing to test this out, you’ll need to download that helper client from Apple’s developer site.

[Via AppleInsider]

With Real-Time API, Instagram Goes Beyond the App Store

By Graham Spencer

Instagram yesterday released their real-time updates API which allows other developers to integrate Instagram photos, tags and locations in their own apps. The API is already in action on a number of apps including Foodspotting, Momento and Instagre.at.

Over 2000 developers signed up for access to the API and some other popular apps and services such as Flipboard and About.me will soon be adding Instagram API into their products. However at this stage the API is read-only as Instagram works to ensure a smooth implementation of the API, which was only announced earlier this month. Instagram has a demo of what the API can achieve, with a dynamic web page updating as new photos are uploaded to Instagram.

Apple Internal Document Confirms MobileMe Available Online Only

By Graham Spencer

Apple has notified its retail staff that it will no longer be producing the physical MobileMe boxes and moving sales of the product solely online. This has all but confirmed what was was reported yesterday with customers to be directed to apple.com/mobileme to purchase the product once all existing stocks of the MobileMe boxes are sold.

The question still remains whether MobileMe will soon get a major revamp and possibly become a free product.

[Via 9to5 Mac]

Apple Prepares For Retina Monitors With HiDPI Mode in OS X Lion

By Graham Spencer

Digging through the build of Mac OS X Lion that was seeded to developers yesterday, MacRumors discovered the presence of “HiDPI display modes” which suggests that Apple is planning for the possibility of Mac displays running something similar to a Retina display sometime in the near future.

Developers would, as they have done on the iPhone, provide each UI element in two sizes, one in the size they currently are and then one at twice the resolution. It would work virtually identically to how Apple implemented the Retina display for the iPhone, with the high-resolution displays using the double sized UI elements so that physically the size of the elements would stay the same.

MacRumors gives the example of a 15” MacBook Pro that has a resolution of 1440x900 that could be doubled to 2880x1800 and then use an app’s UI 2X elements and which would leave the application’s UI elements the same physical size, but with much greater detail. Apple had previously dabbled in the notion of creating OS X a resolution independent OS through a number of methods from using vector graphics to providing bitmaps for multiple screen resolutions, but none had previously eventuated.

The HiDPI mode is not turned on by default and must be done so through Lion’s Quartz debug in Xcode.

[Via MacRumors]

Bodega Update Adds Background Updating

By Graham Spencer

Bodega, the alternative Mac App ‘store’, has been updated to version 1.4 and has a new feature that allows Bodega to update apps in the background. The app has also received extensive feature and performance improvements.

The background updater works as a background daemon that will check once a week for any applications that can be updated. It utilizes the Sparkle update framework, so whilst it may not work for every app, it should work for most. Bodega does not have to be running for the daemon to check and users have the option of ignoring pending updates if they wish.

[Via MacNN]

The Daily Set To Head To Android Tablets This Spring

By Graham Spencer

Sources have told AllThingsD that News Corp’s The Daily, which is currently an iPad exclusive daily newspaper, will be heading to Android in the coming three months. Whilst it was always planned for The Daily to head to the Google operating system and propagate onto as many tablets as possible it wasn’t expected to happen at this rapid rate.

The News Corp team got some extensive help from Apple in regards to technical details and was also the pioneering app to use Apple’s new subscription service. The event in which The Daily was launched was not only supposed to include Steve Jobs, but Rupert Murdoch, News Corp CEO said at the event that “we think last year, this year, and next year will belong to the iPad.”