It gives architects the freedom of a pencil and paper, with every project on one device
Revision3’s Adam Sessler visits Firaxis Games and chats with Sid Meier, Jake Solomon, and Steve Martin (among others). Firaxis is the development house behind franchises like Civilization and Pirates, and they’re bringing their 2012 hit XCOM: Enemy Unknown to iOS this year.
It’s a good interview (as usual with Sessler’s video content). I like how Firaxis has its own skunkworks to experiment with mobile games for iOS. You can watch the video below.
A clever little hack to display Plex content on an Apple TV with no jailbreak required:
Essentially, you run a program on your computer which masquerades as the Trailer app. Next, change one setting on the ATV, and you’re up and running. It took me less than 2 minutes to install and get it running. It already uses the new transcoder (which means great support for subtitles), and I suspect it’ll support myPlex soon as well.
There’s a bit of manual configuration to do with this first version of PlexConnect. You can find an official discussion board, check out the FAQ, roadmap, or grab the source code here.
A fantastic initiative by Jean MacDonald. Show your support and help fund the project.
A great follow-up by Fraser Speirs. Fraser is the co-host of the Out of School podcast, and he makes some interesting suggestions for iOS 7 and education.
Another nifty solution by Brett Terpstra:
Inspired by Evernote, I whipped up a little script to find “@reminder” tags with date parameters in nvALT notes (or any folder of text files). It can generate notifications or send HTML emails at the specified time. It’s just for fun right now, but I thought I’d put it out there to see if anyone had any ideas for it.
Brett is already working on Reminders integration, but I’m more interested in the idea of “self-hosted” Evernote-like reminders from nvALT. This is a great match for a TextExpander feature that’s not mentioned very often – date/time math macros.
An important milestone revealed by Apple to Jim Dalrymple.
Apple doesn’t usually share global iPod touch sales, but the company did detail sales numbers once: by March 2011, Apple had sold 60 million touch units. The iPod touch was first released on September 14, 2007; assuming Apple reached the 100 million milestone today, that would make for an average of 47,961 iPod touch units sold every day since launch.
Apple PR:
Apple today announced that global superstars including Justin Timberlake, Thirty Seconds to Mars, Jack Johnson and Jessie J are among the headliners at this year’s iTunes Festival in London. Running every night in September at the Roundhouse, the iTunes Festival features over 60 acts performing at the legendary venue.
The festival schedule for this year’s iTunes Festival hasn’t been posted yet, and Apple says that more details on the 30 nights of free live shows will be made available as they get closer to September. As with last year’s iTunes Festival, viewers from around the world will be able to watch live shows using iTunes, an Apple TV, or a dedicated app for iOS.
iTunes Festival used to take place in the month of July, but Apple moved it to September in 2012. Tickets will be available with a lottery system run by Apple and its media partners.
BioWare’s classic, released 10 years ago, is coming to the iPad. IGN’s Steve Watts has a review:
Knights of the Old Republic is a classic-style BioWare RPG, and still stands up remarkably well. Though its action mechanics aren’t quite as polished as those of Mass Effect and Dragon Age, the characters, setting, and infamous plot twist are as well-delivered today as ever. The iPad’s touch interface is largely an improvement over the original, save for a few reservations.
Knights of the Old Republic is widely regarded as one of the best Star Wars games ever made. IGN’s review doesn’t mention a release date, but it’s safe to assume the game should be released very soon. As Pocket-lint notes, the game is being ported to the iPad by developer Aspyr, who accidentally leaked information about it in a newsletter last week.
This is a neat idea by Second Gear: instead of the regular newsletter, they’ll be using Passbook to gradually release information about their new app.
In Italy, I’ve seen a couple of services that are starting to use Passbook. Pit Pass is the first item that I’ve added to my Passbook since its launch last year, and I’m intrigued by the prospect of more developers using it to tease upcoming apps.
Lex Friedman has a nice overview of Pit Pass at Macworld. As an aside, I’ve also found out today that Passbook files can be viewed in Mountain Lion’s Mail through a popover.