I am very excited about the app store for iphone, to me it could be the start of something huge in the way of games,
and hopefully it'll loosen microsofts grip on everything. They have been the major players for too long I say, noone uses microsoft because they want to, its always because they have to (IMO). I am not a mac fanboy i just dont like microsoft they promised an awesome operating system and totally didnt deliver. They are more interested in there quest for online domination to care about what got them where they are, because they know that they will make money from there crap operating systems regardless. sorry rant over :s to the point.

we could be on the verge of some serious homebrew games coming to the front, wether anyone likes it or not the iphone is going to get bigger and bigger just like the ipod before it and the chances for game developers like ourselves to make games that can be bought on such a large scale platform at reasonable prices, its like a dream come true

it has touchscreen and is easily as powerful as a DS for handheld games, and also tilt function roll on homebrew games i cant wait

(sorry if this doesnt belong in game programming, but topics a bit lacking in here at the moment)

This post has been edited by stayscrisp: 27 Jul, 2008 - 07:13 AM

example

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bd2jc4v0CSw

The only problem is the massive price of the iPhone, and the binding contract with the devil (AT&T) you have to make to get one.

Don't get me wrong, I don't hate Apple irrationally like some folks around here, but I think there are a lot of other things I would spend my money on before I bought an iPhone.

I think Nintendo should do something similar to Apple with this App Store thing though. They're the only mainstream console/portable maker right now that produces affordable products, and isn't trying to push a micro-payments based subscription service. I don't have a DS or a Wii, but if there was an (officially sanctioned) way to develop games for either, I would pick one up in a flash.

I would love to see Nintendo go down this route, although it seems unlikely as its DS still sells like thai prostitutes.
The Iphone is an expensive piece of kit for sure but thats not an issue to some people and there the people who buy a lot of games, developing for an iphone without owning one is entirely possible as some kind of emulation will be available (hopefully bundled with the SDK)

Opening up to home brew shouldn't be considered a "last ditch attempt".

Nintendo would have a lot less trouble going after mod chip manufacturers if they could point and say "Hey look, he's definitely not using that for home brew because we have an officially sanctioned way of doing that".

If any of you are interested in writing an app for the iphone but dont want to go through apple, check out modmyifone.com

There are plenty of ways to jailbreak the iPhone/iPod Touch and run 3rd party apps already. The hack has been out longer then the App Store has. I jailbroke my iPod Touch the first day I got with with following instructions found online and had no problem. Since then they have come out with even easier ways to jailbreak it. As for actually programming for it, I haven't really looked into that yet, but I did see someone was working on a Java Virtual Machine to run on it. So if that works out, you should be able to code your programs in Java.

I am definitely not a Mac fanboy, but I hate M$ with the fire of a thousand suns. Unfortunately, like stayscrisp said, I am stuck using it for some things such as OS since Ubuntu won't play nice with my wireless card and I don't know of another Linux distro that would.