EA Mobile announced the availability of eight major gaming franchises on BlackBerry App World.
The newly added “global blockbusters” include Bejeweled, Need for Speed Undercover, RISK, SCRABBLE (in the US and Canada only), Tetris, Tetris Mania, The Sims 3, and Tiger Woods PGA TOUR. This is fantastic news if you happen to own a BlackBerry AND enjoy gaming on your heretofore no-nonsense business device.
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Redmond has just announced OneApp, a comprehensive framework for delivering apps on a variety of featurephones -- largely in emerging markets -- where processor horsepower and memory are both at a premium. The solution is deployed in harmony with partners (carriers, primarily) that work to offload app processing and storage into the cloud and keep the on-phone footprint as small as possible.
As of 2012, CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo wants Nokia to have 300 million service subscribers. He hope to accomplish this goal by first planning on expanding the Ovi applications environment. Which we all know is a nessacity if he wants to ahve any sort of chance taking on Apple.
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With the overheated competition within Apples App store. There is a trend appearing, that places Developers in a tight spot. How can they develop user rich applications when the market determined acceptable price hovers around 99 cents. This is a problem that has challenged many developers who are trying to make the App Store a viable business. Rim and Microsoft feel like the 99 cent price tags we are accustomed to are unacceptable. Rim has taken the initiative to set the minimum selling price at 2.99 while Microsoft has gone ahead and said, "I know, 99 cents is interesting -- yes, consumers like to pay 99 cents for applications, but 99 cents, come on, I think your app is worth more than that."
A 5-inch Archos Internet Media Tablet, is coming in Sept 15. The handheld will have Google's Android underneath with a layer of Archos applications on top.
Palm has just announced that it will begin accepting applications for developers interested in producing for-pay apps for the webOS App Catalog. Palm says to expect a September launch for its e-commerce program. Palm will be splitting profits of paid apps with developers 70 / 30 , like the rest of the App platforms do.
More information about how developers can submit an application for the beta
e-commerce program, as well as criteria for application acceptance, is available on the Palm Developer Network blog at http://pdnblog.palm.com/
According to Google Wave API Tech Lead Douwe Osinga, Google Wave is scheduled to open up to the public on September 30th. This is grewat news for those like me whome are patiently waiting for access to the platform and all that it has to offer. Osinga has outlined specific areas of improvement and new features. Listed below:
Extensions
Design good flow for adding extensions, which includes:
Enabling users to easily discover extension installers
Browsing experience for insert gadgets and robots from a gallery
Enabling user management of their installed extensions (& easily de-install)
Stretch goal: Expand the extension system with more hooks and actions.
The goal, in the short term, is to make it easier for a givenextension to hook into conversations without being actively added towave. For example, right now you can insert a YouTube gadget from alink to a YouTube video. We’ll open it up to let an extension triggeron a regular expression over any link, so you can build all types of“previewers.” This mechanism will not just trigger for linkannotations, but for any annotation.
Robots
- New Robots wire protocol (v0.2)Shortly we will publish the proposed next version of the robots wireprotocol. We’d love to get your feedback prior to implementing it.
– Java and Python API parityGetting the two APIs to have feature parity
– Robot Gateway / OpenSocial RPC AccessRobots only react to events right now. By allowing the robots toauthenticate themselves through the OpenSocial RPC protocol, robotscan create and retrieve waves without being triggered by the wavesystem first, which will allow for more “active” robots.
– Better multiple wave accessRight now it is hard to create robots that keep multiple waves insync. We’ll add support to updates waves “blindly” (i.e. withoutknowing for sure what their current context is) in a less dangerousway by allowing to update annotated ranges in another wave and further more make it possible to bring waves outside of the current context into context.
– Sunset the existing robots cron mechanismAfter we open the Robot Gateway, the basic wave cron system will nolonger be needed since robots could use Google App Engine’s nativecron system or the Google App Engine Task Queue API.
– Gateway supportImprove the current tweety type of access to support outsideaddresses of the form address+ro…@appspot.com. These addresses will come with their own profiles and will make it possible to bettersupport actions on behalf of external entities.
Gadgets
- Full OpenSocial gadget supportWhile we already support the underlying gadget XML and relatedfeatures, we will add full support for the OpenSocial JavaScriptlibrary (i.e. feature requires=”opensocial-0.9″)This includes a mapping of the OpenSocial concepts onto the waveconcepts and supporting the actual OpenSocial APIs as well asgadgets.io.makeRequest.
– DiffOnOpen/Playback state mode for gadgetsGagdets currently automatically support playback, but sometimes youwant to be able to do something explicitly (e.g. in a chess game showthe previous place of a piece). The same goes for diff-on-open. Currently gadgets only show the current state – with diff-on-open support they will be able to show the user what has changed since last time.
– Google Web Toolkit (GWT) gadgetsFor complex gadgets, GWT is a rather nice way to develop. We’llprovide a library to build gadgets inside of GWT and a small framework to run the same code outside of wave to make debugging with an actual debugger possible.
Embed
- Expanded UI configuration:Switches to display toolbar, participant list, bottom tools.- Methods to switch the wave in and out of edit mode- Stretch goal: Read-only anonymous access so people don’t have to be logged into Google Wave to see embedded waves.
Future Thoughts
Following September 30th, we have several things in mind, but it’ll be important to see what gets built in the meantime and hear yourfeedback on the APIs as things evolve.
Some ideas we’re currently thinking about for later in the year:- Expand the number of hooks extensions can plug into (via regularexpressions)
- Enable robots that aren’t required to use Google App Engine
- Provide an API for robots to access attachments, search and contact
- Explore tools for improving the robot development/debug experience
- Expand the embedding API to cover more use cases
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