Casual Connect in Hamburg, from 10. – 12. February 2010 right at the front-door of FISHLABS 

We are very pleased to attend Casual Connect with three topics on the second day. Casual Games Association Events are the premiere events for the casual games industry with over 3,500 professionals attending Casual Connect Events each year. Casual Connect Europe brings together the most talented and knowledgeable experts in the casual gaming field to further the casual games industry with the best of networking and learning.

This year FISHLABS is among the front runners: With 10 iPhone Games and more than 21 Millionen downloads we are now ranked as one of the top players worldwide.

At Casual Connect we are attending three panels:

What’s the Smart Choice in Smartphones?

Attendees:
Alex BUBB, Senior Partner Manager, Media and Games Nokia
Joe NEALE, Head of End User Programs Symbian Foundation
Michael SCHADE, CEO FishLabs
Moderator:
Chris JAMES, Founder Pocket Gamer

Smartphones are the new black in the mobile content world, but who are the main players and which of the many new platforms and accompanying app stores should you be supporting? Our expert panel of platform representatives and publishers offer an invaluable guide from Android to Windows Mobile.

Case Study: Ad-Funded Games

Speaker: Michael SCHADE, CEO FishLabs

Smartphones are on their way to become the most engaging media in everyone’s life. Millions of downloads with hundred thousands of hours game time make ad games on smartphones like iPhone, Android and other new mobile platforms the Trojan horse for brands to cut through the daily media noise. Learn from best practices with Volkswagen and Barclaycard how to engage with consumers on a global level in a long-lasting and lean-forward experience.

Business Models & Pricing – Making Money on the App Store

Attendees:
Nicholas LOVELL, Director GAMESbrief
Michael SCHADE CEO, FishLabs
Christopher KASSULKE, CEO HandyGames GmbH
Moderator:
Tim HARRISON Founder The Mobile Consultancy

The iPhone has well and truly shaken up mobile games pricing, enabling a wide variety of new business models. This session examines these models and key pricing trends from the initial rush to the bottom to the emerging premium bracket along with micro-payments, lite and free versions, subscriptions and asks the simple question…which models are making money?

Of course there will be enough time for chats and discussions after and in between the panels and we look forward to many inspiring conversations.

Sony Ericsson has been known for its outstanding 3D gaming performance on Java phones for years now. It all started back in 2004, when Sony Ericsson introduced the first mass market Java phone that could render decent 3D graphics on a 176×220 pixels screen. We had been early on and released our first 3D games Motoraver, featuring 3D driving physics in a fairly large sandbox-style city at night, and Robot Alliance, a proper first person shooter in full 3-D (!) with smoothly animated 3D characters, all within 350KB of data.

Continuously, Sony Ericsson improved their hardware and, even more important, the Java Virtual Machine it was running. The crown of 3D enabled java phones still belongs to the K800i, the game experience felt close to the Playstation 1, even if it was not as fast and on a smaller screen. And Fishlabs has to give Kudos to Sony Ericsson. Without this great performance we could never have created mobile games of such high quality like Blades & Magic, Rally Master Pro, Snowboard Hero and Galaxy on Fire 2.

From music to photos to games

In 2005 3D gaming was hyped very much but could not break through as the carriers always forced developers to support the lowest common denominator and the majority of handsets could only render 2D graphics. Sony Ericsson did right in focusing on music instead and introducing the Walkman brand to mobile with great success. A year later Sony Ericsson repeated the success story labeling their photo feature phones with the popular brand Cybershot. With all those millions of Walkman and Cybershot phones sold, sharing a consistent Java platform and decent 3D rendering capabilities, Sony Ericsson’s strength in mobile gaming started as the best kept secret of the industry and led into ruling the mobile gaming business: in 2007, Sony Ericsson was the fourth largest manufacturer of mobile phones worldwide, seven out of ten games downloads were happening on Sony Ericsson phones in Europe and emerging markets like Latin America and South East Asia. Until today, Sony Ericsson has released over 50 models supporting proper 3D rendering and has an installed user base of approx. 200 million devices (Fishlabs’ estimate). Not a bad thing for developers like us, focused on 3D mobile games, if only the ecosystem was right.

iPhone – the mobile games game changer

Nothing is constant but change. It was not Nokia, with its great ambitions in mobile gaming, finally introducing N-Gage as a service, or Vodafone with more than 300 (?) million subscribers who literally changed the mobile gaming business over night. New kid on the mobile block Apple swiped away all competitors with a mobile phone featuring a game experience beyond Nintendo DS and close to Sony PSP. With the latest installment of iPhone 3GS and iPod touch 3rd generation featuring OpenGL ES 2.0 even beyond PSP. In combination with the App Store integrated in iTunes, a fair business case for developers (70/30 revenue share) and a low entry barrier (get started for less than $299 with an iPod touch and the iPhone SDK) for everyone mobile game developers were flocking to this new exciting platform.

Satio – ramping up for the fastest mobile gaming device?

It took Sony Ericsson a while to find an answer to the unexpected competitor coming from the computer area backed by a loyal customer base addicted to superior user experience – which is exactly why Apple is so stunningly successful with the iPhone. Although, feature phones based on Java had been a great success for Sony Ericsson and were the preferred mobile phone for gaming by tens of millions users, the future in mobile gaming lies in smartphones. However, any half-hearted attempt to stand up against the leader of smartphones will fail. But Sony Ericsson has sent a decent device stuffed with the latest hardware to the race. The Satio features the same 3D-Chip PowerVR SGX  as the iPhone 3GS running Symbian on an even more powerful CPU ARM11 clocked at 600MHz. Furthermore, it comes with plenty of memory and with a bigger display than the iPhone featuring 640 x 360 pixels resolution. 

Lots of horsepower – what is it good for?

It is one thing to stuff a lot of nice hardware into a mobile phone. It is another story to make all this power available to the developer. Sony Ericsson did an amazing job here. We have ported Rally Master Pro from iPhone to Symbian featuring almost the same functionality on Satio (only automatic acceleration when using touch controls due to single touch on Satio and no multiple simultaneous sounds due to lack of layered sound capabilities). Although the resolution of the Satio display is quite higher compared to the iPhone we experience a stable frame rate of 30 frames per second on both devices running identical game code and graphical assets. Thanks to the better screen resolution of Satio, it is stunning how much more details can be rendered in the scene (the original iPhone textures were designed with some head room for larger screens).

Xperia X10: Mobile games on the big screen

Today a prototype of the latest Sony Ericsson smartphone has arrived at our studio: A shiny Xperia X10 and we have to convey it looks stunning, indeed. It is still a very early proto but navigation on the capacitive touch screen feels great and fluid and the whole menu is much more inviting and intuitive to play around with than it used to be with previous smartphones from Sweden. As the X10 is an Android based phone it will take a while until we have our first game running on it. But one thing is for sure: The big screen is a great, great plus. You can see our website in full 800 pixels width and everything is crystal clear. Even the small fonts can be read with ease. Equipped with a whopping 1 GHz Snapdragon Chip supporting OpenGL ES 2.0 it promises high-end smartphone gaming on the big screen.
 

We have been working really hard on Rally Master Pro™ for iPhone since January now. In the last couple of months the team has grown up to ten developers working full time on our most anticipated iPhone game. Three engineers were working in parallel on the code, three 3D artists were finalizing the tracks and cars, our internal QA team and our producer have been chasing the last bugs while our creative and art director always had a sharp eye on the project, to make sure that everything was polished to perfection. All-in-all, pimping Rally Master Pro™ up for iPhone was an even bigger job than creating the original Java game and you will see that, no doubt! But the job is done now. We have just submitted Rally Master Pro™ and we are waiting anxiously for Apple’s approval.

Real tracks, more tracks, lots of tracks

Rally racing is about speeding and drifting on tracks with varying surfaces like asphalt, gravel or sand as if there was no tomorrow. You need to have wide and narrow roads with straights mixed with various types of curves. The roads also have to go up and down hill and feature challenging crests or constrictions. Every track has to have a personality and you as a driver will be introduced to this “person” by your co-pilot. So you better listen carefully to him to be able to master it and become a pro – yes, we are serious about the name of the game.

If it’s a rainy day go rally racing on iPhone

In a real rally you don’t always have nice weather. In fact, the weather condition has a great influence on the driving behavior of your car. Asphalt gets slippery when it is wet and if you are going off-road it gets worse. In winter, when racing on snow, you are drifting more than anything else and skillful driving becomes an art. To bring this experience to perfection in a rally racing game you need physics that reflect the driving behavior properly. Even on Java we had 3D physics running in Rally Master Pro™ that were calculating each wheel separately depending on whichever surface. However, on iPhone, with way more computing power, we could increase the sample rate much higher and achieve a much more accurate driving experience in the game.

Controls matter most, especially on iPhone

Handling and controls in a real racing game have to be spot-on. Even the best eye candy and the most advanced physics won’t make you believe you are behind the wheel of a rally racing car if the controls suck. Since tilt or touch controls and auto acceleration don’t work for everyone in the same way we have implemented comprehensive configuration possibilities in Rally Master Pro™. You can set pretty much everything the way you prefer it and even lefties have not been left out.

Give me some eye candy

To make you “feel” the road underneath your tires you not only need good physics and spot-on controls. Last but not least, the visual feedback on the weather condition needs to be accurate as well or the illusion of being in a real rally is ruined. We already had an advanced particle simulation in Rally Master Pro™ on Java. Each wheel was emitting various dust and dirt particles depending on track and weather condition. However, on the big screen of the iPhone it was not convincing enough.  So we had to start all over and create the particle system from scratch with a graphical user interface so we could tweak all the parameters in real-time. Now you can see mud flying into the camera when you drift on off-road tracks through the trees and huge clouds of dust vapor behind the car if you are on a dry, dusty road. Check out the spray when it is raining and you are racing on asphalt.

Final Word

Of course, you always can do better and people will always find something to complain about, like there is no proper cockpit view or you can’t tune the car (actually, you are not allowed to do this in a real rally anyway) but we think Rally Master Pro is highly addictive and offers a lot of fun and great value if you are a petrol head. You will be able to find out about that yourself soon and until then we can only recommend to check out our official game trailer below.

With 265 HP and up to 250 km/h, the new Volkswagen Scirocco R is a real racing machine and is at home both on normal roads and the racecourse. In May of this year, the Scirocco R ranked 11th overall out of 219 starting teams at the legendary Nurburgring and was a dual winner in the class of up to 2 litre cubic capacity with turbocharger. During the race, the 2.0 litre TFSI engine even hit a proud 325 HP performance and the Scirocco R with the starting number 118 recorded a reliable 138 laps and 3,500 km in 24 hours.

24 hour racing on the iPhone

You can now also drive the new Scirocco R on the iPhone, not for the full distance, but for the final stint of a 24-hour race. We have shortened the course a bit in order to adapt the lap times for playing on the iPhone and, of course, you only have to overtake the ten vehicles in front of you. So that you aren’t sent into the race unprepared, you can familiarise yourself with the course in training mode and optimise your lap times.

Head-to-head against your friends on the iPhone

The multi-player mode provides even more adrenaline. You can race head-to-head against your friends in real time over WiFi. For real pros, the controls can be configured in a variety of ways and their sensitivity can be customised to meet every preference. Try it for yourself; the brand-new  iPhone game Volkswagen Scirocco R 24H Challenge has been available for free  download in the App Store since yesterday.

Certainly, some of you have wondered whether we will only be making ad games for the iPhone, since we haven’t announced anything new about our own iPhone games in a long time. The fact is that the development of ad games for the iPhone and iPod is currently a very lucrative business for us. But the best thing about that is that we can use it to finance the costly production of our own iPhone games. That means the better the ad games we develop do, the more we can invest in our own games. So you win either way. Free adv games for quick casual game fun and our top titles that get as much as possible out of the iPhone and offer hours of excitement.

The Best Mobile Game of 2008 soon for the iPhone and iPod touch

Rally Master Pro™ has really cleaned up in the last year. All of the games magazines gave our rally simulation top marks, and Pocket Gamer even rewarded our hard work with a Platinum Award. That makes Rally Master Pro™ the only racing game to date to receive the best possible evaluation from Pocket Gamer. According to the Pocket Gamer Analysis, which summarises the most important mobile gaming magazines, Rally Master Pro™ is even the Best Mobile Game of 2008. No question, of course we had to bring Rally Master Pro™ to the iPhone.  Starting in the autumn, every iPhone and iPod touch owner will be able to put the pedal to the metal and test their rally skills in sun, rain, and snow on 27 varied and detailed extreme courses.

Revved up rally graphics for the iPhone

Naturally, we have revised all of the 3D models and textures. The number of polygons has increased four-fold, and while the Java version of Rally Master Pro™ has to make do with five 256×256-pixel textures, which still is a huge amount for a Java game though, we have given the iPhone version 18 textures with 512×512 pixels and seven with 1024×1024 pixels - way more than we used in any other of our iPhone games before. Rally Master Pro™ comes to the iPhone with tracks of corresponding wealth of detail and variation.

The particle simulation has also been heavily tuned up. Depending on the track surface and weather, a variety of dust, spray, and even dirt particles will be generated for each individual tire. The various kinds of particles act quite differently. On dry, dusty tracks the car leaves a massive cloud of dust while racing through a forest on a rainy day you can literrally see the mud flying. To a certain level, we did that in the Java version too, but thanks to the computing power of the iPhone the particle simulation is way more advanced, here.

Dynamic lighting depending on weather and environment

The dynamic lighting for the rally cars in Rally Master Pro™ is completely new. Thanks to the high-powered 3D chips (OpenGL graphics acceleration) in the iPhone, we can light the vehicle in a variety of ways, depending on the weather: with lots of light and shadows when it’s sunny, diffuse when the sky is overcast, and correspondingly dim in rain and storm. But the environment also affects the lighting of the vehicle. Drive under bridges or through the shady area under trees and the car will be appropriately darkened. It isn’t necessarily an effect that you notice during the race too much, but it nevertheless provides a realistic game experience, and you can enjoy it all at leisure in the replay.

All screenshots have been taken from the Beta version and we are still working heavily on many things. However, to give you a first impression on how Rally Master Pro looks like on iPhone these should do.

To be continued…

Apple has just announced its most successful non-Christmas quarter ever with incredible 5,2m iPhones and 10.2m iPods sold. Since launch, that’s about 45m iPhones and iPod touches and users have downloaded 1.5b applications from the App Store so far. That’s 33 applications per iPhone or iPod touch user. Congrats to that and we could not be more happy about Apple’s success as we are making close 60% of our revenue with iPhone games so far. However, there were a lot of talks about the new iPhone 3GS and OS 3.0 might drive fragmentation which could be a serious threat to the developer community and the success of the App Store in the long term.

Since there is hardly any reliable data available how many devices and which operating system is used we thought we share some figures based on Barclaycard’s Waterslide Extreme, developed off the back of the iconic Barclaycard ‘waterslide’ ad, based on a concept by Dare Digital and developed by FISHLABS (obviously).

Since Waterslide Extreme is a casual game appealing to a broad audience and currently the most downloaded app in pretty much every country (more than 2m downloads within 5 days) we think it gives a pretty good overview of the current installed base.

How many iPhones? How many iPod touches?

Let us start with the iPhone and iPod touch statistics. Most of you know already there are slight differences among the iDevices. As a developer, you want to know how many potential users you might lose if you optimize your app (game) to the more powerful devices like the iPod touch 2nd gen and especially the iPhone 3GS, of course. Respectively, you might consider providing different sets of graphical assets, for instance. 

All data records have been collected anonymously, no back-tracking to individual users possible

As we can see clearly, iPhone 3G and the iPod touch 2nd gen are the most popular devices with pretty much identical market share around 38% each. The iPhone 3GS is around 12,5% and given the short time it is available that’s a pretty remarkable chunk, already.

We at FISHLABS optimize our upcoming games for the performance level of iPod touch 2nd gen which give us a great game experience on close to 90% of the iDevices (iPod touch 2nd gen, iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS) out there. For the first iPhone and iPod touch 1st gen we reduce some of the graphic features, like disabling vertex coloring or reducing the viewing distance accordingly. On the other hand, it is just too early to come up with a dedicated high-end version supporting the OpenGL ES 2.0 for iPhone 3GS. Even more critical if you think about an app (game) that relies on exclusive iPhone 3GS features.

How many iPhones and iPod touches with OS 3.0?

Most developers are very excited about the new iPhone OS 3.0 features like in-app purchasing, push notification, Bluetooth multiplayer and many more. But when is the right time to launch apps, and games in particular, utilizing these new features. Check out the next chart for your consideration.

 
All data records have been collected anonymously, no back-tracking to individual users possible

If you are up for an app (game) with the new iPhone OS 3.0 features you face about 60% of the total potential user base. Still quite a lot people you can reach out to but it will be very hard to rise to the top 25 if your thrust of downloads is cut by up to 40% (some may upgrade for killer apps, though) compared to any competing OS 2.x app. For sure, Apple will promote apps (games) with OS 3.0 features to compensate that. Seems like risky business once the promotion has ended, though. We haven’t decided yet when to launch our first iPhone game utilizing OS 3.0 features. Perhaps launching a game with OS 2.x features first and when the hype is over running an update with OS 3.0 features is a good idea. Of course, this won’t work for apps (games) that rely on OS 3.0 features completely.

Success or failure of each and every iPhone app (game) won’t be based solely on the considerations above but for sure the right strategy when to support new features of iPhone OS 3.0 and/or iPhone 3GS will be fundamental. Given the dynamic in the App Store we will know soon what approach was good and what was not. Just that Apple will have sold another couple million devices in the meantime and the rules of the game will be changed once again. Which keeps it all exciting.

Alright folks, hope that helps when planning your next app / game. You may quote these figures above. Of course, a link to our blog would be most appreciated: http://blog.fishlabs.net/en

Game on!

Michael Schade

Brawn GP has teamed up with Upstream, to create the Brawn GP Racing Game for Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch that includes a chance to win a luxurious Mercedes SL Roadster (US, CA and UK only). Of course, we are thrilled that FISHLABS has been chosen to develop the very first F1™ racing game for iPhone and iPod touch and now the game is live!

What’s in this Brawn GP iPhone game?

You get the chance to drive the Brawn GP F1™ car to qualify on four imaginary, international circuits. The game features a track located in the city of London. Players can drive by landmarks such as Big Ben and Buckingham Palace while doing a qualifying lap around Hyde Park. Three additional tracks inspired by the most famous and challenging elements on the world racing circuit, such as Road America’s Carousel, Silverstone’s Copse and Monaco’s hairpin, will be made available as free updates throughout the 2009 season. 

F1™ racing on iPhone - How does it feel?

Based on our advanced racing engine with 4-point-driving physics, Brawn GP Racing offers the most realistic high-speed racing experience available on iPhone and iPod touch. Well, we tried to give you a F1™ driving experience as close as possible but without being too realistic - if we had done a proper F1™ driving simulation game you probably wouldn’t be able to make a single lap without destroying the car ;-). So it is still about having both thrill and fun here.

How can I win a Mercedes SL?

As soon as you qualify on each track, you are ranked globally, and are awarded entries in the draw according to your rank – the faster you are, the more chances you have of winning. The contest will end at the precise time at which the winning car crosses the finish line in the last race of the season in Abu Dhabi on November 1, 2009. A draw will be held on November 12th and the grand winner, hopefully you, will receive a brand new Mercedes SL. The contest is available to US, Canada and UK residents only.

Off the back of the iconic Barclaycard ‘waterslide’ ad, Dare has developed an iphone game concept which will be available for free download from the apps store as of mid-July.  In keeping with the TV execution, the game allows the user to ride a series of waterslides through urban environments and Dare has hired Fishlabs as mobile technical developers to help bring the concept to life. 

3D Mobile Gaming Ahead Of Its Time

We are a true pioneer in 3D multiplayer mobile gaming and have been working on games like V-Rally 3D - featuring online ghost racing and first person shooter Robot Alliance in a massively multiplayer online gameplay (MMOG) experience - all the way back in 2005. Of course, we had to face extreme technical hurdles back then and the functionality was quite limited. Also, the number of handsets that these games worked on was very small. Actually, only three devices from Sony Ericsson (F/K500i, K700i, S700i) could handle reasonable 3D graphics at that time. However, in order to exchange the game data online we had to stop the rendering every time we wanted to connect to the mobile network. Gameplay-wise it was far from what core gamers desired but it was revolutionary at the time.

No Business Without The Operator

Over the years, mobile phones became much faster. With 3D enabled mobile phones from Sony Ericsson and Nokia dominating the game downloads in 2007, theoretically, we could have addressed a potential user base of some 100 million mobile gamers with basic multiplayer online features. However, even with a reasonable user base installed, we still had the issue to implement new business models like subscriptions or micro-transactions with in-game billing dealing with 160 carriers worldwide. A task that was impossible, especially since most operators had outsourced their gaming business to aggregators who had no interest to go beyond simple pay per download models. But even if those business models had been in place the lack of flat rate data plans would have left any game utilizing connectivity floating dead in the river before it had a chance to start.

The iPhone – The Game Changer

Nobody had it seen coming. While the mobile gaming industry complained about fragmentation, operators taking too big a cut , crappy WAP portals and a value chain that hardly delivered any great value to the consumer, the iPhone came simply out of the blue. With computing power somewhere between Nintendo DS and Sony PSP, an even larger display, innovative touch and tilt controls and, even more important for connected gaming, no extra costs for connectivity, Apple took the lead in mobile gaming contributing 10% of the whole mobile gaming revenue with a handset market share of only 1.2%. Apple was clever enough to force operators to sell the iPhone with all-you-can-eat data plans to drive content downloads, with only one goal in mind, to sell more devices.

Generating Critical Mass

With the Apple App Store, made for developers to come up with innovative ideas, users have the power because content is ranked by users and the content created by third party developers not gaming managers.  This new store reaches a target group of more than 40  million wealthy early adopters who all use more or less the same device and with a direct business relationship, Apple started a new era in mobile gaming. They knew, only in an ecosystem where taking the extra risk is rewarded and a fair chunk of the revenue is given to the developer, could innovation and quality succeed. Following Apple’s tremendous success, other handset manufacturers like Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and lately LG have introduced or announced app stores. Finally, operators started realizing their approach of selling content is outdated and under the umbrella of JIL (Joint Innovation Labs) app stores will finally come from the operators. So the app stores are coming. Some still have teething problems but competition will force every stakeholder to get their homework done. Finally the number of handset users addressable for high-end mobile gaming is gaining critical mass.

In-App Billing – Monetizing Multiplayer Gaming

Now, with a market big enough for 3D multiplayer mobile games, it is again Apple who introduces the last missing part to even justify costly developments of MMOGs on mobile phones: subscriptions and in-game transactions.  With the latest firmware 3.0 for iPhone and iPod touch developers can monetize their applications beyond the pay per download model by selling subscriptions or micro-transactions for in-game items. This may be less important for games with simple multiplayer functionality - like turn based tournaments or asynchronous ghost racing as the multiplayer mode is not a necessity for the game - but a good way for games to diversify from its competitors and does not need to be monetized beyond a single payment per download.

However, in MMOGs a constant and expensive hosting service is needed to run the persistent game world and players of MMOGs expect constant content updates or they lose interest and flock to other MMOGs with a better offering. All this has to be monetized over the lifetime of the MMOG. Subscriptions are a proven model to do this for premium titles whilst casual MMOGs seem to be more successful with a business model gathering a vast number of players to play for free and monetize through in-game items.

LTE – Get Up To Speed

So Apple has successfully set up an ecosystem with about 40 million high-end connected devices and a strong shopping system that enables MMOGs on mobile devices today. However, these MMOGs won’t be truly “mobile” because only the Wi-Fi connection of the iPhone provides enough bandwidth to deal with dozens of players in a 3D scene simultaneously. It is LTE networks that is needed to bring MMOGs on mobile phones so users can be play their games literally anytime and anywhere. Also, with LTE as a new service operators have the chance to introduce subscriptions (only Verizon does already) and micro-transaction billing methods to make sure that developers/publishers will take the risk in massive development and the constant operating service of MMOGs. It is in the operator’s very own interest to do that as MMOGs will heavily drive the usage of data and content services and, if the content offering is compelling enough, keep the churn rate low. It might take a while to reach critical mass on LTE for core or even casual gamers on mobile devices to play against one other but it is inevitably MMOGs on mobile phones with ubiquity and constant connectivity that will reach an addressable market of more than 4 billion users.

(Originally posted on ng Connet Program Blog)

Well, we haven’t been at any WWDC before so we can’t really make a comparison, no doubt, Apple is way ahead of its competitors and the show was also much more than we expected. But first things first. Still quite jet-lagged I missed to take a picture of Marc, our CTO, queuing up for the keynote. I can’t think of any developer congress where people literally wait in line for hours to get in. Now I know why they call it a Blockbuster, Moscone West had a nice queue of greedy developers to conquer a seat in one of the front rows in the riesig Ball Room, easily seating 5,000 people.

Inside, the atmosphere was like being at a rock concert. The crowd was critically anticipating the show to begin. The stage was indeed huge and massive speakers and colorful spotlights hung down from the ceiling and a big luminous Apple logo was glowing in the back. Looks like Apple wanted to blow us away. Phil Schiller, SVP of Worldwide Product Marketing, entered the stage and kicked-off with facts about this year’s conference: 5,200 developers from 54 countries around the world, “this is the best level of anticipation and excitement for our developers conference yet”, he said enthusiastically.

In the next 15 minutes Phil announced the new line-up of MacBook Pro, all with better CPUs  (up to 3GHz), more memory (up to 8 Gig) , better graphics and new battery (good for 1,000 recharges and lasting up to 7hrs). All models are even cheaper than their forerunners and are available today – great stuff – Followed by impressing stats about the Mac OS installed user base: In the past two years the number of OS X users has tripled to 75m today (well, mainly because of the 40 million iPhone and iPod touch users but still impressive).

What’s better than a Leopard?

Next topic was Mac OS in detail. Bertrand Serlet, Head of OS, took over and showed some interesting facts and figures about the improvements of Snow Leopard (90% of what was in Leopard has been refined in Snow Leopard) not without some sharp comments about Vista and its disadvantages. Most interesting: Snow Leopard runs up to 45% faster, it shares up 85% functionality with iPhone OS and it weights about 6GB less, through file system compression.

Safari 4 and Quicktime X reloaded

Along with Snow Leopard, Safari and Quicktime also get an update. Safari 4 now shipping for both Mac and Windows PCs impressed with great performance. According to Acid 3 test it scores 100/100 (benchmark executing HTML web pages) and outperforms Google Chrome and Firefox by far. Craig Federighi, VP of Mac OS engineering, had great pleasure to demo the speed of Safari opening the heavy NYT home page showing huge adverts for Microsoft’s new Bing search engine splashed all over it.

Quicktime got an overhaul of its user interface. Actually, there is hardly any user interface left. When you playback and the mouse is outside of the Quicktime window no status bar or controls are shown. Reduced to the max. Also, it works with any web server now. Bottom line: you can easily upload your video to YouTube. What’s really nice: Trimming options are included seamlessly and Quicktime renders your clips almost instantly for optimized output on HDTV, Apple TV, YouTube and other formats.

Now comes some heavy developer stuff

64bit, Grand Central Dispatch, OpenCL. You probably won’t need it for daily stuff if you are not a hardcore user but worth taking a look at it: With 64bit Mac OS applications are no longer limited to address only 4 Gig of RAM and of course a speed boost of software written in 64bit can be expected (Photoshop users happy now?). Next was multi-core. To benefit from the multi-cores in modern CPUs (we don’t see higher CPU operation speed but more and more cores to increase performance) software has to be organized in threads. Grand Central Dispatch is a new technology in Snow Leopard with built-in support for multi-core, which organises threads. Surprisingly, even Apple Mail benefits quite heavily from that as it uses a lot of threads. Finally, OpenCL, an open standard c-based language to utilize the computing power of modern graphic cards, gives developers up to 1 Teraflop (a trillion operations per second) at hands. Whatever you might want to do with that amount of horsepower underneath the hood if you are not a scientist.

Making New Friends

Personally, the last new feature of Snow Leopard made me think there is no excuse anymore to not have a MacBook Pro: Integration of Microsoft Exchange. So the MacBook Pro can now connect to our company email backend server without hassle, it looks better, it’s faster, it lasts longer, has a better integration with iPhone (tethering e.g.), I don’t need to worry about viruses and after turning it on I don’t have get me a coffee before I can start to work. Eh, hang on, that wasn’t all bad.

iPhone gets the rest of the show

Alright, most of the news was interesting but not why WE were attending in the first place. SVP of iPhone software, Scott Forstall, took the stage and we (iPhone developers) were listening much more closely now. “It has been an incredible year for the iPhone. It was less than a year ago that we launched 2.0 and with it the SDK,” he said. “The response has been staggering - developers have downloaded the free SDK more than a million times. There are now more than 50,000 apps on the App Store.” [applause] “Now we’ve been working really hard to grow the user base for your apps […] We have already sold more than 40m iPhones + iPod Touches […]That’s a lot of devices. And of course passed a billion downloads.”

iPhone Firmware 3.0 Highlights

Well, MMS support is surely not a highlight for Europeans as other handset manufacturers have been supporting this for quite some time now but in the US it seems to be a big thing though. You could argue the same about cut & paste but the way Apple implemented it is again way beyond the way their competitors did. Parental control, tethering (use your iPhone as a modem) and dynamic language switching is all nice to have but nothing that made me got too excited. The feature that finds my iPhone based on GPS or mobile network cell (useful when your iPhone is lost in a building) and alerts, even if silenced, did. Even better, “Remote Wipe” deletes all data (contacts, emails, photos etc.) on the device. Anyone who ever lost a phone knows what I am talking about.

Next is peer-to-peer Bluetooth connectivity: “great for games, will automatically find the other player over wireless or Bluetooth, no carrier needed.” Well, that’s cool but Sony Ericsson had that in place, when was that again? Ah, 2006. But no complains, they integrated the API quite nicely so there is not much to do for the developer to set up a match.
Connecting to 3rd party hardware, like the diabetes monitor demoed, might be also useful for an external game controller for all those PSP lovers still holding up all the buttons it offers. Well, buttons are out, touch and tilt is in! Get it, folks!
Embedding Google maps into applications is for sure great for some utilities but I have never been a fan of location based games and such. Neither do I believe in digital books. Hence,  Scroll Motion passed without any reaction on me. Last one I remember was the integration of TomTom navigation on the iPhone. Since most new cars come with a satnav system anyway I don’t know if that’s going to be a burner. However, I only I’ve only been riding 20+ year old cars for quite a while so you got me.

No new iPhone or what?

More apps using iPhone 3.0 firmware were shown but all very niche like tuning amplifiers for electric guitars or monitoring and displaying data for physical experiments. 135min had passed and we listened patiently to all the hot and the luke-warm stuff, too. But hey, what about why we came here? Phil Schiller comes back on stage: “To call the iPhone 3G a hit would be the understatement of the year. The iPhone has changed how people think about their phones - it wasn’t too long ago that people were frustrated with these… what I’ll call crappy devices.” And he doesn’t stop bashing the competitors: 2/3 of all mobile browsing (most be US) is done on an iPhone or iPod touch. Schiller compares the iPhone App Store’s 50,000 apps to Google Android’s 4,900, Nokia’s 1,088, RIM’s 1,030, Palm’s 18 – big ouch!

iPhone 3GS – The S stands for speed!

“The iPhone 3G has been great, so that’s why I’m excited to tell you about an entirely new version - the iPhone 3GS.” I guess no one expected the suffix 3GS. “The S stands for speed - because it’s the fastest, most powerful iPhone we’ve ever made.” Apparently, about three times faster on average, depending on benchmark. Launching messaging is 2.1x faster, loading apps (SimCity) is 2.4x faster, loading the New York Times homepage 2.9x faster.  Good to hear that Apple also improved the battery life, how much this really adds when playing games needs to be seen.

With the integrated compass and the 3 megapixel camera, also taking VGA videos at 30 fps, it looks like they have some more new cool tech features implemented but for us as 3D game developers this is less relevant. So, the big news about the iPhone 3GS for us at Fishlabs was the new graphics chip, faster CPU and more memory. Especially the new PowerVR SGX GPU by imagination supporting OpenGL ES 2.0 drew our attention. The only thing as a developer that concerns us is that the iPhone 3GS will drive fragmentation. Well, we will see how that goes in the near future.