So accord­ing to Dar­ing Fire­ball Apple’s new iPhone Devel­oper Pro­gram License Agree­ment effec­tively bans Adobe’s Flash-to-iPhone compiler.

CS5 is this­close to release and the iPhone com­piler is the flag­ship fea­ture in this ver­sion of Flash. They’re pretty much roy­ally fucked.

Plus Apple has already made its posi­tion clear on Flash. Per­son­ally, since I’ve never been a slave to brands, I don’t have much of a stake in either com­pany unless one of my mutual funds hap­pens to invest in one. Yet, the way I see it, Adobe can really give Apple the big “Fuck You” if it wanted to, sim­ply by no longer pro­duc­ing any of its Adobe soft­ware for OS X. Now see­ing how design­ers and design houses invest heav­ily in Macs sim­ply to run Adobe soft­ware, should that plat­form no longer become avail­able, what do you think is going to hap­pen? Is the entire graphic design, web, print, and pub­lish­ing indus­tries going to aban­don all its invested know-how and sim­ply pick a new defacto indus­try stan­dard, or are they going to switch to Windows?

I went to Florida for my Christ­mas hol­i­day. In order to not stress out the cat too much, the cat stayed home rather than go to a ken­nel. No pro­fes­sional pet sit­ter was avail­able where I live. So I opted to cre­ate a home sur­veil­lance sys­tem from hard­ware I had lying around and free software.

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I finally got around to down­load­ing the iPhone SDK to see what I can do with it. Since I’ve dab­bled in game devel­op­ment back when I worked with Flash and Direc­tor, I fig­ured I’d see what I can do with the iPhone. I wanted to start with a frame­work and I looked at Torque and Unity. Though inex­pen­sive by game engine stan­dards, dur­ing a reces­sion­ary time of cost cut­ting, it’s hard to val­i­date a nearly $1000 pur­chase, espe­cially if you don’t know yet if that invest­ment would pay off. So I finally set­tled on the cocos2d-iphone frame­work which is based on the cocos2d frame­work for Python. There is lit­tle to no doc­u­men­ta­tion, so be pre­pared to read source code. Mon­o­cle Studio’s whitepa­per will def­i­nitely help you boot­strap your project. In the spirit of that paper, I thought I’d share my trans­la­tion of the cocos2d “Hello, World” exam­ple adapted for the cocos2d-iphone framework.

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I like to use my iPhone for view­ing pod­casts. How­ever, man­ag­ing them through iTunes leaves much to be desired because some pod­casts I like to view and then trash them, while oth­ers I like to archive and have synced at all times. iTunes does not have an obvi­ous way to set this up.

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