I am currently doing some work for the Union initiative at Unity Technologies. It is an initiative designed to bring current and future games to emerging platforms whether they are set-top boxes, TV internals (play a game on your Bravia without having a console), or cellular platforms. We are doing most of the business-end deals with manufacturers and hoping to bring a great catalog of stellar games made with the engine to them.

I am also still doing community support for the Torque line of engines, though I cannot really announce anything officially until the trigger is pulled by Eric Preisz. But the future there is bright for all Torque licensees.

I am also applying for a position with District 25 as the Technology Coordinator. I have no idea yet if I will even get an interview. I am hopeful, but I also really enjoy working at ISU as a Computer Analyst.

So that is just a small update on some of the things going on in my life right now. Thanks to the two spammers who are reading!

Below are the most popular options I have people ask me about, as well as my opinion on them for iPhone development.

1. Hackintosh

While the Hackintosh is a solution that people often try (and there is a nice tutorial on Gizmodo for creating one), it does not fulfill the specs for the Apple iPhone SDK EULA. Now, you may be able to put one together, and you may even somehow get by Apple's initial scan of your App. If they do a compliance scan, you may find that all the hard work that you did to get your App finished in the first place was futile since it did not comply with even the most basic standards in their agreement.

If you're looking to make a really crappy piece of software that you do not plan to support and do not care if it never gets advertised on the Top Apps list or if Apple decides to not let it into the store in the first place...then I guess you can try to go this direction. I just can't recommend it. There are too many variables when putting together a Hackintosh to ensure that you will comply with the EULA. If you are looking at targeting jailbroken phones or are generally a hacky type that is more interested in tinkering with the tech than actually deploying to the App Store, then you could give it a try.

2. Using an Older PPC Mac

With the announcement that Apple will not be supporting the PPC chip in the next version of their OS, the price of older Macs plummeted. It makes me wish I had sold my dual-G5 on EBay before the announcement. I would have made a lot more than I could today. But with the lower price-point on older machines, I get a lot of questions about using them.

I got the iPhone SDK 2.2.1 working on my G5 after much internet browsing, swearing, making sure things didn't drop in root versus the developer directory, more swearing, dealing with keychain issues, a ton more swearing. And I got it to work. Then I installed the 3.0 seed and it broke the hard work I had done. Hours and hours of frustration leading to more frustration.

Luckily I had a shiny new Intel Mini on the way. I installed everything, went through the Apple Developer Portal's step-by-step instructions without a single failure...and it worked in 30 minutes (after downloading, of course). What I learned: if you value your time and efficiency (and sanity), it is not worth the frustration to try to get it working on something that it was never meant to work on in the first place. Sure the simulator is a Universal Binary...that gets people excited, but from the wide-range of complaints and questions and problems on the forums dedicated to doing this, as well as my own personal frustrations, I cannot recommend doing this.

Plus, it most likely will not pass the platform compliance pass to get into the App Store. Who knows, it may, but do you want to stake your development hours on it?

3. Jury-Rig a Windows Machine and Cross-Compile with gcc

This is for the truly hardcore. While I can understand the fascination, I think this is best left to people who make homebrew toolchains and port Voodoo drivers to new builds of their favorite flavor of Linux. Especially since they will have to emulate the keychain process as well to sign the App correctly, generate the package and trick it out to look like it was developed on an Intel Mac. While it is probably something that is doable by a somewhat talented hacker, I don't think it is an option for most of the people I talk to who are just looking for a way to use Windows and maybe use some free tools they've heard about as well. Because then it would be free...except for the Apple Developer Subscription, right?

Perhaps, if you like beating your head against brick walls.

My Take On All This

Again, to be the broken record, if you are going to target a platform full-force and want to build a marketable business, you need to work with the bare minimum that the platform requires. This means an Intel Mac Mini with the latest, greatest version of OS X. The XCode toolset and developer documentation is a free download from Apple's DevCenter. You will also need an Apple iPhone Developer subscription.

There are a lot of great platforms that you can develop using a Windows machine (and a good chunk of them will work with a PPC or Linux). You can jump on the BlackBerry developer bandwagon and go crazy. You can hit up the Google Android platform. How about the Palm Pre's WebOSdev? There are a ton of excellent markets out there. Some are emerging and some are well-established. And all of them are very cool. If you're going to target a platform for your business, don't do it half-assed and try to get around the system. You'll usually end up writing really bad code that is not guaranteed to work on the actual platform...and supporting extremely angry customers.

Just my thoughts since I talk to a lot of people trying to target the iPhone.

That has been my experience with Snapz Pro X from Ambrosia Software. I am in the market for software to capture video of what I am doing on my Mac to create some iPhone developmnet videos. This, of course, led me to search Google for such software. I found several reviews, which were quite nice (though some of them like FreeMacBlog pointed to IShowU as a better-quality competitor).

At the time, I was downloading the latest system updates (finally, a Java fix) and the 2.2.1 iPhone SDK for my new Mini. I really did not want to saturate my line with more downloads; so I was looking at the product pages for software rather than demo versions. My impression from the Snapz Pro X page is that the new version is better than the old version...but that the features are entirely too numerous to catalog. So I should just take their word for it.

They had some demo movies that I could look at from 2005, and their screenshots were less than captivating when it came to showing off features. The videos were good, but as I noted...old. I was unsure whether they were from the current version or an older version or if this new version was going to be updated in the future (near or far).

When I looked up IShowU, I could find not only videos of the featureset but a downloadable manual. Needless to say, I was easily more impressed with the site presentation for the product. Which is not saying much since the Snapz site gave me no reason whatsoever to think about purchasing their product. In fact, it highlighted the screen capture more than the video capture functionality in the brief product paragrahs, making me think twice anyway about purchasing it since OS X already has screen capture abilities...without a $69 price-tag.

Now that I have everything downloaded, I will actually try the demos. But from looking at the presentation of the software, there is no way I would have even considered purchasing Snapz Pro X. I had more luck searching Google for product specs than I did the site. Bad Ambrosia, Bad.

Ben Nadel is an expert. I'm usually pretty skeptical when I see/hear the word expert, but in this case it is true. His resume not only speaks for itself, but his presentations and previous work speak more volumes than his resume ever could. His extensive look at JQuery is one of the best explanations I have ever heard on it; and extremely accessible to people new to JQuery. I'm not new to JQuery and it gave me a ton of "Ah-ha!" moments where I groked things I hadn't realized I did not get.

Mark Cuban's "Open-Source" Business Stimulus Plan

Do you have a killer business idea? How about 999? I found both of these on Seth Godin's blog. Very, very cool (and open) proposal for serious businesses.

"I'm a truck driver. I drive big rigs all day long and I know trucks. When I get home, I love to drive my Dodge."

That's the base message of the ad. And it makes sense to me. I've known a lot of truck drivers in my time, and they definitely know a lot about the trucks that they drive. It makes sense that they would choose to drive good-q2uality, heavy-duty trucks in their regular "off-duty" time as well as when they're on the clock. The authenticity of the messages is almost self-fulfilling.

But then at the end of the ad, there is a disclaimer. Aside from the various APR commentary and such that is included in such commercials, there is a notice that the commercial is not based on actual customer experience. Which throws a huge red flag in my face. Could the marketing department or ad agency not find a real truck driver who is a Dodge fanatic? I know several, and while some would definitely not be the poster-children of articulate radio ads, there are a lot who are very articulate and very, very supportive of their trucks.

Living in Idaho, I know people who have gotten in fights over their favorite truck being dissed by someone with a different favorite. While those people are not the fans that marketing hype want to focus on (they are already caught), there are a ton of enthusiastic and well-spoken fans ready to scream down the competition. Why not make use of them? Especially in ads that will otherwise deflate themselves when it comes out that the whole thing was a marketing sham?

If you happen to have a fanbase, make some good use of them. People like to state their opinions, and if they love you...let them.

Interruption marketing is nothing new on the web. If you go to CNet's websites like GameSpot, are not logged in, and try to click on content, there is a chance that you will see an ad on the way to the content you really want to see. I do not have a really big problem with this, even though it interrupts the usability of their site. I know that they need the revenue from the ads and interruption marketing is well-entrenched.

Fast Company, on the other hand, interrupted me before their main page...and the ad did not load correctly. It was akin to walking up to a shop that looked somewhat interesting and being told by the doorman that there was a really cool thing to see down the block. He was not exactly sure what it was, but that it was better than what I had been looking for at the shop. Undeterred by the doorman, I entered the shop and found he was right.

The site definitely has some interesting articles, but most of them are somewhat underwhelming to be gracious. I should have taken the doorman's advice and gone somewhere else. However, just like I did not click the ad that refused to load, I would not tip the doorman in this case; providing no click-through revenue for Fast Company or whatever company's ad had failed.

Now, I don't like people stopping me on the street to sell me encyclopedias and I don't like sites interrupting me when I'm trying to find something relevant to my interests. But I'm willing to say no to the pushy encyclopedia salesman and I'm willing to click the "skip this add" link if I have to. I'm trained to jump through bad marketing hoops, and I'm good at saying no and forgetting whatever was pushed at me--the likelyhood of me actually being interested in your interruption is low and my irritation rate is high at having to be interrupted.

However, I do often click ads and such that I find interesting on social media sites like Facebook (which often have a voting mechanism to let the marketing group know if their ad was effective or not). But I have to find it interesting and find it on my own. If I'm in the middle of something, I'll bear with your ad and clicking to ignore it. But if I see an ad before I even see your front page and who you are and what you do...there's a problem with the way you do business.

If I can't connect with what you do, why would I want to go to your site at all? Maybe, if interruption advertising on this front were effective, I would never go to your site at all because I would keep clicking on your partner's. Sadly for those partners, I think that in my many, many years of being online and dealing with online marketing, I have never clicked on an ad presented in this fashion.

It just tells me that you do not care about your customers or your own brand (or else you would show your frontpage before anyone else could stop someone from getting there). Or else that your only focus is on advertising; any conent that you have that might draw customers to the site is secondary (if not further down the list).

If I'm going to your site; if I might be interested in spending money there (if you have such services) then let me get there. If one of your premium services is that I do not see ads (as many sites are wont to provide to paying customers)...how will I even know that the service exists if I'm blocked from actually going to the frontpage of your site?

Just some thoughts.