It has been an important year for smartphone OS developers. With fierce competition from the iPhone and Google’s Android, the traditional players in the market have held conferences in an attempt to retain and attract developers to their platforms. BlackBerry was one of the pioneering companies with regards to smartphone becoming an essential need for business users. However, the primary concern for most developers during this conference was the direction that RIM was taking to promote the BlackBerry conference.
A majority of the talks held by senior developers focused on the overall experience of BlackBerry’s App World and the ability to successfully publish apps on the BlackBerry platform. Alongside the overall app development process, many experts were specifically focusing on the relevant technologies that were needed for developing and coding apps.
BlackBerry’s platform is meant to be cross-platform compatible; however, issues with the Java focus do occur. Java’s inherent problem is that the number of versions available means that the coding must reflect each version. Resultantly, some apps may not work on selected hardware; this means that developers have to re-code for older sets, etc.
Our Three Games making to the Front Page of Appstore
We are proud to announce that three of our games (Run Razzle Run, Rescue Razzle and Real Deer Hunting) have made it to the Front Page of Games Category on the Appstore. We have developed these games for SunStorm Interactive.
Hats off to our Graphic Design, Development and Sound Engineering Teams for this accomplishment.
Go, probably the shortest name for any language conceived by developers, excluding C of course. Go is an effort by Google to introduce a new programming language to help developers utilize the new technology that is fueling a boom in the computer software industry.
The primary purpose of Google of launching this new language was to deal with the following issues:
•Computers are enormously quicker but software development is not faster.
•Dependency management is a big part of software development today but the “header files” of languages in the C tradition are antithetical to clean dependency analysis—and fast compilation.
•There is a growing rebellion against cumbersome type systems like those of Java and C++, pushing people towards dynamically typed languages such as Python and JavaScript.
•Some fundamental concepts such as garbage collection and parallel computation are not well supported by popular systems languages.
•The emergence of multicore computers has generated worry and confusion. (Source)
The very first point caught the attention of many people. Currently 64-bit systems are incapable of dealing with the 32-bit designed software applications. Resultantly, there’s a need to create software that fully accesses the hardware to its full potential. The recent slow down in software development has been linked to the inability of current programming languages to deal with hardware that is being pushed in new machines. Go does support x86 architecture for processors while maintaining legacies for older processors. However, the focus of the language is to change the landscape for programming languages and improve object orientated programming for programmers.
TkXel and SunStorm Interactive have done it again. Using the resounding success of WW2 Beachhead, Real Deer Hunting and Rescue Razzle; the new game, Run Razzle Run is now available at the App Store for the iPhone under the Family and Arcade categories.
Our in-house graphic design team has developed the art work in 3D to make the game more amusing and entertaining for the users. We thoughtfully created “Razzle”, (a friendly rat) to build a series of arcade/family games around this character in the future. Besides just development, we also have a dedicated sound engineering team which has developed the original score for Run Razzle Run.
In the game Razzle needs to run back home safely while avoiding the cumbersome crows and hungry hawks wanting to make him into a tasty meal. However, he has to run home using the extensive grid of powerlines, and he must jump to avoid becoming a feast for a hawk or biting the dirt when colliding with a crow.
Run Razzle Run will challenge your reflexes as the levels grow more and more complex. Razzle starts to run faster with fear as the crows and hawks begin to realize there’s a running away from them.
Delve into the game with realistic sounds of crow’s cawing, hawks swooshing and Razzle’s squeaking with fear. The beautifully hand-drawn landscapes that bring the game to life are stunning and add fun to Run Razzle Run.
In a recent survey conducted by Gartner, the Symbian platform showed that it was still the undisputed champion of smartphone OSs. However, with the recent explosive growth of the iPhone along with the buildup of Android, webOS, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile, this may become a thing of the past.
Symbian has traditionally had the largest marketshare due to the long-term strategic planning of the platform. What are now considered standard features for smartphone OSs’ such as app stores, firmware updates, developer SDKs, etc were all pioneered by Symbian. Unfortunately, it seems as if the technology was well ahead of its time in comparison to what is considered “revolutionary” or “cutting-edge” at this time. Symbian should look to recapitalize on this edge by leveraging the platform aggressively to consumers again.
Below are a few steps that Symbian should seriously look into to re-launch the platform into consumer minds again:
