I’ve been in San Francisco for the last week, running the Macworld booth for Danlabgames.

Besides showcasing all of Dan’s games, which went over very well, I tested out a rough demo of Rotrix on the crowd, leading to an estimable response from both gamers and some industry publisher people.

Receiving positive feedback felt very encouraging after pouring so much work into the project, and we’ll see where it leads.

Space Barnacle also seemed to be a hit, and looks fantastic on a glossy 24″ iMac. Going with the 1.6:1 aspect ratio totally paid off. It feels so mischevious to completely fill that high resolution display with a miniscule 288×180 pixel game.

I should be able to release a Mac port as soon as Apple releases Java 6, which, knowing Apple, will only be supported in Leopard… even though it’s been out for nearing 2 years on Windows, Linux, and Solaris. The rumor is that now that the Macintosh is on Intel architecture, they’re just porting the OpenSolaris version instead of rolling their own… which currently means 64-bit intel only? I don’t know, but it’s kind of sucky.

There’s something in the air

That brings me to Apple’s big announcement. The MacBook Air is light, underpowered, and overpriced.

No optical drive, slow hard drive, terrible integrated graphics, only 1 USB port? These are all things I need, but of course if I had a desktop at home, and I didn’t do graphics-intensive game development… and I was rich, maybe it’d be more attractive.

Stake your claim

The real buzz of the conference was iPhone development, even though few details on the SDK were announced at the keynote. A lot of developers are already working on projects with the reverse engineered headers.

Paul Kafasis likened the iPhone to the switch from Classic to OS X. These next few months will be like the wild west, and those that stake a claim early with quality software will have a really solid foundation in the future.

With 4 million phones sold already, and another 10 million forecasted by the end of the year, along with an untold number of iPod Touches, it’ll be a populous platform. And Cocoa developers will have an intimidating head start.

GAMES

Of course there’s a huge potential for games on the iPhone and iPod Touch. Just the hardware specs run circles around the DS. They’re equipped with a 660Mhz ARM1176 with a 3d graphics co-processor for hardware accelerated rendering, and include 128mb of main RAM, to say nothing of the gigabytes of speedy flash storage and wifi. And apparently, they’re running OpenGL ES 1.1 and SDL has already been unofficially ported.

A friend noted that if the iPhone were a game console, it’d already be the fastest selling console in history.

On Monday I was interviewed by San Francisco’s ABC 7 affiliate, for a story on mobile gaming. Bizzare and fun, with some footage from Wacky Mini Golf and Rotrix.

I’ll be staying in the bay area through GDC, so I’ve got another giant Moscone event to look forward to. Apple being Apple, the late February launch of the iPhone SDK may very well be after that — February 29th even.

Addendum

One of the best parts about events like Macworld is that it provides a chance to meet and knock around with all the great people of the Mac and tech scenes, some of whom you only see once a year.

I have to give a shoutout to the Picturesque guys, who had the booth next to me. Keep doing great stuff, and send me some of those photos!

Fun fact: Derek Yu, the editor of Tigsource and artist of Aquaria interned at Panic a couple years back, working on a cancelled project that Cabel showed a screenshot of during his session at last year’s C4. I knew that pixel art looked familiar.

Cursorcerer is a little tool I hacked together which allows you to hide the cursor at any time by use of a global hotkey. It can also autohide an idle cursor and bring it back as soon as you move the mouse.

The inspiration for this tool is one of my favorite and most utilized OS X features: the control-scrollwheel zoom trick. I use it all the time to make things like embedded flash videos full screen. The trick’s only major downfall is that it’s a constant battle to get the cursor out of the way.

To install, just double click on the prefpane. Hit control-option-k to zap and unzap the cursor. If you want to uninstall, go to ~/Library/PreferencePanes/ and trash Cursorcerer.

The technique behind this global cursor hiding hack originates in a useful post to the Apple carbon-dev mailing list from Red Sweater’s Daniel Jalkut.

Download Cursorcerer 1.0

While hanging out in Chicago this past Friday, I decided to check out the line at the Michigan Avenue Apple Store in anticipation of the dramatic 6pm launch of the iPhone. It was nuts: cops on Segways, restauraunts handing out free food, and a line that stretched around the entire block.

I tried taking a few pictures on my crappy cellphone, but realized that I could probably get better results from the iSight in my MacBook Pro. So I ended up walking around, holding my machine up and attempting to capture the general pandemonium.

Around 6:15, I went across the street to a Starbucks to see what kind of stuff I’d managed to get, and quickly spliced it together into a little video in iMovie.

When I came out, everyone in line had already gotten phones, and I could finally wander into the store to try out some of the demo units on display.

I guess my thoughts echo those of most reviews. Really nice flashy interface, and my few minutes of trying to type ‘doomlaser.com’ into the touch screen made me want to destroy it.

So awhile back I was thinking, “You know what would be funny? A screensaver that fakes a kernel panic!”

For those of you who might never have seen one, a kernel panic is basically the most shocking crash that you can get on a Mac. It’s Apple’s equivalent to the famed Blue Screen of Death.

What a great way to play a prank on someone, or frighten yourself.

So here is the end result, a harmless screensaver that faithfully emulates the horrifying experience of a kernel panic. It comes complete with a misleading Quartz Composer Preview so that the KP is all the more terrifying.

Download KPSaver