I was pretty excited about live broadcasts of every NCAA tournament game on Joost, especially given CBS’ bad habit of dropping a game of local interest in favor of something nobody outside the east coast cares about. Well, sucks to be me–I’ve been trying, unsuccessfully, all morning to get a game to load.
Adam Ostrow at Mashable got a game to load, but I know it’s not a problem between me and Joost in general–I mean, I got an episode of What’s Happening! to play, no problem. Just no basketball.
It’s too bad, because it looks like CBS has completely dropped the multi-paned live look-in view I always loved so much.
Apple officially announced the software development kit (SDK) for the iPhone today. In short: It looks like it will be really easy to download and install third-party applications for your iPhone. You’ll be able to install and uninstall programs directly from the phone or through iTunes. In addition, if you rely on enterprise e-mail (such as Microsoft Exchange) you’ll be able to access mail directly via Exchange protocols (I can access my KU mail from my phone via IMAP, for what it’s worth).
Tons of blogs have covered the news in detail, so I won’t rehash what they’ve said–read for yourself:
One downside to how software will be distributed–that is, exclusively through Apple–is that the availability of freeware from small developers will probably be slim and none. Apple is charging developers $99 per year to distribute software through the exclusive channel. So, unless software developers adopt freeconomics en masse, we may be limited to freebies from the big guys only. That’s not the worst thing in the world–giving the small developers a few bucks every now and then is what keeps things moving forward.
Either way, I’ve been waiting for this since the day I bought my iPhone–I’ve been a chicken about jailbreaking my phone because (a) it’s my only phone, and (b) I’m not well-off enough yet to go around throwing money at expensive cell phones willy-nilly.
I finish grad school in December. That’s still quite a ways away from now, but it doesn’t stop me from thinking about how I’m going to spend all of that new free time I’ll have on my hands. One project, I’ve decided, will be to revisit the short stack of games I actually enjoyed but never got around to finishing. This series will be a commentary on these games and eventually (hopefully) reports that I’ve indeed finished them.
Let’s take a look at the games, roughly in the order of when I started them:
- Beyond Good and Evil (PS2)
- The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (GameCube)
- Tekken 5 (PS2)
- The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (Wii)
- The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (Super Nintendo, via Virtual Console)
- The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap (Gameboy Advance)