I was spending a few hours the other day wandering from store to store looking for a laptop for my son. Nothing extreme, just something Windows based that will run Free Realms and any other game he wants to play. Being only nine, I don’t expect the need for a high-end video card so even a standard on-board Intel is fine. I wander into BestBuy and start looking at what they have available. As I come across each laptop I do a quick review search on my iPhone to see what people are saying about them. I come across a Compaq model that seems like it just might be what I’m looking for. Apparently the battery on it doesn’t last long, but he’s going to use it in the house, so that’s not a big deal. Anyway, I notice the price on the box and realize it’s $100 more than what’s advertised on their website. Weird.

I grab one of the guys wandering around looking for something to do and ask him why the price difference. He immediately tries to pull up the page on their website using his computer, but since I’ve heard of the BestBuy problem with them using a different web page internally, I had him my phone with the page already loaded with the lower price clearly marked. He then goes on to explain that they’ve opened up all the laptops, installed their “Geek Squad” software on it, and then re-sealed the boxes. WTF!? They’re selling hardware they’ve already opened? He tries to bestow upon the wonders of their software and how I can now just buy the laptop and do nothing to it but turn on the power and rainbows and kittens will explode from the screen.

Now, I know how computers work. I could start using it from power up whether their software is on it or not. I let him know in very polite terms that I will not pay $100 more for a machine and I’ll take my product search somewhere else. It just reminded me of how car dealerships treat their customers by “upgrading” new cars with weather guard protection plus with clear-coat and bug avoidance or something and then charge you more for the same car. It’s just an extremely slimey business practice to get more money out of people that don’t know any better. The whole situation made me feel insulted.

I have a standing personal rule that I don’t buy hardware from BestBuy. Movies and games fine but no hardware. I have no idea why I was willing to even considering a laptop from there anyway.

I’m going to place an order with Dell instead.

Any game that has a psychotic Red Riding Hood and Snow White has to be awesome. Just from the little bit I’ve read about this so far it definitely seems like something I have to play. I have to hand it to Playlogic for using the Unreal Engine in such a manner.

Joystiq has a story and more images on their site.

I’m continuing to update Hurricane for the iPhone to the latest 3.0 firmware. Grabbed the final firmware and SDK from Apple last night and re-built everything on my phone. Nice to see it finally running on the device. A few more days of dev and the new version should be ready to release to the world. I think everyone will be pleased with the update.

There doesn’t seem to be a way anywhere within the sdk to rotate a UINavigationController and it’s children to a new orientation when the view is displayed. There are a ton of people asking about this all over the web and everyone gives them the same useless answer that doesn’t solve the problem. This creates a ton of posts I have to sort through and no results.

Yes, I know how to tell it to rotate or not rotate a certain view, no this isn’t the functionality I’m looking for.

I have multiple pages of data. Some I require must remain in portrait mode while others are able to be rotated. Going to one of these rotatable views and then returning to a portrait view will cause the portrait view to be in landscape mode. Rotating the device to fix this view doesn’t work as this one doesn’t allow rotating.  *sigh*

I’ve been spending a few hours messing around with the MapKit part of the iPhone 3.0 SDK. I was able to easily get a scrollable google map up and running pretty quickly and then mess with rendering my own content on top of it. I need to be able to place multiple markers around the map, but I don’t want to use map annotations for all of them because the pins just look horrible. They’re fine for user locations, but pins everywhere just looks bad, plus they’re only available in red, green, and purple. So, I’m drawing my own markers on top of the map and that seems to be working well for the most part.
Going to keep messing with it for a bit and see if it’s definitely a piece of the sdk I want to continue to use.

Nintendo just announced that they’re releasing a lime green DS Lite at the start of next month. I absolutely love this color. Why couldn’t they have released this color a year ago? I’m about to pick up a new DSi and then this color comes out. I can’t justify picking up a DS Lite and then a DSi, there’s no point, but it’s my favorite green. Wonder how long before they do a green DSi?

I spent most of today giving a training course on iPhone development at FullSail. I think the presentations and tutorials I put together were fairly useful. The purpose of the class was to take someone from never touching iPhone development, and some of them never touching a Mac, to getting a few simple applications up and running in a short amount of time. I covered just the absolutely required objective-C constructs and explained more about how memory allocation works as I went along. The whole alloc/init/retain/release thing is difficult for people just starting out to really grasp.

As nervous as I was going into this, I feel it came off pretty well. Now to get back to my comfy zone with DirectX =^..^=

I have to get up at 5am to head to airport for the trip to GDC, the Game Developer’s Conference in California. While I’m not looking forward to the actual flight out there, hate flying, I’m sure the trip itself will be a fun time. I’ll be posting updates to twitter while I’m out there, so if you follow along I’ll be posting about what I see.

Today my latest project went live, Cat Calls. An adorable little application that will both annoy your pets, entertain your friends and look cute doing it.

You can find more information at my company website.

I’m moving all my new handheld development away from the iPhone. The app store is too flooded with junk applications causing consumers to lose any confidence in the quality of software they find there. No matter how much time and effort you spend, the drive for a lower price point makes development difficult to justify. There are also instances of some “developers” flooding certain app store categories with fifty of the same application. This is what happens when you get that gold rush mentality.

Microsoft announced their application store the other day and so far I like what I’m seeing. Microsoft restricts the number of applications a developer can release in a given year with each additional application requireing more of a financial investment. I’m hoping this will eliminate the overpopulation of poor quality seen on the Apple app store.