The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

Want an iPhone app business without all the boring hassle of actually programming and releasing iPhone apps? Boy, does Brice Milliorn have a deal for you! He's auctioning off his iPhone app business, which he says has 87 different apps for sale, over on eBay.

Milliorn says he started out developing apps on his own, but the business is just too big for him to keep up so he's selling all of the apps and their rights, all of the source code, and technical support for two months to transition everything over to the new owner. He doesn't specifically say that he'll transfer the developer account on Apple's App Store to your name (he says he'll send over a DVD with the source code and transfer "the whole kit and caboodle" to you), but we presume that's what will happen -- of course if you go for it, you're doing this at your own risk.

What will a burgeoning App Store business, complete with apps like iSexyRef and Swine Flu cost you? Just a cool $100 grand. That's the starting bid in the eBay auction, which has just over a week left and no bids as of this writing. There are certainly less expensive ways to get started selling apps on the store. It only costs $100 to register in Apple's Developer Program for a year, and then you just need to find a developer you can pay -- or even do it yourself with a helper service).

If you'd rather start off with a bunch of marginal to silly 99-cent apps and happen to have an extra $100,000 lying around to spend (maybe for a nice holiday gift?), here's your opportunity.

Just in case you were waiting for the stop-motion app on your hard drive to be compatible before switching to Snow Leopard, you can stop waiting -- even if you're using some other program to do stop motion, iStopMotion is the best and brightest, and with the brand new update to version 2.1, it's completely compatible with the newest version of OS X.

OK, you probably weren't waiting for this upgrade to bring the OS up to date, but hey, Snow Leopard compatibility is a nice selling point with any app. This upgrade also includes the ability to put markers (with their own name, color, and description) in the timeline of your video, as well as a full Japanese localization, to go along with the English, German, and French already in there. It's a free update for all current users, and considering that iStopMotion has made quite a few appearances in various Mac software bundles, odds are you've already got it anyway.

This is a cool interview over at Cult of Mac -- you've heard of Steve Jobs of course, you know who Jonathan Ive is, you might have heard of Rob Janoff, but do you know Ken Segall's name? He's a former creative director from TBWA\Chiat\Day, and he has two claims to Apple fame: he worked on the "Think Different" campaign, and he's responsible for coming up with the one letter that may have defined the modern-day Apple as we know it. That's right, he named the iMac.

The writeup is fascinating, even if you get the sense that we're looking through the lens of history, and things may not happened quite as stylishly as they seem. Jobs apparently showed the Bondi Blue iMac to the ad team, and while he originally "hated" the name, he obviously came around -- though Segall apparently never got the satisfaction of official approval.

He closes with an interesting sentiment about the company, too: at Apple, it's always about moving forward to the next big thing, and everything is product-centered, not number-driven. Segall says he was around for a few Jobs "flare-ups," but if there was a fit thrown, it was always in trying to keep the company moving forward as quickly as possible.

Interesting stuff. It's quite a legacy, too -- the iMac was originally called so because it was a Mac that connected to the Internet, but obviously since then, the i has become symbolic of many other things, all the way up to iLife, the iPod, and the iPhone. You tend to forget, after all of the millions of dollars and the culture and promotion, that it all came from the head of a guy in a conference room looking at a computer Jobs just pulled the cloth off of.

Here's a few interesting stats from a survey recently conducted in Europe. These aren't specifically about the iPhone, but given that smartphones relied on buttons almost exclusively before Apple's handheld came along (and nowadays, everyone's bragging about their touchscreen technology), a temperature-taking on what people think of touchscreen controls is more or less a referendum on what people think of Apple's influence.

At least in France, Germany and the UK, reactions are mixed. While 38% of those surveyed say they were planning to get a touchscreen on their next mobile phone, only 47% of people who already owned a touchscreen said they would get another one. In other words, less than half of touchscreen owners thought they'd stick with the technology on their next purchase. Apple remains an anomaly -- both HTC and Apple have a higher amount of current customers planning to stick with their touchscreen interface (with the full numbers being released at a conference later this month), but the fact remains: current touchscreen users aren't anywhere near 100% on living button-free forever.

Especially as a gamer, that makes a lot of sense. Touchscreens are great for a lot of things -- they allow for limitless flexibility in the kinds of interfaces on offer, and especially with multi-touch, a lot of the controls on the iPhone are extremely intuitive (you automatically know now that pinching equals zooming, and so on). But as nice as touchscreen is, there are a lot of functions on mobile phones, from adjusting volume or changing music tracks on a phone out of sight in your pocket, to hitting exact button controls while twitch gaming, that work much better with tactile feedback. Steve, as he always does, made a big deal about the iPhone being a one-button interface, but I wouldn't be surprised at all to see future iterations of the iPhone include either a few more buttons, or, even better, a few more haptic interface technologies.

It's funny -- when the iPhone App Store first opened up, the first thing I asked for next was a way to manage apps from directly within iTunes. But when that finally did show up, I was still left unsatisfied for some reason. I'm not sure why -- app management offers drag-and-drop functionality with your app icons, and that's about the easiest way to organize things across the home screens. But for me, it still seems unwieldy somehow -- dragging icons onto full pages stlll creates empty pages, and dragging icons between screens is awkward to me.

I'm not an interface designer, but having more than one home screen open at a time seems like it would be nice, and being able to assign my own tags and categories to apps (combined with an auto-sort function) seems nicer. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate that we can manage apps from iTunes, but it just seems harder than it should be.

Fortunately, iTunes 9.0.2 snuck a few updates to the system under our radar last week -- you can now put more than 176 apps in the organizer, and those will move on to grayed-out homescreens. You can still access them on the iPhone by using Spotlight, but those grayed-out homescreens only serve as a buffer to hold your overflow apps while you're organizing them. Doesn't really help the actual experience of sorting apps, but it should give you some breathing space when dealing with lots and lots of apps.

Speaking of buffers, it would also be nice to have a "shelf" to store app icons on while you're moving them around (you can use the bottom 4 apps as a minishelf, but that's not really enough). Maybe you could pile them into different areas on a screen and then drag them in the way you want onto your homescreens. Like I said, it's great that we do finally have an app management system in iTunes. But my feeling is that it's a little too much like the awkward iPhone-based system, especially with large numbers of apps, to be much help.

Ngmoco's Eliminate has been building up buzz ever since it was announced, and now the first-person shooter is out on the App Store to try for yourself. As you can see above, it offers some relatively basic FPS gameplay when compared to shooters on other platforms (I've been having a lot of fun with Borderlands lately), but given that this is the iPhone we're talking about, this kind of twitch 3D gameplay is actually pretty impressive. You can play online over 3G or Wi-Fi, and as you play, you can earn credits and level up, which gives you access to more weapons and better gear. The game itself is free, but it's all based around a microtransaction system where you buy "energy" which allows you to earn those aforementioned resources. You get a certain amount of energy per day on your own, and if you use it up, you can't progress any further unless you get out the wallet or wait another day. And the game uses ngmoco's own Plus+ social interface to track leaderboards and accounts. Interesting plan, and we'll have to see if players vibe with it or not. Some have already voiced strong concerns about the in-game pay-to-play microtransaction system.

If that doesn't vibe with you, and you'd rather play some old-school (and old business model) FPS gameplay instead, id's Doom Classic also got released on the App Store last weekend. That game comes at a cost of $6.99, but then again, with old-school Doom, you know exactly what you're getting into. And you won't have to buy any extra energy to charge your BFG and slay any demons you happen to come across.

We mentioned Gamesalad's plans to bring their publishing system to the iPhone earlier this year, and now they've done it: for $99 a year, they say that you'll be able to design games on their game creator development tool, and then publish them straight out to the iPhone's App Store. If you don't want to bother publishing the games yourself, you can create them and have them "viewed" through the Gamesalad Viewer (which we couldn't find on the App Store quite yet), or you can export them out as full applications and publish them as your own iPhone apps (Flutterby is in the store right now as an example of a Gamesalad Creator game).

There's also a $1999 membership service that lets you customize every aspect of your games, and provides you with direct customer support, which is supposed to be for "elite users" (like, we guess, actual game companies). And truthfully, I've developed a few apps using just Xcode, and it's not too big a deal (though I've never had to go through an actual release or worked with end users, which I'm sure is most of the battle anyway). But if the thought of using professional coding tools to develop your little game idea sends you into panic attacks, and the Gamesalad creator seems more your speed, this might be a nice viable way for you to turn your gaming idea into App Store gold.

It costs nothing to download and try out the creator, so if the idea interests you, you can work on putting a game together, and then pay later when you decide you've got something you want published on the iPhone. And hey, if you do put a game up, be sure to send a tip and let us know -- we'd love to see the end products of this process.

Just in case you missed it, I got my wish from a while back: there is an official version of the classic board game Settlers of Catan, called just Catan, on the App Store right now. I'm still playing Kolonists, the unofficial knockoff that got kicked off of the store for infringement, but if you've got wood for sheep, this official version should get you your portable fix. If you're unfamiliar with the Catan juggernaut, check out this thorough piece from Wired.com.

There's hot seat multiplayer gameplay (I assume you just can't cheat by looking at what resources other people have), or a few AIs to tangle with if you don't have friends at hand, and the game includes a scrollable board to play on, game stats to track, and a tutorial for those of you who haven't rolled the dice and tried to build the Longest Road yet.

The game is created by United Soft Media, a German company that's also ported the game to the DS, and while it's not quite as shiny as the Xbox Live port (my personal favorite version of the game, outside of the real thing, of course), the reviews on iTunes say it gets the job done, at least while you're waiting for the next board game night (and while we're talking about board games, can I recommend Dominion? Best table game I've played in years). The game is $4.99 and available right now. Anyone have any ore?

TechCrunch has posted pictures of what they're calling an "unlaunched Apple tablet." In 1990, as the story goes, Apple was supposedly working on a pen-based touchscreen tablet called the Pen Mac that was actually extremely small for the time -- just about an inch thick, with a screen the same size as a Mac Portable. They were bringing a few different companies in on the deal, and apparently it worked well -- ran a full Mac OS, used a pen to control or let you plug in a mouse and keyboard, and there was even a smaller version called the PenLite (bulky by today's standards, but remember that this is 20 years ago now).

So why weren't we all using tablet computers 20 years ago? TechCrunch blames John Sculley, who apparently thought the tablet idea was out, and the PDA idea was in, and we ended up with the Newton instead. I won't second guess him -- while it's easy to think that anything could have beaten the Newton, would the current Apple touchscreen tablet craze even be here if it weren't for the iPhone? And isn't Apple's smartphone just a hop, skip and a jump from their original PDA?

With all of the success stories coming out of the App Store, it's been pretty easy to forget the problem of piracy for most developers. Not so for Fishlabs, who've posted over on the Touch Arcade forums that their latest game, Rally Master Pro 3D, is experiencing a 95% piracy rate. You read that right: supposedly 95% of the people playing the game on the iPhone haven't paid for it.

There's probably a multitude of reasons why that is -- the app is $7 with no trial version, it's not a super-popular app quite yet (so one pirated copy on a popular message board is probably traveling farther than the copies coming off of the official App Store), and there are probably at least a few other factors in the mix that we don't know yet. Still, 95% is obviously pretty darn high for a platform that's supposed to only deliver software through Apple's official store.

Now, fortunately Fishlabs doesn't sound litigious -- they're not pulling the old "piracy = lost sales" fallacy that many companies in this situation would do. They are lowering the price on the app -- they expected it to be worth more, but apparently their consumer base seems to disagree. They tell Mobile Entertainment that they'd entertain the idea of providing content only through Apple's in-app purchasing service (presumably, that would prevent piracy by locking down the extra content), but they also say that's a gamble they've tried and missed on other platforms before.

Of course, it'll take more than one post on one message board to make hay out of the problem of app piracy -- it definitely happens, but on the other hand, there certainly are apps selling well, and there are also apps not selling well that don't have this level of piracy going on. Apple already has lots of authentication and validation processes in place, but if app piracy is this big a problem for everyone, they may need to look at more.