Filed under: Gaming, WWDC, iPhone, iPod touch

Master Jumperton is a simple game where you swipe to create platforms for Master Jumperton to continually jump higher and higher. There are some similar games on the store, but Jumperton is well-crafted and features a high scores board and basic options. Master Jumperton isn’t yet available on the store.

Filed under: iPod Family, Developer, iPhone, SDK

Apple has released a 3.1 beta for the iPhone SDK. Both the SDK beta and firmware are available for testing and development to paid members of the iPhone developer program. As pre-release software, any details about this new release remain under NDA.

A pre-installation advisory and beta release notes are available as per Apple’s usual release strategy. As before, you cannot use the 3.1 SDK to create applications for submitting to the App Store, so if you plan to download it be prepared to create a separate installation directory.

We covered Jason Rohrer’s Primrose when it first came out — the creator of Passage, a critically-acclaimed indie game, had taken his first steps onto the iPhone with an abstract puzzle game, and in this latest interview with Edge, Rohrer says he’s on the iPhone to stay. He says that when he first moved from strictly art/indie games to more commercial development on the iPhone, he worried that he was selling out: he wasn’t a fan of cell phones at all or any Chinese-made gadgets sold by American companies, and yet the iPhone’s platform seemed most “palatable” to him in terms of making games and a little money from them.

And yet he says the iPhone still has pros and cons — even in an “open source, free software” world, Apple’s system offers a choice: you can buy a packaged-up version of the software and throw a little money back to the developer (not a ton — he says you’ve still got a better chance at making a living from Vegas than you do from the App Store), or you can still try building and installing your own version on your iPhone. As an open-source developer selling apps on the App Store, he says, “you’re charging for the service and convenience, not the content.”

Still, he echoes the sentiments of lots of other developers: “There is no quality filter, except for the whims of the masses.” Apple’s App Store offers up an intriguing system for many indie developers like Rohrer, who want to earn a little money for their games without setting up all of the complexity and burdens of a more traditional publishing channel, but it’s still tough to keep from getting lost in the mix.Jason Rohrer on going from indie to the App Store originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 30 Jun 2009 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

iPhone Savior featured this short video clip this morning by Scott Patrick showing how to use an inexpensive Contour iPhone case and some common hardware to make an iPhone tripod mount.

There are two impressive points about this mount; first, by using the Contour case, you know that the iPhone is going to be held securely (my wife used one for over a year and never had it inadvertently open up), and second, Scott made it so it will work with any standard tripod camera mount head.

With the tripod Scott is using, it would be simple to flip the camera 90° to put it into a landscape configuration. This should work well for both still photography with any iPhone or video work with the iPhone 3GS.