When I was a kid, there were lots of gaming platforms, but several failed due to existing IP. A prime example is the Commodore 128. Commodore touted the computer’s C64 compatibility as a major plus, but it meant no-one created C128 games, because loads of C64 ones already existed. The same, to some extent, went for the Amstrad CPC, which got loads of duff ports from the ZX Spectrum, due to some shared architecture. I wonder how iPad will fare. Apple’s device not only resembles a giant iPod touch—it also runs almost all existing App Store content. You get apps sitting centrally in the screen or ‘pixel doubled’.

With nearly 30 million iPhones and millions of iPod touches in the wild, and many thousands of games available, I wonder how many devs will target iPad, and how many will just continue developing for Apple’s already popular handhelds. If the former happens—and developers take a punt, hoping Apple’s new device will become as successful as iPhone and iPod touch—you end up with another top-quality gaming platform from out of nowhere. If not—which could so easily be the case—iPad will be a pretty device playing games that look OK, but were ultimately designed for another system. Here’s hoping the former’s the case.

This morning’s Times reports Nokia will close its Regent Street store, because it’s somehow—and this is a massive (non) shock—failed to tempt people across the road from the Apple Store. Frankly, this is mind-boggling. How a shop stocking a bunch of fairly dated and dull phones never managed to grab people from an always busy store chocked full of exciting computers, music players, multimedia devices and software is beyond me.

I tell a lie—it really isn’t. But it is, apparently, beyond CCS Insight analyst Ben Wood, who remarks in the Times article: “There was no question that the store was trying to replicate what Apple had done and build up the brand rather than shift devices. The question is why that strategy has worked for one company and not for the other.”

And this is why I hate analysts. Ben, this is your job. Are you seriously questioning why Apple’s store is a huge success and Nokia’s isn’t? Apple got there first, Nokia is a shallow copy. Apple has loads of great kit, Nokia doesn’t. Apple has a brand associated with aspirational qualities, Nokia’s brand is primarily associated with cheap phones you chunk in the bin after a year.

It’s really quite simple—unless you’re an analyst.

Yesterday on Cult of Mac, Leander Kahney wrote The top 5 secrets to designing a killer iPhone app site, citing the importance of a decent web page for marketing your app or game. He suggested: make the site a single page; use an iPhone image with your app inside as the main image; include an instantly recognisable App Store badge; use animated screenshots showing the app in action; and display the price up-front.

I rather grumpily commented that tip six should be devs including some kind of downloadable media kit, and, surprisingly, a dev just emailed me for some advice on this, and so I figured I’d share it with the world at large.

First, some reasoning for me being grumpy about a lack of press pages. I write about iPhone and iPod touch apps a lot, but many of the articles are round-ups. Commission rates are such that you don’t get a lot of time with each app, and so you need to maximise the amount of time you spend using it and writing about it, and minimise everything else. Time I have to spend faffing about taking screen grabs, syncing my iPhone to send the grabs to iPhoto, and then extracting them to Finder, is time I could have instead spent using your app or your game.

Furthermore, although Apple intelligently provided a means to take grabs on a device (hold the home and sleep buttons), this is, at best, awkward. I often end up back on the springboard, because I pressed the home button too early, or ‘missing’ the right moment in a game, because my fingers were otherwise engaged on the multi-touch screen, and requiring two of them to take a trip to the iPhone’s tactile buttons was a quest too far.

What makes me happy is when developers deal with this themselves. You know the best bits of your own game or app, so should provide insight into such things for people writing about it. And you shouldn’t be saying “just go to the site and grab something there,” unless the site has appropriate material. Two companies that utterly get this are GymFu, whose press area is fantastic, offering PNG grabs, icons and press releases, and Madgarden, whose Saucelifter website provides succinct info, a bunch of PNG grabs you can drag to Finder or Windows Explorer, and a downloadable press pack.

If you’re thinking of revamping your website for an app or game, take note of the Cult of Mac article, but also ensure you include a press page or at least some basic assets for download:

• As a minimum, ensure your app or game grabs are full-size PNGs, which are not lossy. Compressed JPEGs are not usable in print, nor are resized images and those with watermarks.
• If there are specific points about your app you want to share, include these in a succinct text overview.
• To seriously make friends with hacks, provide everything as a downloadable ZIP.
• And always make sure you provide an email address for media enquiries—otherwise people like me sometimes give up and go and write about someone else’s creation instead.

It’s not necessary to have all this in a separate press section, although you can if you choose. Just having usable PNGs on app info pages is enough. The important thing is you do something, rather than just bung heavily compressed grabs online and avoid telling writers how to contact you.

Update: As a couple of people have already said to me, this information is largely good for anyone developing apps and games. Ensure people can contact you. Provide info about what you create. Provide uncompressed screen grabs for download.

Apple crushed Psystar in court; the ruling reported on November 14 stated Psystar had no right to hack about with Mac OS X and sell Mac clones.

Oddly, commentators are saying this is a bad thing. PC World called it a ‘hollow victory’, providing all the usual garbage arguments like “what if [insert car company] only let me [park in certain places/drive on certain roads]?”, ignoring the fact that with Apple, the entire unit—hardware and software—is the product. (And, car-argument fans, with Intel Macs you get your own roads and can also drive on everyone else’s.) Boxed copies of Mac OS X are to enable people to update existing Apple products. And since other platforms and PCs exist, Apple in itself isn’t a monopoly.

The main argument rearing its ugly head, though, is that Apple is stupid in restricting its OS to Apple hardware alone. It could, some say, have huge market-share if only Apple allowed its software to appear on every PC around, or even if it just licensed to choice vendors such as Dell.

This is bull. Apple is, despite what some people seem to think, primarily a hardware company, and it makes the bulk of its money from relatively high-end kit. If Mac OS X could be run on cheap hardware, that wouldn’t increase its market-share—it would just eat into Apple’s profits. This already happened once, during Apple’s disastrous experiment with Mac clones in the 1990s. And lower profits for Apple leads to less R&D and weaker products—a vicious cycle that would neither benefit Apple nor the industry as a whole.

Furthermore, Apple runs a relatively tight ship, and that’s because it deals with the entire package itself. If Mac OS X had to officially run on a huge number of additional pieces of hardware, problems would hugely escalate, and the platform’s stability—much of what makes it so appealing in the first place—would be gone.

Ultimately, Apple cares about profits. Sure, it doesn’t want its market-share to plummet, but then that’s not happening. Even in these dark financial days, Apple’s share is (very) slowly rising. And even with its small market-share, Apple consistently outperforms the competition; but it’s a fallacy to believe Apple would perform better if it ditched its lucrative hardware in favour of cheap Dell laptops running Mac OS X.

Mac OS X 10.6.2 arrived recently, and it doesn’t support the Atom processor. This has led to people crying foul, saying Apple’s out to kill the hackintosh community. One blog claims, commenting on the system causing instant reboots for affected hardware, “My sources tell me that everytime a netbook user installs 10.6.2 an Apple employee gets their wings”. Shane Spiess is then quoted in an article by Kevin McLaughlin for ChannelWeb: “There is no other logical reason why Apple would do this unless they’re going to enter this space with some sort of tablet-type device” (hat-tip: Daring Fireball).

I suspect the reason is simpler. If you count the number of products Apple has in its line that use the Atom processor, you’ll come up with the figure of zero. Nada. Zip. Why should Apple spend time supporting a processor that’s not used in its products? Chances are Apple’s been optimising and bug-cleaning, and broke something that it can’t be bothered to fix—because it doesn’t need to. And even if the action was ‘malicious’ as the earlier linked blog claims, it’s worth noting that Apple is a hardware company and makes a huge chunk of its profits from Macs. If Apple doubled its marketshare but in doing so lost most of its sales to Atom-based netbooks, it’d be screwed. But as Apple’s Q4 results show, the company’s in fine form and doesn’t have anything to fear from hackintoshes, which more points to the likelihood that it just doesn’t care.