This is just one of the coolest things I've seen in a while - some clever folks ported the ScummVM over to the iPhone, taking advantage of multi-touch support to deliver a perfect playable experience of classic LucasArts adventure games!

ScummVM fully supports multi-touch to simulate the behaviour of the mouse using gestures. With a single tap you left click, but for a right click you hold one finger and tap with another. To toggle click and drag, which is necessary in some games like Monkey Island 3, you "hold one finger on screen, swipe another up from bottom to top." Then you can drag something, lift your finger to drop it and it will automatically switch back to normal. Quite ingenious and easy.

Fully supported games

Day of the Tentacle (a must)
The Dig
Flight of the Amazon Queen
Full Throttle
Gobliiins
Gobliins 2
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (a must too)
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (this one too)
King's Quest 3
Loom
Maniac Mansion
Monkey Island 1: The Secret of Monkey Island (best game ever)
Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge (ok, maybe this is the best game ever)
Sam & Max Hit the Road (another must-have)
Simon the Sorcerer 1
Simon the Sorcerer 2
Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders

Obviously this is likely not sanctioned by LucasArts, and I wouldn't be surprised to see the site disappear in a while. But it's my personal hope that it might help show interest in some of these classics... wouldn't it rock to get these as downloadable games on Arcade, for example? With Achievements? One can hope! (And no, this isn't any sort of hinting - I'd just love to see them!)

Have had the iPhone for just under a week now, and wanted to share some more thoughts.

Overall, I am absolutely in love with this device. It feels fantastic in the hand, the screen is drop-dead gorgeous to look at, and in general it "just works" as you'd expect. In particular, the touchscreen UI is just as responsive, intuitive, and accessible as all of Apple's promotional videos show.

Pause and internalize that for a moment.

Everyone I've shown this phone to wants one - no exceptions. The only thing that is keeping a few folks I know from getting one today is a lack of Exchange support. You can work around some of this by syncing your phone to a PC with Outlook on it; that'll sync your contacts and calendar to the phone (though obviously you don't get push email or the ability to create contacts on the road). Yes, I've seen the same rumors as you about Apple licensing Microsoft's ActiveSync technology. I don't know if it's true (nor would I be able to say if I did know), but I can say that most of the fencesitters I've met are waiting for some sort of Exchange support and they'll jump as soon as it might be available.

Some other thoughts in no particular order:

The Good:

• iPod support is great - I was even able to import WMA Lossless songs from my music archive into iTunes for Windows. It simply transcoded the music to 256 Kb AAC (the higher setting I chose) and it just worked. I could even add album art to the music that was missing it.
• UI is coherent and extremely well-integrated together. Everytime you have a "I want to mail my picture" sort of thought there's a button just waiting for you right there.
• Camera is surprisingly good quality, though simple (more on the simplicity below). It takes easily the best "camera phone" pictures I've seen, and I've been using it to flesh out the contact photos in my Outlook address book.
• Virtual touch keyboard works fine. The larger screen makes the buttons a bit bigger than they might have been otherwise, and the predictive text technology is quite good - even with my fat, pudgy fingers.
• WiFi is beautifully integrated. Sitting in an open hotspot? No problem - the phone sees the signal, and asks you (once) if you'd like to use it. From then on, it'll automatically switch to that SSID anytime you're in the area without bugging you. I wish to god the Smartphones I've had in the past did the same - I ended up never using the WiFi support because it was such a pain.
• Voice quality (ie, "does it work as a phone?") is fine. I, and one other iPhone owner I've discussed this topic with, haven't had problems. The speaker volume (when being used as a speaker phone) is a bit quiet for my taste, but the audio quality has no issues I can tell. I suspect people who have problems are in poor-coverage areas.

The Bad:

• There are some minor annoyances in the iTunes Windows client UI. The one that bugs me the most is in the "select a folder" to sync photos UI. You can only select the top level folders on a drive, and not sub-folders. Since I store photos by year and topic (//server/photos/2007/summer BBQ), I can't sync specific events easily. I've also had a few crashes, usually when shifting tabs, saving changes, all the while the phone was syncing.
• While the UI is generally extremely consistent, there are odd exceptions to the rule that highlight the 1.0"ness" of the product. The one that always gets me is the difference between zooming back out on a photo or in Safari (double-tap) and the Google maps applet (tap two fingers).
• Camera is very, very (very) simple. One button to take a picture - that's it. No zoom, no cropping, no white balance, no flash, etc. The UI is nice and clean because of it, but I hope there will be some expansion here in the future.
• AT&T's EDGE network can be slow. The built-in WiFi support helps a lot here, but you really feel it when you're out of range of a hotspot.
• Applications are limited. The ones on the phone are nicely done and useful, but I'm already looking to external websites for "iPhone applications." I'm hoping that Apple opens up the platform to software developers over time.

The Ugly:

• Said it before, but no Exchange support is currently the biggest blocker to people I know adopting this phone. Yes, even more so than price... but remember, I live in the Seattle-area/Microsoft influenced part of the country. I fully expect price to be more of an issue elsewhere - though it appears Apple's sold over half a million of these guys in just one weekend, so they seem to be doing ok so far.

All-in-all, I really feel Apple's set a new bar here for a mobile communications device (note not just a "phone"). I'm really looking forward to seeing what Microsoft, Motorola, Nokia, and other mobile providers do with future devices. Competition is a good thing!

As suspected, Apple announced their iPhone. More can be found at Engadget (including sexy picture) and other sources on the web. You guys know I'm also an Apple and OS X fan, and I have to say this is a pretty slick looking device. Lots of questions in my mind - the fact that it runs OS X makes it potentially interesting as a game platform though the hardware specs will help determine a lot there. I'd buy this tomorrow if it syncs email to an Exchange server as the Microsoft Smartphones do. Not clear whether it does or not - anyone know?

[Edit: My phone lust just got dampened by the price: $499 for the 4 GB, $599 for the 8 GB model. When will people learn that $600 is not the new $300? (Thinking consoles here, of course.) Lots of potential to the device, but is it worth as much as a PS3? (And I'm specifically talking about the PS3's hardware and future potential, of course - not the PS3 as it stands today.) I bet we'll see a $100 price drop by holiday.]

Just wanted to share a quick post to share this link about Transgaming's Cider from Red Herring. Not a lot of information, but it appears Cider allows game developers to basically wrap their Windows game such that it can run on an Intel Mac. The key appears to be that a developer can use their existing source code base without a lot of changes. I'm sort of thinking of Cider as Parallels for gaming... which sort of leads me back to possible Apple strategies for gaming.

There are a few plays I can imagine, but I only have time to write up one now. That theory, in short, is that I can imagine Apple creating a Cider equivalent, but tied to OS X. I personally believe Boot Camp is a step on that continuum. As you probably know, Boot Camp allows you to dual-boot between different OSes. The next logical step has already been taken by Parallels, which enables virtualization (or allowing both Windows and Windows applications to run inside of OS X). Many people believe virtualization belongs in the OS directly, so it's not hard to imagine Apple working hard to enable this in the next version of OS X. And at that point, it's not that much more of a step to create an "Intel Mac Gaming SDK" that enables game developers to optimize what's basically their Windows game codebase and simply run on the Mac, just as Cider appears to allow. Heck, I could even see Apple shortcutting the whole process and just acquiring Transgaming and putting those guys to work on the OS directly.

This would be a huge step forward for Apple as it could resolve that nagging problem of not having enough games on the platform. It's probably of smaller benefit to the game industry as a whole since the total number of games being sold may not go up dramatically (after all, people are likely to buy only one copy for whichever system they want to play on). What it doesn't address is Apple's desire to expand iTunes reach into the living room and other devices... which I think leads to Apple's other potential gaming strategy. More on that later.

Rumors have been going around the web for years that Apple might get into the mobile phone market. Engadget just posted an article highlighting some interesting finds:

"Anyhow, in the June 28th iPod updater package, apparently if one were to analyza few particular files with a hex editor, one would produce some very peculiar and anomalous commands, like t_feature_app_PHONE_APP, kPhoneSignalStrength, clPhoneCallModel, clPhoneCallHistoryModel, prPhoneSettingsMenu, and so on. They're confirmed to have absolutely nothing to do with the Moto iTunes phone line, which makes sense, and we will concede that such a find seems highly unusual."

This struck me as interesting because there have also been a few rumors of Apple getting back into the gaming market. Apple's done a great job of reinvigorating their PC line with the shift to OS X and Intel Core Duo processors, and today your average consumer can get pretty much anything done on their Mac that they might do on the PC. Yes, there's a smaller selection of applications overall, but there tends to be at least some solution for almost every need... except gaming. No offense to Mac fans out there (of which I am also one), but the Macintosh gaming landscape is a bit of a wasteland. This is the one area Apple really needs to kickstart to be successful over time; after all, gaming is regularly listed as the second or third most important application people want to do with their PCs ("internet", or web-browsing and email being first).

Point is, I can see an Apple cell phone happening, if only because it would be a great extension device for iTunes - think iPod and cell phone combo. I'm sure Apple would have some fun negotiations with the cellular carriers on iTunes revenue sharing, but that's all solveable at the end of the day. Once you have an "iPhone" you've nailed two of the devices people are most likely to carry with them while away from home. What's the third? A portable gaming device like the PSP or DS. My gut is if a cell phone/iPod hybrid is coming down the line, a version that encompasses gaming isn't far behind.

Busy day today so I can't write more, but I'll try to gin up some better-formed thoughts this weekend on what Apple's gaming strategy might be. I don't have any special crystal ball here, but I do have some thoughts on what might be interesting plays for Apple. Hint: the Mac Mini just seems like an odd little device... today.

[Edit: Penny Arcade mentioned a product from Transgaming called Cider that appears to allow Windows games to run on Intel Macs pretty much seamlessly, albeit with some developer work. To quote Tycho:

"Transgaming's Cider product allows Windows games to run on Intel Macs without dual booting or costly and painful waxing. It isn't emulation exactly, and it does require some devloper cooperation. I've been expecting Apple to handle something like this themselves, and they may yet, but perhaps they believe that Boot Camp has it under control. I sometimes, even in our enlightened age, see snark merchants snickering about the dilapidated state of Mac gaming. This was in a post I was reading on my Mac, booted into Windows, right before I played the demo of Prey with no hitches the very day of its release. I don't know if there is this storehouse of tired-ass Mac jokes out there that have no defined use, or what, but we're way past the expiration date on that type of material."

Pretty cool - I'm actually not familiar with Cider directly but will obviously need to look into it.]