Hasta La Gadget!

This week in speaking with the crowd at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference, Tim Cook let it be known that Apple has reached a new high mark in cash paid out to developers. While Apple announced back in early January that they’d paid around $7 billion dollars to developers in all, Tim Cook announced today that Apple has paid out more than $8 billion. That’s one massive up-swing in a very short amount of time!

It was also made clear by Cook that it’s not just with developer payouts that Apple is succeeding. China was spoken about as well, with Cook saying “when I look at what Apple has done in China, I think it is hard for anyone to evaluate, and say it’s not impressive. Apple has gone from a few hundred million in revenue in one year to $3 billion in the next, to $13 billion the next – we’re adding over $10 billion every year!” Cook was more than willing to let the audience know that he was pumped up about Apple’s current path.

Speaking also about what Apple would and would not do to earn cash, specifically with “affordable” products, Cook let it be known that the company’s “North Star” is “a great product.” Cook continued speaking about how they’d actually tried to make cheaper products, but found that instead of creating a Mac for under $500, it made more sense to make the iPad. Thus that product ecosystem was born.

Cook also had a question asked of him about limits in each of their most important “categories” of products. The Apple CEO spoke simply: “There’s that word limit. We don’t have it in Apple’s vocabulary.” Cook continued, “When I zoom out and look at the smartphone market in particular, what I see is a market that is projected to double in the next few years.” A mighty powerful claim for the company that’s been so very undeniably present in the smart device market since its inception.

Read more about these and additional subjects spoken about by Cook this week at the conference via the timeline below – and let us know what you think!

Apple developer payout jumps to $8 billion is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

With the Microsoft Xbox 720 and the Sony PlayStation 4 looming, it may seem strange that an Android-based gaming console called OUYA would have any impact on the public’s interest. But there it is, a tiny box working with Google’s mobile OS and the NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core processor (with 4-PLUS-1 technology) and the ability to run a lovely collection of games right out of the box. And given the news and updates we’ve seen over the past few weeks, it’s more than just the Kickstarter fans that are aiming to get their hands on the OUYA action.

The most recent news bit to hit the OUYA-sphere has been word from the creators of the console that they’ve already seen such a great response, they’re planning on releasing a new model every year. That’s a schedule only a smartphone or tablet generally keeps. It’s also been claimed by the company that the first retail sales window will be June of 2013 – coming up quick!

Partners have been stacking up with intentions of getting games onto the OUYA platform since before the hardware was finalized. In fact we’ll not really know exactly what the console looks like in its end-form until the public has their hands on the retail version of the device, but still, the innards are enticing! Have a peek at this brief list of contributors and games promised to be attached to the system thus far:

• Words with Friends creator Paul Bettner
• Double Fine Productions’ Tim Schafer
• Firefox creators Mozilla
• CodeZombieGames who brought on a first-impressions look at the hardware
• Namco Bandai
• Plex
• HAWKEN!
• Twitch TV
• Minecraft
• XBMC
• Vevo
• Square Enix who’ll bring Final Fantasy III
• Onlive for game streaming of all kinds
• Human Element in a prequel format
• And the OUYA team has also revealed lists of games promised for the console

There are already Developer Consoles out there in the wild and they’ve been shipping since December to a full list known only to the company itself.

have a peek at the timeline below to see more recent OUYA action and stay tuned to SlashGear for the upcoming launch – and any oddities that occur between here and there!

OUYA Accelerates is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

The cloud is a wonderful place, and it makes sense that developers are wanting to get in on the action, especially with Dropbox, which boasts over 100 million users so far. Finally, though, the company has announced the Sync API, which will allow developers to easily integrate their products with Dropbox without the developers having to do a lot of the work.

In the past, developers could integrate their services with Dropbox, but many of the abilities, such as syncing, would be the responsibility of the developer, meaning that Dropbox only supplied the storage at the time. However, Dropbox is bringing some of that to an end and will be transitioning some of the developers responsibilities onto itself.

Essentially, the Sync API allows other apps to just work with Dropbox, and it can even act as if Dropbox were a local filesystem on the device itself. The API takes care of syncing and caching, as well as retrying uploads and downloads, which gets rid of all the grunt work that developers had to go through in the past to achieve similar results.

The Sync API is available now from Dropbox’s Developer webpage, and all the information you need to get started is right there. A few developers have actually already been using the new API in their apps, including Chris Cox, who is the developer of Squarespace Note. Cox notes that the new API cut his Dropbox code in half, which can also cut down loading times for the app.

Dropbox introduces Sync API for iOS and Android is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

This week the folks at BlackBerry have sent out a whopping 12,000 BlackBerry Z10 Red edition smartphones to developers across the world. Packages have been sent this with a note thanking these developers for “taking a leap of faith” in working with BlackBerry before and through the release of BlackBerry 10. This device appears to be exactly the same as the standard BlackBerry Z10 (see our full review here) device save the limited-edition red color casing.

The “Limited Edition Process” can still be seen on the official BlackBerry website for developers with a mystery package at the end of a timeline. This set of instructions shows that it was developers working with BlackBerry 10 apps and submitting a qualifying app to the company before January 21st, 2013, that were able to get in on this hot red party. This process was originally shown to have been delivering a BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha device which was then requested back before the BlackBerry 10 Launch Event.

UPDATE: Developers can still get in on the action as the BlackBerry team has extended the deadline for the Limited Edition Z10 to February 28th – head to that Limited Edition Process link and get your coding fingers out!

Amazingly it appears that a “6-8 week” launch window has been broken to pieces by BlackBerry (still called RIM when this whole process began) as developers have already begun receiving what up until now was still a mystery package. The package was described as simply “The Limited Edition device” and was noted as being “a specially designed fully functional BlackBerry 10 device built to help recognize those developers that helped launch the BlackBerry 10 platform by submitting quality 3rd party applications.” Rather simple and entirely enticing.

This is now one of three different editions of the BlackBerry Z10 that will be on the market, the first being a standard black version and the second being a white edition offered only through Verizon (thus far). There will of course also be different editions based on the radios required for each different mobile carrier both here in the United States and abroad – and it’s looking like the end of March is going to be the delivery window on the whole – can’t wait!

[via BlackBerry]

BlackBerry Z10 Limited Edition Red sent to 12,000 developers for free is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Just a few days ago, we told you that Brian Reynolds, Zynga‘s chief game designer is stepping down from his post after almost four years at the company. At the time, it wasn’t clear what Reynolds planned on doing next, but the man has spoken, and while he’s still not 100% sure what he’s going to do, starting up a small game studio is likely in the cards.

In a guest post on VentureBeat, Reynolds discusses the good times that he’s had at Zynga, and reflects on the past at Big Huge Games, as well as co-founding Firaxis Games alongside Sid Meier. However, while we was grateful for the time spent at these studios, Reynolds says he ready to “shift into a different gear,” and is thinking about starting his own small game studio.

Reynolds says that this would give him the power to do things that he wasn’t able to do at Zynga or other past jobs. He says he misses “getting to write code personally and make fun with [his] own hands.” He even says he misses the days of “day-to-day panics of being somewhere small and new and vulnerable, and the excitement of owning a small company.”

Reynolds notes that he wants to take risks and do stuff that might not be up to snuff for a publicly-traded company like Zynga. Thus, Reynolds says that “starting a little studio with a few wingmen…is likely to be on the menu.” As far as what he plans to do at this studio, should he start it up, he notes that mobile strategy games are a big interest for him.

[via VentureBeat]

Image via Flickr

Zynga chief game designer likely to start own game studio is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.