i don’t believe in the merge of phone, ipod, pda, it means too many compromises. i want to keep my phone small, robust and reliable for going out, thus i prefer to have a separate, relatively huge pda for email, browsing, writing and hopefully music production. text input via stylus/handwriting recognition can be quite convenient when you have a decent pad (a book for example) and a bigger pen (i currently use a wooden chopstick, works perfect).

i don’t know the zune (i’m in europe). i guess they’ll keep it closed just like the classic ipod models.

But yeah, I agree — open SDK should make things easier. I wonder if Microsoft will respond with Zune, given that they’ve got what appears to be the Windows Mobile platform, or one of the other manufacturers. (And if not, why not?)

I think the iPod is still a great platform to develop for, I just see the challenge in the specialized interface rather than programming issues. Possible applications would for example be artists’ installations which require generated sounds, iPods could fill the gap between a full computer and a CD-player here.

However, with the arrival of the iPhone/touch SDK, hopefully all limitations interface- and prgramming-wise will be gone and we can look forward to a really shiny future with futuristic audio apps from independent developers.

I’ll stand by what I’m saying.

What’s special about it — I think that they’ve integrated it with iPod and the iPod library. It’s not that it’s a new idea, it’s that it’s an idea that could be hitting the mainstream. I think the idea of releasing this as a quasi-album, then pulling music from your library, is really interesting. And I’m of course familiar with the history of this area. I’m actually *not* sure that leads to a shiny, new future, because personally I’m pretty happy listening to and playing music without necessarily interacting it — I find that future hard to conceive, because it’s really unclear what form this might take, even with the precedents that are out there.

Minor miracle? Yeah, I think so, just because iPod dev seems like a pain in the arse. (*Minor* miracle, I said. It’s not Jesus in toast, necessarily.)

And I personally think the visual style is really great; that’s just my personal opinion.

Harmonix didn’t send a press release, either. :)

But I hoped this would spark discussion, so I’m totally happy to hear what others think…

btw, the whole programming environment and the plugin concept of podzilla made development very easy, i didn’t find it hard at all.

as for the phase game: i don’t get what’s so special about it and what separates it from the old beatmania concept (we’ve seen stuff like this on consoles and cellphones for almost a decade). i find it neither stylish nor innovative and it’s certainly not a “miracle”. i like your optimistic, yet euphoric style of writing and the will to see miracles in new products which gives a great feeling of a shiny near future. but i’m sorry, this just reads like a harmonix press release.

Rockbox programming is HARD. Official iPod programming looks just as nasty. It’ll be interesting to see if it’s easier to do this stuff with iPod Touch / iPhone and its SDK. I think in general, you won’t see this area progress until there are better development tools.

At the same time, while we’ve been *saying* this would happen for a long time, new mobile devices really are getting more like desktops, especially with beefed-up OSes like the embedded Linux stuff showing up. So I could see the line between “phone”, “music player”, and “mobile computer” continuing to blur. That will also help make interactive musical gaming easier to do.

uav, thanks for that link! I had forgotten about that one.

But, of course, interactive music games go WAY back — the folks at Harmonix had quite a series of games long before Guitar Hero was even a glint in their eye. What I find interesting is integrating them with the music player in this way.