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iOS devs appear in new Develop 100 listing
The Develop 100 is a list put together every year of the top video game developers in the world, and this year there's a surprising trend showing up: a lot of iPhone and iOS developers are starting to make the grade. Touch Arcade spotted around 50 iPhone and iPad developers in the list, which is more than I've ever seen in a list usually populated with the likes of Bioware, Nintendo and Blizzard Entertainment. Sure enough, Nintendo is number one this year, but World of Goo creator 2D Boy is in the second spot, with Cut the Rope developer Zepto Lab in third. A little further down, there's Chaos Rings developers Media Vision, along with 1337 Game Design (Dark Nebula), Rockstar Leeds (GTA: Chinatown Wars for iOS) and The Coding Monkeys (Carcassone). That's pretty amazing -- these little iOS developers are beating out much larger devs, like Halo's Bungie and Call of Duty's Treyarch, for the top spots on a pretty prestigious list. One reason for the changes is probably that the list is now weighted more towards the ratings on Metacritic, where iOS games tend to do very well compared to other video game titles (for a number of reasons, from a lower price to a completely different type of media and market). Still, it's interesting to see upstart iOS developers we know and love stacked up in such a favorable way against much larger and more experienced traditional game developers.
SubEthaEdit 3.1 plays nicer with the 'net
SubEthaEdit, the high-power collaborative code editor from The Coding Monkeys, has been bumped to version 3.1 with new features to make collaboration easier than ever. SubEthaEdit has always worked well for LAN collaboration, but many users found the manual setup for sharing over the internet to be cumbersome. The Coding Monkeys answered the call with a couple of new ideas. First, automatic port forwarding handles establishing your channel outside of your LAN transparently, supporting all routers with UPnP or NAT-PMP capabilities. Second, iChat invites allow users to drag iChat buddies onto a document to automatically invite them to share in your coding ecstasy. This feature is Leopard-only, although I'm unsure if that applies to the invitee as well. The iChat invites go a step further with "Friendcasting." You can view and connect with your friend's friends with the click of a button in the connection browser. You can disable this feature at any time. If you're not familiar with SubEthaEdit, but happen to use Panic's Coda, then you're already familiar with the engine it runs on as it was licensed to Panic in 2007 for the web development package. If you're looking for a code editor and haven't tried it, it's definitely worth a shot, especially if you work in pairs or teams. TextMate and I have a monogamous relationship, but I'm allowed to look. Fair enough. SubEthaEdit costs 29 euros (about $45 right now). Visit the SubEthaEdit page for a 30 day trial and a screencast of the new features.
