2010 June « iBeams

New app? gravibeams?

Recently Apple featured a really simple openGL app, Something that was being marketed as a installation piece back in the 1990’s. Beyond rendering setup this app required about 20 lines of code (provided you had a xyz vector class) . Someone quickly copied this app and made it free, now the original is being sold for 2 bucks and the copy is being sold for a buck. It says something about the fickle nature of Apple’s featured app process that they managed to turn someone’s weekend iPad porting project into tens of thousands of dollars.

I took a look at the original and it’s 8000 ratings (implying that it actually sold more like 30-50k copies) and said I can write this in an hour. Of course when I did it, I added a bunch of more modern rendering tricks, and it was inside the iBeams rendering framework so I have echoes stretching off into infinity, and the accelerometer bouncing stars around . I’m currently working on making a simplified UI for it.

You’ll have to forgive the lack of audio, I didn’t quite realize that it wasn’t easy to video tape the ipad while holding the iphone.