Normalkid:Arnold Kim

I’ve owned an Apple computer since the age of 12 or so. My first Apple was an Apple //c. I later moved on to the Apple //gs, a Mac IIsi, PowerMac 7500 and so on. I’m presently on a Mac Pro Quad Xeon.

During those 20 or so years, one thing has remained pretty constant… Apple has had very little interest in encouraging game development on their platforms. I can’t find any original references, but there’s an underlying belief that Steve Jobs hates games. Whether or not that’s true… that’s how Apple has acted over the years. Even to my then teenage mind, it seemed crazy that Apple would actively discourage such a popular use of their computers.

All that may have changed with the introduction of the iPhone and iPod Touch SDK. At the launch event, Apple invited Electronic Arts and SEGA to demonstrate their latest games running on the iPhone and iPod Touch… could it be that Apple has finally changed their attitude?

It seems so… but even without Apple’s blessing, I believe the iPhone and iPod Touch will become a huge gaming platform. The potential market is just too large and the desire for casual gaming on your mobile phone is just too great. By the end of 2008, Apple expects to have seeded at least 10 million iPhones to the world.

Everyone finds themselves in situations where they are just killing time and all they have is their mobile phone. Text messaging, browsing the web, and playing the latest iPhone game are the activities that people will increasingly turn to.

Based on this belief, Blake Patterson and I have launched a new site catering to those interested in gaming on the iPhone and iPod Touch.

We’ve been filling out content and formatting over the past few weeks. News stories will obviously pick up after the official launch of the iPhone SDK in June, so we have just been ramping it up in the meanwhile. I can’t be certain what the future holds, but I believe this site addresses a very loyal and expanding topic of interest.

When you have an established site, one of the most tumultuous events that can happen is a major site redesign. No matter what the changes are, no matter what the improvements are, there is always a very vocal group of people who simply hate it.

Now, to be fair to those users, changing the look and feel of a site that they’ve grown accustomed to is certainly a disorienting experience.

Macworld is about to undergo a major site redesign and has already seen a bit of criticism based on the beta site. The other scary part of their move is a change in forum software from UBB.threads to Jive. I suspect the outcry from that move alone could drown out any criticisms of their site design. Hopefully, they’ve spent time to make the forums “feel” the same as it did under UBB.threads. Good luck!

The fear of a site-redesign has what kept MacRumors in its current form for the past 4 years. But lately I’ve decided that its time to look into a site redesign and we’re starting to look for the right designer to do it.