Macgasm

You know things have gone bad for Zynga when the only way they can recoup the cost of the $183 million dollars they spent on DrawSomething a couple of weeks ago is to ad even more advertisements to AdSomething to the game.

In addition to the normal in-app advertisements that DrawSomething forces users to draw as part of the game to get their money, the company will now also be rolling out even more advertisements. In the future you’ll find yourself looking at banner ads, video trailers, and puzzle words for DreamWorks’ Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted. The Wall Street Journal has pegged the value of that advertisment partnership somewhere between $250,000 and $500,000.

Maybe the plan was to introduce these ad models all along, but it’s hard not to think that Zynga is rushing to make coin while it can before gamers leave the game behind entirely. At its height, 14.5 million people were playing OMGPop’s DrawSomething, and it’s now rumored to be seeing only half of that number on a daily basis (7.6 million).

That $183 million dollars is starting to look a little ridiculous, isn’t it Zynga? Hats off to OMGPop for getting top dollar though, that was quite the coup.

We all knew that Tim Cook, the unfortunate dude who has to follow Steve Jobs’ legendary tenure as CEO of Apple, would not necessarily walk in his predecessor’s footsteps. One of the ways that Cook has distinguished himself is by being more affable and personable, and even sitting down for lunch with random employees in the Apple cafeteria. Fortune magazine’s Adam Lashinsky describes how Cook comes across so easy going and down to earth that Apple staff love his company (as opposed to feeling like they’ve just been thrown into an episode of Fear Factor). Contrast this to Jobs, who had a ritual of stopping employees in the hallway or the elevator and demanding they explain to him on the spot what they do here, knowing full well that a bungled answer could potentially cost them a job.

Cook differentiates himself from Jobs in more ways than just his lunch company; He’s also responsible for calling for independent audits of Apple’s overseas factory conditions and pushing Apple into a greener and more environmentally-conscious mode of thinking. Shareholders are particularly pleased with Cook allocating $45 billion over three years to stock dividends and share repurchasing.

Despite his untimely and tragic passing, the era of Steve Jobs is not quite over yet. While Cook has been at the wheel for the launch of the iPhone 4S and the iPad 3 (aka The New iPad), these products are still echoes of Jobs’ brilliant mind (the 4S was even released while he was still alive). Cook has certainly asserted himself as a CEO who can relate to people a little more easily and, at the same time, make some very positive quarterly financial reports. Time has yet to tell if, once the momentum of Jobs’ influence has faded, he can imagine the products which will keep Apple on top of the tech world.

Source: AppleInsider

Our iOS Games Workshop deal is just about to end. If you’re looking to get into developing iOS games but your coding skills are only mediocre, this could be just the thing for you. With the iOS Games Workshop, you’ll learn how to build iOS games without ever having to touch a single line of code. And the workshop is available for only $59. That’s 67% off the regular price of $179. But hurry, because this deal is about to end. If you’re ready to join the ranks of the best iOS games, don’t pass this opportunity up. Head on over to our deals page before it’s too late.

Microsoft is hilariously late to the tablet market with anything resembling a modern tablet OS. Sure, Bill Gates loved the idea of a Windows desktop with a stylus, but that ain’t no tablet, sonny! As Windows 8 (RT BBQ Edition for Tablets of Beloved Fearless Leader Of The Motherland 2008 Server Edition) was revealed, Microsoft went on and on about how duct-taping Metro to the classic Windows OS was all about choice and no compromise and blah blah blah. That said, they had the good sense to make the ARM version of Windows free from plug-ins. Most of us assumed that would mean Microsoft would join Apple’s fight to wrestle the web away from Adobe, but it turns out they’re compromising.

Rafael Rivera, Within Windows:

Yuck, yuck, yuck. So a half-working sorta version of Flash will be rolled into Internet Explorer 10, and Flash continues to limp its bloodied corpse forward another long, long year. This is less than happy news for those of us who fight with Flash on a daily basis. I’m sure that Windows tablets will be super fun to use, and we’ll all be punching chimps and watching splash screens for decades to come.

Source: Within Windows

On The Rain-slick Precipice of Darkness

The first in a planned quadrilogy of games, episode one of On The Rain-slick Precipice of Darkness (Or Otterspod) set the bar high. Clever writing and lovely comic strip styled cut scenes made this game beloved by quite a number of gamers. Episode two was released, and then a long wait without any news happened. Then, sadly, it was announced that the developer, Hothead Games, had canceled the last two games in the series. Luckily, Zeboyd Games picked up the franchise, and we’ll be seeing episode 3 in a new form this summer. If you want to kick off your adventure, all you need to do is drop $1.99 USD on the App Store.

DLC Quest

This game is all about playing with the tropes of the game industry. Inside jokes, satire, and sassy dialog are the bread and butter of DLC quest. To gain features like audio and the ability to move left, you need to “buy DLC packs” with coins you find in game. It’s extremely clever, and absolutely worth the $1.99 USD asking price in the App Store. If you’re a gamer, you’ll find yourself chuckling the entire way through.

So apparently this unknown company called Blizzard took a chance on a risky title called… I forget the name… I think it was Diablo III… and shocked everyone on the entire planet by breaking sales records like crazygonuts.

I kid. Blizzard is so good at breaking sales records that nobody’s surprised. As the parrot in Aladdin said: I may have a heart attack and die from being not surprised.

Having only a week behind it, Diablo III has already torpedoed through 6.3 million purchases — 3.5 million of which were in the first 24 hours, thus making it the fastest-selling PC game ever. As if that’s not enough, there’s an additional 1.2 million players who received Diablo III as a freebie for signing up for World of Warcraft’s Annual Pass promotion, which put 4.7 million people around the world in front of their computers ready to fight evil on day one. What’s more, that figure of 6.3 million doesn’t even include the players in Korean Internet game rooms where Diablo III is the top-played game (North Americans may not be aware that gaming cafés, or “bangs” as they’re known in Korea, are a pretty big deal).

Here’s Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime expressing his profound disappointment in the pathetic sales and bleating about how he promises to do better next time:

Those preparations of which he speaks are in reference to the server problems Blizzard had when Diablo III hit the streets. To put it briefly, Diablo III ended up loading Blizzard’s Battle.net servers to create the same result one sees when a steam roller drives over a pudding cup. Apparently problems still persist, but Blizzard has dealt with the worst of it and is likely to get things under control before too long.

Still on the fence about Diablo III? Treat yourself to the Macgasm review and hear what we had to say about it.

Traditional means of communicating on mobile devices and computers have often followed very distinctive paths historically. Until recently, the mobile phone was based around text messages and voice chats; however, on the computer it’s been video chats and instant messaging for quite some time now. Now that we have personal computers as our telephones, why hasn’t anyone come along and merged all of these communication methods into an easy to use application, one mobile communications app to rule them all?

I’ve been saying for over a year now that Messages and FaceTime needed to be integrated, then technologies like iMessage/SMS need to find their way into iChat as well. We don’t need one application for each communication medium. What we need is one communication medium that wraps all of the other mediums into one all powerful communicating application. We’re almost there, with iMessages heading to OS X, and FaceTime getting integrated into the Contacts app in iOS. It’s time we merge these beasts entirely, once and for all.

John Herman over at Buzzfeed has put together an interesting concept that places text messages, FaceTime and file transfers directly into one application. Alongside the FaceTime video is a button for the telephone, access to contacts, and a history of previous SMS/iMessages messages sent between contacts. It certainly makes sense.

Shut up and take my money already. I’d pay for that app.

If Apple’s serious about bringing iOS back to the Mac, and a little more OS X to iOS, they’d be smart to reevaluate how we communicate in 2012 and then rebuild the tools we have to make those kinds of connections with friends and family a whole lot better. One app to rule them all, one app to find them.

It’s looking like LaCie and Seagate have entered into negotiations that would see Seagate purchasing Lacie for 146 million Euros. Based on the Forbes findings Segate plans on purchasing Philippe Spruch’s 64.5 percent stake in LaCie, then once that’s completed they will make an all-cash tender for the remaining LaCie shares:

Great for LaCie, and a pretty questionable move for Seagate. According to their press release, Seagate is essentially purchasing LaCie for its “premium-branded direct-attached storage line, strengthen our network-attached storage business line and enhance our capabilities in software development.” Whether or not that is worth the price of investment is up to Seagate, but to us it sounds like all they need is a nice external enclosure for their drives. We’re oversimplifying obviously, but are we really that far off the mark? One thing’s for certain, Seagate is about to inherit some nifty looking case enclosures.