It was even pretty much done and ready to be released, but they wanted to focus on Star Fox 64. There's ROMs of it floating around on the internet if you look.
For most of the iPod's lifespan it was not the best product on the market, it was just the best marketed.
I wouldn't say it was just better marketed, although that is true. It was also better designed, both in its hardware and software. An iPod in your hands felt and looked great and the scroll wheel made it intuitive to use. Anyone could easily pick it up and check out what you had in your library.
Before I had one, I had an iRiver iHP-120[0], which had a plethora of features an iPod didn't have. But it was ridiculously hard to use if you didn't know what you were doing.
Indeed. I was once engaged on a project to develop a new personal media player. QA had quite a selection of other vendors' PMPs, so we could learn from their mistakes: and ye gods and little fishes, poor UIs were abundant, not to mention often sluggish to respond.
(Sadly, ours never came to be, but that's a long and occasionally hilarious - in the DailyWTF sense - tale. Suffice to say, if your application crashes on trying to close any file, and the vendor's recommended workaround is to never close files, get ready for interesting times)
The scroll wheel was a gimmick in the tradition of the Apple hockey puck mouse, that was worse than the obvious alternatives (a regular rocker is much easier to use for scrolling through long lists) but people bought because they look cute and trusted Apple's supposed design insight.
I too have never understood how the scroll wheel could be considered intuitive. The first time I saw one I was somewhat baffled until my friend showed it to me and even then it was always a struggle to control.
Intuitive (to me) would be the scrolling on other players...hit up it goes up one, hold up and it goes up increasingly fast. Maybe that's boring but it's completely obvious how to work it when you pick it up.
Anyone could easily pick it up and check out what you had in your library.
This is subjective, of course. I'm lost every time I have to change songs on a friend's iPod classic :-). Give me traditional buttons or a touch screen any day.
Definitely. It'd be cool if someone could get the text-to-speech synthesizer to follow a single BPM and time signature. Then throw some drum loops and ambient sounds over that that would switch up every file.
To write a secure online multiplayer game in javascript, the server would have to assume the client has been compromised by default and verify everything server-side. This wouldn't work for anything fast paced, but it'd suffice for RPGs and puzzle games.
For example, in an RPG, a client says it's moved 5 tiles north. The server receives it, but before broadcasting it to other players, the server would have to read the map and make sure it's valid (e.g. there's nothing in the way).
"True, but I personally can say that I'm very happy to hear this, as I've been hoping for a serious contender besides Android and IOS."
Give it a couple years. Samsung's the biggest manufacturer of Android devices and they've been working on Tizen[0] to curtail their dependency on Google.
> There was a post a bit back (which you might be referencing) about almost this exact situation, except it was about black hat SEO dramatically backfiring. Specifically, businesses were asking bloggers and news sites to delete spam comments that linked back to the sites.
