"Yes, We Are Bringing C# Programming to the Mac"
Mike Harsh, a Microsoft developer, posted the above quote on his MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network) blog. He is talking about WPF/E, a “cross-platform, cross-browser web technology that supports a subset of WPF XAML.” The big quote from the post is:
“The WPF/E package also contains a small, cross platform subset of the CLR and .NET Framework that can run C# or VB.NET code. Yes, we are bringing C# programming to the Mac. ”
This is very big news for the Mac programming community. Part of the promise of a technology like .Net, the Microsoft CLR, and Apple’s Cocoa is the portability factor of the code; if Microsoft really brings this to the Mac (and other platforms?) this could eventually mean some Windows-only apps easily ported to the Mac.
Adults Spend More Time Playing Games Than Children
MacCentral reports of a telephone survey involving 1767 adults and 500 teens, conducted by the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA). The survey concludes about one-third of adult gamers spend 10 hours or more every week playing games, either on console or computer. Only 11% of teenage gamers played that same amount of time per week.
Other interesting statistics include 64% of adult gamers play console games by themselves, and about 55% play online. 
Havok and nVidia Collaborate on Physics Acceleration For Games-Except on Macs
Seems nVidia and Havok are working on a library that uses the gpu to accelerate physics in games. The article implies Mac games might not offer it due to licensing costs.
The good folks of CocoaLab have made available a Free book on Cocoa programming:
Bert Altenburg, author of “AppleScript for Absolute Starters”, in co-operation with Alex Clarke and Philippe Mougin, has released a new book for newcomers to Cocoa programming using Objective-C and XCode. This tutorial is for non-programmers, and is aimed at levelling the learning curve as much as possible.
Course Technology PTR and Charles River Media will offer a a 25% GDC discount on their latest game development, graphics, and animation books at the GDC 2006 (Booth #426.) Some of their latest titles include: Game Programming Gems 6
3d Modeller Cheetah3D 3.1 Released
Cheetah3D is a lean, fast and elegant 3D modeling, rendering and animation package for Mac OS X with an easy learning curve. It offers many tools from polygon editing over advanced subdivision modeling to boolean operations and Beziere splines. The Javascript support allows you to extend Cheetah3D by yourself with custom file loaders, exporters, tools and so on. It also offers many common file loaders and exportes like .fbx, .3ds, .dxf, .obj, .3dmf, .sia etc. What’s new in this version: “Smart Folders”, improved FBX export, an accelerated renderer, uto-highlighting to select tool, and bug fixes
Bullet Continuous Collision Detection And Physics Library
Bullet Collision Detection and Rigid Body Dynamics Library. MIT license, free for commercial use, mainly for games and animation. Discrete (GJK) and Continuous Collision Detection (Time of Impact), Constraint solvers, modular C++ framework.
Looks like Newton and ODE may have some competition.
Intel Mac Mini Has Dissapointing Performance In 3D Games
This Macworld review gives some benchmarks for the Intel Mac Minis at UTK4 and Nanosaur 2. Sadly, the Intel Mini is actually slower on UTK4 than the G4 based Mini. Looks like the MacBookPro or iMac are the way to go for Mac gamers.
Macworld’s Intel Mac Mini Review
AWMOO C/C++ Development Studio Released
AWMOO Software recently announced the release of AWMOO C/C++ Development Studio version 1.1.2. AWMOO C/C++ development studio is a game development tool with an emphasis on ease-of-use. It consists of a C/C++ interpreter which is integrated with a user interface and a plugin specification. By having a plugin specification you can write small editors which are tightly integrated into AWMOO C/C++ Development studio. For example load/save/display 3D models and modify them using the algorithms you are creating, or execute C/C++ implementations of mathematical models over any kind of data such as biological or geographical models. A free demo is also available.
2d Vector Animation Editor Synfig
Synfig is a powerful, industrial-strength vector-based 2D animation software package, designed from the ground-up for producing feature-film quality animation with fewer people and resources. While there are many other programs currently on the market to aid with the efficient production of 2D animation, we are currently unaware of any other software that can do what our software can.
CodeLine Developer Preview 2 Released
Basasoft announced the availability of CodeLine Developer Preview 2 for download, a new IDE for developing full fledged native Mac OS X applications in object-oriented BASIC language. It includes support for system frameworks like Cocoa, WebKit, etc. and can easily produce Universal Binaries. New features include:
- Basic support for Mac OS X 10.3.9 and gcc 3.3.
- Framework has been heavily expanded including nearly all Cocoa functionality.
- Improved framework importer.
- Stability.
Many new examples including Quartz drawing, Bezier paths, Toolbars, sheets, sprites, fullscreen windows…
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