So the Apple tablet turned out to be a genuine product, to the surprise of exactly no one.  Possibly the worst kept secret in the world of technology, the iPad – not iSlate like people were thinking – has turned out to be pretty much what everyone expected; the iPhone mentality applied to a laptop to make something that has most of the features of both.  Not all of the features though, which has left some people disappointed but it will, however, sync up to with your iTunes and let you use all your existing media straight out of the box, so the music and movies that you already have can be loaded onto it and enjoyed with minimal fuss, just as you’d expect from an Apple product.

From a consumer point of view, it’s almost humbling to see the Apple brand rolling out in full force again.  The company is amazingly skilled at gripping peoples’ interest and giving them a product that addresses their needs in a simple and elegant way, and in the case of the iPad it addresses needs that they didn’t even know they had.  The iPad costs about as much as a netbook, and you can be sure that the interface will be easier to use and understand than that of a tiny computer, and instantly familiar to anyone who has an iPhone or iPod Touch.

And as an iPhone developer, the iPad presents a world of possibility.  Not only will our existing games work on the iPad without the need to convert them, the iPad gives us a much bigger canvas to work with.  We’re very proud of the talented designers and artists we have hear at Matmi, and the iPad not only gives us a chance to show off just how talented our artists are, it also gives out designers room to stretch their metaphorical legs.  The iPad lets us take all those ideas that were just impractical for the small screen of the iPhone, and with the SDK available right now, March is going to be an interesting time.

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Recently, I came across a problem when I had to migrate web content from a Windows IIS host to a Linux Apache host and some of the content had upper-case characters in the filenames.  On a Windows IIs platform ‘index.htm’ is the same as ‘Index.htm’, but Linux is case-sensitive, and so on a Linux Apache host, this is not the case.

The solution I used was to rename the content with all lower case directory and file names and write an .htaccess RewriteRule.  Our host had disabled RewriteMap for security reasons, so I had to use the less efficient pure RewriteRule variant. Credit and thanks to JDMorgan (Jim) for providing this example on a forum.

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Dagfinn Bach, a Norwegian developer who worked on the very first MP3 player in 1993, is currently working on the successor to the humble MP3, which he calls MusicDNA.  A MusicDNA file will contain not just the song, but could also contain lyrics, videos and blog posts, all of which is dynamically updateable. It’s strange to think that we make one day look at MP3s with the same wistful regard we have for eight-tracks or the seven-inch – ignoring for a moment that at least some part of the storehouse of affection we have for physical storage media is its quality of sound – but time marches on, and it would appear that a more interconnected musical experience is in store for us in the future.

I have to admit, this appeals to the part of me that wishes ‘the future’ – and yes, I do mean a nebulous collection of futurism and sci-fi nerdery – would hurry up and arrive already; but at the same time, I can see how this might prompt concerns that the relationship that young people have with music is being irrevocably altered.  The kind of peripheral content that MusicDNA would include has always been part of being a music fan, but by including it with the song itself, it ceases to be an organic process of accumulation, and becomes just another media channel.  On the other hand, if end users could make MusicDNA files, it would be an amazing avenue for sharing user-generated content and for new bands to make their presence felt.

However, MusicDNA means that the amount of content needed to get an album together – provided that the concept of the album survives – suddenly shoots up.  This is unlikely to be a problem for artists on big labels, although as yet, no major label has signed up to MusicDNA, but for the aforementioned new band, it requires a significant amount of extra work.  Bach is quoting up to 32GB of extra content on MusicDNA files – although I’d assume that it isn’t actually on the file itself, not unless that’s some particularly impressive compression – but when your first single can hold all the content on your band website hundreds of times over, that first single might suddenly seem very daunting.

It’s refreshing to see however, that at least someone is looking forward rather than back when it comes to music, even if it’s a Norwegian computer engineer.

After much anticipaton, we released our new facebook game, Ten-Pin Crazy Golfing in time for the Christmas break; but here at Matmi we’re perfectionists and so we couldn’t resist tweaking the game to make the game even better

We’re not going to spoil the surprise and tell you want we’ve added and changed, but it’s not long to go before we unveil the new and improved Ten-Pin Crazy Golfing, so keep watching this space for something really special!