Following closely on the official release of iPhone OS 3.0, Apple has seeded a developer build of version 3.1, build 7C97D, along with the SDK.

The point release appears to be more than bug fixes, too. A number of sites, including Gizmodo, are reporting features like:

• Faster boot time
• Bluetooth voice control
• Access to video editing through APIs for third-party developers
• Non-destructive editing of video by allowing saving of copies
• Fraud Protection, or phishing warnings, as an option in preferences for Safari

This discussion at MacRumors also has an interesting list of new features:

• A carrier selection preference, though apparently not for AT&T customers
• An MMS option, though again this does not apply to AT&T customers yet
• Saving video sent in e-mail to the camera roll
• Direct copying and pasting in the address book, no need to select edit first
• Copy and paste phone numbers to and from the phone keypad
• Canceling text messages as they are sent
• Choose picture size/quality for MMS video, where MMS is an option

As for fixes, the biggest problem, so far, relates to hardware of the iPhone 3GS, not the OS. Whether the new firmware helps with overheating issues has not been reported yet.

The speed at which Apple is updating the iPhone firmware is intriguing. From the final of version of 1.0 to 1.1, over two months passed, and nearly that much time from 2.0 to 2.1 and 2.1 to 2.2. Of course, this latest version of the iPhone OS is a beta, but it’s hard to imagine two more months will pass before iPhone OS 3.1 is officially released. One possible explanation might be that with the apparent early success of the Palm Pre, Apple feels the need to compete a little more aggressively. If so, bring on Windows Mobile 7.

Just about as far back as I can remember, every new release of an operating system has brought new features, additional functionality, and, unfortunately, more bloat. This applies equally for OS X and Windows, and in recent years has become even more prominent.

Windows XP was bigger than both NT or 98, Vista was far bigger than XP, and Windows 7 is shaping up to be bigger still than Vista. Panther included 150 additional features, Tiger brought more than 200, and Leopard brought north of 300, as well as a visual refresh and more dependence on the 3D interface. We can see a steady trend of increasing size and complexity for operating systems.

But while Microsoft is continuing that trend with Windows 7, Apple has opted to do something different. The company has taken a step back and started building a platform that is going to carry their operating system for the next 5-10 years. Snow Leopard includes “no new features.” Apple has decidedly spent the past year refining Leopard, stripping out old code, and building frameworks for developers to take advantage of the multicore, multiprocessor machines that it’s building.

But let’s be clear: To say that Snow Leopard includes absolutely no new features is kind of misleading. Snow Leopard does include new features, including some tweaks to the Dock and Exposé, a new Finder, and exchange support for iCal, Mail and Address Book.

That’s all well and good, but the real new features, the ones that matter, are all for developers. 64bit support, Grand Central Dispatch (GCD), and OpenCL will make applications developed for Snow Leopard faster, and able to take advantage of the power and capabilities of the new machines. Enabling 64-bit applications means that apps can now address more than 4GB of RAM (theoretically up to 16 billion gigabytes). The new GCD frameworks make it easier for developers to write code that executes on all of the available CPU cores simultaneously. OpenCL enables developers to tap the unused power of the graphics cards to speed up their applications even more. Snow Leopard is more than an OS, it’s a platform built for developers.

And yes, Apple is dropping support for PowerPC. I’m assuming that stripping out the Rosetta code and the PowerPC code from universal binaries is one of the ways Apple has saved so much disk space in Snow Leopard when compared to Leopard. Although, as awesome technologies go, Rosetta certainly ranked high.

To get Snow Leopard to as many Macs as possible, Apple is going to try very hard to push how much faster all the built-in applications run. However, the real benefit from Snow Leopard might not be seen until the developers catch up. Large, professional applications like Apple’s own Final Cut Pro and Adobe’s Photoshop might see the biggest benefit from taking advantage of the new technologies.

What Apple has done is shift away from adding more and more code and features into OS X, and instead concentrate on making what’s in Leopard lighter, faster, and stronger. It’s the right thing to do. Snow Leopard might be a hard sell at first, which I’m assuming is why it’s competitively priced at $29, but roughly a year after it comes out, when more developers have had a chance to build on it, I believe we are going to see a line drawn in the sand. There will be the apps before Snow Leopard, and then there will be everything that comes after it. Leopard is a transitional OS, the prequel, and Snow Leopard is the main event.

Just about as far back as I can remember, every new release of an operating system has brought new features, additional functionality, and, unfortunately, more bloat. This applies equally for OS X and Windows, and in recent years has become even more prominent.

Windows XP was bigger than both NT or 98, Vista was far bigger than XP, and Windows 7 is shaping up to be bigger still than Vista. Panther included 150 additional features, Tiger brought more than 200, and Leopard brought north of 300, as well as a visual refresh and more dependence on the 3D interface. We can see a steady trend of increasing size and complexity for operating systems.

But while Microsoft is continuing that trend with Windows 7, Apple has opted to do something different. The company has taken a step back and started building a platform that is going to carry their operating system for the next 5-10 years. Snow Leopard includes “no new features.” Apple has decidedly spent the past year refining Leopard, stripping out old code, and building frameworks for developers to take advantage of the multicore, multiprocessor machines that it’s building.

But let’s be clear: To say that Snow Leopard includes absolutely no new features is kind of misleading. Snow Leopard does include new features, including some tweaks to the Dock and Exposé, a new Finder, and exchange support for iCal, Mail and Address Book.

That’s all well and good, but the real new features, the ones that matter, are all for developers. 64bit support, Grand Central Dispatch (GCD), and OpenCL will make applications developed for Snow Leopard faster, and able to take advantage of the power and capabilities of the new machines. Enabling 64-bit applications means that apps can now address more than 4GB of RAM (theoretically up to 16 billion gigabytes). The new GCD frameworks make it easier for developers to write code that executes on all of the available CPU cores simultaneously. OpenCL enables developers to tap the unused power of the graphics cards to speed up their applications even more. Snow Leopard is more than an OS, it’s a platform built for developers.

And yes, Apple is dropping support for PowerPC. I’m assuming that stripping out the Rosetta code and the PowerPC code from universal binaries is one of the ways Apple has saved so much disk space in Snow Leopard when compared to Leopard. Although, as awesome technologies go, Rosetta certainly ranked high.

To get Snow Leopard to as many Macs as possible, Apple is going to try very hard to push how much faster all the built-in applications run. However, the real benefit from Snow Leopard might not be seen until the developers catch up. Large, professional applications like Apple’s own Final Cut Pro and Adobe’s Photoshop might see the biggest benefit from taking advantage of the new technologies.

What Apple has done is shift away from adding more and more code and features into OS X, and instead concentrate on making what’s in Leopard lighter, faster, and stronger. It’s the right thing to do. Snow Leopard might be a hard sell at first, which I’m assuming is why it’s competitively priced at $29, but roughly a year after it comes out, when more developers have had a chance to build on it, I believe we are going to see a line drawn in the sand. There will be the apps before Snow Leopard, and then there will be everything that comes after it. Leopard is a transitional OS, the prequel, and Snow Leopard is the main event.

When Apple revamped its operating system and adopted Nextstep as the base of OS X, they brought along with it an extremely powerful version of Unix based on the open-source project FreeBSD, now known as Darwin.

Unix has a long history, one that started in the basements of Bell Labs by a group of AT&T engineers some 40 years ago. A professor in a C programming course I took once said that they were supposed to be writing drivers for the AT&T hardware, but instead, they wanted some way to use the system to play games, so they invented Unix.

Unix is now a mature and robust operating system, and since OS X is based on Unix, it has inherited all of its power, and some of its complexity. The beautiful aqua interface that we are used to seeing is really all that is needed, but if you would like to take a look at what makes your computer tick, Apple included Terminal.app to act as a window into the GUI and into the Unix soul of OS X.

Nick started a great series back in January 2007 on this subject, and now I’d like to cover some of the basics again, and maybe bring a different point of view to the table as well.

Open Terminal.app (found in Applications → Utilities), and you’ll see a window with a prompt waiting for you to start typing.

At this point, it’s important to understand a few things about the Terminal. For one, the commands that you can type are interpreted and carried out immediately, no waiting around. So if you tell it to remove a file, it will do it right then, with no easy way of recovering it. There isn’t a recycle bin on the command line (not without a little coaxing, anyway). Secondly, since Unix was developed decades ago, many of the commands seem a bit archaic. Back when most of these utilities were written, they were all abbreviated to save space and cut down on the number of keystrokes you’d need to type. Below is a list of a few essentials, and another list from Nick’s post is here.

• ls (list): Probably one of the most important commands, it lets you see what’s in your current directory.
• cd (change directory): This is how you move about the filesystem in Unix, for example, to move from Library to Documents.
• file: This one isn’t short for anything, but it will give you a brief description of what a particular file is.
• cat (concatenate): Or “Grab everything in this file and let me read it.”
• man (manual): The online manual will describe most commands that you’re interested in; for example, typing man ls will give you the manual page about the ls command.

It might be helpful to open a Finder window and put it right next to the Terminal. Open the Finder so it shows your home directory. Type ls in the Terminal to see the same files that you see in the Finder. Try another command: touch. touch is designed to change the last accessed timestamp of a file, but it will also create a blank file. You can see the file created in the Finder as well. You can cat the file, and see that there is nothing in it.

Now that you’ve created a file, and looked at its (blank) contents, you can remove the file using the rm command. This is one of those dangerous commands that, if used carelessly, can really screw things up. For this example, carefully type rm file into the terminal, and watch the file disappear in the Finder. You’ll notice that your Trash stays empty — that file is goners.

The Unix filesystem is a nested hierarchy, with each directory separated by a forward slash (/). The current working directory is symbolized as a dot (.), and the parent directory is symbolized by two dots (..). The top of the hierarchy, known as the root, is symbolized by a single forward slash.

So, to move to the parent directory, you could type cd ... If you were in the Library directory and you typed this command, you would then be moved into your home directory. To see the very top of the hierarchy, you would type cd /. Type this command now.

Also, move in the Finder to the hard drive where you have OS X installed. I have mine named, originally, “OS X”. Type ls in the Terminal, and you’ll notice a few more files than you can see in the Finder. These files are important Unix system files, and should not be touched unless you really know what you’re doing…and really, not even then. To illustrate the importance of these files, you could type file mach_kernel.

This is the kernel, the core of the operating system. Do not mess with this file. Several of the other files are directories. You can change directories into /bin, for example, and type ls to list the contents of that directory. You’ll find a file in that directory named “ls,” which is the executable for the ls command. When you type ls into the terminal, it executes this tiny app. A great place to learn about Unix is to get a list of this directory, and then read the man page for every file listed.

To exit the Terminal, just CMD-Q like any other app, and you are back in the comforts of OS X.

This has been a very brief overview of how to go from absolutely no Unix knowledge whatsoever to the smallest amount of Unix knowledge necessary to poke around a bit. There’s a lot of power under there, but before you can really start to harness it, you need to get a decent understanding of the hows and whys.

When Apple revamped its operating system and adopted Nextstep as the base of OS X, they brought along with it an extremely powerful version of Unix based on the open-source project FreeBSD, now known as Darwin.

Unix has a long history, one that started in the basements of Bell Labs by a group of AT&T engineers some 40 years ago. A professor in a C programming course I took once said that they were supposed to be writing drivers for the AT&T hardware, but instead, they wanted some way to use the system to play games, so they invented Unix.

Unix is now a mature and robust operating system, and since OS X is based on Unix, it has inherited all of its power, and some of its complexity. The beautiful aqua interface that we are used to seeing is really all that is needed, but if you would like to take a look at what makes your computer tick, Apple included Terminal.app to act as a window into the GUI and into the Unix soul of OS X.

Nick started a great series back in January 2007 on this subject, and now I’d like to cover some of the basics again, and maybe bring a different point of view to the table as well.

Open Terminal.app (found in Applications → Utilities), and you’ll see a window with a prompt waiting for you to start typing.

At this point, it’s important to understand a few things about the Terminal. For one, the commands that you can type are interpreted and carried out immediately, no waiting around. So if you tell it to remove a file, it will do it right then, with no easy way of recovering it. There isn’t a recycle bin on the command line (not without a little coaxing, anyway). Secondly, since Unix was developed decades ago, many of the commands seem a bit archaic. Back when most of these utilities were written, they were all abbreviated to save space and cut down on the number of keystrokes you’d need to type. Below is a list of a few essentials, and another list from Nick’s post is here.

• ls (list): Probably one of the most important commands, it lets you see what’s in your current directory.
• cd (change directory): This is how you move about the filesystem in Unix, for example, to move from Library to Documents.
• file: This one isn’t short for anything, but it will give you a brief description of what a particular file is.
• cat (concatenate): Or “Grab everything in this file and let me read it.”
• man (manual): The online manual will describe most commands that you’re interested in; for example, typing man ls will give you the manual page about the ls command.

It might be helpful to open a Finder window and put it right next to the Terminal. Open the Finder so it shows your home directory. Type ls in the Terminal to see the same files that you see in the Finder. Try another command: touch. touch is designed to change the last accessed timestamp of a file, but it will also create a blank file. You can see the file created in the Finder as well. You can cat the file, and see that there is nothing in it.

Now that you’ve created a file, and looked at its (blank) contents, you can remove the file using the rm command. This is one of those dangerous commands that, if used carelessly, can really screw things up. For this example, carefully type rm file into the terminal, and watch the file disappear in the Finder. You’ll notice that your Trash stays empty — that file is goners.

The Unix filesystem is a nested hierarchy, with each directory separated by a forward slash (/). The current working directory is symbolized as a dot (.), and the parent directory is symbolized by two dots (..). The top of the hierarchy, known as the root, is symbolized by a single forward slash.

So, to move to the parent directory, you could type cd ... If you were in the Library directory and you typed this command, you would then be moved into your home directory. To see the very top of the hierarchy, you would type cd /. Type this command now.

Also, move in the Finder to the hard drive where you have OS X installed. I have mine named, originally, “OS X”. Type ls in the Terminal, and you’ll notice a few more files than you can see in the Finder. These files are important Unix system files, and should not be touched unless you really know what you’re doing…and really, not even then. To illustrate the importance of these files, you could type file mach_kernel.

This is the kernel, the core of the operating system. Do not mess with this file. Several of the other files are directories. You can change directories into /bin, for example, and type ls to list the contents of that directory. You’ll find a file in that directory named “ls,” which is the executable for the ls command. When you type ls into the terminal, it executes this tiny app. A great place to learn about Unix is to get a list of this directory, and then read the man page for every file listed.

To exit the Terminal, just CMD-Q like any other app, and you are back in the comforts of OS X.

This has been a very brief overview of how to go from absolutely no Unix knowledge whatsoever to the smallest amount of Unix knowledge necessary to poke around a bit. There’s a lot of power under there, but before you can really start to harness it, you need to get a decent understanding of the hows and whys.

An early version of Chrome is now publicly available for Mac users, at least what there is of it. As the Chromium Blog glibly posted, this release is intended for developers who take “great pleasure in incomplete, unpredictable, and potentially crashing software.” Having caveated that, Chrome feels fast, faster than Safari, and that is saying something.

Something else to be said in favor of Chrome is that it’s stable. Not that this release doesn’t crash — it does, but it just dies gracefully. Unlike Safari, which upon crashing takes all your browser windows down to the grave, Chrome displays a “sad tab of death” for the single offending browser instance. Similarly, isolating browser instances benefits security, and security for Chrome is also boosted by periodically updated blacklists of malware and phishing urls.

What's wrong with this UI picture? Look at the tabs.

On the negative side, “developer preview” is arguably a euphemism for alpha release, with all the negative connotations that implies. Something as basic as resizing the main window demonstrates in jaggy, tearing detail how far Chrome is from completion. Just some of Chrome’s missing features include:

• Flash is right out (but javascript seems pretty robust)
• Printing and saving pages
• Bookmark importing and organization
• Privacy settings, passwords, and autofill
• Full screen display

Nonetheless, even at this nascent stage of development, Chrome for OS X is impressive. Mac users should definitely be looking forward to it in their future.

Programming for the iPhone is still pretty new. It might be a bit tougher to find iPhone developer resources, but we found a bunch that will get you through building any iPhone app you might be starting on. Check out our list of our favorite developer books, blogs, podcasts, screencasts, open-source libraries, communities, forums, conferences, training, and more!

Books

Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK

This is the go-to book for beginning iPhone developers by Jeff Lamarche and Dave Mark. It takes you from downloading the SDK to creating your very own apps. The official page and support site: http://iphonedevbook.com/

Programming in Objective-C 2.0

This is the book to get if you’re just starting out programming. It assumes you have no prior programming knowledge before picking it up. It’s highly recommended for people who don’t know any programming and want to learn Objective-C. Not a lot of iPhone-specific stuff in this one, but a lot of this knowledge will carry over when you do want to create iPhone apps.

Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X

This book assumes you know a bit of C/C++, and it’s a really good book for getting started with Apple’s developer frameworks. There isn’t a lot of iPhone-specific stuff in this book, but a lot of what you learn carries over into iPhone development.

Pragmatic Programmers iPhone SDK Development

This book is in beta still, so you can only get the PDF. It was originally scheduled to be released by now, but they are updating it to include iPhone SDK 3.0. It’s still worth it to get the PDF. I’ve gone through it, and it is fantastic. The book is now set to be released in September.

The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook: Building Applications with the iPhone SDK

This book is full of code snippets that will help a lot of people with common tasks that Apple’s iPhone SDK doesn’t provide. There are some code blunders in this book, but luckily they’ve fixed the code and put it up here. They also have movies at this site that demonstrate what each mini-project does.

iPhone in Action: Introduction to Web and SDK Development

The iPhone in Action book covers both native and web programming in step-by-step tutorials. It’s a complete primer to iPhone development.

Blogs

Mobile Orchard

The best iPhone developer blog I’ve seen. It’s written by Dan Grigsby and Ari Braginsky. I recommend you start with the top posts on the right sidebar and go through all the archives. Pretty much all of the articles are gold.

iCodeBlog

This blog has some of the best iPhone app building tutorials on the web. They have newbie tutorials as well as multi-part advanced tutorials ranging from Hello World to game development. The “ToDo List Using SQLite” tutorial series is a good start for a new developer to learn a breadth of concepts.

iPhone Development Central

The meat of this site is the video tutorials. The videos are separated into different levels of complexity. Good site for audio/visual learners.

Dr. Touch

Dr. Touch gives us a mix of specific programming solutions as well his experiences with the App Store and his sales. The recipes section of his blog have really useful code snippets to help you build your app.

iPhone Development

Jeff Lamarche is also the author of Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK. He keeps his blog updated constantly with cutting-edge code and even a guide to surviving WWDC.

Keyvisuals iPhone Development

This blog isn’t updated as often as some of the others, but the articles that do come out are really useful. My favorite recent one is How to Detect Network Availability.

71squared

71squared has some great iPhone game development tutorial collections. It is updated quite often, and anyone interested in iPhone game development should check it out.

How to Make iPhone Apps

It’s a fusion of iPhone app marketing and coding. Most of the site is focused on marketing your app.

iPhone SDK Articles

This blog isn’t updated that much these days, but the articles are still useful. It’s 100 percent dedicated to code tutorials.

148apps.biz

Jeff Scott writes about various iPhone app marketing tips and analytics. The blog is focused on the business side of iPhone apps. It’s fairly new and looks very promising.

iPhone developer:tips

A how-to focused blog run by John Muchow. The posts are put together in nice bite-size pieces.

PrEV

Bill Dudney is an author/screencaster with the Pragmatic Programmers family. The books and screencasts he makes are good for beginners, but a lot of the stuff on his blog address more complicated coding issues and bugs in the SDK.

Podcasts/Screencasts

Stanford iPhone Application Programming Course

Stanford open-sourced its lecture, slides, and course material to the world. It’s available for free in iTunes. Watch the presentation by Loren Brichter of Tweetie fame when you get a chance.

Mobile Orchard Podcast

Awesome podcast series with iPhone app developers and their successes (and struggles) running iPhone app businesses. They always have A-list guests.

Pragmatic Programmer’s Screencast Series

If you’re more of a video learner, start with the Coding in Objective-C 2.0 and Becoming Productive in Xcode screencasts. Follow that with the five-part Writing Your First iPhone Application screencast. If you really want to get fancy with transitions and animations, check out the Creating a Compelling User Interface with Core Animation screencast.

Objective-C for Rubyists

Peepcode is usually known for its Ruby resources, but it has a great screencast that teaches you about Objective-C. It’s edited by Scott Stevenson of great Objective-C resource, CocoaDevCentral.

The App Show

Great conversations about everything related to iPhone apps. The podcasts are about an hour or so long.

iPhone Alley

The iPhone Alley Podcast is a weekly roundtable with different iPhone app media peeps and creators. Each episode is very entertaining.

Schenk Studios

This site has some great video tutorials — and a lot of them, too. He’s made 25 of them, including a sneak peek at some new 3.0 features.

Open-Source Libraries

Joe Hewitt’s Three20 Open-Source Objective-C library

Three20 is a collection of iPhone UI classes, like a photo viewer, and general utilities, like an HTTP disk cache. Three20 is derived from the Facebook iPhone app, which is one of the most downloaded iPhone apps ever.

Bullet Physics Engine

Bullet is a free, professional 3D game multiphysics library used in some popular games in the App Store.

Cocos2d Framework

Cocos2d for the iPhone is a framework for building 2D games for the iPhone and iPod touch. There’s a great community around this open-source engine, so there’s plenty of support to help you get your iPhone game out there.

Matt Legend Gemmell – Cocoa Source Code

Matt Gemmell has some great code out there for the community, including MGTwitterEngine, the Twitter API used in iPhone apps Birdhouse and Twitteriffic.

Appsamuck

An open-source collection of 31 mini-iPhone app projects to get you up and running fast.

Communities/Forums

iPhone Dev SDK

The greatest iPhone developer community on the Internet. Chris Stewart’s site boasts nearly 6,000 registered users. The forums are very active. You’ll find yourself visiting this site at least once a day.

Stack Overflow

Stack Overflow is a collaboratively edited question and answer site for programmers — regardless of platform or language. Every question asked on the site will almost always get a correct answer.

MacRumors Forums for iPhone Programming

Great community of developers on this forum. They even include some nice guides for getting started with iPhone development.

Conferences/Training

Apple Worldwide Developers Conference

WWDC is Apple’s official developer conference. All the cutting-edge programming topics are taught here. The 2009 one runs from June 8-12. WWDC is the Mac daddy of all iPhone conferences. Get it? Mac daddy? I’m here all night, folks.

360|iDev

360|iDev is the premiere iPhone, iPod touch developer conference in the world. The next one will be a four-day event and will take place September 27-30, 2009 in Denver, Colo. They have a call for papers right now if you want to make a debut as a conference speaker.

Pragmatic Studio’s iPhone Development Course

Here you will learn how to build iPhone applications from experienced iPhone developers Bill Dudney and Daniel Steinberg in this four-day training course. The next one runs August 4-7, 2009 in Reston, Va.

iPhoneDevCamp

iPhoneDevCamp is the brainchild of Raven and Dom. The event format is “unconference” or Barcamp-style, featuring content from the participants themselves. There are satellite events held all over the country. The next one is this August.

Game Developers Conference

This conference is for all game developers, and there’s an increasing number of mobile app game developers. If you’re a game developer or want to be one, this is the one game developer conference to go to.

StackOverflow DevDays

This is more of a general developer conference, not just iPhone developers. The beauty of this conference is that it’s in multiple locations and dates, and it only costs $99. Plus, you get to hang out with Joel Spolsky.

Other Collections Of Resources

Apple’s Official iPhone Dev Resources

The Apple engineers give us a lot of information to get started with app development. There are a lot of resources that Apple provides including documentation, how-tos, videos, code samples and forums.

iPhone Flow

This site is updated daily with the best iPhone developer links on the web. It’s driven by the community submissions, and all the links are top-quality here. The site is maintained by the Mobile Orchard crew.

XCake iPhone Dev Resources

MattJ’s collection of iPhone developer resources. A lot of good stuff here including our very own Create A Drum App tutorial.

The Flying Jalapeno Lives

Great list of iPhone development blogs written by Corey.

Those are my favorites. I’m not a human Google, so I may have missed some gems. What are your favorite iPhone developer resources?

The real core of the video game industry has long been Japan, where it enjoys a pop culture status that Western studios can only hope to one day achieve. It stands to reason, then, that a good barometer for the iPhone’s success as a gaming platform would be Japanese industry interest in the device. A recent survey by Japanese middleware developer CRI suggests that interest is very high indeed.

CasualGaming.biz details the report, which found that of 102 game studio representatives surveyed, 87 percent responded in the affirmative when asked if they were interested in developing for the iPhone/iPod touch platform. Nearly 20 percent had, in fact, already done so, and another 16 percent already had games in the works. Thirty-eight percent said there was corporate motive, but that they’d yet to make any concrete moves. Maybe they’re holding out to see what exactly iPhone OS 3.0 is capable of.

Either way, the survey reveals other interesting details about why the iPhone is the most popular smartphone platform for development among Japanese game companies — and also about how far behind its competitors are lagging. Android, the next most appealing platform in the survey, garnered interest from only 47 percent of respondents, while the much-hyped Pre intrigued a dismal 6 percent. I suppose not having really seen the device in action in the real world tends to lessen its appeal to profit-driven businesses.

In case Apple wants to increase its developer base, the survey also asked about what were the biggest impediments to iPhone development, and at least one of the answers suggested that Apple is either very clever, or foolishly stubborn. Half of those surveyed felt that the biggest drawback to iPhone development was that they had to do so on a Mac.

So, Apple could probably add even more apps to its extensive library by opening up development to other platforms but, on the other hand, the respondents said it was a drawback; they didn’t say it deterred them completely. The appeal of iPhone development is probably actually driving Mac sales to game studios, which is likely worth more to Apple financially than the addition of yet more content to the already very healthy App Store.