Alternative to Wacom Stylus?

Dart Stylus?

Now that Wacom have released a bunch of different styluses for tablets, the Solo starting at $20 ranging up to the top of the line one at $70...there suddenly seems like a lot of choices one of which is the Dart, also $70 but this seems to work much better across various platforms.

Not one I've had the opportunity to try right now, but it's something that should be on any digital artists radar looking for something with a bit more control to be used on various tablets who aren't in the Cintiq budget.

Boston Unity Group - The Winter Showdown

The Winter Showdown was the third meeting of BUG at the Microsoft NERD Centre, held last night, 30th November.

The presentation was held by, Trevor Stricker, of QuickHit, talking about their NFL licensed game and the combination of using Flash and Unity3D as well as looking a little into their monitisation routes of micro transactions and adware.

Following the presentation, their were a handful of demonstrations by people, many of these were updated demo's that had previously been shown so they were not recorded, but one that was new I will mention as I thought it was brilliant, a cloud based asset server.

But first, here is the presentation, the intro followed by 5 parts, the last two parts were from the Q&A session which was especially interesting and well worth watching.

Intro -

Part 1 -

Part 2 -

Part 3 -

Part 4 -

Part 5 -

The cloud based asset server was created by Defective Studios. The website doesn't contain very much information about the asset server, which is a big shame, but they are offering beta testing for free, email Matt Schoen for details at schoen@defectivestudios.com

What made this really interesting was the simplicity and cost, they were planning on offering a monthly subscription to the service at $10 and the cloud being run from Amazon, but if you wanted to run your own servers they were working on another license fee for that.

This platform is a cheap alternative to the Unity Asset Server, much simplified and something that works very well across platforms via a web interface with no real learning curve. Meshes and textures are uploaded to the cloud and people can sync the whole build or specific items and can get them running in Unity immediately, meshes and textures being very robust with all scaler and modifier information remaining intact.

iPhone Dev Resources

Some sites everyone should have bookmarked - The Ultimate Toolbox for iPhone Development.

That site is such a great resource covering tools and tutorials on getting you started, heavy slant on the app side rather than games but it does also cover the basics of doing games.

iPhone Dev Made Easy - Short slideshow going over some tools.

35 Free Icon Sets for your iPhone projects - Does what it says on the tin...handy collection to get you started.