3 Feb 2012
Xappr is a gun accessory for your iPhone that’ll instantly appeal to everyone from fans of the original Duck Hunt on Ninteno to the latest Halo or Call of Duty FPS shooters. Imagine, holding a weapon that looks like something out of a James Cameron sci-fi blockbuster, your iPhone safely mounted on top, your favorite shooting game loaded and ready, the grip tight on your hand, the trigger itching under your finger, your multi-player enemy right in your cross-hairs. How fun does that sound?
The Xappr and Micro-Xappr guns are currently on preorder, but will be available in the EU, Isreal, U.S., and Canada this June. Apps will be required to support it and while there’s only a handful right now, more should be coming soon. A lot more I hope, especially the Modern Combat, N.O.V.A. and other premiere App Store games.
Pre-order price is $30. I’m getting one. Are you?
Source: XAPPRGun
MetalCompass will reveal smartphone guns at the Nuremberg Toy Fair
MetalCompass will reveal for the first time two models of gaming accessories for smartphones – The Xappr and the Micro-Xappr guns. The models will be revealed in the international toy fair that will take place in Nuremberg, Germany between February 1st and February 6st.
Both the Xappr and the Micro-Xappr allows players to play a variety of augmented reality and shooting games. “The Xappr guns has already more than 10 amazing augmented reality games that will allow the player to intercept alien spaceships, find and eliminate ghosts, fight evil flying robots, hunt a horde of blood thirsty zombies and the most important – engage in battle with other players” says Oren Shtark, MetalCompass’ CDO.
MetalCompass will release this spring the first real world multiplayer first person shooter for smartphones – ATK. ATK will allow players to simulate combat scenarios with different types of weapons – guns, rifles, grenade launchers and powerful pulse weapons. ATK will support three battle modes: Death-match, Last Man Standing and Teams Mode.
The Xappr guns will be available this spring but players from the US, Canada or the EU you can pre-order the Xappr gun now, get a discount and be the first among their friends to get the Xappr gun this spring.
3 Feb 2012
We’ve blown through a ton of content this week so if you happened to miss out on anything, make sure you jump back a page or six and get yourself caught up. If you’re looking to talk more, head on into the iMore forums and hang out! You can register now to get started today and while you’re at it, check out some of the threads below:
If you’re not already a member of the iMore Forums, register now!
3 Feb 2012
Apple may have begun testing what appears to be ZFS (Zettabyte File System) support in the latest iOS 5.1 beta. If the information received by iMore is accurate. references to ZFS, including the mounting tools, are contained deep inside the system files. This raises a lot of questions about where Apple may be taking iOS storage in the future.
If you’re not familiar with ZFS, here’s Wikipedia‘s introduction:
ZFS is a combined file system and logical volume manager designed by Sun Microsystems. The features of ZFS include data integrity verification against data corruption modes, support for high storage capacities, integration of the concepts of filesystem and volume management, snapshots and copy-on-write clones, continuous integrity checking and automatic repair, RAID-Z and native NFSv4 ACLs. ZFS is implemented as open-source software, licensed under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL).
In other words, it’s highly scalable and highly resilient, something you want in cloud environments. ZFS support was included in some earlier versions of Mac OS X, but was not included in the final, shipping version. Rumor has it Apple wasn’t pleased when Sun spoke openly about Apple’s adoption of their technology, leading Apple to pull the plug. Whether that’s accurate or whether Apple simply determined it was going to go another way with OS X storage is unknown.
Even without official Apple support, we’ve seen OS X ZFS ports crop up since then. What sets this iOS implementation apart from some of the very original, official, OS X ports of ZFS is that it already contains the ZFS utilities (zpool, zdump, etc). By having the utilities already installed it means that the port is in a more complete stage of development and has full read + write access (unlike the original OS X ports).
So here’s the question again, if this information is accurate, why is Apple looking to include ZFS in iOS? Could it be part of a greater plan to integrate better cloud services into future versions of the iPhone and iPad?
More: Wikipedia
