Posts with tag tuaw

Here's another user-made iPhone theme featuring the icons from World of Warcraft, made and sent to us by Nasum of Garithos, Hordeside. We covered one of these almost a year ago when the iPhone first came out, but this one is apparently made from scratch, and features the new iTunes store as well as an icon for the Installer.app (man, today is just a Mac gear day on WoW Insider, isn't it? I feel like I'm blogging for TUAW).

Hopefully, when the official iPhone app store drops in June, we'll see some non-jailbreak uses of this stuff -- right now, to use either one of these themes on the phone, you have to hack into the firmware and go places Apple doesn't officially want you to go. But those WoW icons definitely work great for all kinds of things: even Blizzard officially put them to OS use in a downloadable theme for XP. There are so many WoW icons floating around that they're a natural (if not exactly legal) fit for almost any use -- here's hoping that in June, Apple's SDK will turn out at least one theming program, and we'll be able to do this stuff without hacking away at the iPhone.

Update: Nasum (whose name we spelled wrong originally, sorry about that) says the theme is now in Installer.app, if you'd like to install it yourself.

Apple's little sliver of gadget joy supposedly has a full installation of OS X hidden somewhere in there, and since WoW is available on OS X, you just knew WoW was going to appear on the iPhone sometime. It hasn't happened yet, but as the video shows, we're getting there.

In this case, the magic key is a little program called Telekinesis (created by the same guy who created Quicksilver, if you're part of the Cult), which lets you channel monitor output to your iPhone, as well as allows mouseclicks and even simply typing back into your computer.

So it's not really WoW running on the iPhone (yet), but rather an instance of WoW controlled by an iPhone-- it still has to be run on a separate computer. Unfortunately, implementation actually turns out to be pretty poor-- this is not even barely playable. The guy who did it says he can chat, so I guess it's a first step. But while I'm sure we'll get there, we've got a long way to go.

[ via a newly redesigned Joystiq ]

We've already seen WoW on an Intel Mac thanks to our resident Mac-user, but he's managed to go one better. Previously we saw the OS X Universal Binary version running at 50-60fps; running WoW under Windows on the same hardware, maximising all the graphics settings, there's actually a gain in framerate to the tune of 6fps.

Those of us with PCs creaking along on the default settings are justified in being envious. While keeping up with the vast succession of new PC games requires regular upgrades and a killer gaming rig, if your free time is taken over by WoW then you obviate the need to upgrade -- but miss out on the fantastic framerates such upgrades can afford.