I spent some time this past year creating a few iPhone apps with Herb. The two apps I built are still on the app store, here are the links if you’d like to check them out: 9,999,999 Crazy Fortune Cookies and Beach Babes Wisdom.

Today Sean Dahlberg announced on the SWTOR forums that the game will be released sometime in Spring 2011. So I’m guessing it’ll be out before Christmas 2011?  Here’s the quote from the forum announcement:

“While we have not announced a specific date, we can confirm that we are targeting a spring 2011 release for Star Wars™: The Old Republic™. We’ve got a lot of exciting updates and reveals planned throughout 2010, including the first-ever hands-on testing for the game. It’s not too late to sign up to be a game tester, so go to www.swtor.com/tester and sign up today. We can’t wait to share more about the game with you as we progress through the year, so make sure you stay tuned to the official website for details.”

Check out the post and replies at the official SWTOR forums here.

Look back times of approximately 13 billion years.

A brief excerpt about this photo from HubbleSite:

“This is the deepest image of the universe ever taken in near-infrared light by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The faintest and reddest objects (left inset) in the image are galaxies that correspond to “look-back times” of approximately 12.9 billion years to 13.1 billion years ago. No galaxies have been seen before at such early epochs. These galaxies are much smaller than the Milky Way galaxy and have populations of stars that are intrinsically very blue. This may indicate the galaxies are so primordial that they are deficient in heavier elements, and as a result, are quite free of the dust that reddens light through scattering.”

When they mention “look-back times”, they are talking about how long it takes for the light from those stars to reach us. So the light left those stars 13 billion years ago and we’re just seeing it now.

Read the full details and check out the image for yourself at HubbleSite.

I downloaded the IVideoCamera app today on my IPhone and must say I really dig it. IVideoCamera lets you create videos on your 2G/3G phone and save or share them with others.

The quality of the videos is not all that great but it’s good enough I’d say. Much better then trying to grab a snapshot of something you might miss, instead just boot up IVideoCamera and make a quick video of it. If you want high quality photos though you should probably use a different app.

You can save your videos over to your Camera Roll, however I highly suggest sending your videos to yourself in an email instead of saving them. If you save your videos to your Camera Roll you can not share them from the Camera Roll. If you email your video to yourself you can do whatever you want with it from there.

It’s a very cool app and at 99 cents you can’t currently beat it. Here’s the link to IVideoCamera at Itunes.

Want a true look into the future? Want to learn one of the amazing things Nanotechnology can do for all of us?

Check out this video showing a Nanofactory capable of creating laptops with 1 billion CPU’s and perfect quality.

Reminds me of Star Trek with products on demand:

I wanted to listen to some Metallica, so I went to “MetallicaTV” on Youtube which is the official Youtube channel for Metallica.

When I got there I was immediately shown the message “Metallica – All Nightmare Long (Video) This video has been removed due to terms of use violation.”

Metallica wrote the song, created the video, but they can’t show it on their own Youtube channel.  Brilliant.

Lars – maybe you should sue yourself over this.

It’s true, Google has finally stepped in to start taking away profits from affiliates and putting them into their own pockets. This won’t come as a shock to many of you but this was the first time I had seen this in action on Google for myself.

I did a search on “garmin nuvi 780″, as I was looking to sell a few of these for the holiday season. When the results come in, the first two advertising results are straight from eCOST as you can see top right. At the bottom of the pic you can see where I went to make sure and yes, eCOST is a member of the Google Affiliate Network:

So what does this mean? If Google has a Google Affiliate Network partner that is selling a product you want to sell, you will never have the top advertising spot in advertsing search results as Google will be using that to sell the product for one of it’s partners.

Here is the letter Google sent out to their Google Affiliate Network Partners, looks like they’ve finally put all the pieces in place:

” Google Product Ads Beta

How are these ads ranked? will be testing to identify the most effective ad formats.

Ad Rank = Commission × Quality Score. The quality score takes into account the relevance of your product to the user’s query, conversion rate of the query and the matched product ad on Google, your account history, and other relevant factors.“

UFC 105 was pretty wild. I’ve broken into the top 100 this week, my next goal is to hit the top 50.

My fantasy picks seem to be getting a little stronger but I can’t seem to keep up with all of the fighters and all of the new guys moving into the UFC. GSP finally has a new challenger, and even though Vera lost I think he really deserves more shots at guys in the top 10 in his weight class. Those kicks he hit Couture with were just brutal.

The pictures the hubble takes are incredible.  The butterfly nebula pic was making it’s rounds in the news when these images were released.  That pic is cool and all but I think that the Carina Nebula is a much cooler pic.  Beth mentioned that it looks like a big elemental type thing with big beefy arms coming at you “Like something from Warcraft or one of those games.”

It’s cool looking at the image above, but to get the real feel for this you need to see it in the highest resolution possible.

You can view the 6005 X 7159 resolution jpeg here, it’s 48mb so you’ve been warned. If you would rather view tiff file it’s 98.14mb and the same 6005 X 7159 as the jpeg.  Once you get the file downloaded it is really cool how much you can zoom in and see everything.

If you want to view the image in smaller resolutions you can. But if your connection and computer can handle it I highly recommend checking out the highest resolution image. This is one of those things everyone should see.

I’ve been playing Mafia Wars for a while now and just started playing Mobsters 2.  If you enjoy Mafia Wars I highly recommend Mobsters 2.  It’s the same style of game as Mafia Wars, but they are taking some cool next steps with their game design and it’s worth checking out. If you click the link above it will install right to your Facebook apps.

Playing this style of browser game is a lot like grinding out levels in a MMORPG like World of Warcraft.  The difference is in World of Warcraft it can take hours to finish up your daily quests doing boring things over and over.  Playing Mafia Wars or Mobsters 2 only takes a few minutes each day, and if you feel like putting in more time from there you can.  That’s what makes these games so much cooler and why they are drawing such huge numbers.  Mafia Wars used to have a message saying “Join the 4 million others that played yesterday!”, although as I look at the game today I don’t immediately see it.

Mobsters 2 has really got my creative side going with game design.  I can see some really cool things they could do with this style of browser game that could turn it from what it is today into something that could be true global gaming.  If they can just hit the right speed and style of gameplay I think a game like that could easily do much more than the 4 million players that were playing Mafia Wars yesterday.  Just bridge the gap between languages with gameplay and you’ll hit a gigantic goldmine.

I imagine we’ll need an acronym for it, everyone loves acronyms.  I’d call it a WWBG or World Wide Browser Game.  I have a cool game design concept brewing in my head for a game like that could do this, I need to go get some notes down before I lose any ideas.