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Handango Developer's Conference July 5, 2000
 Handango Developer's Conference
June 29-July 1 2000
I was lucky enough to be invited to the Handango Developers Conference last week, at the beautiful Resort at Squaw Creek in Lake Tahoe CA. Despite the usual long flights, I'm sure everyone had a great time. The huge mountains surrounding the resort created the perfect scenery. Unfortunately the people at Handango were smart enough to close the windows during the conference so we wouldn't know what we were missing!
The first day started off bright and early with breakfast. I had the honor of sitting with none other than the winCE game master himself, Jimmy from jimmy.com. He was very excited about the next game he was working on, and promised to send a beta my way for a preview. He has a large number of people working on it, and hinted that it will even be better than the wildly popular Turjah! I later caught up with Borislav Kolev from Beiks Software, author of several Palm games including NetWalk, Karateka, and Xonix. He mentioned a desire to make more games for the palm and we talked a bit about some of his ideas. The full interview with both Jimmy and Borislav will be coming soon...
The theme of the conference speeches was definitely wireless. Stats from IDC showed that Palm would continue to dominate the handheld market, although WindowsCE would also improve. Since Palm has said that all of their new devices would have internet capabilities, it will be interesting to see how things develop over the next few years. For a special feature of the future of handhelds and what it means for gamers, click here.
The next day I had the opportunity to talk to David Oakley from Astraware. He was nice enough to give me a copy of Zap!2000 and Asteroids to play on my long flight home, which sure came in handy! There were a few kids with Palms there (it helps when your Mom works for Palm), and we both had a good time loading them up with our games.
Overall, the conference was a great way to hear from all the hardware manufacturers to get a feel of what was coming next. What was nice about it was that it wasn't too platform specific, with speakers from Palm, Microsoft, Symbian, and Research In Motion. Meeting with other developers to make good contacts was also a high point, and hey, we couldn't get a better location for it!
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