I had what I thought was a neat idea once: Create JavaScript apps that explicitly supported the Wii’s Internet Channel, with special controls enabled for the Wii Remote. These days, I don’t think that idea is worth it, so I’m abandoning it.
Nintendo’s basically ignoring the Internet Channel. They’re not doing anything to promote it beyond what they’ve already published, and more importantly they’re not updating it. That means developers of made-for-Wii content won’t get any new functionality (access to the B button on the browsing remote would have been nice…) or any of the performance boosts and standards support improvements from anything beyond Opera 9.30. With the Wii U on the way, I don’t foresee this situation improving.
The rest of the world seems to be ignoring it, too. There seems to have been practically no buzz about it, save some murmurs of excitement and a joke or two when it first came out. marketshare.hitslink.com reports 0.00% market share, which is probably rounded, but still pretty darn low.
Creating made-for-Wii apps accomplished two awesome things. #1, it allowed the player to play these games while holding an NES gamepad-like device. If you’re the sort of gamer that I am, you know the importance of holding a controller in your two hands to play games. (Which is to say, not at all important, but we like it, dang it.) #2, that combined with saving game data on the server freed you from the PC and let you take your game experience to another device.
For #1, I’d like for Web games to be able to use actual gamepads on the PC. I’ll pursue this soon.
For #2, if the buzz surrounding iStuff & Android is any indication, the best way to do that is to make my apps mobile-friendly. I shall do that, then. This will be somewhat hindered by my not actually owning a mobile device that does Web browsing, but with any luck I’ll be able to borrow my mom’s phone every now and then. (Hi, Mom! 😀 )
So yeah, those are my plans, let the past be past and ROCKET FORWARD IN BLAZING GLORY, at least when I get around to picking up the pace on my projects.
P.S.: Because it doesn’t make much sense to update an app just to remove a feature, Signs of Life and Wackyland will keep their Wii-specific features until I have real updates for them.
Of Course you can borrow my phone. Just return it in one piece.