Tag Archive for 'developers developers developers developers'

The Annoying iPhone App Process Was All Part of Apple’s Master Plan To Make Developers Build Web Apps

Published by Zacqary Adam Green at 6:00 PM on December 16, 2009 in Commentary. View Comments Tags: , , , . Short URL: http://plankhead.com/ZH

Steve Jobs with iPhone
Robert Scoble just Sc-c-c-cobleized us with this post speculating that iPhone app developers, fed up with the App Store approval process, are abandoning apps in favor of websites that do the same thing.

Lately I’ve noticed that some developers are avoiding building apps and, instead, are building custom web pages that are designed specifically for the iPhone. [...] Yesterday another one came along from Nextstop, which is a cool new app for sharing cool things to do near you (great for travelers to check out) and they, too, decided on HTML5 instead of doing an iPhone app.

Some reasons Nextstop likes HTML5:

1. Rapid iteration. If they code a new feature tonight, you get it tonight. No waiting three weeks for you to get their latest.
2. It prepares their systems for building a native app. Why? Because apps can include a Safari browser instance inside, so all of this work is reusable, even if they do a native app.
3. It’s easier to build and debug because you don’t need to do a lot of specialized coding to make the native app work properly.
4. It fits into the greater web easier for users. In an iPhone app it can be jarring to take users out to a web browser, but if they already are in the browser they are used to going to other pages and back again using Safari’s navigation.

That sounds like a really great idea, doesn’t it. You know who else thought so? Steve Jobs:

WWDC 2007, SAN FRANCISCO—June 11, 2007—Apple® today announced that its revolutionary iPhone™ will run applications created with Web 2.0 Internet standards when it begins shipping on June 29. Developers can create Web 2.0 applications which look and behave just like the applications built into iPhone, and which can seamlessly access iPhone’s services, including making a phone call, sending an email and displaying a location in Google Maps.

But then the developers were all like, “Nooooooooo!” and Apple was all like, “Fiiiiine!” in October 2007 and announced a way to build native apps. But submitting an app to the App Store and going through the approval process is annoying as hell for developers, so they’re getting around that by doing what Apple wanted them to do anyway in the first place.

That Steve Jobs sure is a crafty one.

Google Goes After Cyanogen For Making Their Customers Happier

Published by Zacqary Adam Green at 10:53 PM on September 24, 2009 in Commentary. View Comments Tags: , , , , , . Short URL: http://plankhead.com/qK

Totally not being evil, you guys. Not at all.
About a month ago, I installed a wonderful thing on my G1 called CyanogenMOD. Named after its developer, a man who goes by the pseudonym Cyanogen, CyanogenMOD takes the free and open source Android operating system included with the G1 and makes it run faster, look better, and save storage space. After installing it, my G1 barely ever felt sluggish, all of the space-hogging applications could be stored on my spacious 8 GB memory card, and the interface improvements made it so much more of a joy to use. I’m now happily using all of the Google services that make Google their money much more often than I had before, and my phone would be too sluggish for me to make Google money nearly as much if I had to go back. The 30,000+ people who have also downloaded and installed CyanogenMOD probably agree.

So, naturally, Google is showing Cyanogen their thanks for increasing the Google-use of 30,000 people by sending him a Cease and Desist letter. Wait, what?

Well, apparently some of Google’s applications aren’t open source, such as the Android Market (which allows you to give Google money indirectly by buying apps from developers, who then give a portion of their money to Google). Sure, you can easily download and install these apps yourself from the freely available developer repository, but Cyanogen had the audacity to save 30,000 end users the trouble of doing all that just so they could continue using Google’s products and making them money. That constitutes “distribution,” which only licensed developers who sent in $25 and the filled-out form from the back of the comic book work for Open Handset Alliance members can do. Never mind that there aren’t any alternatives to many of these applications, and they’re kind of essential for a lot of Android’s usefulness.

Admittedly, under the current Jurassic-era copyright law, Google has the legal right to do this. Cyanogen does not have the resources to license their software, thus he does not have the license to distribute it. But considering that Android, as a whole, is a free and open source operating system, and that Google has nothing to lose from CyanogenMOD and much to gain, this is a real dick move by the “Don’t Be Evil” company.

Arpeggi – An Experimental Gameplay Project Game With 0D Graphics

Published by Zacqary Adam Green at 2:16 AM on August 7, 2009 in Miscellany. View Comments Tags: , , , . Short URL: http://plankhead.com/DU

The Experimental Gameplay Project, a “make a game in seven days” thingamajig which begat the prototypes for World of Goo and Crayon Physics Deluxe, has announced their theme for the month of August as “Bare Minimum.” So I decided to spend three days (it was done by then) making a game with the minimum possible resolution: one pixel.

Arpeggi — A game in one pixel (formatted to fit your eyeballs)

Due to some technical limitations, such as the fact that one pixel is really hard to see, I magnified it by 600 times. With these extra 599 pixels of space, I decided to cheat and add some intro text, but all of the actual gameplay could theoretically be scaled down to a single pixel if you traded the mouse-based control for an analog stick.

I hope the game is relatively easy to figure out despite the limitations of the resolution. And because that was my goal, I’m not going to say anything else about it.

Hit the jump to play it, and to download the X11 Licensed source code:
Continue reading ‘Arpeggi – An Experimental Gameplay Project Game With 0D Graphics’

OpenID Needs A Friends System

Published by Zacqary Adam Green at 3:37 AM on January 24, 2009 in Commentary. View Comments Tags: , , , , . Short URL: http://plankhead.com/rFq

UPDATE: A reader informed me (indirectly) about something called PortableContacts. Commentary at the end. Original post follows…

Personally, I would like to brutally murder the term “Web 2.0″ with katanas and fire. It annoys me. But regardless, I sorta kinda understand that when people say “Web 2.0″ they mean the era of the web where user-generated content (read: comments threads) became an essential part of everything. Also that whole social interaction stuff. But in the back of all these Web 2.0-loving people’s minds is the question, “What is Web 3.0?” Again, I have a profound moral and biological(?) objection to putting a version number after “web,” but I’m going to humor everyone and say what is absolutely essential if we ever want to get started on whatever “Web 3.0″ is: OpenID.

But the problem with OpenID is that it just identifies you, and perhaps passes along some little bits of info like your name and email address. Every one of those individual sites, whether they take OpenID or not, still requires you to maintain friends lists on all of them. And there’s no central hub to see what friends are doing all across the web. FriendFeed does not count, you still have to friend people again there too. If I use my OpenID at a site, and a bunch of my friends have done the same, I don’t want to go around adding them as friends there again. They’re my friends no matter where I go.

Then again, some people you meet on the web might be more “clients” or “contacts” or something than “friends,” per se, so keeping these relationships intact across the web would encourage people to stop “friending” everyone they see, and simply add them to the appropriate group; now you can finally show those photos of you getting drunk and stripping only to people you really trust. So it’s more of a “relationships” system.

Now, all this user-generated social stuff (Web Two Point Freaking Oh) didn’t really take off until the basics of the web, like HTML, were finally made (mostly) compatible with everything. So in order to move on to the next big trend in the web (Web 3.0, if you REALLY must), we have to make social networking work all across the web. So, let’s figure out how this OpenID-based (or complimentary) interpersonal relationships system would work.

First, let’s give it a name. Do you have any suggestions, Helvetica Bold 10 Dark Red?

How about OpenRelationships?

Hmm, uh, no, I’m not sure that’s the best connotation. You know what, just OpenID Friends works. Here’s what it should be…
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The Eight I’d Really Rather You Didn’ts Of Storytelling in Games

Published by Zacqary Adam Green at 2:56 AM on January 19, 2009 in Commentary. View Comments Tags: , , , , , . Short URL: http://plankhead.com/DjA

Aubrey at Wolfire Games recently posted a discussion he had with another game developing friend, Jack Monahan, about mastering gameplay, and what that means to the player and about the game. Eventually they drifted off to talking about how story factors into this, and it took the comments thread a little while to realize that they didn’t mean to say “a good story gets in the way of gameplay.” Actually, what they criticized was a situation where “the story is the best part of a game,” which I agree is a bad thing. If a game is trying to be a narrative, it should have the story and gameplay complement each other without either taking precedence; I will now elaborate on that to the amusement of the audience.

If a game developer feels they cannot tell a good story, or if they can’t get a writer…actually, scratch that, if they aren’t a writer already and they can’t get one, then they should probably be making a simulation game. By “simulation” I don’t necessarily mean Microsoft Flight Simulator or SimCity, that’s just the term I use to say “non-narrative” because “documentary” doesn’t always work (i.e. Space Invaders isn’t exactly based on real life, but it doesn’t tell a story). But assuming a developer feels up to telling an epic tale of some grizzled space marines fighting against insectoid/reptilian aliens in a palette of gray and brown, there are a few things I’d really rather they didn’t do. I will now follow in the footsteps of Our Great Noodly Lord The Flying Spaghetti Monster and give you eight of them.

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