Wednesday, August 4, 2010

As indie software developers, sometimes the only type of testing we do is developer testing. And we all know that can be less than optimal ;]
But with larger apps, sometimes it can be useful to get some outside help. I recently did that with my upcoming app (Battle Map for iPad) by hosting a beta test, so thought I’d share some of the knowledge I learned along the way.

Monday, August 2, 2010

This is a really good discussion to have. I found that in the iPhone Indie Business it is no different than with any other business: You rarely talk about money, although it is the big underlying topic and ultimately defines each Indie’s ability to live this life. Let me share a few things I learnt.

Apple gives iOS developers a limited number (100) of beta slots per year. Each slot is assigned to a specific iOS device, so if someone wants to test on muliple devices, or someone replaces their existing device with a new one, it takes up another slot. In addition to that issue, its also a big pain for me to collect device identifiers and add them to the beta list in the first place. So thats why I never seem to have any beta slots open.

But!

The good news is that if you are already signed up as an iOS developer ($100) per year from Apple, then you can self sign my betas with your own developer certificate and test them that way. Heres how you do that: (Thank you Matt Stevens and Tuaw)

Many of us have a basic understanding of the idea of tension and release, and the use of conflict in basic dramatic structure.

But Nihilistic Software gameplay programmer John Rose said in a new Gamasutra feature that game developers dont explore tension and release closely enough, even though games have great potential to communicate the concept.

You have been rejected. Last Friday you thought you had hit bottom when you got rejected by the barista of the day in account of you flirting with the barista of a different day that showed up out of turn to, surprise, have a coffee. What can you say, you got confused.

When I submitted Terminology to the App Store in early July, I really wasn’t sure what to expect.  I was proud of the App.  I felt it hit a niche on the iPad that had not been fully exploited. I thought it would do well.

It did far better than I expected, topping out at #25 on the Top Overall Paid App charts for iPad, and holding the #1 position in the Reference category for a full week.  All with relatively little marketing support. Terminology’s ranks for the first two weeks on the Top Paid, Top Reference and Top Grossing charts look like this:

2 weeks ago Ive presented in this blog our vision of where want to go with our Development Cycle by adopting a Rapid Prototyping approach.  And some of the very important sub-phases were about the game ideas and describing the game, but how should we document those important steps?  This is what id like to tackle in this week blog post and present an interesting solution that can provide a well done Game Design Document quickly.

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

When I wrote my Introduction to NEON on iPhone, I considered some knowledge about the iOS devices’ processors as assumed to be known by the reader. However, from some discussions online I have realized some of this knowledge was not universal; my bad. Furthermore these are things I think are useful for iPhone programming in general (not just if you’re interested in NEON), even if you program in high-level Objective-C. You could live without them, but knowing them will make you a better iPhone programmer.

When your profession empowers you to design literally just about anything, it’s easy to rationalize just about any game design decision. Hell, I somehow managed to rationalize that our new power up for Tilt to Live have a screeching hawk sound effect. Bad idea? You’ll have to wait and see.

The good news is that unit testing is a lot simpler than driving a standard shift, but there are a lot of small details you need to get right to do it successfully. Even after reading about unit testing and being convinced of its benefits, programmers are often not sure how to get started. This month’s column is not going to try to convince you of the many benefits of unit testing (I hope you are already convinced), but rather, describe some very concrete tips to help you get started right away.

Thursday, July 15, 2010

One of the consequences of the advent of the internet and free online content was the steady decline in revenue that the traditional print media sector has experienced in the last decade. In the first years of the new century the internet offered opportunity, with publishers expecting a growing revenue stream from the sale of online content and ad sales. The fact has been sobering – because of the glut of free content available online consumers have demonstrated a resistance to paying for information freely available on the internet, and hence the challenge of generating revenue in the digital age has become a genuine issue for publishers. Although significant investment in building up online business has been made, in most cases this has not compensated for the loss of business caused by the decline in print and print advertising sales.

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

I quickly encountered a problem: touch-screen gestures are difficult to describe concisely. To solve this problem, I created a means of talking about such gestures symbolically; I call it Touch Notation.

Tuesday, July 6, 2010

If you’ve installed Xcode 3.2.3 you quickly became aware that the only SDK’s packaged with this version are 4.0 and 3.2. Until 4.x has widespread adoption, chances are you’ll want your applications to run on earlier versions of the iPhone OS (iOS) SDK. You can accomplish this feat through two configuration options within Xcode, the Base SDK and the iPhone OS Deployment Target.

Monday, June 28, 2010

Pandora has had a charmed history with mobile platforms — the company’s music streaming app is one of the most popular on just about every type of phone out there. It just makes a lot of sense to have personalized radio in your pocket. But with a small developer team and a confusing emerging mobile platform world, it wasn’t as if Pandora always knew what to do or even why it was succeeding.

Have you ever thought “I wish there was a way to click a link in an email and launch my app…” Well there is, through the magic of custom app URLs. The basic idea is this: register a custom URL protocol with the iPhone, and if someone clicks a link with that protocol on that device, it will launch your app. But wait, there’s more: because it’s a URL, you can pass parameters into the app on launch. If you’re a C programmer, this is like being able to pass command line parameters into the application as an argv list.

If you have an app available, you probably have an accompanying website for it. As someone who tries and buys a lot of software, I see many such websites during the average week. Some are great, but most make the same few mistakes again and again. I want to share some tips for making software product websites that don’t turn customers away. This is all common sense stuff, but it’s incredible the number of companies that don’t seem to understand these points.

The key to selling anything (and that doesn’t have to mean selling for money; it could just mean making sure your product is seen and considered by people, whether it’s free or not) is to empathise with the customer; try to be the person you’re selling to. Many app websites screw this up, and usually it’s because they haven’t designed with the customer’s priorities in mind. Let’s run through those priorities.

In case you haven’t heard, there’s like a bazillion iPhone and iPad application on the market, and another bazillion OS X applications. It kind of makes it hard to keep up sometimes when your team has ten reviewers, all generous enough to donate their time to review applications.

Updating existing App Store titles to support new features in Apple’s iOS 4, from multitasking to the higher resolution Retina Display of iPhone 4, are relative easy and straightforward to do, developers report.

From a marketing point of view, I thought poker was a decent choice because there are tons of people who enjoy playing poker, there are a number of iPhone poker apps that do well sales-wise, and I figured if I created one that was of high enough quality, people would play it.

I thought I’d just write up a blog post on something a little different that I did while doing promotion for Pokerbot that wound up getting me some good reviews in the iTunes App Store