Monday, June 28, 2010

Okay, so now that 2 days have passed since my Admob purchase mentioned in my last post, and I have  seen the sales figures for those 2 days, I think I can write this entry with the results.

First, before I say anything else, I want to make one thing clear, because I feel like a couple of people maybe got the impression that I did this ad buy thinking “woo I’m going to buy $50 of ads and make a profit!”. I said in the first post, I definitely didn’t expect a profitable ROI from this. Just logically it is clear that running this sort of ad can’t really be immediately profitable, because a ton of people have run small ad buys like this in the past, and if they were immediately profitable, all those people would still be doing it, and ramping their buys up to a way bigger scale.

I know the title of this blog post is ugly, but I’m hoping to do a tiny bit of optimization for my search results and I want to make sure to make it clear that Pokerbot is an iPhone poker game. Now let’s move beyond that and get into this: I mentioned on my Twitter account earlier today that I ran a small ad buy to advertise the game. I thought I would put s

It’s no secret that “multitasking” is one of the great new features of iOS 4. Unfortunately, many people have a misconception about what Apple has implemented. Hopefully this short essay will help you understand the restrictions and the good reasons for having these limits.

During the chasm of time since my last proper post, I finally got round to releasing the project that I had been working on on and off since Christmas – Brainz. For the uninitiated, Brainz is a rip of of slightly inspired by the numbers game from UK game-show Countdown, a staple of Channel 4′s schedule since it’s birth. The game involves using whatever operators you want to turn six small random numbers into one large random number, and it’s surprisingly fun for geeks.

Recently I’ve had a couple of emails asking for advice on getting started with iPhone game development. I thought, to save time in future, and to reach as many people as possible, I’d write a kind of comprehensive overview post here. Bear in mind that this is my opinion. I would encourage anyone starting out to get advice/information from as many sources as possible so that you can make your own informed decissions.

Every iPhone developer fears the one-star-on-uninstall rating. I understand Apple’s reasoning for adding the prompt for rating on uninstall, but since that’s the only time users are prompted, it becomes a very biased, negative rating. There may be hundreds of users happy with your app who never rate it on iTunes, but everybody who uninstalls it gets asked to give it a review. That’s quite unfair from the developer point of view.

I’ve been meaning to put up the rest of the Inner Product columns I wrote for Game Developer Magazine, but I wasn’t finding the time. With all the recent discussion on data-oriented design, I figured it was time to dust some of them off.

This was one of the first columns I wrote. At first glance it might seem a completely introductory topic, not worth spending that much time on it. After all, all experience programmers know about pointers and indices, right? True, but I don’t think all programmers really take the time to think about the advantages and disadvantages of each approach, and how it affects architecture decisions, data organization, and memory traversal.

Earlier this week, CNET ran an article critical of the permission model of the Android Market. Google’s response to the criticism was that “each Android app must get users’ permission to access sensitive information”. While this is technically true, one should not need a PhD in Computer Science to use a smartphone. How is a consumer supposed to know exactly what the permission “act as an account authenticator” means? The CNET opinion piece “Is Google far too much in love with engineering?” is quite relevant here.

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

iPhone 4 will make your UI look stunning. Everything in UIKit has been scaled up already so it will require only a bit of work on your end to make the rest of your app look amazing on iPhone 4. If you only code and don’t touch Photoshop, you’re in luck. However, if you’re a UI designer or have the skills to do your own UI, hopefully you did your original artwork in a nice high resolution – if not, you have a bit of work cut out for you with updating all the UI elements to 2x the resolution.

I promised to return with the full analysis of the iPhone App Store economics analysis, from every angle, with all data I have managed to find. This blog intends to paint the most accurate picture of the specifically Apple related iPhone App Store market economics - and lessons from here should apply to most other smartphone app stores as well. The one final piece of the puzzle that had been missing, that we desperately needed to ge the full, honest picture, was the Apple official revenue number, which we finally got a few days ago, at $1.43B total revenues generated over 2 years, and thus $1B paid to developer. Now we can do the full analysis. But first a few general comments.

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Wired’s new iPad app was released on May 26, 2010 and instantly became Apple’s iPad App of the Week. It has been touted as the future of magazines and a bold step forward for digital and interactive content. Indeed, someone who works in the publishing industry has even said, “It is, ultimately, the best digital magazine on the best platform yet for digital magazines.”

I finally got around to downloading the WIRED iPad App today. My first observation was it was taking forever to download, initially I thought my internet connection had dropped out. A quick check of the App Store showed the download weighed in at a whopping 527MB! Surely there’s not that much content in the app? Adobe were charged with bringing WIRED to the iPad, so I was curious to delve into the app bundle, and see just what sort of technology they were using to generate this app. I wanted to know where it was carrying all that weight.

Over the past couple of months, it has become painfully clear to me and many of you at Gamezebo that the quality and quantity of download games is dropping. There are less download games being released each week, and of those that are released, many are just not good.

Sunday, May 30, 2010

The Mac indie development situation was weird, because for about 10 years, it was dying. After the Great Mac OS Pleistocene of the late 90s, only the strong and truly devoted stayed on. As a result, theres a strong culture and community and some very strong and oft-cited role models to follow if you want to make it as an indie developer. The Panics, Flying Meats, Red Sweaters, and Delicious Monsters of the world. Windows has "MicroISVs", but the Mac has indies, and it means something. And theres lots of support available to those trying to make the jump. Its a pretty happy family.

Saturday, May 22, 2010

I think there’s a chance that the reasoning behind the now infamous change to Section 3.3.1 of the iPhone Developer Agreement is much deeper than the community has thus far considered. There’s a pattern that Apple has been following since the beginning of the iPhone project that may be hiding “the truth” in plain sight.

Monday, May 17, 2010

One of the most commonly asked questions we get from both developers and industry outsiders is: how much money can I make developing apps? It’s a hard question to answer.

So we decided to conduct a survey. We asked for sale sdata from 124 developers that market applications ranging in price from 99 cents to $79.99. This survey was conducted on apps that ran the gamut of popularity, from wildly successful to barely breaking three figures. Developers were anywhere from funded companies with multiple titles under their belt, to first time, single-person authors. Both regular app developers, as well as game developers were included. This mining of data was intended to cover the entire iPhone app industry as a whole, without allowing outliers to skew the data too much in one direction.

Sunday, May 16, 2010

A few months ago, I wrote a post analyzing how Flower Garden had done since it was released. It was a story with lots of ups and downs, tales of trials and failure, but ending on a positive, optimistic note. It went on to become one of the most read posts in this blog, and the comments were all very encouraging. Clearly, people, and especially other developers, are hungry for this kind of data.

So here we go with the second part. How did Flower Garden fare after the new year? Was it just the Christmas purchasing frenzy that had a momentary effect on sales, or was there something more to it?

If you still don’t think Apple has designs on the gaming market with its mobile devices, you haven’t been paying attention. The early April release of the Wi-Fi iPad followed at the end of the month with the arrival of the 3G version could have been mistaken for the arrival of a new gaming console, given all the high-profile games available for the new device.

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

It’s one thing to go on record saying I wouldn’t be creating an iPad-specific version of Flower Garden, and another seeing the iPhone version running on an iPad with all the ugly jaggies and huge, pixelated text. So when it came time to do a new update, I decided to at least take advantage of the iPad capabilities to make the existing app prettier by making Flower Garden into a universal app. It’s now available on the App Store, so go get it and check it out!

Surprisingly, there wasn’t that much documentation on how to go about making a universal iPhone/iPad version. There’s a document from Apple showing some initial steps, but that’s about it. So I wanted to share what I learned along the way, including some very useful tips I learned through trial and error or by doing a lot of digging through Twitter and the development forums.

Moving Remy in Harmony: Pixars Use of Harmonic Functions
This article will describe some new mathematical techniques being tested at Pixar for use in upcoming films...