SimianLogic2

I've been going the other direction recently. We have a photoshop plugin that exports layers with metadata (where an image is located, fonts, font sizes, text, etc). For any platform that has a basic scene graph and some sort of label functionality (Unity, iOS, android, theoretically even web) we write a runtime that converts the metadata into runtime UIs.

So it ends up being custom logic for interaction on each platform, but the design/assets can be shared cross-platform.

I'll jump on the "use Unity" bandwagon.

I've written mobile games with Flash/Air, natively (Obj-C), RubyMotion, and Unity. I enjoyed RubyMotion more than Obj-C but I'm currently using only Unity.

Do you know ruby already? I particularly like RM b/c I have a ton of experience writing ruby code already... but ultimately for game dev the portability of Unity is just the best right now. I like ruby more than C#, but it's not a wide margin like it would be for Ruby vs Obj-C.

This reminds me a lot of sound effects in video games. At the high end you can hire a sound designer to do custom foley/SFX. For a small game, maybe $1-5k. Midrange, you can hire a sound designer with extensive knowledge to pick royalty-free sounds for you (maybe $250). On the cheap, you can browse through SFX libraries yourself and pick out what you want and pay per-effect (maybe $20-$50 worth). Ditto for music.

It's kind of a spectrum of "custom-for-you" to "off-the-shelf" AND a separate spectrum of "no-effort" (picking) to "put-in-a-lot-of-time-and-effort" (doing your own shopping).

None of these are "wrong" or "stealing" -- in this analogy Fiverr isn't even the "cheapest" option (the author could put in some time and browse royalty-free templates on their own). It seems like more a sign of a mature market with too much inventory than anything shady.

Feel a little baited and switched--I was hoping for an astronomy article!

seems kind of expensive for what it does.

imagine a game with 100k DAU (big, but not huge)

2 sessions per user per day

say 10 "saves" per session

100,000 * 2 * 10 = 2 million synchs / 10k * $0.15 = $30/day

for $900/month you could do FAR better just rolling your own

these numbers are all reasonable for a mobile game... so it seems to me that the main use pattern would be for apps that don't need to synch very often. and if an app doesn't synch very often, why even bother throwing an auth wall at your users?

If all of your layouts are created in code, every visual tweak requires an engineer. In general I will do almost anything to NOT have to lay out views by hand, as nothing slows a project down more than jumping into the tweak-a-magic-number-and-recompile cycle. It sucked when I was doing CSS, and it sucks even more when I'm compiling code.

For the most part IB mostly doesn't make sense for games, so I have a custom Photoshop script that exports each layer with metadata. A custom importer reads the metadata file and loads the whole view in the proper positioning. So I've basically swapped IB for Photoshop, but the work flow is essentially the same....

I don't agree with the mirroring proposed by this post. A true mirror would be a Male Founders Conference focused on the problems that male founders specifically face (maybe dating / work-life balance / fatherhood / fitness / ???). Closing the gender gap is the wrong takeaway (I think).

Having nitpicked the author's take on the FFC, I'll throw out my own: it seems like a mistake to make it a female only event (or am I misreading that?). I could see a lot of value (for women) being generated by having high profile (male) VCs and tech advisors attend the conference as well. Right or wrong, the vast majority of advisors and VCs are men at the moment, and educating them on how to help female founders seems just as valuable as educating the founders themselves.

I had a Fujitsu Lifebook P1510 running Windows XP back in 2006... a 9" convertible tablet with a capacitive stylus. It's still my favorite machine that I've owned, and felt like the future (sitting on a couch, browsing the net & playing games).

It saddened me greatly that Microsoft forbade anything under 10" for Vista & Win7. The Surface Pro is the first Windows machine I've actually desired since then -- the only thing that held me back was the 4gb cap on RAM. I already pre-ordered an 8gb model and can't wait to play with it.

How I perceived this article: I'm a thoughtful designer and pissed off that an "amateur" CEO is dipping her toes in my sandbox. Also, if I can bill a client for months of logo design and they see a Fortune 500 CEO doing it themselves they may question if I'm worth it.

(I know nothing about the author, so this is just my perception.)

Yes, there's some validity to calling out the bullshit in Mayer's fluffy post. But equally mixed in are just as many nonsense bits...

I think for that middle market you have to look within your organization. At my last job I ran an intro to procedural literacy (i.e. coding) tutorial for PMs, artists, and even accountants who wanted to learn a little bit about how to program (or even what kinds of problems you can use a little scripting to solve). I used Processing and ruby, and people generally seemed to enjoy a quick dive into it.

While it may be a problem that top ten rankings can be bought (I haven't seen any evidence that it is a problem), without those organic downloads from the top of the charts it would be much much harder to build a growth business out of the app store. Turning off the top rankings seems like it would prevent there from ever being another Angry Birds or Instagram... discovery is too hard otherwise.

Even an editor ranking is ephemeral. Say you're right and the cream rises to the top--how long would a feature last? A week? Two weeks? Maybe a couple hundred thousand free downloads?

I don't know what the organic/non ratio is at most companies relying on paid installs, but my gut would say it's somewhere on the order of 1:1 or better. If you remove the organic installs, CPIs would essentially double overnight and most of these businesses would no longer be able to sustain themselves.

I think when people say they dislike the "Top" lists, what they're really saying is "I'm already fairly well known and could easily get editorial featuring if we moved to an editorial-only model." This type of system would actually be much worse for indie developers, I think, as they would have to have a connection somewhere to have any hope of getting featured (much like you need to know someone to get onto Steam). Most of us dont have $20-$40k to buy our way onto a top list, but knowing that we could without having to have a publisher or hookup at Apple is a great equalizer.

Seems smart--most of what I use Yahoo for nowadays is content (Y!Sports, Y!Finance), and Tumblr adds a lot of content.

Seems like a better "Facebook phone" than the one on Android.

has anyone had success with an html5 game on ios? it seems viable for android (v8 yay!), but i haven't been satisfied at all with javascript performance on iOS. maybe for something that's turn-based and doesn't require slick transitions?

(edit: this sounds a little negative... what i mean is, pointing to a really slick html5 game on the app store would make selling the book a lot easier)

Good article. I've been working on a board game prototype on and off for a couple of years and have decks of cards with things taped on them that look very similar to your dice. My plan was to perfect the mechanics and then just make an iPad app, but I think this demonstrates a boutique print run is not that unfeasible.

Interesting that they broke it down into only two types of particles: moshing and not-moshing. In my experience there should be a third particle for the "border guards" -- the people who help keep the shape of the pit and actively push people back in (as opposed to a non-mosher particle which merely absorbs hits).

I don't think it's that people are "mean" or less friendly than in the South--it's just harder to break through with strangers. People in general are a little less outgoing towards strangers (not sure if that's the right word, but can't think of one better) and a little more focused on their own things. That may be because the work culture is so focused--free time is a little more valuable when you're working long hours and people just may not be as willing to stop in a grocery store and chat for half an hour on the best way to cook zucchini.

I guess another way to put it would be that everyone is headed somewhere (and not always a place), whereas living in the South I remember the culture being a lot more about relaxing and waiting for things to come to you. It's not as bad as New York, where everyone is literally headed somewhere, but more like a state of mind--like everyone here is working on a difficult puzzle in their head, even when they're not at the office.

Take a trip out to Tahoe or Yosemite and that mostly shuts off--people you meet on hiking trails and in restaurants/hotels are warm, friendly, and usually pretty chatty.

I grew up in cherokee county, went to UGA for undergrad and GT for grad school. Lived in midtown for a year and East Point for a year (it was cheap!). I came out to CA for a summer in undergrad and fell in love with the parks. Came out again for an internship in grad school and fell in love with a girl. Moved out here in 2007.

Compared to Georgia/Atlanta, the biggest changes I've noticed are: 1) everything is much much more expensive. a house that would be ~$200k-$250k inside the perimeter will cost ~$700k-$800k on the peninsula. houses in the $300-$400k range would probably go for $1-2mm out here. Average restaurant bills are ~$50 for my wife & I for what I would consider pretty "normal" places (we'd probably average $25-30 in comparable Atlanta restaurants). I'm lucky that my wife's job has on-site daycare for only $1500/month. The one exception is veggies--I routinely go to the local farmer's market and walk away with a week's worth of veggies for under $20. 2) at the same time, salaries are a lot higher. even if your housing/expenses take up the same percentage of your paycheck, your disposable income will generally go a lot further (an iPad costs what it costs anywhere in the U.S.) I've bought things since moving West that I probably never would've spent money on living in GA, just because I had that extra disposable income (i.e. flying to the UGA-Arizona State game a few years back). This can be a double-edged sword, though--if you want to do your own thing or start your own company, it will be MUCH harder to do that here than in Atlanta (making $50k in the app store is a hell of a lot cooler in Atlanta than it is in silicon valley) 3) people are generally pretty nice, but not interested at all in getting to know you or chatting randomly. we've been in the same house for 4 years now and barely know the neighbors 4) the amount of stuff within driving distance is really, really incredible--including the excellent state and county parks. people here are MUCH more interested in going outdoors on the weekends (whereas I found in GA people mostly just hang out on the weekends, maybe having a bbq or going to a lake). 5) if you're an engineer and decent at what you do, you'll never want for a job. 6) the work is a lot more high-energy -- i know engineers in ATL who work from 9-5 (or less) and more or less coast through the day... but are smart enough to get all their work done. that sort of attitude does not fly at all in silicon valley. if you feel like you're smarter than everyone around you in Atlanta, move out here and you'll be pleasantly surprised 7) if you're interested in things like hackathons, there's always something going on and it's pretty easy to meet like-minded people 8) the weather's awesome

I was thinking about this the other day from the opposite direction. Seeing the Salvation Army people outside grocery stores with the bells is a little sad now--because of inflation, the value of loose change just keeps going down and down. At the same time, debit/credit cards are obsoleting cash and making the now-less-valuable change even more scarce.

At least here in the bay area, I imagine they'd do much better with square readers than a bell and a bucket for change.

Every time I see a startup that starts with a Z, my first thought is: "Is that the boob thing?" (Zivity)

doesn't sound like "hacking" so much as "using"

I say I made Filler in around a month back in 2008, but really I made it one night--the prototype, anyway. From there it took a couple of nights & weekends to add some menus, ads, and high scores. I'd say I've booked somewhere in the neighborhood of $50-$75k off of it since then, and it still makes decent ad money today.

A weekend is more than enough time to get a prototype together that's worth devoting more time to. Ludum Dare is an excuse to put aside the rest of your life for that weekend and take a crack at it (especially for people who don't normally make games).

Cool stuff. I played around with SublimeText's SublimeGDB package and now have a visual way to set/maintain breakpoints.

http://www.simianlogicstudios.com/2012/09/20/rubymotion-subl...

Somebody more familiar with GDB could probably get the SublimeGDB package to just hook straight into RM's debug builds.

I'm considering the 920 instead of the iPhone 5 (though I may come screaming back). For me it's comforting that the phone has some heft--most of the Samsung phones feel really cheap compared to the iPhone.

A lot of people are mentioning this was brought over from Android, but it reminds me the most of WebOS (Enyo, really). I've had my TouchPad longer than my Android tab, so I can't say whether this was common on Android first.

coughHeyZapcough

The biggest problem for me was that he didn't explain why the project needed $150k. From the (granted, simplistic) explanation, it sounded like something that could be built in Flash in a couple of months.

Seems normal--whether it's a good deal or not depends on where that valuation comes from (in-house or pegged to a funding round), where you think the company will exit, if you think the company will exit, the salary they're offering, and the salary you could get elsewhere.

If they sell for a penny under $60 million, your options are underwater and worthless. If they double in value over the next 4 years (assuming standard vest), that's $450k to you if they sell for $120 million. If they never exit and you leave the company, you're basically screwed (unless you have $450k lying around and are certain it will be liquid again later).

You should make a projection of how you think the company's value will change and weigh that against the salary they're offering. Three-quarters of a percent sounds pretty generous for a startup that's already valued at $60mm, unless you're coming in at a pretty senior level, but without knowing where that valuation comes from it's hard to say for sure.

Seems like a Pinterest for words instead of pictures.