jon914

The makeup of your diet, among other factors, determined how the body reacts to the extra calories and decides whether to store it more as fat and/or lean muscle mass.

With some custom code and the help of libraries like MacWidgets, you can make some decent native-looking GUI's with Swing. See my profile for an example of one - it's a large-scale desktop application.

I concede though that if you go with out of the box LNF's, even Nimbus, your results will not be up to par.

Apple's been fairly lax lately with its checking. A friend's game that we were able to get crashing on launch 100% of the time passed through the original submit process without a peep.

The same friend, just for kicks, submitted a deliberately broken app that didn't crash but showed a blank screen after launch. It also got approved without incident. It's like Apple just ran automated tests, but no human ever saw it.

I have a feeling that Apple's process varies depending on the kind of app (free vs. paid), the platforms you're targeting and your past history.

I get mostly relevant opportunities, but they never acknowledge that I'm already running my own company, even when contacting me via LinkedIn where that's pretty obvious.

These aren't exactly no-name companies or recruiting firms but the actual companies themselves - we're talking about Zynga, Playdom, ngmoco, etc.

Is this something other founders have found?

High-protein, low carb and delicious (creamy texture and flavor) at the same time. I alternate between Chobani, Fage and a couple other brands, but the nutritional profile is about the same for all of them.

I prefer to take my yogurt plain and mix in my own jams, rather than the fruit on the bottom variants. That gives me more variety than the default flavors provided and lets me control the amount that goes in.

The Iwata Asks interview for Wii U has been posted. Some interesting insights into the thought process that went into it.

http://e3.nintendo.com/iwataasks/

The Fugue set is extensive and is my goto set. http://p.yusukekamiyamane.com/

Our startup's main product uses Java for a UI heavy app because makes it cross platform out of the box and is relatively easy to develop a nice, native looking UI with if you know what you're after.

Our closest competitors locked themselves to one platform and have faced challenges trying to go cross platform.

Thanks for the clarification. I missed the Target inclusion on the basic things I was looking for because it's based on the circular, which has fairly little in the way of food items.

With Whole Foods, the best (and most pragmatic) deals they offer aren't at all on their website and must be tracked in store. I think that there is a market for including Whole Foods, not in the novelty items, but in comparing natural/organic commodities that are popular enough to be carried by Target, Safeway and even Costco. On those fronts, WF is frequently the cheapest.

Do you have plans to, perhaps, crowdsource some of the price reporting similar to how gas price comparison sites are done?

This is pretty neat, and I'd definitely use this once it expanded to cover the stores I visit (WF, TJ's, Target) and a broader range of items. The one pitfall for the current market is that stores that don't run circulars or stores for which the circulars are harder to scrape are important but harder to get at.

For example, Whole Foods and TJ's are substantial players in the Bay Area market as well as discount stores like Target where there's a mix of the everyday low price model and sales on loss leaders. What are your plans to tackle stores like those?

Overall, this is a good start, and I look forward to seeing this fleshed out more.

I use the Sparrow framework and find it to mimic the Flash's API more closely, and the API as a whole is less complex. The primary downside at this time is that the community is less active/developed, but the author is very helpful when it comes to answering questions.

The poor in India and China don't eat enough to become obese, let alone gain significant weight.

I think that the term "poverty" relates specifically to developed countries where fast food is the cheapest way for the poor to feed themselves off the dollar menu.

Thanks! The Balls in Space game scored several sponsorships that have collectively gotten it into the 4 figures range, which is pretty good by Flash standards.

Cocos2D is the most popular 2D iPhone game framework. An alternative, if you're used to the Flash/ActionScript way of doing things, is Sparrow. You may also find that if you're doing an action/physics game in the future, Box2D will inevitably be necessary.

If you're looking for a GUI as opposed to a programming API, in addition to the fine options above, my startup (http://www.stencyl.com) also does this and is based on Sparrow (and Flash for exporting to the web).

However, I'll be realistic and say that if you're making an RPG, you'll find it much easier to build it by hand.

Nothing wrong with that. It was just the first thing that popped to mind when I saw it.

I'd love to see a posting about the evolution of the mascot and overall design of the app. It's pretty slick.

The mascot is cool, but am I the only one to think it looks a little close to Toucan Sam (Fruit Loops)?

What fascinates me about Miyamoto is his tendency to allow form to follow function. Whether it's the design of Mario (to maximize visibility), the choice of music to suggest the nature of a stage or the instant recognizability of an enemy (spiny - don't jump on it!), his background in industrial design shines through.

Sure, I'll list out some of the pain points we're aware of and have tried to address.

- Not able to think logically. There's only so much you can accomplish if you take logical thinking out of the equation, and when you do, the creations are underwhelming. Many startups set out to make creation easy, and that works to some extent, but the real solution to the problem may be to try to educate users and bring them up to a minimum bar (learn how to fish), rather than trying to lower the bar to the floor (give them the fish). This would be suicide for most startups, but the users of creative apps are more patient and more willing to learn and grow with the app. Sure, we'll shut out some people this way, but we want to lift up the right, motivated people, rather than trying to lift the entire world up.

- Can't draw/other artistic skill. Shockingly, this ends up being a big problem, and people absolutely hate using placeholder art if they can't draw. We've addressed this by integrating a marketplace for pulling in all kinds of resources.

- Can't work with other people. Many game projects fail due to bad communication (if you're not working solo). They start out strong when brainstorming and then die somewhere in the middle, usually when the members fall out of regular contact or don't know what's going on. We've integrated some features into our app to directly address this after observing how our users interacted with each other on several group projects.

- Set their sights too high. No, you're not going to create an MMORPG or RTS as your first project. ;) This one isn't directly addressed by our app right now and falls more under the umbrella of general user education and progression. One idea we have is to incorporate game elements (turning game creation into a game?) to nudge the user towards making baby steps towards completing something through a quest structure, rather than trying to let them go free from day 1.

The take home point is that like any startup, what you set out to do ends up evolving as you move along and that the problem you're solving turns out to be different and sometimes larger than what you originally expected.

As a founder of a startup doing #3 (Stencyl), I can attest to that idea being an enormous time sink and risk. I can name at least 10 startups or larger companies that went after that idea and either died or pivoted.

What we have is working, and it's working well, but as we press forward, we find that our strongest value proposition is no longer the code-free aspect, which turns out to be just one small part of a larger puzzle. Once you remove that roadblock, other pain points come to light that are far more difficult to solve.

Our main product isn't a web application, but we're the oddball startup that's using Java/Swing to build a desktop application which is a visual designer for creating both Flash and most recently, iOS games.

Our ability to deploy to Windows and Mac is giving us a leg over some competition that's unable to serve the larger Windows market. Being able to knock out new features very rapidly (within minutes/hours) is another advantage.

Reminds me of PG's essay about how Viaweb was able to implement a competitor's feature the same day it came out...

You should build a relationship with potential investors over time, starting from when you have a prototype. Don't wait until you actually need to raise a round.

Investors like to see traction in your product, and if you lack it, they'll continually label you as "early."

Avoid cold calls unless you have no other way in. Get introductions through your network.

I've been on mine for almost 3 years, pulling in 40 hours a week on top of a full time job. I haven't launched (I will in a few months), but I've built up a base of 1000 users, all through sweat and blood. It's hard, it has it's up and downs, but it's a thrilling ride no matter how it plays out.

Fish feed consists of small, less desirable fish such as sardines and mackerel. These are rich in omega-3, so shifting to grains reduces the quantity available in the fish.

Some farmed fish requires fish to feed them, which is unsustainable in itself when you're feeding N pounds of other fish to produce 1 pound of the edible type.

See: http://www.nicholas.duke.edu/thegreengrok/farmedfish-pnas092...

Recently, I've seen more of a shift to grains, but that reduces the nutritional value of the fish.

What surprises me most about this article is that the author was able to gain some visibility (sugarcoated or not) into this industry, in China no less.

Slaughterhouses and meat processors in the US, in particular, are notoriously opaque about their operations in a way that would make Apple's practices seem lenient by comparison.

It's great to hear that this was a practical consideration on Apple's part.

I hope that they ensure a smooth transition of the responsibility to Oracle and perhaps even hand over some of the existing work, if licensing permits it.

This reminds me of an anecdote where Jobs was arguing with an engineer about the look of the original Mac's internals:

"I want it to be as beautiful as possible, even if it's inside the box. A great carpenter isn't going to use lousy wood for the back of a cabinet, even though nobody's going to see it."

For lengths of time, they only had one engineer on it by the name of Mike Swingler.

I can't speak for that today, but my source for this info was the Java Swing team themselves since they talked all the time with the Java "team" at Apple.

This worries me greatly because my startup's product is based on Java, which gave us an advantage over others in our space for being able to work across Mac and Windows while maintaining a great user experience thanks to a lot of customization on our part (see profile).

While I concede that Java has lost relevance on Mac, there are outliers like ourselves who've written native looking Java software and don't have a viable route should the worst case scenario arise.

My only inside knowledge is that the Java "team" within Apple was very small, which explains why it constantly lagged behind on updates.

I'm interested and sent you an e-mail.