Som(a)niloquy

The Myth Of Multitasking

Multitasking and iOs 4.0 – What it is and what it is not.

For a while there it seemed Android phones really had the iPhone beat with a certain feature known as Multi-tasking. It was all over the news and yadda yadda yada. Then Apple announced an upgrade that now includes – wait for it – multitasking. But it may not be what you think it is. We want to take a moment here to answer a few FAQs about the multi-tasking mystique and to speak another obvious question – what’s this got to do with AppUp.

First, lets talk about the concepts here. When an operating system can multitask this is its ability to run more than one program at the same time. (Not to be confused with threads which are different) This gives each running program access to important system resources simultaneously and the user gets the ability to do several things at once. For example an MP3 player bopping along while your email client checks POP3 while you’re editing a text document. When it comes to our desktop systems – we’ve come to expect this kind of behavior as minimal requirements. But prior to iOS4 the iPhone didn’t allow any third party processes (read: your app) to continue running after it lost focus. In fact, the iPhone “single-thread” experience has become a marketing point in many places and people started rediscovering the mental clarity of doing one thing at a time. It should be noted however that Apple always kept certain classes for their own use and apps like iCal were treated as a special case, often behaving in a multi-tasking kind of way. It just was something mere mortals were forbidden to do. Continue Reading…

An Open Letter to Intel on The AppUp Center

The app store concept is not a product or a service. It’s a complete reset of the way ALL intellectual property will be sold, shared and distributed. It will completely reshape the world of books, music and software.

How can Intel’s ApUp Center thrive and dominate?
1. Make it Cheap
2. Make it Easy – More importantly, make it LOOK easy.
3. Improve on What Apple has Already Done Well
4. Never Mention MeeGo
5. (After you never mention it) Make MeeGo Beautiful and Bulletproof
6. Apple is Not Your Enemy – Google Is
7. Show Us The Money – But In Secret
8. Support MeeGo and Air. Drop Everything Else
9. Leverage and Cooperate With Existing Services
10. Encourage Other Forms of IP

And 11 – Embrace and celebrate the huddled masses of
disempowered Flash developers – they are your future.

When and How Backgrounding Is Stupid

We generally like Apple and the iThings. Shoot – that’s been our bread and butter for about two years now. But a recent update is just lame.

In all their glorious confidence, Apple believed that the new multitasking benefit would be happiness for all.

Well guess what? We hates it – for the most part. Sure there are some apps that it is nice for. Apps like Pandora or Skype, some navigation applications… But for most applications, including ours, it’s absolutely a waste and we’re mad.

If it were an optional feature that could be added in I wouldn’t be writing this article but instead they’ve made backgrounding the default action when a user presses the home button. As a result, these apps stack up in my hidden tray and slow everything down. Especially ,my 3G phone where I don’t even have access to kill them. They also slow my 3Gs down way too much, its not SUPPOSED to do anything but when I feel like my phone is lagging the first thing I do is double-click home and remove all the apps waiting to come back from the grave. Lo and behold – it does runs faster.

If you’re a developer that is sick and tired of your app being forced to stay ready for the next start up, and you don’t want your app to bleed useless cycles off your customers’ phones – we found an answer.

If you add the simple tag “UIApplicationExitsOnSuspend” to your info.plist file and set it to true your application will no longer bog down iOS 4.0 phones.

Example Code For Your Plist:
<key>UIApplicationExitsOnSuspend</key>
<true/>

We hope most developers will use this tag to save us all from lameness but what we REALLY hope is that Apple will turn this around and make a simple end to an app the default behavior and make backgrounding an optional add-on.

Sound Design in AppUp Games and Apps

by Matt Fox

When we set out to make G: Into The Rain, we came to understand that sound design was an area we did not want to neglect. This is not to say that we were immediately aware of the importance of having good sound. In fact, to be honest, we knew that G was going to be first deployed on the iPhone. The on-board audio playback hardware on the iPhone is not exactly high quality – unlike the netbooks which we eventually ported G to late in 2009. During the development, we started to realize that we weren’t necessarily tied to one platform, and that devices like the netbook could impart a much richer game play experience in terms of sound.

In the early conceptual phases of our development, we decided to have a look around at the games that we all liked. Sound design wasn’t something that jumped out as a priority. Frankly, the first non-visual game element that most people notice is music; and while we were blessed with a very talented composer for the musical score of G, that is a topic for another post. Sound, as a game element, is often overlooked. If you ask many people what they enjoyed about a particular game or application, more often than not you will hear about how they liked the gameplay, or that the art was stunning, or that the storyline moved along really well, or that they really liked (or hated) a particular character. Sound design, or rather good sound design is not something that is in your face. It’s subtle, and most often it’s only really noticed after the visual. For instance, when you walk into a room, unless there’s a buzzsaw running, most likely the first thing you’ll notice is what it looks like. We are visual creatures, and hearing most often is employed after sight.

Now I don’t want to convey the idea that because we’re primarily visually oriented, that good sound design can be left for the back burner. Quite the contrary. When we looked around at the games that we all liked to play, we started to catalog and attempt to define what it is that we enjoyed about those games. Eventually, we began to pay close attention to the sound design. In doing so, we had to look beyond the iPhone, and plan accordingly. We came to the conclusion, that one of the reasons we liked the games we did was because of the sound. In most cases, it wasn’t an obvious, in-your-face sort of revelation. Sound was used here as a way to augment the look and feel of the games. Looking ahead, we made the choice to take sound design seriously – which is especially vexing considering the less-than stellar (external) speakers on the iPhone. But if we had taken the approach that “nothing will sound good on the iPhone” and had half-hearted sound design, then G certainly wouldn’t have sounded as good as it does now on a netbook. Continue Reading…

On Porting from iPhone to Netbook with Flex – Interacting with the UI: Cocoa Delegates and Flex Observers.

by Ryan Green

Today we explore the emerging zeitgeist of two companies that I love. I submit to you that embedded in the very code of their developer SDKs lie the underpinnings to a complete corporate world view. I know, profound stuff. I thought so myself while typing this in the airline terminal of Denver International Airport while waiting for a friend to arrive. Perhaps I’ve waited too long and those funnel cake sticks from that other burger chain have started to affect my brain chemistry. We shall see.

My new working theory is derived by examining the use of patterns in the User Interface components of Cocoa and Flex.

Exhibit A: Apple believes the world and developers must be controlled and well managed. This is why the primary pattern for talking to User Interface (UI) Components is the delegate pattern. The delegate pattern means that when a user does something to a component, like clicking on a Picker, that Picker UI Component delegates responsibility to a delegat-ee. In other words, the Picker tells the delegate what to do and when to do it. There are a few benefits to the use of this pattern. Delegates clean up well (memory-wise), delegates have a clear and predictable function, and there is one and only one responder for any action by a UI component. Continue Reading…

Computex: The Buzz, The Bombs, and the Booth Babes

“I just flew in from Taipei and boy are my arms tired…”

I wrote that line a month ago when it was hoped to be at least slightly true…So the “just” has now become a distant memory and I’m only now getting to this blog, but better late than never right?

The whole point of this article is to give a report on what I saw at Computex which was in Taipei (as always) June 1-5. Now in the spirit of full disclosure I should say right off the bat that I was only in Taipei because I was invited to go by a large semi-conductor outfit you’ve no doubt heard of. And since I really never read those NDAs I sign I really don’t even know if I can mention then by name here…but you’ll read between the lines no doubt (where Google will not). Anyway, it’s worth saying that these folks were very generous to lil’ol’ Soma Games, took great care of me and didn’t EVER stop feeding me! I swear I ate 13 times a day over there…which was a good thing.  I stood atop the 2nd highest building in the world, the Taipei 101 and was shocked to see that a Starbucks in Proto-China looks exactly like a Starbucks in Seattle – I just couldn’t really read the menu. But who cares right? ’cause I just know where “Americano Maximus Quad Shot” is on the menu anyway and everybody understands a pointing finger. Continue Reading…

The Lament of a Flex Developer

or “Why Apple broke my heart and Adobe is holding the pieces”

by our very own Ryan Green

April 8, 2010 was the day the first salvo was fired, all out war declared, and the following day an Adobe employee named Lee Brimelow had his emotions get the better of him. His blog post told Apple collectively to… well… ahem. Apply screws to themselves.

See, the following Monday, was a day that I, as a Flex / Flash developer, loyal Apple fan-boy and AppStore developer had eagerly anticipated with bated breath. Monday, the 12th, was the day when the world would open up. When those, like me, whose livelihood depends largely on the Adobe Flash Platform would finally be allowed into the mobile space; unencumbered; invigorated; and empowered.

Continue Reading…

Where the Intel App Store Fits In

Soma Games was in Las Vegas this last week to attend CES whereIntel announced the beta launch of their new app store aimed at netbooks. (Check it out here)

For Soma Games, this was a singular opportunity but I’m seeing a lot of ink out there this week by folks who don’t get it. The refrain I’ve heard from the party poopers is the laconic ‘another app store?’ whine as if the paradigm shift represented by app stores is somehow old news. These folks totally miss what the app store model represents and they will be eating their words as their myopia is exposed in the coming months, particularly in what the Intel store represents.

In the broad sense, the app store model is a huge opportunity for everybody in the software chain. Developers like Soma Games can get our product out to our tribe for minimal cost, fans benefit from the long tail and…blah, blah, blah. You’ve already heard all that about Apple’s raging success. But don’t think of the iTunes store as a product where it’s critical to be first and unique. Instead it’s a new way of doing business, and that’s a much bigger thing. In fact, the Apple store is getting pretty fat and bloated these days, some genuine competition will be good for it. Another app store is a good thing in the same way a competitive shoe store is  a good thing.

As for the specific punch of Intel’s store, you need to remember the three rules of retail?

1. Location
2. Location
3. Location

The App Up store is likely to get off to a fairly slow start because it isn’t really a new idea, people have seen these things before, and so the gee whiz factor is gone. But Intel is working with OEMs like Dell and Acer to get this thing pre-installed on netbooks that ship out all over the world. Pretty soon there will be a gigantic installed base that grows more of less by osmosis. The netbook users who are all about minimal fuss will be drown to its ease of use and one-stop-shop featueres and before you know it the app store will be the first (and often only) place they will look any time they think they need a new utility of time sink.

In other words, before long, being in that store will be like placing your business at the corner of 1st and Main where everybody goes to browse…because it’s right on their way to everywhere else.

Manifold Publishing

There is no way that any video game or series of video games can possibly tell the stories we want to tell at Soma Games.
Neither could a graphic novel,
…or a book,
…or a movie.

If ‘the medium is the message’ then we will only have told our stories properly when they are told across multiple media, each used in its proper place to express the proper part of a manifold expression of creativity that ought to transcend any single medium. Continue Reading…

Keep Raising The Bar

Christian game developers have toiled in obscurity for all these years largely because we’re broke and making a video game is an expensive proposition. With little access to capital games have struggled with older technology that doesn’t compete with current expectations and anemic (…or totally absent…) marketing budgets. The two factors make the whole enterprise of building a Christian game a daunting task. The Catch-22 of course is that investors want to see some proven indication that a title has a reasonable chance of making a profit but it’s been next to impossible to prove the point when nobody can make a realistically funded effort. (Left Behind notwithstanding…ahem)

But two recent releases have me smiling about things to come. The first is Heaven The Game (which we reviewed here) and the other is Adam’s Venture. Neither game is what you would really call a AAA title and neither plays on a console which is where most of the gaming market is right now, but neither title could have been cheap to make, and that means somebody is starting invest some serious dollars into this niche I’ve been talking about for years. Continue Reading…