So we’re all hard at work getting Wind Up Robots ready for the store and as we were doing that I was thinking we ought to look at the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablets as additional platforms. So I hurried on over to Best Buy and picked up the hardware so we could test it all out.
To cut to the chase, I am quite impressed with the Kindle. (I haven’t had the chance to really dig into the Nook yet but I’ll get to it). First off, the UI that Amazon rolled for the tool is very well done and it’s the first time I’ve been impressed by the design, images, and feel of a tablet UX that wasn’t the iPad. Other tablets have done reasonably well…but also fallen short of the experience that for many people is the default – Apple’s. But Amazon put good effort here and it shows.
Second – Wind Up Robots looks and plays great on the Kindle. The game was made using Unity3D and with the Android plug-in we just exported and run. It was simple and what’s more, the hardware kept up wonderfully with a game that’s designed to be pretty intense on the CPU. I was frankly expecting a noticeable drop in frame-rate but quite to the contrary, the Kindle even performed better in some ways than the iPad, specifically in touch response. You can see us testing the game on the Fire in in the video below.
Personally, I’m not a fan of the 7″ form factor, it’s too small for me, but other guys here like it and if my main activity is reading eBooks, then the smaller form makes for easier reading…so I may not be the target audience here.
But most importantly (to me) this is the first place I’ve been motivated to make the effort to put my product in an Android app store. Now that Amazon has taken a big step toward the moderated, managed and at-least-slightly-walled garden app store, suddenly they have my interest as a developer. For all the Android hardware that’s being sold the dirty little secret among developers is that Android customers simply don’t spend any money which makes for a lousy business model. (see more here) But I for one am very encouraged by the Amazon store and how it looks like a great step toward finding and training a body of customers who aren’t looking for everything to be free. (Not that free is always bad, but always free is bad). Of course time will tell if Kindle Fire customers act more like Amazon customers than Google customers - but I for one am impressed and ready to roll the dice.
I have about eight blog posts I wan to make coming out of the Intel Elements 2011 Conference, most of them positive. BUt one of these seems pretty time sensitive and I want to be part of the conversation out here so I’m going to do this now even if it’s only half baked.
Whoever is in charge – you cannot use the name Tizen – it’s about the worst possible marketing move possible at this moment. Instead – call it MeeGo5 – and you’ll be celebrated instead of mocked.
The other day, Soren Johnsen posted a tweet that really caught my interest. He said
“The next console generation will be won by whoever understands why the Xbox Indie Games Channel did not become the iOS App Store.’
This is true in so many ways.
The iOS App store has enjoyed an unparalleled level of success since it launched a few years back largely because it managed to hit a golden combination of approachability by both developers and consumers, while simultaneously lifting the best to the top through a natural feeling review system. For the first time Joe Schmoe could take his idea, build it himself and publish it to millions of potential customers, all from his living room. Customers had access to hundreds of thousands of apps at their fingertips, instantly, anytime and anywhere, for an affordable price.
We’re here at Intel Elements 2011, a “one year later” event from where we first heard Peter Biddle lay out a rather large vision for the Intel AppUp Center. Without going back into the history and our previous thoughts on AppUp I find myself feeling increasingly invested in this thing. Far more than getting tied up in what AppUp is or is not, I’m fascinated by what AppUp wants to become.
If you have hung around with us at any trade shows in the last year you probably would have heard one of us, at some point, as “Where is BlackBerry?”
Ever since the iPhone started to eat into the smartphone space like one my famished coffee-bean-headed farm zombies we kept waiting for RIM to respond and as months turned into years we started to think they’d lost it. “it” being both the HUGE advantage they had worked hard to gain with the brilliance of the click-wheel and also their collective minds. By January this year I had crossed my confidence tipping point and figured BlackBerry for the walking dead – still shambling about but done nonetheless.
Then at GDC I got a very pleasant surprise – the soon-to-be-released BlackBerry Playbook.
It was exactly 1 year ago that we got our first taste of Intel’s AppUp Center when they launched the beta store at CES 2010. It was received with mixed reviews and nobody really knew what to expect from it.
What a difference a year makes.
Note to Intel: Why does this page still say "Moblin?"
Today you look at the AppUp Center and right up front is what must be the biggest runaway hit game of 2010 – Angry Birds. What a huge coup! What a great “I told you so” moment. Congratulations to Intel – Peter, you called it man.
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…
Posted 1 year, 5 months ago at 4:08 pm. Add a comment
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.
Posted 1 year, 5 months ago at 3:52 pm. 13 comments
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.
Posted 1 year, 5 months ago at 10:00 am. 1 comment
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…
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.