Som(a)niloquy

Celebrate good times, come on!

We are used to planning for disaster, disappointment, failure or bad news. How often do we prepare to celebrate? Celebration is such a critical part of business and company culture.

Today we are celebrating our Code-Monkey’s title Bok Choy Boys game we made with A&A Global being featured by Apple’s New and Noteworthy section on the iTunes store. Our team was obviously energized and excited about the news. We instantly made plans to celebrate and congratulate all of our friends, collaborators and hard working artists that made this happen.

So why don’t we plan for things like this? Something common to our staff in discussing the topic is that all of them have the experienced the opposite.  People opt out of walking when receiving a degree.  First steps, words and birthdays are lauded but as we grow older we shy away from them.

So at Soma and Code-Monkey we want to break the mold. We are taking time out to cherish this a bit. If you are near our office we invite you stop by and have some fun. We will have an open house from 1-3 pm this next Thursday June 30th 2011.

And if you find yourself in our shoes take a minute out of your schedule and value celebration.

Microsoft is in a Death Spiral

I saw this link on Fox today where it asks “Has Microsoft Lost Its Tech Edge?” and my only response is “You Just Noticed?”

My personal realization of this started over a year ago but was then repeatedly reinforced over and over again at trade show after trade show lat year. MS was there at all of them, CES, Computex, IDF – that’s no surprise. What was shocking was how pointless their presence had become. An example – at Computex I saw a dozen or more tablet computers in the Microsoft booth as if they were coming out with a bunch of new and interesting hardware. But 80% of them were locked away in boxes (more here) and the rest were just retreads of 8 year old tech. Beside the useless hardware was the pointless revision of Office. To see more of the same at CES this week doesn’t surprise me at all.

The worst moment was when MS joined Intel during the tech keynote at IDF. When asked “Does MS have anything exciting you are working on?” in front of thousands of tech fanboys and media reps the woman literally said “no…not really.”

I was shocked!

Nothing? Really? You can’t even lie about it and say “…nothing I can share. [wink, wink]“? It was embarrassing and it sure looked as though the answer took the Intel guy by surprise…but there it was.

In short – Microsoft appears to have completely lost any sense of vision for the future. Yes, the landscape has changed and new technologies have emerged. Can that possibly be a surprise? Continue Reading…

Taking back the boxed games?: Do you prefer eVersions

Are you buying family games this Christmas? We are. We bought a few favorites for the kids, but actually took them back in favor of the eVersions. This was a choice my wife made. That really surprised me. Let me just say in our family, she is not the gadget freak the rest of us are. My Kids and I play games on all of our devices (we have many, one of the perks being in the gadget/game/app development business). She has always resisted using them…until now. To set the scene, about two weeks ago the kids introduced her to Angry Birds on the iPad. She was instantly hooked. Then this last weekend the  Electronic Arts sale was announced and I grabbed many of the titles for 99 cents that were usually $6.99 – 9.99. One of the games happened to be the same as a boxed game she had bought, Piktureka, as a Christmas present . After playing as a family and enjoying the sounds, unique and enjoyable playtime, she bagged up the boxed version and took it back to the store.

I asked her why,  and she said that it just  made sense. The iPad version reduces clutter, is more fun to play, you can’t lose pieces,  and she really likes the sound effects. And to top it all off this is coming from the least techy person in our house. So there you have it. What games are you buying this Christmas. We are also enjoying Clue Spy, Yatzee, and the kids really like Life, although Life for me feels a bit claustrophobic on the iPad.

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.

On Porting from iPhone to Netbook with Flex – Understanding the Syntax of ActionScript and MXML

by Ryan Green

I’ve spent most of my career on the web. Well, my first real job was as busboy at a local mexican hole-in-the-wall restaurant (love the salsa.) Then as proud crew member of a certain fast-food burger joint with golden arches (click here to skip to the meat of this post), then, as up and coming young web designer. It is amazing the job you could land in the dot-com bubble with some decent photoshop know-how and a copy of Microsoft Frontpage…

Anyhow, what I quickly learned in my stint as web master, besides the art of pixel perfect nested HTML table layouts so that my webpages could load inside the 1990′s on a 28.8 baud modem, was that if you wanted to give your customers any value besides a relatively accurate re-creation of their 4 page full-color brochure, you needed to know databases and some form of server side scripting.

I chose Cold Fusion. At the time this was due to the fact that it was the only book in our little office that didn’t have the letters ‘CGI’ and ‘Perl’ in the title. Cold Fusion provided some nice tag based syntax for connecting with a database and displaying tractor parts in a webpage. Then came Javascript and DHTML and VBScript and PHP and then, at last, Actionscript 1 & 2.

Now, lest you fear I die a quick death stuffed to the gills with obscure scripting language knowledge, Actionscript 3 arrived with Flex just in time to spare me the wrath of Java nerds hailing the death of ColdFusion and other “non-languages.” The language of the User Interface has steadily matured into Object-Oriented like syntax and smarter uses of XML to define the UI, and the “real-programmers” have moved native with Objective-C/C++/C#/C-flat and C#-minor. Oh, and don’t forget Java on that little mobile platform called Android… and how dare I forget ruby and python.

All this to say that, in this day-and-age, we face a fragmented amalgamation of languages and platforms all vying for title of “most-awesome-real-language.”

Well, my nomination for new entrant into the “real-language” lexicon is Actionscript/MXML, a syntax that gives Javascript its Object-Orientation and the HTML tag actual namespaces and custom tag names. 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…

The Mouse is Dead! Long Live Touch!

I’l never forget the moment I first understood that the iPhone was something magic though at the time I wasn’t sure what it was I was observing. My pastor, who is one of the most dedicated MacHeads I know, had an iPhone without 38 seconds of them being released. A few days later he was showing a photo of his grandson, on the iPhone, to Beth. Beth is one of those people who maintains a kind of  love-hate relationship with all technology. She’s not a gear-head by any stretch, but nor is she a Luddite like Rebekah. (I do SO love you sweetie, even if you resent my livlihood.)

Beth took the iPhone, cooed appropriately at the charming picture and began to hand the phone back to Bill. As she did the photo rotated and scaled and Beth gasped. She pulled the phone back to herself and the photo spun around again. Eyes like saucers and her mouth agape she starts spinning the phone back and forth back and forth in awe until Bill snatches it away from her with a protective ‘give me THAT’ kind of look.

Without any expectation and no penchant for TechWow Beth had seen something that connected with her emotionally and intuitively. In that instant I think I glimpsed the future.

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…