Archive for April, 2010
iPhone OS 4.0 keynote summary
Apr 10th
Here’s a link to the keynote presentation.
Here’s a short summary:
Seven Tentpole Features of iPhone OS 4.0:
1) Multitasking – the ability to run more than one app, have them continue running in the background, and switch between them with tremendous fluidity.
- Background audio (example: control Pandora and stream music while in other apps)
- Voice over IP (Skype) including the ability to receive calls when the phone is locked.
- Background Location – optional periodic GPS tracking.
- Push notifications
- Local notifications
- Task completion after exiting an app, for instance to finish a photo upload.
- Fast app switching that keeps apps from draining battery but makes it possible to switch rapidly between apps.
2) Folders- have up to 2160 apps instead of just 180! And can dock the folders so from the video it looks possible to have 36 apps on the dock.
3) Mail - enhanced Unified Inbox for multiple email accounts and message threads.
4) iBooks on iPhone
5) Enterprise business features like better data protection.
6) Game Center – Social Gaming Network. Invite friends, Matchmaking, Leaderboards, and Achievements.
7) iAds - Mobile advertising that keeps the user in the app but provides an emotional and interactive experience.
Great tools for distributed collaboration
Apr 9th
So far, I’ve found a few tools to be indispensable when working with distributed teams. Here’s a short summary of my favorites so far: IM, Skype, Google Docs and Dropbox.
IM – I find IM to be very useful when I need immediate answers. Use Trillian to access MSN Messenger and Yahoo IM. Also, the log can come in handy when trying to recall points made during a chat. Drawbacks include interruptions that can disrupt creative flow. Project related IM can end up taking too much priority over the work if not careful.
Skype – both the voice chat and the desktop sharing in Skype are super useful. You can get through a lot of material quickly verbally and if you are working with art, it’s really good to be able to interact with it or have it explained on a shared view of the screen. Drawbacks- it doesn’t work for everybody. Voice chat can be cumbersome for people who don’t have a relatively quiet environment.
Google Docs- we did project planning on a small project with a distributed team using the spreadsheet app in Google Docs. It was great being able to edit the doc at the same time. Whenever we have any meetings about that project, they usually take place in the project spreadsheet. Drawbacks – it’s a web app, so it’s just a little clunky. Maybe that will change with HTML5? Also, a functional issue with the IM that is built into google docs is that it can sometimes be hard to notice when someone types, so we tend to use external IM instead or IM within the doc itself.
Google Wave – we tried to use this once with a team of three, but it was hard to get everyone to check it frequently enough to know if it would have been worth using.
Dropbox – file sharing. Dropbox maintains the files in a local directory for each client with access to the dropbox. It’s super useful and much easier than emailing files around, So far, it has worked really well and supports a variety of platforms. Drawback- the subscription can be a little pricey in that if you use a large amount of space, each team member needs to subscribe at the same level. I haven’t checked the pricing model lately, but this was the only drawback I found. Oh and when we used it, the shared filenames were not encrypted, but the files were.
HTML5? Silverlight? Flash? Unity?
Apr 2nd
I was recently working on a Flash game that ran great in every browser except IE. In IE8 it ran really slowly. We had to figure out what was going on because IE is the 800lb gorilla of browsers.
We found and fixed the problem. It turned out that the cause was running the Flash object with hardware acceleration enabled in the browser settings in the HTML embed tag – but only in IE. The weird thing is- having hardware acceleration enabled should have made the game run *faster*. Of the browsers, it *drastically reduced performance* only when running in IE. It didn’t affect the game in other browsers Chrome or Firefox. It’s hard to tell exactly why it ran slowly on IE. It could be something in IE or it could be something with the Flash Player. Since the game ran fine on Chrome and Firefox even with the setting enabled, it’s fair to guess the slowdown is something in IE.
So then we got into some discussions about Silverlight and HTML5 and other competitors of Flash content on the web. Well I knew a little about Silverlight (proprietary) and knew very little about HTML5 so I watched this video from May 2009 Google I/O. HTML5 looks sort of interesting [video]. There are a few demo videos out there of HTML5 showing off some pretty decent 3D graphics. Also, for web apps it looks interesting in how it could simplify HTML.
The problem that seems to be persistent through the years in the browser wars (now the platform wars) is the lack of incentive for cooperation from the various vendors to adhere to a new standard. Personally, I think it’s unlikely to have the ones with largest market share cooperate unless they are driving the change- and with HTML5 as far as I know they are not driving the change.
For a small game company making web games, it might be a better idea to go with technology that lets you create your product at some level in the pipeline where the browsers are cooperative. For web games, the most pervasive option is still Flash, although several new platforms have launched that do not support Flash at all. An additional issue is that IE8 can now run it slowly in some situations with some settings. Flash is still so pervasive on the web it might not really matter yet. In most Flash games, I think running with hardware acceleration turned off is not that big of an issue. If you need hardware acceleration, another alternative that might keep you out of the browser wars is to go with something like Unity. It’s a 3D engine that has a web player, can make standalone apps, and has a version that can build for iPhone. Here’s a link [http://www.unity3d.com] if you want to check it out.