78c? Ads! Model? Market!?
Jun0
Yesterday I logged into AdMob to check the status of the account in preparation for the release of iLostMyMarbles Free. To my amazement, we’ve made $0.78 so far in ads just from testing and showing off! This seems really piddly until you consider that iLostMyMarbles only exists on three devices, and that our ad supported model has already netted us more than a sale would.
Speaking of ad supported, I’m trying to decide whether to put in interactive roadblock messages in addition to the ads, but fear this would cause a backlash as our model is full games with ads for free and without ads for cheap. Shareware is also known as nagware, and I don’t want to do that because I also think that we stand to make more money from the free users than the paid users in the long run. I’ve seen some anecdotal evidence that delay-nags work well, but I’m not sure it’s suited to us.
Does anyone know where some market research on shareware conversion rates by demographic can be had? How about by tactic? Combining that with iPhone sales demographics will give a good idea of who I should be marketing to and how. If only I had oodles of cash to hire a market research company…for now I’ll be lazy and leave out the roadblocks.
Security and VMWare Fusion
Jun0
Unfortunately not everyone has access to an Apple machine running OSX, so for an iPhone-Development curious friend I decided to create an account and let him play with things over VNC. Being at least slightly concerned about the security, I tested out what his account had access to before turning it over, and was dismayed to find that he could reach all the partitions in /Volumes/ with no problem, including private files in my Windows User folder.
I solved that quickly and easily by changing permissions on /Volumes/ to 770, verified that it blocked his access, and left it alone.
When I started using VMWare Fusion instead of booting directly to Vista, I found that running a virtual machine from any volume except System failed, and it occurred to me that the /Volumes/ permissions must be the problem. After switching them back to 777, VMWare works great but I’m left in a quandary as I’d like to be able to virtualize and share this workstation at the same time.
Any suggestions for this?
CentOS 5.3 RoR Install
Jun7
My Linux of choice is CentOS, owing mostly to its stability and very mature support base. Even with that, it’s actually pretty hard to find a good guide for installing a Ruby on Rails stack on CentOS 5.3. Here are the commands I run on a clean VPS or server (works for i386 and x86-64):
yum -y install mysql mysql-devel mysql-server yum install -y ruby ruby-ri ruby-rdoc ruby-libs ruby-devel yum -y install zlib zlib-devel openssl openssl-devel chkconfig mysqld on service mysqld start mysql yum groupinstall -y 'Development Tools' yum update -y wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/57643/rubygems-1.3.4.tgz tar zxvf rubygems-1.3.4.tgz cd rubygems-1.3.4 ruby setup.rb gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-config=/usr/bin/mysql_config
I hope this saves someone just a bit of time, let me know if you have any trouble.
Interface Reworking
Jun0
We’ve decided to rework most of the interface for iLostMyMarbles per Matt’s usability analysis. It’s more work than I expected to put into the project at this stage, as the code was pretty much finalized, but I’m happy that he has strong ideas and I want to make this first foray as solid as possible. Hopefully we’ll be able to avoid reworks during our next project by having a proper conceptual phase, something Matt was not part of for iLostMyMarbles.
The plan is to remove options and make some of them driven by a natural progression through the game. The original select-what-you-want options screen is going in favor of a simpler version that chooses your skin and spin based on your difficulty. It will also enable difficulties and levels only after you play the previous one, but I’m a bit worried that people will think they’re missing “features” of the full version when they see the grayed out options, so I’m not sure about that one.
I should have those changes knocked out by the time Matt has graphics, I’m also running behind on my consulting website and resume reflow. I thought it was the weekend?!
Device Testing
Jun0
This evening I purchased an iPod Touch to test our applications on. If you’re looking for a good alternative to the $600+ iPhone from AT&T, the iPod Touch 2G can be had for around $240 locally and $215 online (8GB models). The majority of the hardware is identical to the iPhone, so there are few performance or look and feel differences. Highly recommended, especially since it worked out so well for me. Sadly, the iPod does not have GPS capabilities, so it won’t work to test applications that require that.
After going through the ADC iPhone process to enroll the iPod and get all the development certificates set up and enrolled, I started up iLostMyMarbles for the first time and was amazed at how well Apple’s development cycle is put together. I have been developing on the iPhone Simulator, which is fine for your basic application but does not simulate the performance of the actual device. Graphics performance is the real unknown, which is critical to a game like iLostMyMarbles.
I’m glad to report that I only had one performance issue with the iPod hardware, which was related to a tracing text each frame. I disabled that in favor of a simple shadow and saw no other bugs or issues at all, so we’re on track for our first release.
Designer!
Jun0
Yesterday I had an awesome lunch meeting with Matt Garrett, a graphics designer I worked with at Pensaworks. Apparently we’re on the same page with iPhone App development, and we’ve agreed to make a joint venture out of it where he provides style and graphics and I provide features and code. Matt is a stellar graphic designer, and I’m really excited to have him as a partner on this stuff!
While there is some overlap in our skills, we’re both very solid in our respective corners and I think that will help us produce games and apps that have both great code as well as great designs. If you hadn’t noticed by the design of this website, I’m not much of a designer! My ideas on interfaces range from “concise” and “intuitive” to “responsive” and “fast work flow” - not the best memes for iPhone development, since the iPhone’s success draws from style as much as technology.
Project Management on GitHub
Jun0
I’ve chosen GitHub as a project management platform for my developments. It’s inexpensive and well featured, includes messaging, downloads, wikis, issues, and your source code. I’m a little reticent to store my source code on their servers, but I decided to take the plunge with their private repositories. So far it has been working out great!
I’m also considering FogBugz and Lighthouse for the project management side of things, as they have nifty performance indicators and milestones and releases and much, much better issue management. Lighthouse is inexpensive but does not integrate all that well with GitHub (basically it just listens to GitHub commit messages) and FogBugz is exceptionally powerful and thus expensive.
I didn’t ignore the rest of the options, but found self-hosted solutions like PHPProjekt aren’t what I need. My pitiful 2Mbps upstream connection at home really isn’t suitable for hosting much of anything, so I chose to go with an online hosted solution that everyone can get to, whether or not my Internet connection is congested or working.
Up For Air
Jun0
I’ve just spent the better part of a week totally engrossed in iPhone, Objective C, and Cocoa while writing endlessly rewriting my first commercial application. I’m honestly not sure how much effort I’ve put into iPhone development so far, but the end result has been ignoring everything else for a week, including this blog.
Stay tuned for a detailed post about my application. I’ll also be posting about what I’ve worked out for secure project management and source control.
Besides the late bills, cluttered house, and a growing todo pile this week, I missed SQL Saturdays #14 this morning where I had planned to volunteer. I feel really horrible about this as I really wanted to support these guys and what they’re doing. Great events!
I also want to shout out to Radio Paradise, which is just light years beyond every other radio station out there. Check them out!
Stress-less
May0
The last two weeks have been very pleasant and enjoyable, but I feel like I’ve been idling at 10% throttle, which is far short of normal for me. This site and blog are an effort to keep the world informed about my hobbies, research, and profession. I don’t expect too many readers as I don’t plan to promote or advertise in any way, but I will send prospective employers, contractors, friends, and family to this page rather than boring them (and myself) with repetitive updates.
Professionally, I am an entrepreneurial software and systems architect focused on distributed and peer to peer systems. I recently left my position as Vice President of Systems Operations at Brand Asset Digital, LLC in order to maintain creative freedom and to explore other paths in computer science. Brand Asset Digital is transitioning from development to sales and support, and I prefer to develop new technologies rather than maintain existing ones. My position was eating most of my time and preventing progress on my research, so I am looking for new employment in the 40-60 hours per week range rather than the 60-80 hours per week range.
Please check my resume and give me a call if you are interested in my skill set. Pensacola is not the best locale for a career based on technology, so I am prepared to interview and move out of state or work remotely.
At the moment, I am working on five projects. Two are iPhone Apps that I won’t discuss on here due to a very competitive atmosphere. I’m also working on temporally aware video codecs, massively concurrent real time analytics, and distributed (as in peer to peer) computation. Setting aside the iPhone applications, which I consider possible money makers, my research and development is focused on hard problems. Making money off solutions to these problems is not my forte, so I work with others to do so.
I’ll keep this post short so as to save some content for tomorrow. I’ll try to maintain daily posts as long as possible.
