745 karma · joined February 20, 2013
Now I work at a big tech company.
Blog: https://ethanmick.com YouTube: https://youtube.com/@ethan_mick Twitter: https://twitter.com/@ethan_mick
You can email me at [ethan] at the domain above. I'm always interested in chatting to new people and answering any questions.
"The AI Challenge is all about creating artificial intelligence, whether you are a beginning programmer or an expert. Using one of the easy-to-use starter kits, you will create a computer program (in any language) that controls a colony of ants which fight against other colonies for domination."
[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-collap...
If you do enable full access, then yep, anything is fair game. But that's a tradeoff users can make.
[1] - https://twitter.com/SwiftKey/status/514540356918972416
[2] - http://swiftkey.com/en/blog/swiftkey-require-full-access/
[3] - https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/Genera...
Just happened to a friend, she can't install the update she had downloaded.
If TI is such an incumbent, why haven't they been disrupted? Could someone come in and make a better calculator for a cheaper price (like Casio, in the article. Not sure if it's a better calculator though)?
The other problem is, even if they did, no one would buy it because it wouldn't be available for the SAT/ACT.
Edit: Casio in the article competes on price.
[0] http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/12/tsa-insan...
To be fair, I think the idea would work for different platforms, but perhaps be explicit on the front page.
What I'm looking for is a game engine (asset library?) that lets me build my town by placing buildings, and dropping in my main character - and then I can just run around the town, opening doors and talking to people. Tons of tons of game have dialogue, medieval fighting, assassinations, kill moves - I don't want to have to spend time making any of that. I want to test my game ideas and see if they are fun. I want to write the parts that are unique to my game, the story and the decisions you make. Then, later, I can go back and iterate on assets.
Both game engines now have Asset stores, but I'm not sure the level designer is to the point where I can quickly iterate over my ideas.
1: Apps don't download from the App Store the first time. I need to try 3 or 4 times.
2: Swiping a notification from the lock screen frequently crashes springboard.
3: In fact, switching apps frequently crashes springboard.
4: Music didn't download from iCloud properly.
My friends have different bugs, as well as my iPad, which is interesting. One friend didn't have his reminders work for a while.
As an aside - Xcode 5.0.2 is extremely buggy too. But we know Apple loves it's devs.
This came too late. For months now - ever since iOS 7 came out, I've had to tell people "iOS 7 is great, but buggy. Don't worry, Apple will release 7.1 soon that will fix a lot of these issues." Time, and time again, I said that. With each beta it became more and more obvious that Apple wasn't releasing a quick fix for the myriad of issues that plagued users.
I think Apple did this wrong. 7.1 contains new features and updated UI elements. Fuck that. I wanted the hundreds of bugs that were impacting users to be fixed back in October. I expected the new iPads to be running 7.1. I think Apple should have focused solely on fixing the bugs present for 7.1, and then released 7.2 that had these features. But since September 18th, (173 days ago!) I've been dealing with a buggy OS and been apologizing for it [0].
To me, that is unacceptable.
[0] I'm a big Apple fan, and develop iOS apps, and a lot of people in my circle come to me with their Apple questions.
I played a round, and got to 512. But toward the end I wasn't sure if I was actually playing with a strategy, or just pressing buttons randomly with some thinking involved.
So I built a script to randomly press the arrow keys[0]! I let it play a few games, and the highest it got to was 128 before consistently losing. So I guess you'll need some decent strategy to get to 2048.
I feel like App Stores in particular have made us (users) feel too entitled.
0 - http://realmacsoftware.com/clear/letter
[Edited, grammar]
If you have any thoughts or comments feel free to ask!
First off, I hate, hate, the practice of slowing down the game or crippling it, and then allowing the user to use an IAP to get the game back to a normal pace.
I vow never to do that.
However, a some users (and anecdotally, quite a few of my friends) won't download my app if it costs $1. The barrier to entry is too high, and they don't know if they are going to get a good experience. They can't pick up my app and hold it, feel it, rub their hands over it's quality. They have 5 screenshots (and any reviews online) to go by. Okay, so I'll make it free to lower that barrier.
But now how do I make money? I think the best thing to do is to simply have users pay for content that they have already proved they love. Let them play through 50 levels, or the first "area" of the game. Let them buy more levels or unlock more content. This way they can play the game and decide if they like it, and if so, buy more.
I think the two rules of thumb about this sort of IAP is: 1: Don't be a asshole. Give the user a lot of completely unaltered content up front, and really let them dive into the game. Ensure they know that buying the rest of the game later will cost some money, but don't take away features because they haven't bought the game yet. Let them fall in love with it. 2: Price it fairly. Let users buy "All Levels Forever" for $5, or each level pack for $2. Allow them to unlock all the content at once. If they bought 2 levels packs, and want to buy all the rest later, give them a discount.
Make a game you'd want to play.
Version 3 looks like a huge win for customers, really excited to be grabbing the update for free from the App Store. Although honestly, I'd pay for it again at this point.
[1] http://0v.org/installing-ghost-on-ubuntu-nginx-and-mysql/
1: If I highlight text with my cursor and mouse, and I scroll using my trackpad (MacBook Air), I expect the text to be highlighted with the scrolling. Word fails at this. 2: I expect different my basic OS X commands to work, ctrl+e, go to end of line, ctrl+a, front of line, etc. These don't work in Word. 3: Scrolling is not smooth, typing is not smooth, and many other small annoyances.
I understand that OS X isn't nearly as big as Windows for a market, but I would love it if the software crafted for it wasn't so bad.
iOS 7 is buggy, get over it [I'm a developer, I've been on iOS 7 since the Betas, it's still buggy]. Hopefully 7.1 (and please, Apple, 7.2 and 7.3) will fix a lot of these issues.
Also, I figured small screen size would be a bigger issue, but that doesn't seem to be the case.