ja2ke

Sometimes these attitudes start cropping up in large numbers because you're a shitty boss, so I guess watch out for that too.

There are probably more great engineers in the world than great chefs.

It's often easier to find the review form on the App Store than it is to find a human-answered "contact us" form or address for the developer.

When a user writes a shitty review, they know for a fact the developer will read it, whereas many app store developers may not even have a web presence, let alone a reliable looking way to contact them.

I'm not saying that's good by any means -- dialog with your customers gets to the bottom of things and usually leaves them happier -- but right now if it's easier for your customer to find and leave a public vent session on your app store page than it is to find out how to contact you, they are going to take the path of least resistance.

If user to developer dialog is important to you, enable your users to do it, don't expect them to jump through hoops to seek you out when there's an easier alternative.

There is a difference though - the iPad was built by Apple to be bought as a piece of multipurpose hardware (once you buy it, Apple is happy, has made a profit from you) while the Fire was built by Amazon to be a cheap window into Amazon streaming content (once you buy it, all Amazon wants you to do is consume media, so they can make their money back).

I don't know if that's true. There are a lot of professionals in the visual arts who need monstrous, component-driven, customizable workhorse computers to do what they do, and that won't change any time soon because their job depends on working on or near the cutting edge of what hardware can output.

Apple has served that market (or at least the front-end focused part of it) pretty well in graphic design and video for a long time, but even if that market becomes too small or too complicated for Apple, those people will still need their machines and their systems, and their business will be big enough for someone.

I think Apple likes that their computers are used to make the content that people use their computers to consume. I think it will take them a while to give that up. I also think that, eventually, they WILL give that up -- it just won't be for a while yet -- and that's probably about when I'll stop using Apple products.

You probably meant "HNfluence."

They have a "is your thermostat Nest compatible" guide and video that isnt too unfriendly. http://store.nest.com/#compatibility

Location based reminders are a feature in iOS 5 across all phones. My vanilla 4 can do it, so presumably my old (and iOS 5 supported) 3GS can too.

Siri itself is the only (big?) iOS 5 feature that is hardware locked to the 4S.

"Dropbox" is becoming a verb. They need to keep that up, so people ask if their device has Dropbox, or more appropriately (if incorrectly), ask if it "can Dropbox?"

It is a feature, a service, but so is Netflix, and Dropbox isn't encumbered by movie studios. They just have the neat "whoa this is almost magic" part.

Google seems to care. You can see it here: http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/

An optimist would say that's exposed so you can wipe it clean, a pessimist would say that's exposed so you can refine your profile to be better advertised to.

This isn't really a mask in the more commonly perceived digital graphics sense, in it's not actually creating transparent negative space around your image. The "masked" area is still a solid color, in this case white.

It would be more appropriate, and less flashy, to call this PNG matting, because it's far more analogous to cutting a matte (overlaying a paper stock frame over your artwork to shape it's borders) than it is to an actual mask (using an overlaid shape to actually define a new transparent alpha channel for your image)

Carmack on Rage in his own words, when giving the QuakeCon 2011 keynote (most important bit is probably after the ellipses):

"If you've seen me I've been spending a lot of time over there [at the demo stations] just watching people playing, generally with a big old grin on my face.

"We had so much that we set out to do on this that was different than what we had done before. Id had been almost a stereotype of what you do - first person shooter, run and gun, corridors, monsters jumping out at you, this type of thing. We invented this genre and we followed it for a long ways, but people thought that was all that we were doing.

"And with Rage we set out to be really pretty ambitious, to do a lot of things that we had never done before, and in hindsight knowing that it took six years, we would look back and say, 'Maybe we shouldn't have been quite as ambitious, maybe we should have done a few more of the things we had plenty of experience doing,' but in the end everybody gets the benefit of... we picked hard battles, we fought all of them, and in the end we did a really damn good job on it.

[...]

"It really is probably the most enjoyable id game, from my perspective, that we've ever made. I've played all of our games to degrees, but I was never one of the people who could spend eight hours deathmatching. I know there's a lot of you out there, but that was never kind of my take on our games.

"The pacing on Rage allows us to go ahead and have a game where you have moments of abject terror and intensity, and it's nicely balanced by the areas where you're going through, you're exploring, you're talking in town and doing these things. And we learned a lot through this process. By no means are we ready to be stood up next to Skyrim or something as an adventure game -- that's not what we're doing -- but it is clear at this point that there are beneficial things we can add to the gameplay experience, where we take everything that was fun and good about classic id games, and you can do these other things that add additional layers to it, that don't take anything away."

(Watch the keynote at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zgYG-_ha28 )

Carmack's take on his own game seems to be a very very far cry from the parent article's "blame the artists!" whinging. It sounds from what he says about his own take on the game, and probably more importantly from how genuinely excited he seems up on stage, that Rage's mixing up the tried and true id gameplay formula was, personally for him, an exhilarating breath of fresh air.

Post-return-of-Jobs Apple (and really Apple throughout its history, though more cleanly and clearly recently) has, for all its success and all its innovation, been very very traditional at its core: It sells hard goods to public consumers in exchange for cash. I don't think Apple has any interest in flipping that incredibly successful equation and selling its consumers to advertisers.

iAd is an obvious-feeling exception to this, of course. That said, iAd has clearly never been a focus, it's always felt like an "I guess we should," and maybe a poster child for WebKit in the commercial/ad space, but not as a significant means to an end for the company. How often is iAd discussed by Apple or anyone else, especially compared to everything else they do.

They also sell content in their online stores, but that is also a false lead, because it differs from Google and social network styles of digital monetization. They're still selling CONTENT to CONSUMERS there, and they're only doing it because they want Apple hardware to be the thing people buy to consume their media.

When selling iCloud, they have repeatedly pointed out that its an advertising free service. "Who wants ads in their email?" was the sentiment expressed at its announcement.

Apple suddenly shifting gears, turning their precisely built, paid for and profitable consumer goods into trojan horses for bundled adware seems nearly entirely unlikely.

Letting users INSTALL that sort of thing wouldn't be a surprise -- "Siri, play 'Super Troopers' on Netflix" -- but that's, again, the user using a paid for service or product on the device, not the user being sold to an advertiser.

"The iPad and Kindle Fire are emblematic of their makers. Apple’s primary business is selling devices for a healthy profit, and they back that up with a side business of selling digital content for those devices. Amazon’s primary business is as a retailer, including as a retailer of digital content. They back that up with a side business of low-cost digital devices that are optimized for on-the-fly purchasing of anything and everything Amazon sells. The Kindles are to Amazon what the printed catalog was to Sears a century ago."

That's the best articulated philosophical breakdown between the two products and the two companies that I've seen. The two devices look similar at a glance, but the reasoning behind their numerous differences boil down entirely to those two different philosophies. Apple wants you to buy an iPad to buy an iPad -- they get you to do that by pointing out how it has apps and music for sale. Amazon wants you to buy a Fire to buy a ton of Amazon digital content -- they get you to do that by making the Fire itself cheap.

He won't benefit, if history serves. He's traditionally been harmed by buggy X.0 redesigns, so he wants it deployed ASAP so the big bugs are fixed by the Christmas rush.

"They'll have no problems opening their own internet channels."

I think that Netflix (and Hulu) show that part of the appeal of online content consumption is that the content and the curation/presentation don't have to be intrinsically tied. Having to pay for a Starz account to watch Starz content through the Starz Player is about the most '90s thing they could do.

Having their content on Netflix or Hulu makes media companies feel like second class citizens because -- from their current worldview -- they are. They're no longer the tastemakers, the editors, the curators. They're now just the guys with the content, and in their eyes the content guys are the red on the balance sheet, they're the means to an end.

If advertising is the mousetrap, the content is the cheese, and its a big goddamn blow to traditional media outlets to discover that on the internet, they're cheesemakers or they're nothing, because there are waaay better mousetraps out there.

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* Stratifying your content curation by creative entity feels counter to what people seem to be expressing they like.

I think people like Netflix because it has a disparate collection of content which it recommends, filters, and curates, and lets users choose and collect within that content. You don't need to go to Netflix' "BBC" section to watch Doctor Who -- it's just there, filtered by Netflix' employees and algorithms to sit next to other like-minded content. Content made elsewhere, curated with care, and paid for.

He looks ridiculous, sure, but you can't look at that image with the huge stage decoration and the jean patches and think its any time but the 90s.

I think huge jean patches are valid 90s style. Maybe not as late as 1997, but they undeniably pair pretty well with the huge teal "Developers" jotted script marquee behind him. It was a different time.

From this http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6471/the_valve_way_gab... it sounds like their employees shuffle between projects and teams pretty frequently. I imagine some employees are more mobile than others, but from the sounds of most things about that studio, people are rarely locked down spatially unless they want to be.

Thanks! I know that IV buys patents up and then doles them out to litigation-only spinoffs, but I didn't know how far down the line Webvention was.

I'm confused on this -- Is Webvention another IV spinoff like Lodsys, or are they an actual independent patent holding company?

EB Games (née Electronics Boutique), Software Etc, Funcoland, and international chains like Gamesworld were the competition, but they were all bought up by or merged with GameStop in the mid '90s through the '00s.

(edit: I'd also originally listed Babbage's in there with competition, but reading up reveals that GameStop was basically Babbage's, renaming themselves to GameStop at some point along the way as they were merging and consolidating.)

Other competition, now also deceased: Hollywood Video had GameCrazy for a while -- small gaming stores built into Hollywood Video rental stores -- which was actually a pretty spectacular game retail experience with great current and retro selections, but when video rental really started dying a few years back Hollywood closed them all down. I think Blockbuster had some game sales to try and compete as well, for a bit, but not to the degree of GameCrazy.

GameStop's only remaining competition is online with Amazon and digital distributors like Steam and OnLive, and in the (often superior to GameStop's) new game aisles of big box chains, probably most specifically* Best Buy and Toys R Us.

*(based on forums where people talk about buying games)

Yep. If they have to extend it, 5-6 days would make a lot more sense for that exact reason. Nobody can catch up online anymore.

I read the article. This thread started with "S3/AWS aside." I think "Amazon" isn't a platform because it's not a single thing ("Facebook"), but Amazon offers a number of services which can be used in concert. Maybe those are actually the same in practice, but they exist in different spaces in my brain.

Fulfillment seems like a service. You don't build a business on someone else's warehouse, you use their warehouse to support your business. Unless someone's writing a "Fulfillment by Amazon Client" and selling it, I guess.

True. Sorry for my lame, sarcastic hyperbole.

They're solving that by no longer releasing products.

Nintendo has disregarded non-gaming software, especially software aimed at connectivity, or at software as a service, pretty consistently. The WiiU and the 3DS don't seem to have made any advances in that department. While the WiiU won't use the insane friend code system, 2010's 3DS still does. Ever since the Wii debuted with an integrated (but simple) OS, I have hoped that Nintendo will get on board with that stuff.

Microsoft really pushed having an integrated console dashboard and operating system, and Sony has slowly caught up with the big pieces over the life of the PlayStation 3, but whenever it's mentioned to Nitnendo, they seem to take pity on the questioner for seeing any importance in it, giving online, connectivity, and software as service a grimace-ridden "that's nice, dear," before going back to putting more gyroscopes and polarized displays in their disconnected, single player peripherals.

I just don't think it's in their culture, and they don't seem ready to make a shift.

I've also bought Minecraft, but I haven't bought this new, differently named title, "Minecraft Pocket Edition," so I'm not concerned or confused.