Hacker News Reader

kpaoon US developers can offer non-app store purchasing, Apple still collect commission

> Even if you're side-loading, you're still using Apple IP.

Many free apps on the store who can get away with charging outside do it. Uber, Banks, etc...

Why can they use Apple's IP for a flat $99/yr and others don't? It's not a fair system. Paid apps are essentially subsidizing the free ones.

kpaoon Why I don't use my real photo when messaging with customers on my website

I'm wearing someone else's shoes every day so I can give you a quick feedback of my experience. I'm trans, blonde, pass relatively well and on the feminine side. I have seen a drastic shift in messages I get from people online. I regularly get mansplained obvious things about aviation, tech, coding on social media. People don't assume I'm the CEO of my company or that I have anything to do with engineering anymore. Glad we hired someone else to do support for us...

kpaoon A customer reported an error in the map used by Flight Simulator

Yes we did, we actually have plenty of airline pilots in the community who have given feedback we incorporated into the sim.

kpaoon A customer reported an error in the map used by Flight Simulator

If we get a strange claim like "The 737 at MLW should have a stable approach speed of 170kts, with 70% N1 and 5 degrees of pitch", then asking for a source of information seems pretty reasonable here...

They usually don't find it because it is based on "shower curtain" type of sources. ("my brother told me", or "this other sim behaves this way")

kpaoon A customer reported an error in the map used by Flight Simulator

Right, but there's no excessive AOA here... except during recovery maybe but I doubt they let it go that high...

kpaoon A customer reported an error in the map used by Flight Simulator

What do you mean engine stall?

As long are you have enough thrust, airspeed and no system preventing you to go above a certain pitch or AOA, then the plane should fly just fine...

kpaoon A customer reported an error in the map used by Flight Simulator

It's an everyday occurrence during the development of our app (Infinite Flight).

We often get customers complaining about a misplaced sticker on a livery, a missing exit door in a particular variant of a the 737-900... That type of stuff is easily verifiable. But for things like the airplane not behaving in a way they expect in certain conditions, or perhaps a wrong approach speed or angle, discussions usually start with: "We tuned the airplane based on information available to us at the time we built the airplane. We are happy to make any changes based on an actual report from one or more pilots flying on this airplane, or better yet, the aircraft manual if you can get your hands on one."

The discussion usually ends there :)

One we get often is about why it's possible to do a barrel roll in a jet liner in Infinite Flight. We simply point them to the video of that test pilot who did one in a 707 ;-)

kpaoon All Tesla Cars Being Produced Now Have Full Self-Driving Hardware

Tell that to a pilot who's had an autopilot failure where a servo went crazy all of a sudden. You better act quick, especially in low visibility situations, to turn it off, or pull the circuit breaker. It might happen a bit slower than in a car, but the consequences can be much more dramatic.

kpaoon All Tesla Cars Being Produced Now Have Full Self-Driving Hardware

Pilot here as well, unfortunately, it's a fight that won't be easy to win. If in the mind of people, Autopilot means self driving. It's going to be hard to change the global perception.

When I'm using the Autopilot, I feel like I'm in my airplane, always on guard, and in a practice of recovery from unusual attitude in flight.

There are a few times also where being an engineer has helped a lot. You can pretty much predict the situations where the car will run into issues and conflicts ahead of time, just by looking at the scenario in front of you.

It's something that the majority of population is not trained to do.

Now having said that, I used to own a BMW X5 with Adaptive Cruise Control, and that car was also doing some pretty stupid things at times, especially when cars in front were moving out of the way. The car would suddenly think the way was clear and floor the accelerator...

kpaoon FAA Urges Passengers to Not Use Samsung Galaxy Note 7 on Planes

Have you updated that phone regularly? I have one for testing here, and it's become so slow, I don't even know how one could use it every day... Even if they bring back removable batteries, software updates will take care of the deprecation. Just look at an iPad 2 with iOS9 today...

kpaoon Your Phone Has an FM Chip. So Why Can’t You Listen to the Radio?

Same reaction here... they made me feel guilty about using adblock, I was nice enough to disable it, then that unrelated video kept on playing, and they popped up another message saying thanks... Who's in charge of this? ugh...

kpaoon Microsoft Acquires Xamarin

So happy for Miguel and Nat. We worked with Xamarin when we ported Infinite flight from Windows Phone to iOS and Android. We wouldn't be there if it wasn't for them.

One thing I'm really looking forward to is efforts on the QA front. I'm scared to update every time as things are frequently broken, especially on the iOS side.

kpaoon My iOS Indie-Game Numbers

This is mostly the feeling I get from reading those articles about lousy sale on iOS. It has become too easy to write those types of simple games, what are those guys expecting? It's a known fact that if you write such a game in a few weeks, it will most likely not generate any money.

kpaoon The Jet With a 17-Ton Telescope That NASA Uses as a Flying Observatory

Do you have more info about the airplane performance? I'm working on a flight simulator and this plane is one of the 747's we're going to add. I'd love to get more details about the differences compared to a regular 747SP.

kpaoon Propose HN: Screenshot Saturday

We were on Windows Phone but stopped maintaining the app a year ago because XNA was dropped by Microsoft.

kpaoon Propose HN: Screenshot Saturday

Thanks! It's written in C#, we use Xamarin to target both iOS and Android. We also have a PC version running on standard MS.NET

I'm not familiar with Harmattan.

kpaoon Propose HN: Screenshot Saturday

http://i.imgur.com/IKshtxL.png

Working on adding Multiplayer to Infinite Flight[0] (Flight Simulator for iOS/Android)

This screenshot shows work in progress with an expanding group of beta testers. It's been really fun working on this so far. I've been spending the past week implementing automated policing tied to a reputation system that gradually unlocks airports and airplanes.

[0] http://www.infinite-flight.com

kpaoon Facebook Fraud [video]

We learned this last year when we started paying for ads on Facebook. Our app is in a niche market (Flight Simulator for mobile devices), I assumed that very little people would click, but we saw a constant increase of about 1K likes/day. After looking at the analytics, I decided to cut Brazil and India. We had a huge disconnect between our App Store country data and those ads, and we also saw no noticeable change in our sales figures.

The accounts also were random like the one in the OP video, a Indian teenage girl liking a Flight Simulator? Why not... Hundreds? nope...

I feel like I've been cheated by Facebook in a way and would like my money back. They sure can find a way to figure out if those clicks are legitimate. Someone has 3K likes of random interests? That's a red flag to me.

kpaoon Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?

Thanks! Yep we're just a team of two, for now at least. It's starting to be a bit too much and we need to bring in more people at some point.

kpaoon Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?

Infinite Flight: it's a flight simulator for mobile platforns I had been working on on the side for almost 7 years before finally deciding on joining forces with a friend to ship it on Windows Phone, then iOS and Android. What's cool about it is that it's written entirely in C# while and we still get decent performance on most devices. Also, we're slowly gaining traction with users that prefer flying with us rather than with the established competitors :) You can find more about the app here: http://flyingdevstudio.com and http://infinite-flight.com

kpaoon FAA to lift mobile shut-down rule

> My understanding (from a pilot friend of mine) that it is really about radio interference with the pilots' radios

If it was the case, this would be a complaint we hear from pilots every day. Think of how many people simply forget to turn off their cell phones...

kpaoon Apple Dev Center outage

We've got a rendering issue on iOS7, we knew about it from the numerous non-devs who demanded a fix immediately!

kpaoon Jony Ive is Not a Graphic Designer

Yeah, and Windows Mobile devices with touch screens had been around for quite a while before the iPhone came out... Ex: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Wizard

kpaoon Transporting the CIA A-12 Blackbird to Area 51

I also doubt they would have long enough runways in Burbank to take off with that beast.

kpaoon Uber Drivers Protest Outside the Company’s San Francisco Headquarters

Not really... I spoke with a driver down in LA once, he got on probation because 2 obnoxious passengers rated him 1 star. One of them was smoking in the vehicle, got told to stop, didn't like it, 1 star... The other one wanted to get to the other side of the city in 45 minutes on a Friday afternoon at 4pm... They didn't make it despite the driver's best effort, so she rated 1 star.

That seems unfair that the driver gets on probation for those 2 instances.

kpaoon Starting your first business in France? Here are the steps, and some great tips

When I read things like this, I'm glad that I was in the US at the time I had the opportunity to create my app business (flight sim app for mobile). My school mates who are still in France are having a hard time with all the overhead of french bureaucracy when doing anything... most of them are thinking of moving abroad at some point.

The whole process in the US was so easy, finding a bank was a total non issue.

kpaoon Mono 3.0 is out

We're in the process of porting our Flight Simulator (Infinite Flight - http://infinite-flight.com) from iOS to Android. We originally developed it on Windows Phone.

Porting from WP7 to iOS took a few months, mostly because MonoGame didn't have any 3D support (we added it). We have been slowly porting to Android, it's been pretty good so far, the framework makes it easy and we've had very little issues making external libraries build on MonoDroid. Xamarin's also been very responsive to our questions and issues.

If you want to see what it looks like, here's a video of what we have lined up for our next update coming out in a few days: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5N_ckb-dXw

kpaoon Mac App Store taking two months to review my app (video)

We have experienced similar wait times, 13 days for the last one, and we got rejected for a valid reason as well... It's just frustrating to have to wait that long when it took just a few days a couple of months ago.

I really wonder what could have happened recently to have review times jump from 7 days to 13...

kpaoon Show HN: Our flight sim for iOS: Infinite Flight

Thanks!

FYI, we have an update coming next week which will add a CRJ-200, a Space Shuttle, Missions, map enhancements, better runways, bug fixes for sound and accelerometer issues...

kpaoon Show HN: Our flight sim for iOS: Infinite Flight

The WP7 and iOS versions are pretty similar. The only device that has specific code if the iPad, to support a different layout of the controls.

As to the gotchas, we did a talk at AltDevConf a couple of months ago that was just about that: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOnUog6WeUU

The second part is about Infinite Flight and how we ported the app from WP7 to iOS using MonoGame and MonoTouch.

If you eventually get the app, let me know what you think, and don't hesitate to leave feedback on our uservoice site :)