Jumping on the Lite bandwagon

posted by jack at 01:16 CET in / compute / programming

Since Scribattle never got any "new releases" exposure on the App Store (see previous entry), I decided to go ahead an put out a free "Lite" version. Still a highly playable game, but with a few key features stripped out, and including a few strategically placed "Buy Scribattle" buttons. Hopefully this will be downloaded far and wide, and lead to some sales of the original! At some point I will post some sales data.

The sixth tip for prospective iPhone developers

posted by jack at 11:43 CET in / compute / programming

A while ago I posted five tips for prospective iPhone developers, and with a little more experience under my belt I've got one more:

6: Post-date your first app's release date

When I wrote tip 5, it had been nine days since my app was approved for sale, but it wasn't in the App Store due to Apple's unknown delays in finalizing my sales contract. I ended up waiting another 19 days, a total of 4 weeks after I got the "your app is approved for sale" message, until the app appeared in the App Store!

OK, a four week wait isn't the end of the world, but in these days where 5000 new apps appear in the App Store each month, every day counts. And worst of all, according to the App Store, the "release date" is not the day my app appeared in the App Store, but the day, 4 weeks earlier, that it was "approved for sale"! So, on my app's first day in the App Store, if you drilled down into Games/Action and sorted by Release Date, you wouldn't see Scribattle on the first page. If you clicked the little arrow to go to the next page, you still wouldn't see it. In fact, you'd have to click that little arrow fifteen times to get to Scribattle. Which means, effectively, that no one will see Scribattle just by browsing around the App Store. I had one sure chance of exposure near the top of a category, and lost it due to the workings of the App Store.

Incidentally, I emailed Apple to complain about this, and they sent me a courteous reply, telling me that it "is operating as expected", i.e. it's not a bug, it's a feature. Great feature, Apple!

So finally, the tip: When you submit your very first app, before your contracts are finalized, don't set the release date to "today". Put it a month or two out into the future. Then, after your app is approved and your sales contract is finalized, you can go back into iTunes Connect, change the release date to the current date, and have your first app actually show up as a new app in the App Store. I'm telling you this now, gentle reader, because I wish someone would have told me this months ago.

Scribattle in the wild

posted by jack at 14:24 CET in / compute / programming

At long last, Scribattle is available! iPhone and iPod Touch users can now get it from the App Store, load it up, and start blasting away at Scri and Flingers and Pent (oh my!)

It's been quite a journey getting this game to market. I've had very few programming challenges, but a number of small delays due to various technical details involved to package and "sign" the app during development, test, and distribution, and a few large delays related to how Apple implements their developer program and handles their contracts. There's a lot of extra hassle compared to releasing desktop software, but a number of friends and colleagues assure me that the system Apple has put in place is still miles ahead of the process for most other embedded and mobile platforms, so hey. I'm not complaining (very much).

Now then, if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, it's time to go get yourself some Scribattle. OK?

The folly of executive pay caps

posted by jack at 13:54 CET in / politics

Obama's new proposal of imposing executive pay caps on firms that receive government bailout money has a problem as seen in USA Today and other places: Since firms that are doing well don't have the pay caps, there may be a "brain drain" wherein the "best people" won't want to work for the companies where the limits are in place. According to a "compensation consultant" named Alan Johnson, "[...] you end up killing the institution you tried to save [...] You drive away the good people."

Hard to deny that. You want to "save" a company via cash injection, but at the same time you put a limit in place that will tend, over time, to lead the best people away from the company. The implied upshot of this is that we shouldn't be imposing a salary cap. I'd like to take this a step farther, and suggest that we shoudn't be trying to "save" them with cash in the first place! Clearly, there is a range of results in the financial industry, where lots of companies feel like they need a handout to keep going, whereas some are apparently doing OK (e.g. the ones who would theoretically pull talent from the ones where the caps would be applied). It seems to me that we should let the market take care of this. Those companies that are doing the worst should risk going under, just like any other industry. If they do, their competitors can buy up their assets, including their previous customers, etc.

The fact that we even consider bailouts for behemoths like the automobile industry and the financial services industry seems to prove that the US "market economy" is anything but. Like Newton's laws of physics which break down in conditions with extreme velocities or extreme scales, our concept of the free market seems to break down when actors in the marketplace are extremely large.