Oh man -

HS convinced me to sign up for a triathlon - and the only thing that gives me hope on this is that he’s in worse shape than i am

Had my first Bike/Run day today and boy was that a bit of a shock, jumping off the bike and starting to run. I thought my legs were just going to break off and I’d be a torso just laying in the street. After a bit though my thighs worked out their confusion and I got into the flow.

Overall i am looking forward to the experience and I hope that at the end of this thing I’ll be smiling!

I’m posting this because it bugged the hell out of me and I hope this saves some pain and frustration for some people.

As I think i have mentioned on this blog so far, i have recently switched over to Mac and so far I love it. Its shiny, fast and generally just works. Kudos to apple for one more convert.

Right now, I have my Mac Book Pro running with both VMWare Fusion and Boot Camp running WinXP SP3. Why do I taint my Mac with Windows? Well sometimes you just need it especially if your working in the business world where PC is still the dominant beast. Anyhow, when working native in Mac or even in VMFusion, the network speeds are tops man. I haven’t seen any of the slow performance issues that have been discussed. However, once you boot up into Boot Camp I found that my ethernet speeds barely crawled by in comparison to when i was native mac.

First thing out of habit, i started blaming Apple. Must be a bad driver… must be a conflict. In reality, it turned out to be a bad ethernet setting, which could partially be Apple’s fault but most likely its a hardware detection issue by the Windows OS. As Windows wasn’t designed to run on the Mac, i couldn’t get that upset but still - whoever could have addressed it, it would have been nice to have it rectified right off the bat.

So get to the issue already!

THE ISSUE

Slow network speeds over an ethernet connection.

I was able to track down, the issue stemmed from the ethernet adapter not correctly detecting the correct mode (simplex vs duplex) nor the correct speed (10Mbs vs 100Mbs) of the network.

THE FIX

1. Open up your device manager - Control Panel -> System -> Hardware -> Device Manager
2. Locate the ethernet device in the tree - Network Adapters - >Marvell Yukon 88E8058 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller
3. Right click the adapter and select Properties.
4. Click the tab labeled Advanced.
5. Select the Speed & Duplex property and set the value to 100Mbps Full Duplex.

I have a setup that most normal users probably won’t have but as long as your hardware supports 100Mbs or higher transfer rate and you notice slow network speeds when connected via an ethernet cable you’ll most likely be fixed by this fix.

A couple of weeks back, we posted two applications for the iPhone to the Apple review process. We’re pretty familiar with it now, but its subjectiveness is pretty overwhelming. The two applications we posted were political satire apps called Whack a Republican and Whack a Democrat (we are equally opportunity satirists!). After several weeks of review we had begun to get a pretty bad feeling about them - not to mention we were running out of time if we wanted to get them out before the election. Over the weekend we recieved our response from Apple - not good news.

Whack a Republican

“Dear Developer,

Thank you for submitting Whack a Republican to the App Store. We’ve reviewed Whack a Republican and determined that we cannot post this version of your Phone application to the App Store because it contains content that ridicules public figures and is in violation of Section 3.3.12 from the iPhone SDK Agreement which states:

“Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple’s reasonable judgement may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users.”

If you believe that you can make the necessary changes so that Whack a Republican does not violate the iPhone SDK Agreement we encourage you to do so and resubmit it for review.

Regards,
iPhone Developer Program”

The games are basically reskinned versions of our Whack a Gopher game with added sound/animations and a bit more complexity. We have a few sound bytes and such along with our custom graphics - but seriously. Our we berating anyone? Sure we poke fun at both candidates but no more than any other media outlet. I guess you the end user will never get a chance to know though, since Apple intervened on your behalf.

The way Apple has censored the iPhone applications has me for one very confused. What precedent are they following?

Music - Apple has no problem posting for sale material with explicit content

Movies - Rated R? No problem.

PodCasts - Pretty much anything goes.

Applications - A bit of risky content? A political Satire? OH NO! We can’t have our customers seeing any of that! Sorry please change your app so that its suitable for any child 5 and under or we’re not going to post it.

So my questiona are:

Why?

Why the discrimination towards applications that are obviously not applied to the rest of the offerings on iTunes?

What?

Whats the Risk?  My guess is that any kid downloading an app has pretty much the same opportunity to download explicit content music or movies just as easy. As a developer, I would be extremely happy with the idea of having my application marked with a rating or otherwise denoted as explicit what have you if it ensured that the community could review the application for what it is.

How?

How can we possibly predict what Apple will find offensive or against their policies. Based on our Spin the Bottle / Truth or Dare experience it truly seems like it depends on who is assigned to review your application. Re-submit and you might get lucky.

Whack a Democrat

I know that the Apple mechanism is a heck of a lot better than other mobile platforms. I also like the fact that Apple promotes the applications for me through iTunes - its a great platform for deliver and reaches a huge audience. However, I for one would like to have a much better idea of why the limitations are there regarding the application content so that we can better judge what to spend time on and what we can simply blow off as another wasted effort.

I for one will be hoping that Apple changes its policies to be more inline with their other media offerings and stop hating on the app developers.

Let the customer decide!

For some more information on Apple headaches - check out my friend Jeff Branc’s blog on the same topic.

Thanks to Slashdot for this one.. Indian Moon Mission Launched

Looks like everyone is getting into space these days which I couldn’t be happier about, and now India is making some strides to get a little closer to the moon.

Its been several years since the word from up on high was to get us to Mars, and my thoughts are that if we’re going to get there - it will be a global effort. India joining in on the exploration of space is only going to help gather more information that will help us reach that goal of one day having a human footprint on Mars.

Still - i wouldn’t mind a hotel on the Moon.

With two games out and more on the way, I have started to notice the difference between great games and the passing of the tides.

So far our applications have been doing pretty well (our Truth or Dare app especially), but with focussed attention on Apple’s AppStore, I have gained a much better insight into what differentiates a good game from a great one.

iPhone games are unique and diverse as the iPhone itself. The touch screen and the accelerometer, give the end user many more interface choices than any other mobile device on the market and more than many game machines available for in the home use. Utilizing these aspects of the iPhone in manners both intelligent and in an intuitive way can really make the difference in the games longevity.

This is a new realm for me, and the learning curve has been pretty steep since I am a switcher (just getting my first mac in June). However, writing the games and playing whats out there I am getting a feel for what makes them tick for the iPhone. The topics I’ll cover in this article are Story, Interface, Graphics which all combined result in the overall gameplay for the end user.

Story

The idea that Wack a Gopher has a story may throw some people. You start the game and there are gophers that pop up and you hit them with your finger - its pretty basic. However, there is some basic story there, although its not adapted to the depth that it could be.

“There is a gopher city that is out there in the desert, and your there to destroy it by whacking them as they are destroying the landscape. However you don’t want to hurt the beneficial bunnies and thats why you lose a point if you hit one.”

There  you go - basic but its there, and as a result the game is fun only as long as it gets more difficult which could go indefinitely, but we capped it at 3 levels with 3 subsections. As a result its a fun little distraction for a while, mainly when your frustrated :). Really though it was designed more for kids and the kids seem to stay interested in it for a longer period of time.

In comparison, i’ll throw out a game from way back that in my opinion was the best story driven game of its time, and maybe ever. Ultima IV Quest for the Avatar by Origin had a depth of story that seemed limitless. Character interaction was limited but required great attention, the lore of Britannia was deep and every aspect of the fictional land was incorporated into the gameplay. From the overall topography to the moon cycles - if you didn’t master the moongates you were pretty much left walking everywhere. Ulitma had a great run and finally culminated into one of the first MMORPG and is still going strong today. The reason for this is its constantly developing storyline which people all over the world can identify with and grow with.

So whatever your game type, whether it is the most basic or  the most intense - you need to come up with some story line that you build your game around - no matter how minimal it is. It will help you build a better game and keep the user more engaged.

In part 2 of this on going experiment, i’ll talk about Graphics & Sound on the iPhone and why they are a pain in the butt, and the expectations of the users that everything looks like Koi Pond.