Category: News

We’re gearing up for release now. Fine-tuning the app. Making it prettified in the web admin GUI. Adding some UI feedback in the app. Building the Production server in the final configuration and taking it out of Debug. And of course planning a release party. Aidan has been an absolute demon in working on this and I don’t spend enough time thanking him.

(I’d also like to thank the Private Beta test teams who put up with crap, bugs and stuff. We owe them heaps too. I will personally shake their hands when we release 1.0.)

I also took SyncBridge to a customer site from demo as well and the feedback was very positive – always best to leave a product demo with a credit card rather than a business card. Things are definitely progressing in that respect.

I’m totally buzzed.

Those words, uttered by Kevin Flynn in TRON more than two decades ago really inspired me.

I love computer games. Sure – I may not like them as much as this guy or even these guys but I do love games. I especially like games which allow me to kill my friends in fun and creative ways. I’ve organised LAN meets for the last 4 years which have always been “Mac heavy” but we’ve had PC guys there and it’s always been good fun. Admittedly the Mac gaming market is in a little bit of flux right now as some of the best games out there haven’t and won’t be Intel native so performance is going to be a little less (though Halo on my MacBook Pro is flippin’ lovely). As more and more Universal games come out we’re going to see a raft of people wanting to upgrade. My brother is already sold on it 🙂

We have a product roadmap here. Some things that we really want to get started on once SyncBridge 1.0 is released. We’re going to need to have more people on board for them which is cool. One of these things is a game. Or, if it works out, a series of games. I have the basics of a game world, we have discussed the first game release and I’m really quite excited by it. Much like SyncBridge, this is software designed by someone who really wants to play it.

The biggest difficulties we see ahead:

   ?????? game engine.

   ?????? me no do grafix.

   ?????? platform support.

   ?????? licensing.
Obviously we want to do a game that will be popular. I’m really only interested in supporting the Mac but it’s entirely likely that the Mac market ain’t big enough for that. My model for this would be early days Bungie which was, in my pinion, the best thing to happen to the Mac games market and if I’d been The Steve, I’d have bought Bungie with some of that War Chest cash rather than leaving it to Redmond. But then I loathe the idea of being an Armchair CEO of someone else’s company. I’m in fanboy mode here.

 

Engines of Change

This means some tough decisions. I’m not a coder (as I think you have all gathered) and we have a choice – license a game engine or build one. Licensing seems to make more sense and will make us actually a huge heap closer to release. We have to then look at the costs of licensing as well as the development languages and where the engine can be deployed to. This is a tough decision. We considered Unity3D but the lack of multiplayer is a major issue. (the web site talks about networking but is stunningly silent on the actual aspect of multiplayer).

 

Where are the pikchas

I don’t do graphics but I know how I want it to look. This means getting people who can not only make pretty pictures but who can also read my mind. Graphic designers can do this. Apparently.
For the first game I just want it to be FAST. The textures and background are really important and I want the immersive quality to be such that people complain to us about motion sickness. (mostly because there’s an ex-colleague of mine who gets motion sickness and I will laugh when he tries to play it. Bleargh.

 

Platform Nine for the 10:30 to Little Thaxton

I’m only interested in Mac gaming but it’s plain to see that if we wanted to do this right, as a networkable game, then we need to include Windows support. And if we’re going to be supporting Windows we’ll need Windows dev guys. And if we go that far, do we look at Linux? What about porting to consoles? To be honest, as I don’t own a console, the idea of writing a game for one doesn’t appeal in the slightest and if I had to choose, I’d probably aim at PSP/Nintendo DS. Which consoles do you choose? XBOX? XBOX 360? PS2? PS3? Wii? That just seems like a huge worm kettle (or whatever the metaphor is). I vote for Mac and we’ll add Windows support if people are nice to us.

 

Can I see your license, sir?

I don’t want to get obsessive about this. One of the things I loved about Myth II was that it was really LAN party friendly. I personally own about 4 licenses for HALO (3 Mac, 1 PC). I want to make it as approachable as possible – but how to do that and end up with sales that justify the costs of the game engine license? Too hard a question for now.

This has turned into a mad rant. I’ll have a wee think about it and talk more later.

For those unlucky buggers who are on the private beta, we have yet another download for them. It’s really important to read the release notes and that’s why I’m blogging this as no-one ever seems to read the README.

   ?????? do not use this beta on production data. I’m serious about this. We will wipe the server clean. I’m not joking.

   ?????? the GUI is complete but unpolished. Please provide feedback on usability as well as bug reporting.

   ?????? you’ll have received the password for the encrypted DMG in your email.

   ?????? use the enclosed report form for feedback. Make sure you include approximate times for synchronisation as well as the numbers of items reported by the system.

   ?????? the various bugs reported in the previous beta versions have all been fixed. If you find a re-occurrence of them, please report them again!

   ?????? yes, this could be the first really usable version.

So, from now on, RTFREADME and go get the files.

We’re implementing some user-interface gubbins tonight and we’ve bumped into one of those things that remind you were dealing with a work in progress and not the be-all and end-all of Integrated Development Environments. I’m not a coder so it just annoys me.

The annoyance? I like rounded text fields for the uid and password entry for SyncBridge. They look neat. They fit with the interface. It flows.

But you can’t have a NSSecureTextField (the password field) with rounded corners.

Why not? Is it a user interface faux-pas? This forum post from January 2005 says:
“It’s not possible to make a NSSecureTextfield with rounded corners without subclassing the hole thing and thats a big party. So let’s wait for 10.4 and hope this one gets fixed.”
I guess it’s simply not to be.

It’s not that I really mind, it just reminds me that this whole thing is a work in progress and sometimes some things don’t get fixed before ship date.

Progress Update: It works. It works bloody well. And I did a happy dance in my chair when we saw it doing everything perfectly. And though it’s not running on the production server, it was quick enough to happen when you launch iCal. Mucho pleased. Now we just need to make it purty.

I moved the blog to a new server (one which actually allows me to run PostgreSQL), and this may well cause a feed refresh for people (it did for me). Apologies for that.

As MJ said, we had the long weekend off—it’s been more like two weeks off for me because I’ve been virtually off-line for that whole time—but now I’m getting back into the groove. Current activity: getting the SyncBridge server up and running at its new home, and ready for testing.

Still don’t know what I was waiting for
And my time was running wild
A million dead-end streets and
Every time I thought I’d got it made
It seemed the taste was not so sweet
So I turned myself to face me
But I’ve never caught a glimpse.

– Bowie, David

This has been a week of changes for me. I’ve been forced into the situation that I have to take stock of where things are going in my personal life and at the end of last week, everything changed.

I don’t think anyone can afford to sit back and idly watch time go by. I don’t think it’s right for you to put your life on hold while others obsess about their past. If, through inaction, you permit something to happen, then you are just as guilty.

I’ve blogged about this sort of thing before but I’m been procrastinating for an age and done nothing. Shame on me.

On other news, we have a hit-list of things we need to do before release and we have to start getting on with things. Aidan is taking this weekend off and so am I. After this weekend, a long weekend extended by the May Day bank holiday, nothing will be the same.

You may have noticed I’ve not posted anything to our blog for the past couple of weeks. Unfortunately, my wife’s grandmother died about two weeks ago, and we’ve spent the intervening time preparing for a trip back to the UK (Yorkshire) for the funeral.

Given that we’d already planned a trip back to Northern Ireland for July (and a subsequent trip to Disneyland Paris for the kids), we decided it would be best for my wife just to stay in N.I. until I could come out and join her. At the last moment, she felt very uncomfortable about the whole thing and I’ve ended up coming with her.

The upshot of all this activity is that I’m on leave from my day job, and in Lisburn (that not-so-well-known market village pretending to be a suburb of Belfast). I met up with MJ on Saturday for the first time in almost three years (and he’s not become _that_ fat) and we’ve kicked off the activities necessary to turn infurious into a limited company.

Also, while offline for about two weeks, I started work on our second product, and I’m pleased to say it’s come on very well – to the extent that we may be able to launch it around the same time as SyncBridge (although it has less broad appeal).