software – Page 6

You Got Game? You need ‘skillz’

The BBC writes about the skills shortage in the Games Industry: The games industry says British universities are failing to equip graduates with the skills it needs. The warning comes from the industry campaign group “Games Up?”, which says games developers in Britain are facing a serious skills shortage. The lobby group says there are … Continue reading “You Got Game? You need ‘skillz’”

The BBC writes about the skills shortage in the Games Industry:

The games industry says British universities are failing to equip graduates with the skills it needs. The warning comes from the industry campaign group “Games Up?”, which says games developers in Britain are facing a serious skills shortage. The lobby group says there are now 81 video games degree courses at British universities. But only four are accredited by Skillset, the government body which monitors such courses.

The courses available would be a factor but do you need a degree to be an ace in anything?

I don’t think so. I think the Games Lobby could work to reduce the cost of entry to the gaming market. For instance, the cost of a development kit for the Sony Playstation Portable is Â£50,000 for hardware alone and an extra Â£5,000 per person for the tools. Additional software like Renderman might add thousands more to the tally and this is all before you figure in salaries.[1]

This barrier to entry is not insignificant. If hackers in the home cannot work on these things, if universities cannot afford these costs or if students can’t work on them part time, then they are not going to develop the skills to compete in this marketplace.

Microsoft has given some lip service to this criticism with the XNA Game Studio Express. For $99 a year, you can transport code onto your XBox 360. This isn’t going to be the same as a full developer kit (I mean, you’re not going to cloning Halo 3 with it) but I know of some people who have been hired based on the quality of their XNA Community contributions. Reading the specifications, it really provides an interesting alternative.

That said, the market can be extremely profitable. While an edge case, Halo 3 cost around $50 million to develop but took in $170 million in sales on the first day. Compare this to Pacman – Atari spent around $100,000 to develop for the Video Computer System but made $300 Million back. costs of development are undoubtedly spiralling.

It’s not all doom and gloom. Nintendo hopes to offer development kits for as little as Â£1732 per developer and Sony does offer development kits to some schools and colleges at a cut price.

I think that Android and the iPhone will start to pave the way here – they offer free development kits, the iPhone offers hardware in excess of the PSP or Nintendo DS Lite (and presumably shipping Android hardware will be comparable) and they’ll make it really easy to buy and download new software (as we’ve seen already with iPhone).

It will be up to educators, lobbyists, interested civil servants and enterpreneurs to bridge this gap.

[1] Source: The Northern Ireland Digital Content Strategy (InvestNI)

XCake.org

The site is up. It’s for people interested in Cocoa and geographically on the Island of Ireland (North and South). http://xcake.org There’s just a Wiki there at the moment. More to come if there’s a perceived need for it. Related posts: XCake 1st Meetup XCake.org is now back up. Dublin XCake.org Meet, Thurs 26th March, … Continue reading “XCake.org”

The site is up. It’s for people interested in Cocoa and geographically on the Island of Ireland (North and South).

http://xcake.org

There’s just a Wiki there at the moment. More to come if there’s a perceived need for it.

Developer Technical Support

This weekend I was ‘called out’ by Michael B. “Wave” Johnson who has a list of credentials as long as your arm (not least that he works at Pixar and wil Shipley think he’s awesome) because I made a somewhat snippy comment about Apple’s engagement with developers. Michael helped me realise that every year I’ve … Continue reading “Developer Technical Support”

This weekend I was ‘called out’ by Michael B. “Wave” Johnson who has a list of credentials as long as your arm (not least that he works at Pixar and wil Shipley think he’s awesome) because I made a somewhat snippy comment about Apple’s engagement with developers. Michael helped me realise that every year I’ve been a Select Developer with Apple’s Developer Connection, I had had 3 Developer Technical Support incidents and I realised that I’ve never used them. I have now resolved to use one up this week.

Michael was right to call me out on this – I was being snippy. Apple provides plenty of samples code and tutorials – they just may not be all pitched at my level and I need to do a good bit more work before I can really complain about the level of support. The DTS engineers are not there to hold my hand but rather to give me a leg up. That’s an important semantic difference.

My frustration is mostly because the iPhone SDK is still in Beta and therefore covered under NDA. I’d love to pick the brains of a couple of iPhone savvy individuals and this is why I’m keen on helping out with XCake.

What is XCake?

XCake is a group that seems to have grown out of the Belfast Open Coffee Club. It happens that there are quite a few people in BOCC who are keen on developing software for the Mac, for the iPhone or just using a Mac to do it. These people also like cake. Sometimes with chocolate. Sometimes with icing. The name was coined by John Kennedy and we’re going to work to get a wiki up and running on that domain. The idea is to have somewhere where we can ask questions, get guidance and, most importantly, not break our NDAs. Watch this space.

I’m much happier being pro-active about resolving my issues.

Linux for iPhone. Nahhhh

Brandon Watts writes for OSWeekly: Since cell phones canâ€™t just run a traditional desktop operating system, all options had to be explored while developing the iPhone, and I was interested in the fact that Appleâ€™s engineers seriously looked at Linux since versions had already been developed that could run on a cell phone. Despite the … Continue reading “Linux for iPhone. Nahhhh”

Brandon Watts writes for OSWeekly:

Since cell phones canâ€™t just run a traditional desktop operating system, all options had to be explored while developing the iPhone, and I was interested in the fact that Appleâ€™s engineers seriously looked at Linux since versions had already been developed that could run on a cell phone. Despite the attention that Linux was given by the engineering team, Steve Jobs made it clear that he was not about to use another operating system aside from OS X.

Brandon. Apple didn’t ‘seriously’ look at Linux the way you think they looked at Linux. I have no doubt that, when developing the iPhone OSX distribution, they looked at embedded Linux distros to see how they worked, what compromises they made – but you can’t in any conscience think that Apple seriously considered using Linux for the iPhone – and that’s exactly what the Wired article says.

“Since 2002, when the idea for an Apple phone was first hatched, mobile chips had grown more capable and could theoretically now support some version of the famous Macintosh OS. But it would need to be radically stripped down and rewritten; an iPhone OS should be only a few hundred megabytes, roughly a 10th the size of OS X.
Before they could start designing the iPhone, Jobs and his top executives had to decide how to solve this problem. Engineers looked carefully at Linux, which had already been rewritten for use on mobile phones, but Jobs refused to use someone else’s software.”

Only a fantasist would think that Apple seriously considered as the base OS for the iPhone. For one thing, the whole thing is GNU-encumbered. Secondly, they had an operating system that had everything they needed including a kick-ass API. Thirdly, did I mention the GNU thing?

Cocoa Days

I’m working my way finally through the Hillegass Cocoa book – but of course my 2nd Edition arrived 4 months ago and I never had the chance to read it and 3rd Edition is out and covers the new XCode so I’m going to be fighting an uphill struggle. I’ll order 3rd Edition after payday. … Continue reading “Cocoa Days”

I find code to be hard. My schedule doesn’t allow for me to be consistent in my approach to learning and so I find myself flailing back and forth, trying to remember the stuff I wrote last time round and spending half my allotted time re-learning. It doesn’t stick much. I’m now convinced I need a mentor to do this who will work through the examples with me, advise me left and right and not get all het up when I’ve had a crap week and didn’t get the chance to sit down and work through examples.

My first problem comes with expectations. If I’m control-dragging connections to the left and right in Interface Builder, I was expecting some code to be generated. Instead I have to manually add these things.

My second problem comes with pre-generated code. It added in an import for UIKit/UIKit.h for some reason – and then when I hit Compile, it burped and complained about UIKit. Claimed it couldn’t find it. To which I say “Well, don’t frigging look at me, you put it in there????” This sort of thing frustrates me -especially when I realise it compiles fine when I change that to Cocoa/Cocoa.h.

Brilliant.

This error has nothing to do with using the 2nd Edition book. It’s a subclass of NSObject which comes with the UIKit.h reference which XCode subsequently has a kitten about. That’s just stupid. So either there’s something wrong with my XCode (entirely possible) or I’m just the worst coder in the world.

I’d say it’s even odds.

[And the result is in. I’m the worst programmer in the world. I’d added a Cocoa Touch NSObject subclass to my Mac application. Cocoa Touch has UIKit.h. Cocoa has Cocoa.h. I feel stupid now but I have to chalk it up to some sort of learning experience.]

WWDC Keynote highlights

There were two things shown during the WWDC Keynote today. The first was new software. This software will be available to everyone who has an iPhone, new or old in July and available to iPod ouch users for $9.95 (which will probably be about Â£7.99 in the UK). The second was hardware: the iPhone 3G … Continue reading “WWDC Keynote highlights”

The second was hardware: the iPhone 3G was announced. It’s pretty much the same device – it has two differences however.

There’s a 3G radio in there allowing access to the UMTS/HSDPA networks. This will step down to GSM/EDGE if 3G is not available which provides a decent fallback. One big advantage of the 3G radio is that it can be used at the same time as taking a call – something that has proved to be an iPhone annoyance – you can’t browse the web while on the telephone! HSDPA supports download speeds from 0.9 Mbps to 14.4 Mbps so until we get more information, it’s going to be anyone’s guess.

The second hardware difference is GPS. Gone is the ‘yeah, you’re somewhere in this town’ and now it’ll pinpoint you right down to your street position and follow you around. That’s what a GPS is for. It’s not going to read instructions to you so it’s not like your Tom-Tom but on the plus side I’m not going to have to buy maps for every inch of the planet if I go travelling.

Let’s face it – unless you’re a real geek, you’re likely going to be happy with current iPhone hardware and won’t need the iPhone 3G at all. You’ll just be able to take advantage of the hundreds of new apps that will be available for free (and for pay), you’ll get the new calculator, better attachment support (now it does iWork documents, Word, Excel and Powerpoint!), the new integration with ‘mobileme’ and other stuff they thought wasn’t interesting enough to cover in a keynote.

Apple said they had already sold 6 million iPhones in the first year while only being released in half a dozen countries. They’re going to be launching in 60 countries….and the price is down to $199 (Â£120 or so) for the 8 Gb version (the version I paid Â£269 (over $500!) for.

Price is likely the biggest sticking point with the iPhone. Not so any more.

Steve Jobs wanted to sell 10 million iPhones by the end of 2008. He sold 6 million at the old price in 1 year. Do you think he’ll sell 4 million more at the new price? Yeah, obvious huh?

No excuse now…

Aaron Hillegass’s Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X is now available on Amazon’s US store. UK store to follow. This coincides nicely with my “Thursday Is Code Night In Bangor” plans. I already have second edition but I’d like third edition because things have changed. That said – even third Edition, though it covers Leopard … Continue reading “No excuse now…”

This, on the other hand, pisses me off. So much for Sterling being stronger than the dollar.

	Amazon.com	Amazon.co.uk	UK price in $
RRP	$49.99	Â£35.99	$70.06
Price	$31.49	Â£28.79	$56.05

Anyway, I digress.

Last night we worked from a different book: Wrox’s Beginning Mac OS X Programming. I don’t have any practical programming experience but I do have a couple of weeks of academic programming (spread across a dozen languages and over 20 years so I effectively know how to say “Hello World” in about 12 languages.) My brother has no programming experience but wants to spend his time constructively rather than sitting around tweaking his wolf.config file for a few extra FPS. We’d scheduled in a one-night-a-week session where we’d get together and learn to write code.

I’d previously considered my options. 50% of my head says to go with PHP or Ruby as they seem to be extremely marketable but I don’t think that I’d be happy with that. I want to make Mac apps and later, iPhone apps. And that realistically means going with Objective-C and Cocoa.

So we spent two hours last night having some fun with compile errors and yeah, it was fun. The material we worked on last night was basic to me but first time knowledge for D. And, to my surprise, at the end, D suggested that we increase this to two nights a week. As I’m in the house on weeknights I’ve been vegging out a lot, reading, writing stuff for lategaming and working through DVDs that I’ve not seen but this new productivity is quite motivating.

We typed in the sample code and then when we got it to compile correctly (the authors deliberately put mistakes in the code!) I suggested a couple of ways we could extend the code which wasn’t in the book and we resolved to do that as homework.

Good times.

Work in progress

Apple released beta5 of the iPhone SDK and quietly opened iPhone Developer registration to the public so that everyone can load their code onto their iPhones and give them a go. The updates SDK is winging it’s way to me at 1495K/sec right now which means I’ll be able to have a play with it … Continue reading “Work in progress”

Apple released beta5 of the iPhone SDK and quietly opened iPhone Developer registration to the public so that everyone can load their code onto their iPhones and give them a go. The updates SDK is winging it’s way to me at 1495K/sec right now which means I’ll be able to have a play with it at lunchtime when I’m away from the oppression at $BIG_COMPANY (where music players have now been banned because they’re ‘not professional’ – it’s fun working through a problem when there are people talking loudly in every direction – really aids the concentration.)

Anyway, the SDK release.

This is, to be honest, much sooner than I expected and I think there must be quite a few happy people around who are loading apps onto their phones and enjoying the novelty. I’ve been fighting for some time at lunch just to try Interface Builder but something has always come up for the last 7 days. It’s frustrating and when I mention the frustration, the helpful response is ‘Well, if it mattered to you, you’d find time.” Brilliant.

I don’t know what sample code will work on the iPhone with the latest beta and I don’t know whether or not it’s safe to load my iPhone with the beta firmware and still want to use it as a phone. And there’s no way to check because Apple still have an NDA on all discussion on the technical aspects of the SDK and firmware.

As this is very much still a learning experience for me, it’s slow and boring. I’ve kinda decided to strike out and work on something else in order to maybe build some momentum. I would like a cashflow-type application for the iPhone.

As you can see, it’s a work in progress.

Nothing is harder on your laurels….

John Gruber writes: “Borrowing ideas is fair game, but copying an entire app is wrong. And itâ€™s creepy, in a Microsoft-of-the-â€™90s way, when itâ€™s a $150 billion company cloning an app from a 10-person company.” This is the #1 demotivator for me when it comes to software development. It’s an unreasonable fear and like all … Continue reading “Nothing is harder on your laurels….”

John Gruber writes:

“Borrowing ideas is fair game, but copying an entire app is wrong. And itâ€™s creepy, in a Microsoft-of-the-â€™90s way, when itâ€™s a $150 billion company cloning an app from a 10-person company.”

This is the #1 demotivator for me when it comes to software development. It’s an unreasonable fear and like all unreasonable fears it has to be overcome. Being afraid to do something because someone else will do it is simply stupid as is giving up when a big competitor comes on the scene. If they see it as a viable market then it’s actually an exceedingly viable market for the small business. You’ll have to fight against their ability to leverage market pressure and the two biggest issues there are going to be:

They can offer for free what you’re selling
The end user likely already has a login to their authentication system

Yes, it’s hard to fight against that kind of pressure but who told you that being an Independent Software Vendor (ISV) was going to be easy?

There are a lot of big company projects out there that start as skunkworks where someone has an idea and a project manager gives them enough rope to run for a while as long as they don’t step out of the yard. Google somewhat circumvents this with the 80:20 work week – 20% of the time you’re permitted to work on projects that interest you. It’s a sneaky way to use/abuse geeks who have a persistent work ethic (the things they love working on, that others would see as ‘work’, they see as enjoyment!). This kind of behaviour is why Google, though massive, still retains some agility and is able to throw out new and exciting stuff on a relatively regular interval. Compare this to Yahoo or Microsoft who haven’t given us anything interesting in years.

Just because Google has completely ripped off the look and feel of your app doesn’t mean you should stop. And that also goes for Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, Facebook, Yahoo or any of the other 900lb gorillas in the market. You’ve got a good product I hope, you have some first mover advantage (in that people have already been paying you money) and you’ve already been thinking of what to do next with your application (which means when some copycat clones you, you can wait, see the effect on sales and then release your planned upgrade).

That said: if you think you could lose 80% of your customer base to this new free service run by one of the big nasty companies out there and this would cause you to lose a significant percentage of income and endanger your company, then you need to start diversifying.

Nothing is harder on your laurels than sitting on them.

ADBE: Nearly there

The recent news that Adobe Creative Suite 4 will not be 64-bit for the Mac is taken as a blow to the Mac. It will be 64-bit for Windows on 64-bit machines running a 64-bit Windows OS (which is a surprisingly small number of people). 64-bit Windows XP runs slower than 32-bit Windows XP so … Continue reading “ADBE: Nearly there”

64-bit Windows XP runs slower than 32-bit Windows XP so the benefits are not likely to be seen there and the number of people running (or able to obtain XP-64) is a rounding error on the Windows sales market. In truth, the only advantage to running XP-64 was to be able to address more than 4 GB of memory with a single process but for many the disadvantages with DirectX and .NET outweighted the advantages.

With Windows Vista, every Vista DVD (with the exception of Starter) ships with 32-bit and 64-bit versions – and if it’s not there, you can buy it from Microsoft for a small additional fee. This means, in theory, if you install with a 64-bit processor, you’re going to get a 64-bit operating system. For home users, this means being able to address between 8 and 16 GB of RAM. For the “Pro” versions of Vista it means being able to support more than 128 GB (not that there are many machines that can fit that amount of RAM in their cases!) The 64-bit version of Vista still has compatibility issues with hardware and software but in the next few years it will be standard. What this means for most people is that when they buy a new PC, they’ll get the benefits of 64-bit software.

Adobe’s problem with CS4 is that it’s 32-bit software written using the Carbon APIs. Apple has been shopping Cocoa as their next-generation framework around for a decade now and still Adobe (and Microsoft) laboured on with the Carbon ‘compatibility’ API because it represented the least amount of work for them. The plan originally was to make Carbon 64-bit compliant but in WWDC in 2007, this plan was trashed. Carbon is old, archaic and it’s too much work to get it to 64 bit when they could keep it at 32 bit and put extra work into Cocoa to make it fabulous. But this buggered up the plans of Adobe and Microsoft and as a a result, Officd will likely remain 32 bit and Adobe’s Creative Suite will not be 64-bit until version 5 which is a long time away.

Is this a big deal

First, lets dispel the idea that 64-bit software is considerably quicker than 32-bit software. In many cases it is slower. But being able to address a lot more RAM – or even being able to reduce the reliance of disk at all and keep entire apps, especially those regularly used, in RAM, is a bit step forwards. Heavy Photoshop users routinely throw around images that are multi-gigabyte in size and being able to load the whole thing into RAM is a huge potential speed boost (never mind having Photoshops own Virtual Memory system eclipsed by fast RAM rather than slow disk).

The gains enjoyed by moving to 64-bit Photoshop on Windows may be reduced by the fact that Vista is a dog (link, link ) and will already reduce performance (though you can turn off the eye candy in Vista and it improves performance considerably). And the fact that, well, it’s Windows which brings along with it an entire world of suck. (This is my opinion). Having to use Windows every day saps my enthusiasm for computing as a whole (and I can say this after using Windows every day for the last 9 months in the day job going from using Mac OS X for years in the day job). Windows just isn’t a lot of fun.

So my opinion is that, performance wise, this won’t make a lot of difference.

Who’s to blame here?

I think that miscommunication between Apple and Adobe is to blame. Adobe knew about Cocoa and how it was the future. Apple should have communicated earlier that it saw no future for Carbon beyond the first 10 years. It’s a stupid mistake to make for two companies who have so much in common and who could be great together and this brings me to a point which has been laboured a few times in past years.

Apple and Adobe could do with working closer together for the benefit of both. It would help to reduce the frustration of everyone who’s had to work with Adobe’s implementation of Acrobat on the Mac platform. It might even bring Flash/AIR to the iPhone/iPod touch platform.

I lay the blame at both their feet for not working together. There’s definitely issues with the companies as they both seem to be angling to be a forerunner in the online application space. Apple is trumpeting HTML, Javascript, AJAX and their own media types. Adobe is trying to get Air, Flash and PDF everywhere. But there should be enough crossover that these companies, which have a long and chequered history, to work together. The adage “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” is certainly true when both companies consider Microsoft. Microsoft is attacking Apple in operating systems (mobile, portable, desktop, server) and media (Windows Media versus Quicktime) and attacking Adobe with Silverlight (as an alternative to AIR/Flash) and their online document formats (which challenge PDF).

Adobe is a relatively small company. They have under 7000 employees They had enough clout to buy Macromedia and gain control of Flash. Adobe’s market cap (the market value of their corporation) is just over 20 Billion this morning.

Why is this relevant?

Apple has about 20000 employees. They’ve got a lot of cash in the bank ($18 billion at last count) and will likely pull in another billion profit at the end of this quarter. With Cash and stock, they could buy Adobe and still leave themselves with a few billions dollars as a buffer against hard times.

What would this mean?

Look at Apple’s recent acquisitions? They bought Macromedia’s Final Cut product pre-1999 and killed the Windows version, releasing the code eventually as Final Cut Pro and iMovie. They bought Astarte in 2000 and released iDVD and DVD Studio Pro. They bought eMagic in 2002 to get Logic and killed the Windows versions. They bought Nothing Real to get Tremor and Shake and killed the Windows versions. Apple isn’t afraid to spend some money to get strategic technology and then kill off a product or three in order to retain loyalty. There were a lot of Logic users who were pissed at Apple’s decision to kill Logic for Windows and I’m sure there were a few who were annoyed about Shake (though decidedly less due to the eminence of Linux in that space).

Wouldn’t an Apple acquisition of Adobe seem to make some sense?

It would give Adobe access to hundreds of Cocoa-proficient engineers with access to the bowels of CoreImage. It would accelerate the development of Mac compatible software development within that company. It would mean that Flash on Mac might not suck as much. And it would likely mean that not only would Adobe stop making Craprobat Reader for Mac, they may rethink the PDF strategy of the company and make it less of a second class citizen on the Mac. Yeah, it’s my opinion.

It would aggravate a lot of Windows users who use/pirate Photoshop on Windows and that market is very large but considering the roadmap they could present, it would then make sense for Apple to do a license trade-in for the Mac-only version. Buy a Mac and trade in your Adobe CS for Windows license for a free Adobe CS for Mac. That would nearly halve the cost of moving to the Mac and get Apple a load of good kudos in that space at relatively small amounts of lost revenue.

This is not a time to be meek.