Category: Uncategorized

Here’s a video promotion from 1993 by Boole and Babbage (supposedly “the first software company in Silicon Valley”, acquired by BMC Software in 1998) featuring Johnathan Frakes as Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Commander Riker. Boole and Babbage made “software to help corporations stitch together computer networks,” a rather messy prospect in those days before we standardized them around the internet protocols.

You don’t have to be a programmer or IT person to enjoy the nostalgic cheese on this video. It opens with a chaotic scene at an early ’90s airline logistics centre, where the reservations system has crashed.  Harold, the only employee “with vision”, is contacted by Commander Riker through the monitor on his 386-based PC. Riker tells Harold that Mainview, Boole and Babbage’s network monitoring software, can solve him problem. After some quick technobabble that’s as vague and hand-wavey as any you’ve seen on Star Trek: The Next Generation, Mainview gives Harold the solution he needs: “Reroute through Cleveland” (which isn’t all that different from the standard deus ex machina on the show: reroute some energy through the ship’s main deflector).

I’m pretty impressed that Boole and Babbage were able to get Paramount to go along with letting them use Star Trek and the bridge set of the Enterprise for this promo. I’m less surprised that Frakes would sign up for the gig: over the years, he’ll appear on anything, no matter how cheesy.

There is one line near the end of the promo that rings true for techie today, even with our pocket-sized devices that run circles around the best desktops of that era and far, far better networks: “Doing more with less will be your constant challenge in the coming years”.

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

The State of HTML5 Mobile Game Development

Pascal Rettig’s The State of HTML5 Mobile Game Development presentation is an overview of the situation with current browsers, HTML5 and game development that you navigate as if it were an HTML5 game. It may not be apparent when you first load the page, but use the arrow keys to move the character around (left-arrow and right-arrow move left and right, use the up-arrow to jump); moving off the right side of the screen takes you to the next slide, and moving off the left side takes you to the previous one. There are some slides whose bullet points reveal themselves as you move from left to right. The presentation is on GitHub, so you can get it, fork it, learn how it works and make your own.

HTML5 game capabilities have improved in leaps and bounds, from Atari 2600-like in Q1 2010 to something along the level of the original PlayStation today. This presentation gives you a look at the state of HTML gaming, both on desktop and mobile devices, the current state of the art (HexGL, an HTML5 racing game reminiscent of Wipeout 2097), the opportunities and limitations, the different ways you can approach HTML5 (as a web platform, a target platform or as a language) and a quick plug for his book, Professional HTML5 Mobile Game Development.

Most Enterprises Have Key Mobile Jobs to Fill

According to ComputerWorld UK, three-quarters of US and UK enterprises have mobile-based jobs to fill. Other stats from the article, which is based on a survey of 600 HR managers from US and UK companies:

• Nearly 30% of companies already have a “mobile strategist”; 29% plan on bringing in someone whose role will be “to development and carry out business-wide mobile strategies”
• 20% plan to create 1 – 2 mobile roles in the next year; 5% plan to create 5 – 10 such roles
• 25% of companies with mobile roles to fill have found it hard to find the right people, most of whom say that they can’t find someone with the “right qualities” for the job
• 20% of business are recruiting mobile app developers and content creators
• 23% are look for looking for people with mobile device management (MDM) expertise
• US and UK companies plan to double spending on mobile initiatives over the next 12 – 18 months

How to Design a Mobile Game with HTML5

If you’ve been meaning to get started with HTML5 mobile game development, this Smashing Magazine tutorial is a good start. 

Google and Microsoft Under Threat from the March of the Mobiles

This Guardian article talks about the idea of “peak search” and “peak desktop” — our industry’s analogue to “peak oil” — how the shift to mobile technologies is affecting giants like Google and Microsoft. For Google, cost-per-click paid by its advertisers has been dropping for the past year; for Microsoft, a slowdown in the PC business has led to drops in income (down 8%) and revenues (down 26%), and in both cases, mobile is pointed to as the culprit.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/oct/19/google-microsoft-smartphone-apps

Mobile Games from the Past (A Post-Mortem)

The year was 2003 and J2ME had just come out. It was the perfect time to be a mobile game developer, right? Perhaps not.

The Market Sides of the Mobile Ecosystem

Charlie Kindel, the guy from whom I used to get my Windows Phone Champ marching orders, says that the mobile ecosystem is a six-sided thing where “each side gives and receives value from the other sides”. They are:

• End Users (that’s right, I said “users”, not “customers”. I’ll explain in a later post.)
• Channels
• Device Manufacturers
• OS Providers
• Services
• 3rd Party Developers

Shopify’s “Rise of Mcommerce” Infographic

And finally, a great graphic from my last company, Shopify, on the rise of mobile commerce. The folks at Shopify are very good at knowing how to respond to changes in the market, and the acquisition of mobile dev company Select Start Studios was a smart one.

 

While others have written speculations about whether Apple’s upcoming announcement will be about the rumoured-to-exist iPad Mini and when it might be launched, the folks at This Hour Has 22 Minutes did one better and speculated what the “Timnote” at Apple’s October 23rd event will be like.

You have to remember that when he said this, it was still an unusual thing to see a computer in the home, the internet was not a household word, the web lived on a single server in Switzerland, hard disks were finally beginning to become standard equipment on PCs, and mobile phones only made calls…barely.

You say, “Why should I learn these difficult technical skills when it’s all just gonna change? Let me know when it’s settled down.” Problem is, by the time you catch on that it’s *never* gonna settle down, you’re five years behind, with no real way to catch up, and you feel like a one-person Soviet Union.

— Stewart Brand on The WELL, circa 1991

Found via The Technium.

How Much?

TechCrunch managed to catch one of those “oops, posted the web page too early” moments at Microsoft, and it seems to reveal the prices for its upcoming Surface RT tablets. Here they are, listed alongside similarly-priced iPads:

Surface Model	Price	Similarly-priced iPad	Price
32 GB, no “Touch Cover” (cover with touch-sensitive keyboard)	$499	16 GB Wifi-only New iPad / 16GB Wifi + 3G iPad 2	$519 / $549
32 GB with “Touch Cover”	$599	32 GB Wifi-only New iPad / 16GB Wifi + 3G New iPad	$619 / $649
64 GB with “Touch Cover”	$699	64 GB Wifi-only New iPad / 64GB Wifi + 3G New iPad	$719 / $849

 

As promised, these models are priced competitively against the iPad. That leaves the hurdles of coming almost three years late to the market, lack of mindshare, smaller app ecosystem, an app store that has to get its act together, developers who’ve jumped ship to other platforms, a remaining developer culture that’s got a lot to learn about UI and the fact that they’re Microsoft (the vendor whose stuff you have to use, not the vendor whose stuff you want to use). On the plus side, Surface is probably the easiest tablet to develop for; Microsoft has to convince developers of this and get them to bring their A-game when writing Surface apps.

It should be noted that these are the Windows RT models, which means they’ll only run RT applications and not any software written for previous versions of Windows. The Windows Pro tablets, slated to come out next year, will run both.

How Many?

They’re building 3 to 5 million this quarter, according to the Wall Street Journal. Once again, for comparison’s sake, Apple sold 17 million tablets last quarter. I will remind the reader that the tablet market is young, and anything can happen.

Any Ads?

Microsoft’s first TV spots for Surface were scheduled to appear last night, according to The Verge. Here’s the first one, a Stomp-inspired dance bit with lots of Touch Cover attachings and detachings, whose message is “Surface is cool”.

Microsoft is reported to be spending at least a billion dollars on the campaign to promote Windows 8, and Surface will undoubtedly be a big player. Hopefully that money will be more effectively spent; we were once told they were spending a half billion on Windows Phone 7’s campaign, with pretty sad results.

They probably got the “Because you have more money than sense” from a Google search. Still, it’s not as bad as this restaurant sign:

Here’s a good reminder to use passwords that aren’t made of names or actual words.

The joke in this poster is also a hint as to why biometrics isn’t the answer. If your password is compromised, you can make up a new one. If your fingerprint data is compromised, you can’t change your fingerprints.

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.