Click the photo to see it at full size.
Here’s another example of William Gibson’s quote in action: “The street finds its own uses for things”. According to Irish Times foreign correspondent Mary Fitzgerald, this is a shot of Syrian rebels using an iPad to assist them in aiming a homemade mortar.
My guess is that he’s using Clinometer HD, which has a pretty good interface, and more importantly, is free.
iOS 7 is due to be released tomorrow, Wednesday, September 18th, and among the new features in this latest version of the iDevice operating system are new ringtones and alert/text tones, which I’ve recorded and posted below. For those of you who’ve become attached to the original iOS ringtones and alert/text tones, they’re also still there, in a submenu marked “Classic”.
And now, the tones…
Aurora
Bamboo
Chord
Circles
Complete
Hello
Input
Keys
Note
Popcorn
Pulse
Synth
Apex
Beacon
Bulletin
By the Seaside
Chimes
Circuit
Constellation
Cosmic
Hillside
Illuminate
Night Owl
Opening
Playtime
Radar
Radiate
Ripples
Sencha
Signal
Silk
Slow Rise
Stargaze
Summit
Twinkle
Uplift
Waves
The Toronto Mini Maker Faire takes place this Saturday, September 21st, and Sunday, September 22nd! Billing itself as “a family-friendly showcase of inventions, creativity and resourcefulness,” it’s a place where you can see cool stuff that you can build, tinker and experiment with, and learn from. It’s about the spirit of the “do-it-yourself” or DIY culture and its pursuits both traditional, such as woodworking, metalworking, carpentry, and clothesmaking, and technical, such as electronics, robotics, 3-D printing, and computer programming. It’s 21st century “shop” meets “arts and crafts”!
As I said, it’s family-friendly, so if you’ve got kids — or just play doting uncle, aunt, or big brother or sister to some — take them on a fun trip where they’ll see cool stuff, learn how to make their own, and maybe even take up an interesting new hobby that will make them makers rather than just mere consumers.
Toronto Mini Maker Faire 2013 takes place on:
It takes place at Wychwood Barns (76 Wychwood Avenue, a short walk southwest of Bathurst and St. Clair).
Tickets are pretty cheap, as they’re being offered at a discount right now:
This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.
Before you post that infographic to your social media account or blog, remember…
This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.
Found via Jelena Misic. Click to see the source.
Yes, it’s an exaggeration, but a little trepidation about using “Reply All” will probably save a few headaches and even careers.
This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.
Over at Ars Technica, the always bang-on Cyrus Farivar has a great article titled How Zynga Went from Social Gaming Powerhouse to Has-Been. Zynga made their fortune — which eventually disappeared — by perfecting the moment of “The Pinch”, which is that point in time when you can make the switch from free to hitting up the customer for money.
I became terribly familiar with this concept during my days at OpenCola, which was during the Dot-com Bubble. A manager I used to work with there always talked about the importance of the moment when you yanked away “The Carrot” — the thing that lures customers — and switched to “The Stick”, which was your means of extracting money from them. Whenever you came up with a product idea, the first thing he’d ask is “Where’s The Stick?” “The Stick” ended up in our everyday vocabulary, and never to describe something nice. For instance, when we’d go catch a movie after work at the nearby Sony Metreon (as it was called back then), we’d look around and say “This place is all Stick“.
Zynga made its fortune by wholesale copying. FarmVille is a copy of Farm Town, and Mafia Wars is just Zynga’s own version of Mob Wars. It’s hard-coded into Zynga’s DNA. It’s through an ex-employee that we know that CEO and co-founder Mark Pincus infamously said:
“I don’t fucking want innovation. You’re not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get your numbers.”
Games are — at least as far as sane people are concerned — supposed to be fun. The article has quotes from developers who remarked that fun wasn’t really part of the equation.
Here’s FrontierVille developer Slade Villena, describing the tension between making a game that made money and a game that was fun to play:
“During my five-month mark, it started turning sour when we were pushing a lot of code that was destroying the ecosystem—they were not fixing bugs,” he said. “At one time, I had 10,000 players trapped inside a quest. 10,000! The attitude was ‘Don’t worry about them.’ [Management] would rather grab new players, keep them for three months or so, get $5 to $10 from them, and those players would quit and leave.”
He was encouraged by management to make a certain item in FrontierVille more plentiful. The item would allow you to complete a quest directly, but you’d have to spend money to get the item. From the article:
“I wanted to lower the drop rate [the frequency with which the item appeared in the game], to make it statistically possible to get this item, to keep it scarce,” Villena said. “But then it started happening to every single item in FrontierVille. The main purpose of them putting [the rate] up so high was so people could spend the tokens, and the strategy for you to make a profit was to get players to spend those tokens as much as possible. You’re reinforcing a negative attitude, rather than reinforcing a positive attitude so people keep playing the game.”
Another developer quote in the article comes from Jason Pyke, who worked on Party Place and the never-released FarmVille 2 Mobile:
“You could always fight back, but ultimately what it came down to was: I could always argue that this would make the game fun, but I had a PM tell me—many times—that they ‘couldn’t get data on fun.'”
I’m not surprised by anything in the article. That’s all due to my participation in a panel discussion at the 2010 DIG Conference (DIG is short for digital and interactive gaming), a conference on videogames held in London, Ontario. I was a Microsoft developer evangelist then, and the panel was titled The New Social Gaming Paradigm Panel. One of my fellow panelists ran a company that not only made games like Zynga, but strove to emulate Zynga. My position was that Zynga epitomized a lot of what was wrong with the way people were making games. At one point, we had an exchange that went like this (I’m quoting from memory):
Me: But what about fun?
Evil, Zynga-worshipping soulless ghoul: Fun. Doesn’t. Make. Money.
Me: Of course it does! People buy Grand Theft Auto, and Rock Band and Angry Birds because they’re fun.
Evil, Zynga-worshipping soulless ghoul: You can make more from those games if you’d actually build it little poison pills into the game that you can monetize. Make them even more addictive. Make them viral.
Me: Look at the words you’re using. Poison. Addictive. Viral. In the world of medicine, these are all bad words. You never once used nice words like “fluffy” or “chocolate”. And you practically spat when you said the word fun. Games should be fun, and gamers should be treated with respect by game makers. [Turning to audience] I want the record to show that the Microsoft guy is the ethical one in this argument right now.
That’s one of my proudest moments as a Microsoftie.
Be sure to read Cyrus’ article, and learn from Zynga’s terrible example.
Well, that was quick: soon after the Windows Phone team posted a video meant to be a “light-hearted poke” at Apple’s announcement of the iPhone 5C and 5S, they took it down. The video may no longer live on the Windows Phone team’s YouTube account, but some people managed to grab a copy and post it on their own accounts. For those of you who haven’t seen it, here it is:
The ad had the title A Fly on the Wall in Cupertino? and features two Apple employee stereotypes bouncing between meetings with Jony Ive (where they’re wearing black T-shirts) and a CEO who’s an amalgam of Tim Cook and the late Steve Jobs (where they’re wearing grey T-shirts). The basic gist of the ad — Apple is out of ideas — is a good one to work with, but the execution is terrible; it’s “cringe-worthy” (to use The Next Web’s adjective), but even more important, it comes off as a little desperate.
Click to see the associated article and video.
Remember what’s going on at Microsoft right now:
Even Microsoft employees winced when they saw the video, and some even publicly disavowed any connection between it and them online. The only thing worse I’ve seen coming from the Windows Phone team was from when I was still with the company — remember the “funeral” for iPhone and Android when the not-quite-completely-baked Windows Phone 7 hit RTM?
The sad thing is that it is possible to poke fun at the other platforms and not come off as trying too hard, and that Microsoft and its partners have pulled it off a couple of times. The best example I can think of is the “Wedding” ad, featuring a wedding party getting into an out-and-out brawl over iOS vs. Android:
My favourite bits in this ad are the two Android fans doing the NFC bump and making a little sound effect at the same time, and this exchange between the two Nokia Lumia-using waiters:
“D’you think if they knew about the Nokia Lumia, they’d stop fighting all the time?”
“I dunno. I think they kinda like fighting.”
The ad’s so good that even the “making of” video for it has over 100,000 views:
Another good ad, this one from my time at Microsoft, is the “Really?” ad, which promoted Windows Phone’s “glance and go” design as the smartphone that would save you from your smartphone:
And finally, here’s the half-decent “the smartphone beta test is over” ad, which is a pretty good way of handling the fact that the move from Windows Mobile to Windows Phone made Microsoft seem as if it were late to the mobile party:
There you have it: historical proof that Microsoft can do better when it comes to promoting Windows Phone. The question is: will they?