We’ll have some fun stuff for you this week!
Follow us on Twitter @ and on Facebook. There’s a cool stuff for royal fans coming from Surfing Dino soon!
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
We are releasing our this week. It is an app for very young children, so you may be forgiven for thinking it was a walk in the park. What could be simpler, right?
I too thought that a series of apps for pre-schoolers was something we could write in one week. As it turned out, children aged 0-4 are some of the toughest customers to sell to, because the apps you build for them must be simple, yet engaging.
Simple does not mean primitive or ugly. Quite the opposite, it often means that you need to pay more attention to detail than when you are designing an FPS, because you need to put less stuff on the screen and still create an engaging experience.
That is why we had spent two months tweaking the code, the graphics, the animation, and the sound according to the feedback from our test audience, the client, and a psychologist. No, I am not kidding, we did ask a psychologist for help with the design. It was worth it. We have a much better understanding of what works and what doesn’t work in apps for small children.
Possibly Our Toughest Assignment So Far
As we are getting ready to release our apps to the world, we are going through the old paid vs. free (ad supported) debate. Here’s my argument for paid apps:
When you pay for the app, we are selling you the results of our labor; when you get a free (ad supported) app we are selling you to the advertisers.
Take your pick.
An Argument for Paid Apps
So, how was our first London Corona SDK training? In short, we had a blast. We’d like to thank all participants and hope that the next edition of our training will be as much fun.
We noticed that those who attended our training and have not used Lua or the Corona SDK before were a little skeptical when they discovered the simplicity of the Lua programming language and the Corona SDK.
But all that skepticism went away when we showed how simple it was to write, debug, and build your code for two platforms, iOS and Android. One of the students said he was shocked by how clean and simple the whole process was.
Indeed, the team at Ansca Mobile went to the basics and wrote a powerful tool that simplifies the process of game development in a way that no other tool can. If you don’t believe us, try this on your Mac:
1. Download the Corona SDK and install it.
2. Start the Terminal application.
3. Type cd /Applications
4. Press Enter/Return.
5. Type cd /Corona (don’t forget to press the Tab ->| key to complete the path to the Corona SDK).
6. Press Enter/Return.
7. Type simulator
8. Press Enter/Return.
Corona SDK will start and you can open either your own or one of the sample projects. Observe the Terminal window for debug messages.
Open Corona SDK Simulator Preferences window and set the “Relaunch Simulator when project is modified?” option to “Always”.
Now, open the main.lua file of the same project in your favorite editor, modify it and save it. Watch the project automatically relaunch in the Simulator. Pure bliss…
Corona SDK Is Programmers’ Heaven
Our programmers will lead the Corona SDK training course in London on March 24-25. More details .
Corona SDK Training
Is this synchronicity or what? Josh Halliday writes about the virtues of simplicity and clarity in programmig on the same day that Stephen Tomkins cites Sir Clive complaining about the mess that today’s computers (and their software) are. I agree that programming is writing and that programmers can improve the quality of their code by following the advice of great authors, like George Orwell. So, if you want to become a better coder, try to become a better writer.
And let’s not forget the editing part. Which is just another name for debugging, really.
Read on the Guardian website.
minimalism: Lessons from Orwell and The Clash – review
What George Orwell Can Teach Programmers
Stephen Tomkins wrote a nice piece on the Sinclair ZX81 for the BBC Magazine. Sir Clive Sinclair is so right when he says this:
“Our machines were lean and efficient. The sad thing is that today’s computers totally abuse their memory – totally wasteful, you have to wait for the damn things to boot up, just appalling designs. Absolute mess! So dreadful it’s heartbreaking.”
I too think that we stopped caring about resource waste. It’s something we have to address in the next decade, because we cannot go on increasing the number of processor cores indefinitely.
ARM does a pretty good job of optimizing for power consumption, now is the time for the programmers to take a look at their own code. The number of layers of code that the CPUs have to plough through these days is ridiculous.
That is why I like writing games for mobile phones—I have a feeling I can have a much more intimate conversation with the hardware than when I am writing code for the Windows operating system.
Read on the BBC website.
PS. The ZX81 was the first computer I had dreamt of, but the first computer I owned was the Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K.
Stephen Tomkins Remembers the Sinclair ZX81
Click here to add the Surfing Dino feed to your RSS reader.
Add the Surfing Dino Feed to Your RSS Reader
Surfing Dino is @ on Twitter. Follow us today!
Surfing Dino Is @surfingdino on Twitter
View more by category: Uncategorized (10), Apps (8), The Big Picture (3), App Developer Stories (1). Or by month: August 2011. Or visit the Complete Archive.