games - Mike Cohen

Links for 2011-5-10 through 2011-5-14

May 14, 2011 by Mike Cohen

Links for 2011-5-10 through 2011-5-14:

Is Nathan Myhrovld’s Intellectual Ventures behind the iOS in-app purchase patent troll job? Intellectual Ventures was founded in part by former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold. The company’s business model is simple – it purchases and applies for a ton of patents. It then licenses out those patents to others under the threat of litigation coupled with a promise not to sue if a deal is struck.
Setting up an Amazon EC2 instance: A beginner’s guide
How to have personality: Lessons from Trader Joe’s 1.4 million price tags – Matt Inouye Trader Joe’s knows marketing. They don’t want you to know this however. Their displays, signage, and advertising (including their kitschy “Fearless Flyer” newsletter) all convey the message that Trader Joe’s is just like the simple grocery store of yesteryear–healthy food, friendly staff, and a store that has a personality.
CocosBuilder – Graphical Interface Builder for Cocos2D CocosBuilder is a free graphical editor for building scene graphs in Cocos2D (iPhone & Mac). With CocosBuilder you can visually layout your objects and load them with a single line of code. Please note that this is still a very early version, the interface is very unpolished and it probably contains lots of bugs. Use at your own risk!
Qualitative Game Design [Alex Evangelou, Angry Fish Studios]
Is Being an Indie all Fun and Games? « Majic Jungle Blog
Huckabee pal Janet Porter believes Obama is a Soviet Spy Mike Huckabee is the scariest GOP candidate. He hides his evangelical extremism behind an aw-shucks facade so successfully that even normally astute people like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are fooled by it. There is nothing friendly about Huckabee’s beliefs, nor in his advisors like Janet Porter. Scary, scary people who wouldn’t think twice about sending liberal, secular humanists like myself to re-education camps.

Posted by Postilicious

Links for 2011-03-28 through 2011-04-03

April 3, 2011 by Mike Cohen

Links for 2011-03-28 through 2011-04-03:

Peter Gabriel – Digging in the Dirt (1992) music video by John Downer – Analysis of the music video
Atlassian – Angry Nerds –
Integrating cocos2d and UIKit – Cocos2d layer subclass that contains a UIView.
Why Your App Name is Dumb — The Brooks Review – Have you noticed how absolutely stupid some iOS app names are? I really mean this — just calling your app “InstaX” doesn’t mean it is as good or as cool as the original. 1 When I am browsing the App Store you have two chances to catch my attention: With your icon. With your app name.
On a personal note, I realize that Removr failed on both of those.
Useful SQL Tricks for WordPress Blog –

Posted by Postilicious

Links for 2011-03-10 through 2011-03-16

March 16, 2011 by Mike Cohen

Links for 2011-03-10 through 2011-03-16:

Custom Controls for iOS and Mac OS X – Cocoa Controls – Collection of open source custom controls
Why I am not worried about Japan’s nuclear reactors. | Morgsatlarge – blogorific. – A good, factual, non-hysterical explanation of exactly how a nuclear power plant works and what happened in Japan. Up front, the situation is serious, but under control. And this text is long! But you will know more about nuclear power plants after reading it than all journalists on this planet put together.
Hausa Party –
Why Angry Birds is so successful and popular: a cognitive teardown of the user experience –
In depth: How Rovio made Angry Birds a winner (and what’s next) (Wired UK) –

Posted by Postilicious

Links for 2011-03-04 through 2011-03-07

March 7, 2011 by Mike Cohen

Links for 2011-03-04 through 2011-03-07:

4 Golden Rules of iPhone Game Design | Ezone.com App News – At the core of your game you need a simple, fun game mechanic. And I stress simple. In this A.D.D. world if you don’t grab players in the first 10 seconds, you’ve probably lost them. Unlike a console game they haven’t invested $50 (in all likelihood it’s $0.99 or nothing), so they have not made a big commitment to your game. If they don’t get it in the first 10 seconds, then they are going to hit the home button and launch something else.
Onramps | eliolhan – Luckily* I have techniques to get back on track when I feel blocked or unmotivated. Without adding any new code, I’ll clean things up:
Conform code indentation to my house style
Fix whitespace and tabs
Remove stray blank lines
Delete superfluous comments
Remove commented-out NSLog() statements
Group and label related methods
Fatal Distractions | eliolhan – I want to talk about what I’ve learned in the last few months about Distractions and how to fight them.
The 3 Ingredients of Successful iPhone Apps | Tapity – To me, say I put in 300 hours to make an app; I’ll call it a success if I make over $23,000 in the first year.
He Thinks Many People Will Like To Read It –

Posted by Postilicious

Links for 2011-02-22 through 2011-02-26

February 26, 2011 by Mike Cohen

Links for 2011-02-22 through 2011-02-26:

OS X Lion Walkthrough: Versions and Auto Save – Two new features that have found their way in the first Lion developer preview but might seem too complicated or “hidden” as only Apple applications support them right now are Versions and Auto Save. With auto-saving capabilities for documents and a proper versioning system in place, Apple is aiming at simplifying the workflows of many users that have to deal with dozens of documents on a daily basis but often forget to save changes and are inevitably forced to start over. To put it simply, Lion will let you work on your documents without having to worry about saving anything. If you do want to save a specific version of a document, however, you can do so in order to access it later from a Time Machine-esque interface that will let you revert to a previous version of a document at any time. Let’s see how it works.
Tiny Wings – Huge Success [Stefan Sorin Nicolin, Spielhaus] – With all these AAA titles coming out for the iOS platform (and elsewhere) there are still some games who pop out of nowhere and climb the charts in no time as if there is nothing easier in the world to accomplish.
[devel] OpenGL ES 2.0 support « cocos2d for iPhone – The idea is to use this thread to discuss how to implement OpenGL ES 2.0 support without the need to write a shader for each CCNode.
The idea is that if the CCNode contains a shader, then it should use it, otherwise it should continue rendering itself using the GL ES 1.0 code.
Django Reinhardt: A Look Behind the Namesake of WordPress 3.1 | Blogging, WordPress, Social Media, Web Publishing – WordCast – With the release of WordPress 3.1 and announcement that this version was named Django Reinhardt, WordPress fans around the world are now learning about Django Reinhardt, the legendary and often overlooked jazz guitarist and composer.
Cocoa Samurai: Practical Design Patterns with Blocks and Grand Central Dispatch – When Mac OS X 10.6 was introduced, the Mac got a very powerful duo of developer tools that made development on a lot easier. With iOS 4.0 developers finally got access to these tools as well. These tools are known as Blocks & Grand Central Dispatch.
Does the world *really* need yet another Twitter client, RSS reader, ToDo list or backup application? « Successful Software – My heart sinks every time I hear a would-be-entrepreneur announcing they have written yet another Twitter client, RSS reader, ToDo list or backup application. Haven’t we got enough of those already? There are more than 1,900 Twitter apps already (possibly a lot more). Somebody probably released another one while I was writing this post. We have passed the Twitter app event horizon, where it is probably quicker to write your own custom app than it is to try and work out if any of the existing apps fulfils your requirements.

Posted by Postilicious