The Nokia Lumia 920 device

Nokia is an amazing hardware manufacturer. The guys have been working on phones since the dawn of time. The WiFi is flawless, the phone never lost signal, and 3G is fast. The GPS is sharp, quick and accurate (compared to iPhone, which usually knew which planet I am on). I even bought a car holder, and used it as navigator. The included HERE Drive+ beta with free worldwide maps is a full blown navigator – don’t need to get anything else. Saved me a hundred bucks already. Did I mention the wireless charging? It just works. One of those things you never knew to miss until you got one.

I really love the looks – @moia has done wonderful job on the design. The display is best I’ve ever seen, the device feels excellent in hand. And I love the bright colors after the iPhone dark ages. Oh – and you can use it with mittens too. The capacitative display is tuned really sharp – sometimes the device registers my touch before I actually have touched it.

The thing is also heavy. And I like it. Makes the iPhones feel like a toy. No doubt, one could use it as a hammer. The finishing touch – the huge mass combined with the short vibe when you hit back or home key in lumia – awesome feedback for user.

Moving from iPhone to Winphone – the Essentials

You can pretty much guess how it goes. Nothing you have on iCloud will work on winphone. iCloud calendars will not work. The address book will not work. iCloud mail is treated as lowlife in winphone – you can make an IMAP connection, with sync set twice an hour. Not quite the instant push notification you got used to up in the iCloud.

Good news – you can get GMail to sync with the winphone with Google Sync. Google calendars, address book and mail sync nicely (although you need your old iDevice to make it happen – the page on which you configure the sync does not work with any IE version). The bad news is that this will apparently end this summer. The result: brace yourself for Microsoft’s outlook.com experience. It will be your default mail & calendar host after getting a winphone. You can try and fight the windmills, but this is how it’s going to be very soon. Live with it.

Moving music & vids to Lumia was easy – MS has an app for that. Reads your iTunes playlists & other stuff and takes care of the transfer. Worked nicely, so I guess I can keep iTunes as my primary audio & video manager. Good.

Windows 8 phone

The Windows 8 user interface ideology is new and exciting. The front page live tiles you can arrange as you like feels good after the iPhone stiffness. The hard cornered, no shadow, two color theme look fresh. That is – until next UI fad appears. The animations are cool, and they run smooth and produce the WOW effect you needed. Good work indeed.

I didn’t even realize how much I had missed this: When you hook up the winphone to your PC, the phone appears on the File Exploder! Transfer the photos, music, vids, documents – anything you want – between the phone and computer as a normal file copy. This IS the way it was meant to be. Straight and clean. Sad it doesn’t work like this on Mac, you have to use the app.

The apps

The good ones.

There is Netflix, and it works perfectly. I watched an episode of the Walking Dead on it, and it never crashed. The UI is even better than in iPhone. And the Facebook app – not that bad, just a little different. Too bad I am not that big a Facebook fan.

Not quite there yet.

Then there are the apps that in theory exist, but… An example: Official Twitter shows every tweet with timestamp one hour late (the “just now” tweets are shown as “one hour ago”). When I click on a tweet, it sometimes opens another tweet I swear I didn’t click – if it opens any at all. The “scroll to top” gesture seems to be totally missing in winphone (the top bar click in iphone)? Quite annoying in Twitter in particular.

LinkedIn; in theory, yes, it’s there, but even more “OOPS” messages than in iPhone. Major bugs in the news part. The showstopper kind of OOPS bugs. I have really low tolerance on this kind of stuff. If it does not work, don’t publish it just yet.

The ones missing.

And then there are the apps that aren’t there at all, and I doubt never will be. Like Google. No Google maps. No Google Plus (which I am personally addicted to). No YouTube. No Google anything. It’s hard to imagine a world without Google. Don’t get confused with apps named “Google” something. They are not the real thing. Usually they are links that will open IE with the Google page.

… and the screwed-up ones

This is dedicated to Microsoft way of doing apps. Bloat them unusable with features: Like “People”. “Music and Video”. MS just doesn’t get the idea of mobile app; You do small apps which do the particular task they are designed for, and NOTHING MORE. Address book shows my contact’s mail etc. Not facebook status, twitter feeds, or images they have posted about their lunch. I have different apps for that. Music & Video app is a music player. You know, with play and stop buttons, and a convinient way of choosing what I’d like to hear just now. NOT a music store, or even a wall to advertise the currently trending songs. Boy did I spend time finding my playlists in the app. Hidden well. I didn’t dare to edit the list. Too scary.

Things I just can’t forgive

The intolerable: The OS native app updater just cannot crash, as it currently does. The updater app has tried to update HERE Drive+ beta for 3 days now, and every times it tries – it crashes with an hex code for the user.

Secondly; If you have an ecosystem which controls which apps get to be published in the marketplace, you don’t let ANYBODY publish apps that are just links to open IE with predestined page. You let only APPS in. The best part was an app named “YouTube”, published by Microsoft itself which just opened mobile youtube in IE. WTF?

Feelings after one week…

I’d love to love this phone. The device is awesome. The Windows 8 user interface ideology is excitingly fresh. I love the downloadable, unlimited worldwide offline Navteq maps that only Nokia has.

But.

Most of my favourite apps – not there. The ones that are – crashing, behaving oddly, or cheap copies by 3rd parties. This wouldn’t be a problem if I hadn’t used the perfectly working versions on my iPhone for years – It’s hard to forgive the version 0.1 problems on the new platform.

Of course there is the counterargument: “But it has Office!“. Who in the right mind wants to use Excel or Word on phone size screen for other than viewing the documents? My first task: Remove office from your start screen taking valuable space.

I’ll try next to figure out if the “business user” argument is valid somehow. I am not quite convinced yet. I’ll keep using my cool Lumia, but – I keep my iPhone nearby and battery loaded…

Articles of the week

New business ideas

“Not quite there yet.”

This blog is about how to get rid of Oracle Forms.

Things keeping you to Forms

The Forms apps still in use tend to have one thing in common: They are monstrously large containing hundreds – if not thousands of user interfaces (forms that is), business logic and functionality written into them over the years of development.

The moment you realize the sheer amount work the conversion will have… I remember helplessness. “It’ll take years, and cost a fortune.”

Every CIO knows, that the ones sitting on the money pile don’t exactly favor projects not directly addiing value to business. Architectures, refactoring and platform development are always on the bottom of the list. How would you suggest a project to rewrite existing app(s) with another technology and effectively stop all new business feature development for years? You don’t. Even if the messenger wasn’t shot, squeezing out a decision may take years.

A little motivation…

Yes, getting rid of Forms will cost a lot. Yes, it will take time. The question is not only about the money though, it’s also about how long you can do without your apps when Forms flatlines next? Few days? A week? A month? Last year I realized that any day now can be the day Forms just stops working. And there’s pretty much nothing I, Oracle or anyone else can do about it.

Ok, almost done scaring you for now. But my point – you are in a hurry. In January 2013, the Java runtime used with Forms has already got recommendation to “quickly update, disable or to remove immediately” by the US Dept. of Homeland Security.

A new hope?

I’ll tell you a little secret now: The cost and time required can be significantly less than you expected – about one fifth, or one fourth of the first cost estimate you got. Nice, huh?

And how’s this possible? The estimate you first got is very likely based on the false assumption you would be making a conversion. That is, everything in the old system would be built into the new system running on a new platform. You are not making a conversion. Second thing, choose the new platform wisely and pay only for what you need.

The trick and how it’ll be done.

This blog is a short-short version of the subject, but it should already give you the idea. If you want the whole story – I’ll be there.

The trick is twofold, and it really contains nothing new. The approach just seems to fit exceptionally well the issue at hand. The first part is rethinking the app by what really is important to your business. The rest of this blog will focus on this. The second part is picking the right technology that fits your needs. Not just picking the default Oracle one, which in most cases is a huge overkill, and will just lead you to another dead end – way too soon by my standards. The subject is definitely worth it’s own blog entry.

Rethinking the app

Again, I’ll emphasize, you are not doing a conversion. First mindset you need is a division of what is essential and what is supplemental in your current Forms app. At the same time, I’ll introduce you to the magical 80/20 rule.

The Essentials

Start by making a quick list of the app goals – why the app is there in the first place. Describe the goals in terms of how the app supports your business. This will be your checklist for later use, to make sure everything is covered.

Next, count and make a list of all the forms the app has. This is also easy – just look at your forms directory and list the .fmx files you have – each one is a form.

After you have the forms list at your disposal, follow a few days how the pro users are using the app. Mark which forms and how often they use each form in your forms list. You’ll very soon notice that 80% of time and use is spent on maximum of 20% of all forms. We had roughly a 400 form app, and most of the time was spent on less than 30 forms. The popular forms should correlate with the goals you listed. Crosscheck the result the other way too – see that every business goal is now covered (they usually are).

By now, you have probably seen a pattern developing; Your are going to make a new app, which does the jobs these top priority forms do (and their count is 20% of the forms, even less). By choosing wisely, the new app will cover roughly 80% of the old app use, including your essential business goals. This 20% is where you put most your money in (ideally – 80% of the money) and make the best app imaginable. User experience (UX) design is one of key key things here to ensure everything runs smoothly, and all unnecessary things distracting the user are weeded out in the rethinking.

The Supplemental

The rest 80% is supplemental. These include (but are not limited to) configuration parameters, business rules or other runtime settings. Exceptions to the common flow of events. Things not used daily, weekly or even monthly, or used by one or few users only. You may have to juggle a bit on where to draw the line. I mainly used two criteria: If it’s runtime behavior configuration of the system – it’s clearly supplemental. If not, I judged the case by it’s use frequency and number of users affected. And maybe later ditched it back to supplemental basket. You don’t have to decide immediately.

The strategy with the supplementals is to minimize the effort on transferring these into the new environment. First weed out obsolete functions and data – there’ll be plenty of this cumulated in your app over the years. Then use any tools and methods you have: Convert, dirty code, copy-paste – whatever it takes to get rid of the remaining stuff. The ideal case would be to use an app generator (like Forms used to be in the first place) to automatically create these trivial functions and their user interfaces from a data model. Plain and dirty.

Hey – what just happened? Let’s summarize. First you limited the scope of actions to the essentials – max 20% of the original Forms app functions. This in turn reduced the costs to about one fifth of the original estimate. This figure will most likely keep even if you made the best app imaginable to support your business goals – having the best UX, modern graphics etc..

The rest – the supplemental – you spend the minimum amount. A good approach: Take a hard cost limit: 20% of what the essentials’ will cost. Give this hard limit to the architects planning the transition. They’ll make the right decisions. Give them a tip that an app generator is your best friend here.

Magic happened. No more Forms. Ever.

The choice of technology naturally affects the outcome – either for good or bad. Please – disagree/agree with the article, comment or share! The buttons are just below!

Running a campaign in Google AdWords for your iPhone app will get a lot of paid visibility in terms of people potentially seeing at least your app name, but that’s about it. The basic math is, that the sales generated from people clicking these ads can never cover the advertising cost itself. Period.

The math part

Proven again yesterday. Tried this before with Kanami, but tried it again. Never learn?

1. AdWords tells my BOUNCE dy campaign had 218 clicks on a day.
2. My site stats shows very clearly that I’ve got 51 actual visits from those clicks.
3. Only 2 of them resulted in what I was hoping for… People moving on to the App Store.
4. If neither one of those actually bought the app – probably not. No way to tell.

The 167 gap?

As you saw, the clicks reported (and charged) by google, and actual landings on my site has a 167 visit gap. This is pure speculation, but I suspect that these are results of a) robots clicking on the ads (?) or b) people accidentally clicking the ad on iphone (my campaign was only shown in iPhones), and then quickly quitting browser.

That’s about 3/4 of all ad clicks that never showed up on my site.

iPhone apps are too cheap for adwords to pay off

From iPhone app marketing point of view is that there is NO WAY to cover the advertising costs with an app costing very little, like USD 1.99. If it costed a hundred, it might do – I’m not sure. If you sell cars, insurances – anything that costs a thousand or more, it’s might be worthwhile. For an app costing virtually nothing – no way.

The BOUNCE dy campaign was a cheap test run – the ads costed me only about 10 bucks. I have previously tried, and noticed that the amount invested really changed nothing. The numbers will just multiply evenly if you invest more.

Too many clicks to actual purchase

One more problem with adwords – it will not allow linking the ad click directly to App Store and your app. Only your website. That’s one more click required from the user to an actual purchase. There probably is a reason for adwords to force this policy, but I just cannot figure out why…

Question

The good questions, for which I don’t know the answer…

Please comment and share your ideas. Because I am running out of them.

Janne Hansen proudly announces, that his indie game BOUNCE dy (short for BOUNCE delivery) has today been released worldwide on the App Store. The things gamers loved in the classic bouncing games of the 80′s, now return reloaded with physics, speed and control on the iPhone.

BOUNCE dy is a tribute to the pocket games of the eighties. Player takes control of the Paddle, and helps the BOUNCE dy brothers deliver the falling items into safety. The simplicity makes the game easy to learn, while modern physics keeps the game interesting. The game doesn’t feel pre-decided, the player is truly in control. Most of the fun comes from the sheer panic of trying to save the falling items.

Janne Hansen describes his game: “I think BOUNCE dy as my show of respect to the games I used to play when I was a kid at the eighties. They had heart. The games of that time were simple and easy to learn, yet extremely addictive. Usually the games couldn’t be won – they just got harder and faster, until… Game Over. Single game took about three minutes, so the player could have a quick run anywhere. These were the things I tried my best to re-create in BOUNCE dy – wanted it to have that same heart.”

Of course, there’s something new: “The seemingly easy bouncing turns more difficult as the player advances in the game. If the player wants to make it through the day, he has to learn a few tricks to better control the bounce. And then, just for the flavor, the game will throw in special items to bounce…”

The game is equipped with Game Center leaderboards and achievements, which enable the players to challenge each other worldwide – go for highest scores, longest streak or see who gets all the achievements.

About the author

Janne Hansen is an indie developer, who made his first appearance on the App Store few years ago with Kanami – a beginner japanese language educational app. With BOUNCE dy he now makes his debut on games.

BOUNCE dy Press Kit & Links

Contact

Janne Hansen – janne.hansen@iki.fi
Promotional codes available on request for reviewing purposes.

Google Glass at New York fashion week

I have always thought it a bit funny, that when I present a new lifechanging application or concept to the crowds, the initial attention always goes to what the app looks like. “Why is it black? Can I change that color?”. The first impressions on the Glass project were exactly the same – the media was asking “Would you wear device looking like this?” almost totally overlooking what you now had in your hands (or head, actually). Google is now taking this seriously – the models on Last sunday New York fashion week Diane von Furstenberg’s show were wearing the Glass as fashion accessory, showing how trendy this can be. Point taken – while making wonders, the Glass can also look good. And it even may come in other colors than just the original silver. Read more on the ABC news article.

What Google Glass means for business

Another good story focusing on a bit different view this week was Benjamin Robbins’s article on the Guardian. His key argument was that wearable devices like Glass will change the world because (The Glass) does so because it provides the ability to interact with relevant data, in real-time and in a collaborative fashion that has never before been possible. I have to agree on that. The demos we have seen so far have mostly focused on the camera features of the Glass. It’s an action camera allright, but I’d say that the best parts are still to come. Combine location awareness, full connection to the networked world, presenting things visually and on audio instead of text, voice control… Quite a package. Food for thought for a concept designers like me. The first real applications will of course be Google hangouts, Google Maps & GMail ‘n stuff. And the glass will for sure spew you full 360-view of Google ads where-ever you might go (hopefully not while I am driving it won’t). But after these…

What it feels like to actually wear one?

Before even the developer release scheduled in early 2013 (?) Google has given a few very limited functionality units – an Explorer version – to a test drive for selected people. One of them was CNET’s Rafe Needleman. Even if the goggles don’t do much yet, Needleman said that the device was comfortable and light to wear. Google has not solved what should one do if already wearing regular glasses, but apparently they are currently working on the issue with glasses manufacturers.

Further reading:
How will Apple respond to Project Glass
Project Glass in wiki

Credits & thank you’s:
@iguchi, @jeebbit
Image credit Diane von Furstenberg
CNET, ABC News, the Guardian

First time I came across the idea of using Kinect for something else than XBox controller was in iPi-soft Motion Capture (MOCAP). The app used Kinect to capture the actor’s movement, then save the recording as a file. The file containing the recorded movement is then imported to a 3D app (say like my favorite Poser). Then you can make the 3D characters dance according the recorded movement. Magic.

What was revolutionary: The technique earlier reserved for the BIG players only was suddenly available for home use, not to mention small 3D project studios. This was also the the moment I started anticipating that sooner or later Kinect would be used in scanning real world objects into 3D models. It just became real.

DIY – Quick 3D scanning test

Download the free KScan3D trial from their website. Install. Unplug your existing Kinect from XBox, and stick it into your PC. As the app installed drivers for Kinect, your PC tells that you have now Kinect connected to your computer. Start the app, and start playing. After 2 hours of joy, OMG – IT WORKS!.

Scanning with KScan3D and Kinect

The KScan3D user experience was excellent – every phase in scanning was pretty much self-explanatory… Scan – Combine – Finalize – Done. Never touched the manual.

Naturally this “Home edition 3D Scanning” has it’s limitations, mostly because of the Kinect’s current abilities. (3D3 Solutions has also the finer solutions available for those with more budget). Kinect is not that accurate, scanning typically requires 2 persons – one to hold the Kinect, the other to hit the Scan button. Kinect by nature does not see/scan small objects, recommendation was “Minimum is roughly size of a shoe”.

Ok, what’s next?

The question becomes instantly what you can do with the scans.

The obvious for me & other 3D graphic artists: You must be able to import the models and textures scanned into a “matching” budget 3D graphic app, like Blender, Poser or DAZ just to name a few. In my case – I would scan real world objects and use them in my 3D illustrations, 3D movies, game graphics and such. For example – I’d like to scan my motorcycle, and make my current favorite 3D models pose on it.

Another logical pair is using the app with 3D printing – scan the model, and then print a copy of it with your 3D printer. Or: scan, polish and then sell your model for others to use. BTW, we are bound to see a new kind of copyright wars, as Mattel et al. will soon start suing kids & their parents who scan and 3D print their Barbie® & Ken® – or sell the models for printing such on soon-to-appear 3D print model marketplaces.

What is likely coming soon: Virtual clothes shops, where you can try on different clothes on your virtual 3D self, comfortably at home with your browser… I am quite sure that H&M and others will eagerly swallow this bait, if not already working on this kind of solutions. At least the previously difficult 3D scanning part of yourself is now well taken care of.

Testing import with Poser Pro 2012

Unfortunately the KScan3D trial version does not allow exporting or saving, so this test is made with the pre-made model downloaded from KScan3D gallery page. The page offers demo exports in .obj .ply and .stl file formats. Poser accepts the Wavefront .obj files

Good news is that the .obj model imports nicely into poser. Below screenshot of the import result, I just fixed her stance a bit, the lights are almost Poser default. I started to test render her to a real .png image, but cancelled as the calculations as the 1.569.639 vertices and 3.129.251 faces took too much time on my poor ol’ mac. And the result would not really differ from the quickly calculated posing image.

The bad news is that the texture data is not included in Wavefront .obj files that Poser understands. This is a big downer for me, as she is, and will look forever like she’s molded from metal (I can just choose the metal color). Normally poser models have their textures in separate .png files, which you can apply to the model in the materials section. I don’t know if KScan3D export can produce a separate .png texture file as the trial version does not export. If it does, great! If not – this becomes just a fancy app, that I can do nothing useful with, at least for now.

Also to remember – the imported model is not your typical pre-made poser figure. You cannot repose it; move arms, legs, apply your favourite poses etc – it’s a “statue”. What you scan is what you get, and that’s it.

Conclusion

If the non-trial version export features fit your needs, I can warmly recommend this. Especially because of the solution total price tag: 99 EUR for Kinect, 300 USD for KScan3D – lots of value for money.

In the near future, apps of this kind will of course be bundled in Kinect installation/driver CDs – as the 2D apps are now shipped with every document printer/scanner. But until that – KScan3D does it’s trick quite well. Impressive!

Oh – and before you ask – you can use the XBox Kinect for you tests. It seems to be exactly same piece of hardware as the Kinect for Windows. The differences are: a) Price tag on Windows version is 100 USD higher, and b) you are by MS licensing terms required to use Kinect for Windows in PC production environment. I’ll restrain myself on further commenting this genious licensing plan cooked up by MS lawyers..

Copyrights and trademarks mentioned in this article again belong to their respective owners.

TexturePacker

TexturePacker creates sprite sheets for your favorite game engine in seconds.

…or to be more accurate – does it without you noticing something quite complex happened in the background during your build. Below is one of my Bounce Delivery sprite sheets, generated pretty much automatically.

I found TP in “Learning Cocos2d” book by @rodstrougo and @rwenderlich (an excellent book that is). Before TP, I was a happy user of the (now-past) Zwoptex web version – uploading sprites of regular and @2x sizes, managing manually how the app should generate the sprite sheet, copying the files to my project resources – you know the drill. This was a required task every time I changed any one of the nearly hundred sprites in my app.

TP pretty much changed that all. Today I don’t upload sprites. I don’t create separate images for regular and retina size. I don’t generate and copy sprite sheets. I even forgot that TP was there, until a while ago it told me my sprite sheet had grown too large. I had to start cutting down the number of sprites in my project to spare on the app size – to keep it below the magical 20MB limit.

This is the best kind of software there is. It does EVERYTHING for you, and you don’t usually even notice it running. Configuring TP took about an hour (including changes to few lines of existing code). After that; Just create the retina sized artwork image, and save it in a directory TP knows. The rest – all taken care of. Every time you build your product. And usually – you don’t even notice something happened. Magic.

Physics Editor

PhysicsEditor creates collision shapes for your physics enabled game. Use the fantastic auto tracer to create shapes within seconds! Directly export to your favorite game engine.

When I was heading to buy the TP, I fell for the trap Andreas had set up for me: “Get TP and PE for a nice bundle price” (I’m such a sucker for discounts). I had only a quick look at TP then – “Create chipmunk collision shapes”. I was doing that too – I’ll get the bundle – maybe I try it later. Glad I did. Proved to be another app I can’t live without anymore.

I don’t know (nor care to know) much about vertexes, polygons and any of that math kind of scary stuff that lies underneath the chipmunk physics engine. PE relieved me from the pain of knowing things like why “your polygons aren’t convex” (the error I got from chipmunk – still today I’m not quite sure what that meant).

I can now also use more complex collision shapes in my app. Before TP, I didn’t dare to use anything else than just plain balls and boxes. Counting the pixels and transforming them into arrays of vertexes for chipmunk was such a stupid and difficult way of doing things. Never again.

Working with TP user interface – again – it’s quite automatic. I love that. The guess that TP’s “magic wand” makes about the shape is usually a pretty good one. I usually end up moving / removing couple of vertexes manually – don’t really need to be THAT precise, and I want to keep the number of vertexes down. Even I know how to do that with the TP user interface.

Finally – yesterday I spent an evening tweaking Bounce Delivery physics for better playability by changing the mass and friction for all the items player bounces in the game. Just change, hit the export and recompile – and I was already testing the results. To do this tweaking without TP… I don’t want to even think about that.

Conclusion

Both TP and PE have saved me the precious hours by automating things that previously had to be done manually. All the time spent on counting vertex coordinates, generating different size images and sprite sheets is now spent on something more productive. In addition – PE has enabled me to create much more interesting gaming experience by the use of complex shapes in my game.

Thank you CodeAndWeb, thank you Andreas!

I have been following Risto Linturi’s posts about 3D printing in Google+ for a while now (Risto is “the” Finnish 3D printing Evangelist). He has been steadily posting news about new consumer priced printers (costing about 500 EUR), general info about the subject, images of his own printings etc.

So far most of the actual items printed (plastic fork, iPhone cover, nuts and bolts, etc.) have looked more or less like plastic garbage. You know – the kind of stuff you’d expect from Kinder surprise eggs – ugly, useless, and totally lacking finish and style.

So why I am arguing that this is going to change the world? Simple.

Question: What is entirely plastic, but costs it’s weight in gold?

Post Mortem: Latest news is that somebody had managed to print a fully working gun, which brings attention to a bit disturbing side of this new technology…

Thanks, links and images:

This blog article contains probably nothing you already don’t know, but I thought that this might be entertaining to know…

BOUNCE inc.

I thought I was soooooo clever, when I invented the name Bounce inc. to my game. I was pretty convinced, that nobody would have NEVER thought of the same name. Again – how wrong can you be.

http://www.bounceinc.com

If I had ran this simple test BEFORE naming the app, I would have saved two days of headache trying to figure the next best name for the app. For your entertainment, here are my candidates – all taken as company names, product names or somehow unsuitable, because they already existed in some form.

<copy paste from my evernote>

*****************************
BOUNCE dy.
*****************************
bouncedy.com –> free
bouncedelivery.com –> taken, but not in use.

Learned anything?

All the brands pictured on the featured image and named in text are owned by their respective companies. Sadly.

What next?

First of all – I wanted to do something entirely different.

As I am a geocacher, I already had lots of ideas about apps based on providing content depending on your location. For example; socially tagging stories to places, which would be revealed only when you got there. Games which would be based on your and co-player locations, and such… I also toyed with the idea of making YASA (= Yet Another Social App), but soon found out the obvious: Who needs yet another social app?

Both of the previous would also require a mi-own server. (In my daytime job, I have built quite many systems with magic happening on the backend, so the thought was tempting). I would also need a secure plan of how to scale the service if it suddenly had millions of users. And monitor that the servers are actually up and running… No thanks at this point. Too much with my time available.

A Game it will be.

While writing Kanami, I kind of got curious what else was there for iDeveloper to use? I mean – Apple UIKit is nice, but let’s be honest – you don’t want to write anything but simple dialog / menu / tab bar apps with it. A little googling (search for libraries, frameworks & such for iPhone), led me to the cocos2d. Finding it (and chipmunk to go with) pretty much sealed it – A game it will be.

BOUNCE inc. happens

It had been quite a while since I last wrote a game… 14 years to be exact...

While still making Kanami V1, I spent the evenings for few weeks reading tutorials and toyed with the framework and the libraries. My first goal was to make a skeleton end-to-end app I always start with, which would be built by the cocos2d customs. After a few more evenings learning the crafts, I suddenly had a working bare bone game running on the iPhone Simulator screen, which looked very much like this (I’ve just added the arrows & descriptions for your convinience).

My first impressions were: A blast from the past. OMG, it’s Nintendo Game & Watch all over again. But this time recharged with up-to-date physics engine, speed and control.

BOUNCE inc happened. I never chose it, it chose me. In a way it’s my show of respect to the games I used to play when I was a kid at the eighties. At that time, the coolest things on earth were Commodore 64, Mattel Intellivision – and the before those, Nintendo Game & Watch, for which BOUNCE inc owes a lot. I loved the simple, yet addictive gameplay they gave us. They had heart.