Software, technology, startups and video games

Wow! Where has the last year gone?! It seems like no time since I first posted about going to WWDC 2009.

I never got a chance to say just how much I enjoyed it last year. It was a great opportunity to learn a ton of stuff about Mac and iPhone development first hand from Apple engineers. The talks were excellent and well delivered, there was a real buzz around the place and the other developers were extremely friendly and helpful. And of course it was an opportunity to spend some time in one of my favourite cities.

It has also been a very interesting and busy year for me since then with Mobilizd. I have completed a number of iPhone projects and have some great iPhone and iPad projects in the works at the moment. I have also met and worked with lots of really cool and interesting people.

I am delighted to be going back again this year, even though it has been a bit of a nightmare getting everything sorted out at such short notice (WTF was that about Steve!?). In particular, I am looking forward to seeing the new iPhone 4G launch at Steve Jobs’ Keynote (hopefully), learning more about iPad app design & development, new SDK features such as Game Center and meeting up with lots of cool developers and of course the WWDC Bash in Yerba Buena Gardens!

So as part of my time honoured WWDC tradition, here is a picture I took in SF last year:

The Balclutha, San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park

The Internet has been all a stir about Apple’s new  iPhone App Developer ToS clause (3.3.1) preventing developers from using 3rd party tools to generate native iPhone apps. Though, there still seems to be some confusion about what it is really preventing. While I can certainly understand people getting annoyed in terms of freedom and openness, as a developer I just don’t see the problem.

About a year ago, while developing an OpenGL/Physics game for the iPhone, I seriously considered using the Unity3D application which provides developers with the ability to develop cross platform games with built-in physics support. I actually had a working demo up in a short amount of time and I was impressed with the software, though the UI was a bit clunky.

However, I just did not feel comfortable about adding an unnecessary layer of software between myself and the iPhone OS. Not only would I have pay Unity for the privilege of using their software, I would not have direct access to the powerful frameworks that are provided by Apple. Further, iPhone OS 3.0 had just been released and I had no idea if/when Unity would add support for the great new features/APIs it created. Add to that the fact that I would have been tying myself to a company that I knew little about and at a time when companies are under serious financial strain, not knowing whether it would still be  supporting the iPhone or even in existence in the months and years to come.

As a developer with 10 years experience of Java, when I decided to begin working on iPhone apps, my first thoughts were about learning Objective-C and Cocoa Touch. Not to begin searching the Internet for Java based cross compilers. While I can see the advantages of using something like Unity, I don’t understand why developers want to write native iPhone apps in Flash or C#. To me it would be like working with one hand tied behind my back. Objective-C isn’t that hard, especially if you are an experienced developer. Look at it as an investment and an opportunity to expand your knowledge. The more you put in the more you get out. If you are lazy or aren’t willing to learn, then stick to writing Flash apps for the Internet and stop complaining.

I realise it will be a very sore point (and I do have some sympathy) for anyone who has already invested time and money in one of the banned platforms, but it was always going to be a risk. Apple were never going to let Adobe have it all their own way.

At the end of the day, we all signed up to Apple’s ToS to get in on the most compelling new software platform since the dawn of the Internet. Apple could have done things very differently, with exorbitant license fees or by only allowing specific partners to develop apps for their prize possession but by allowing anyone to develop an app (within reason), we have all prospered. If we want to play in their garden, we have to play by their rules. End of story…

As for the new features in iPhone OS 4.0:

• Multi-tasking: is a great new feature, but the best thing about it is that we can now stop complaining about it being missing (much like Cut & Paste). Its a simple and elegant solution to a pretty complex problem.
• Game Center: will be a great addition and is something I would definitely want to build into future games. Though that depends on the uptake of iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad users to the upgrade. I sincerely hope Apple give it away free to all users so that we can move forward as a single community and stop worrying about users running legacy OSs.
• iAd: The new advertising platform is less exciting from a personal point of view but it makes sense to have a centralised ad platform for developers to take advantage of if they wish to do so.
• Folders: The new ability to organise apps into folders. I have been looking for a feature like this for some time as my growing collection of apps becomes more unwieldy by the day. Thanks Apple!

With 85 million iPhone OS devices and the recent iPad launch, it is a great time to be an iPhone OS developer!

This post is a response to the discussion on Matt’s blog post about the Games Industry within Northern Ireland. In particular, I wanted to reply to this point by Liam of WeeManStudios:

“The lack of expert skills and full-time developers in NI is still a major barrier.”

Yesterday I attended the INGAGE event at Belfast Metropolitan College. It was great to see some of the work being done here in Northern Ireland and to see other people who are passionate about making video games. The Games Industry in Northern Ireland is very small but starting to grow.

There is no shortage of talent and full time developers in Northern Ireland! We have a strong developer base supported by two large Universities.

The problem as far as I can see is that InvestNI & local Universities have not supported the Games Industry, therefore there are no established games companies here. Even then, I don’t see the small local games companies encouraging students to specialise in the Games Industry.

I haven’t been to Uni in 4-5 years so things may be changing. The likes of WeeManStudios and DarkWater Studios should have an obligation to go to the IT Depts of Queens, Jordanstown or Coleraine and market themselves to students, or provide internships, summer placements, hold Q&A discussions, video game lectures. Hopefully they are doing this already. The cop out is to post jobs looking for experts with 5+ years experience in this Games engine, that 3D modeling package or Game Console experience because, mostly those skills do not exist here and therefore does not encourage local developers and students to go for unobtainable jobs.

Students go where there are jobs and in NI that is mostly to the large US companies that InvestNI have paid millions in funding and tax breaks to set up shop here.

NI needs a Video Game Strategy for the next 10 years and more initiatives to show students and old timers alike what can be achieved. The Tax breaks announced in the Budget now give us a more level playing field with the likes of Canada but we are already a long way behind other UK regions and we need to act fast.

Local companies are vital but we also need to get closer ties to the likes of Sony, Microsoft, EA and Nintendo. We need to market ourselves as a lower cost center of excellence, in the same way we have done for Financial and Insurance companies in the past. Companies need to realise that we need to be trained but are willing and capable. Most US companies are happy to do this so long as InvestNI pay in part for that training. Look at how quickly Citigroup grew in 2 years. Why can’t that be Sony or EA?

I am very envious of the Dare to Be Digital competition.  That is just the sort of thing I would have jumped at as an undergrad wanting to get into the Video Games Industry but not knowing how to. If I had that kind of encouragement, I am certain I would have had a very different career path.

I am sure all Manchester United fans are well aware of the efforts of the so called Red Knights and MUST in wanting to buy out the Glazers and take control of the club.

For those that don’t know, 30-40 mostly anonymous business men, bankers and hedge fund managers claim to be life long fans who are attempting to save the club from financial ruin under the current owners. They have teamed up with MUST, a group of disgruntled fans also interested in gaining ownership of the club.

Currently, all they are asking is for supporters to give their backing by signing up as MUST members. The target was to double the membership to 100,000 as a signal that they have the backing of the supporters and to continue with their plans. It has grown by almost 30,000 new members in the last 24 hours alone and will surely reach their target. Then what? Well the Knights will try to raise the rumoured £1.5 billion pounds needed to clear the huge club debt, buy out the Glazers and put the club on the road to decades of success. Easy! They also claim they will give the fans a seat at the boardroom table. Win/win for fans, right?

However, there is a problem. The Glazers don’t want to sell. It is either going to take a huge offer to make them change their minds or they are going to have to be forced out. It is going to take a lot more than waving a Green and Gold Scarf at them. There are already suggestions that the Knights will ask fans to boycott season tickets. No doubt that will also extend to official club merchandise and match day hospitality. They hope that the lose of revenue will cripple the Glazers business plan and force them to put the club on the market.

So all we have to do is virtually bankrupt the club we have supported our entire lives and place its future in a group of largely unknown people without any idea of their individual motives or how they are going to run the club when they seize control. Will they use debt to take over the club? Who will run the club? Will they each own a share in the club? Will they get dividend payments? How can we be sure the club will never again be taken over by greedy owners in search of a profit? Surely, they will all want their money back at some stage, what is their exit strategy? Who will represent the fans? How much of a say will the fans actually have?

Portsmouth and Leeds are perfect examples of clubs that have almost been destroyed by poor financial management. We have all seen what has happened recently at Liverpool with their 2 American owners virtually crippling the club at a business and footballing level through infighting and lack of funding. How will 40 presumably large egos manage?

I am sure all fans would agree that if the Knights want our backing, they should come out with a detailed statement of their intentions and promise to give 100% ownership of club back to the fans and run it in a similar fashion to Barcelona FC. Until they do, I for one will not be supporting them.

I recently bought an iPod Shuffle 3G (3rd Generation) from the Apple Store to use while in the gym (I did try my iPhone 3GS first but after accidentally throwing it 6 feet in the air, I felt that it was better left in the gym locker).

I had wanted a shuffle for a while but the cost per GB seemed a bit steep. So when the 3G was released with a price reduction to £45 for the 4GB version, I jumped at the chance. Finally I wouldn’t have to listen to endless loops of Cascada and Dizzy Rascal on the jukebox! The main feature of the 3G Shuffle is the lack of volume/play controls on the device. All controls are now on a little switch on the earbud cable. They have a proprietary chip that make the player incompatible with regular earbuds. I know Apple earbuds aren’t the best but my iPhone ones work fine for me so it wasn’t a big issue.

On opening, it is a thing of beauty, simple and elegant, as you come to expect from Apple. I painstakingly created my “Gym Workout” playlist and copied it onto the shuffle. Off I went to the gym and everything was great. For the first hour that is. Then I noticed that the annoying computer voice kept interrupting my and telling my what playlist I was listening to. Again and again. It even interrupted itself! Then, the sound controls stopped working and eventually the main play/pause button stopped working. So off I went to see my local Apple Expert and he was happy to give me a new set of earbuds. The next day I took my new earbuds to the gym and within 20 minutes, they too had failed.

It seems pretty clear that the chip inside the earbuds doesn’t like moisture and is not well protected, which is not a good thing when the primary use of the player is for listening to music while exercising. A quick look around the Internet and its clear that I am not the only one with this problem. To make things worse, because of the proprietary earbud chips, there aren’t a lot of options. There are some accessories on the Apple Store that allow you to use regular earbuds such as the Scosche tapLINE extension lead and tapStick but they are relatively expensive and when added to a new set of earphones are more expensive that the Shuffle itself! I haven’t tested these yet so I don’t know if they are resistant to moisture.

It says a lot about a product when you have to spend more than the original cost to make it suitable for its task. I am afraid I have to give the iPod Shuffle 3G a big fat “F minus” and recommend anyone looking for an mp3 player for exercise to avoid it like the plague. Sort it out Apple!!

I recently switched from Sky to O2 for my broadband provider. I had been on Sky Mid package for a few years and it was good value and worked well (Don’t get me started on Pipex!!).  Earlier this year Sky informed me they were doubling their rates (unless I took their Talk package too). Around this time I felt that their connection was becoming more unreliable.

I decided to switch to O2 Broadband as they use ADSL2, had good rates for O2 mobile customers and got consistently good reviews on thinkbroadband.com. The switch took a couple of weeks and was pretty seamless. However, I noticed that my new connection was significantly slower. Speed tests confirmed that I was only getting 300-400Kbps for both up and downstream.

The main suspect for this was my setup at home. I have an extension lead from the hallway master phone socket to an extension socket under the stairs, and another upstairs to the office where an adsl/phone extension socket connected to my router. I connected my router directly to the master socket and did a speed test.  Sure enough, the speed jumped to 2.7Mbps/1Mbps downstream/upstream.

While this may seem obvious, I had been getting 1.5-2Mbps with Sky with the exact same setup. I did know that extensions add interference but it didn’t seem to impact the speed that much and I preferred to have the router upstairs out of the way. Though for some reason it has a much bigger impact with O2. It could be something to do with their modem or ADSL2. To their credit, their instructions do say that extensions may affect performance.

Anyway, the moral of the story is to connect your router to your master socket or at least be aware of the effect extensions may be having on your Internet speed (BroadbandSpeedChecker.co.uk).

Its been a while since I added a Howto on here. Hope you find it useful.

The Bullet 3D Physics engine is shipped with the Oolong 3D Engine for iPhone. However, if you just want to use the physics engine in your iPhone app, the following steps should help you to integrate it into your project:

1. Download Bullet. I got it as part of the Oolong Engine source from Google Code.
2. Open Xcode Preferences, select Source Trees and add one with Setting Name “BULLET_ROOT” and Display Name “Bullet”. Give it the full path to your Bullet folder.
3. In your Xcode project, CTRL+Click on Classes folder and select Add Group. Give it the name “Bullet”. Then CTRL+Click the Bullet group and select Get Info. Set the Path Type combo box to  ”Relative to Bullet”. The Full Path should show the full directory path for the Bullet folder.
4. Select Project/Edit Project Settings from the Xcode menu. Search for “header search paths” in the Build tab and add the full path to your Bullet src. Make sure to check the Recursive checkbox. You will need to do this for Debug and Release build configurations.
5. In your source code, include the relevant bullet header e.g.
   
#include "btBulletDynamicsCommon.h"

   will include everything you need for rigid body dynamics.
6. Check out the Oolong samples to see how to use the physics engine or head over to the Bullet website for more resources.

Hopefully, I haven’t missed anything out but let me know if you spot something incorrect or can’t get it to work.

Update: 21/07/09: One step I forgot to mention was that Bullet is written in C++. You iPhone application class files will default to Objective-C and so won’t be able to compile. You need to CTRL+Click the class file referrencing the btBulletDynamicsCommon.h header file, select Get Info and change its file type to be Objective-C++. That should allow it to compile properly.

Wow! Where has the time gone. I can’t believe I am flying out to San Francisco later this week. This is my last picture of San Francisco, so enjoy the twisty bends of Lombard Street on Russian Hill.

Not long to go now! Continuing on from last week’s post. Here are the Painted Ladies, famous Victorian Houses on Haight St, San Francisco.

Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference takes place from 8-12 June in San Francisco. I am heading over as part of a 30 strong InvestNI delegation for my first Apple conference since converting from the Dark Side last year. Its going to be pretty intense with tons of information on iPhone and Mac application development! So with the miserable, wet and cold May we are experiencing at the moment, I thought I’d cheer myself up with a nice picture of the Golden Gate Bridge:

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San Francisco is probably my favourite city. This will be my 3rd trip there (last time was my honeymoon in 2006) and I can’t wait to see it again! I’ll post some more pictures over the next few weeks…