Downcast Systems

Break Timers – Comparison of Windows/Mac UI

Dave Haynes — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:23:53 +0000

People give Windows a hard time. It has a lot going for it, although “polished UI” has never been a particularly fitting bullet point for the operating system’s apps. I’m not sure why Windows developers have had such a hard time with UI… I thought WPF might change the landscape a bit, but it hasn’t done much. Hopefully the new UI changes in Windows 8 (Metro), in addition to the inclusion of a Windows 8 App Store (finally!), might get some Windows developers to design prettier applications… Time will tell.

I have BreakTime on my Mac, but I’m working on my Windows PC for my day job quite a bit, and I wanted something similar for Windows. I was appalled by the selections.

First, let me show you 3 break timer apps from the Mac App Store:

Breaktime

Break Timer

Breaktify

Now for the Windows contenders…

Scirocco Take a Break

Break Reminder

Workrave

The Windows apps are so ugly that I refuse to use them. They might be just as feature-rich as the Mac apps, but I just can’t look at that all day.

Aftermath of Christmas Crazy Eights, Lessons Learned

Dave Haynes — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 17:18:06 +0000

Please read How I Developed Christmas Crazy Eights for the first part of this epic tale.

I was getting a decent number of sales the first week or two; not great, but I thought it would pick up even more as it got closer to Christmas.

The opposite happened, though. As it got closer to Christmas, the number of downloads dropped off considerably, averaging about 1-2 per day on iTunes, and I don’t even want to talk about the Android Market or the Amazon App Store for Android. Let’s just say that two hands were sufficient to count the total Android sales.

Somewhere around this time I got two 1-star reviews from people who didn’t understand that Christmas Crazy Eights is not a game by itself, but an add-on to a real life game, and that you need real cards and at least one other person in order to play the game. You can’t reply to comments either, so, as the developer, all you can do is stay calm and ignore it. (Okay, let’s be honest, that’s what everyone tells you to do, but it really pisses you off considerably.)

I tried getting the app reviewed, but all the review sites kept sending me back canned emails saying they’d love to review my app, as long as I was willing to pay for the review ($25-$500). I was a bit disheartened that it worked that way. I wondered if I paid more if I’d get a higher score! I didn’t pay for any reviews.

On December 13, I made the game completely free. No ads, no gimmicks. Just free. On Wednesday, I’d gone from 1-2 downloads per day on iTunes to 83. Yesterday alone I had 129. Even the Android Market is catching up now that it’s free, going from averaging ~0 downloads per day to about 35 per day.

So, I know what you’re thinking — those numbers are all well and good, but you’re not making any money! Alas, that is very true. I’m hoping that by making it free, it will generate some buzz about my company and what I’m trying to do, so that a future game will have more downloads and potentially better sales.

Here are some of the mistakes I made, and how I intend to fix them for the next game.

I’ll have a better quality picture as the first screenshot, showing the game running on an iPad/iPhone surrounding by people playing (probably only showing their hands and cards).
I’ll have the How To Play section show up when you click Start the first time, so you’re forced to go through it at least once. That should avoid some of the 1 star reviews from people saying, “The game never starts!”
I need to add Facebook/Twitter integration, and some easier way to rate the game, so people will be able to “spread the word” a little easier. I didn’t even have the Christmas Crazy Eights facebook page ready at launch because I was so excited to just get the game out there.
Another app developer recommended I follow his approach and add something like “For Two” or “Party” to the end of the game title. Probably not a bad idea.
I probably should have had my company’s website redesigned before I launched, but I only just did that last week.
Next time I’ll factor in the costs of artwork a little better. Art is very expensive, especially when your product only costs 99 cents. You need a lot of sales to make that back.
I should have tried a sponsorship. “Hallmark Presents Christmas Crazy Eights!”

Although I’ve been a professional software developer for close to 15 years, mobile apps are new to me, but I’m learning a little more with each one. Maybe one day I’ll have it mastered.

How I Developed Christmas Crazy Eights

Dave Haynes — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 17:17:53 +0000

I started this project back in September… I had the idea for doing an “augmented” game where you’d use the mobile device as a part of the game, but not really *the* game. The game logic would be with the players, and the mobile device would just add-on to the game.

I thought the easiest way to experiment with this idea would be to do an augmented version of the classic card game Crazy Eights because the rules are pretty simple, and it would be easy to add some additional fun things into it. Zombie Crazy Eights was my first thought, but since it was already September, I would be working on it only in my spare time, and I’d never used the Corona SDK before, I figured I better shoot for something more attainable like Christmas. Christmas Crazy Eights was born.

I immediately started mocking up the game using Balsamiq. After I got it to something I was happy with, I started mocking it up in Photoshop with art from iStockPhoto. Once I was happy with my Photoshop mockups, I bought the art from iStockPhoto. Here’s the interesting part, though. I only bought the standard license. I looked over the extended license, and it didn’t seem to fit for a mobile game, so each piece of art cost me about $20. So I spent about $150 on art for a Santa, a Rudolph, a background, some buttons, some gifts, etc.

Meanwhile, I was programming the game, learning Lua and the features of the Corona SDK.

About a month later, as I was getting ready to buy some more art (I had planned on having more than just two characters in the game), I looked at the iStockPhoto licensing terms again, just to be extra sure I was still compliant. I swear the license terms had been rewritten (!!!), or made more clear at least. It now says specifically that you cannot use iStockPhoto art in a game unless you pay for the extended license, which costs an additional $150 per piece. $150 x 7 pieces… I couldn’t afford that for this “experiment”!

I was very discouraged for about 2 days, thinking, “This game just isn’t gonna happen,” but I pulled out of my funk and got back to work. I contacted Dave Neale, an amazing artist whom I’d worked with previously, and he whipped up some awesome Christmas characters for me for a reasonable fee. (Should have contacted him first, but I thought iStockPhoto was a deal.) I set to work creating the background and some additional art for the game myself (spending many, many hours on Photoshop tutorials and struggling with the damn pen tool), and I set out to find some new gift images as well.

I found a whole set of Christmas icons (which included gifts) and promptly bought them directly from the artist for a small fee. Now, I finally had all the art I needed, and everything was legit!

I finished up programming/testing the game and released it for iOS and Android devices in early November for $.99 USD.

Woohoo!

Please read Aftermath of Christmas Crazy Eights, Lessons Learned for the next chapter in this epic tale. Learn how it all goes horribly wrong! Well, not horribly wrong. That’s too strong. Learn how it all goes not-as-awesome-as-I-had-hoped!

A Little Perspective on the Cost of the Corona SDK

Dave Haynes — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 13:10:35 +0000

I just finished reading The Noticer by Andy Andrews. It’s all about changing your perspective. Things aren’t as bad as you think — stuff like that. It’s a great book, and the character Jones (a wise old man) dispenses excellent advice to the various townsfolk that helps them through some difficult situations. The day I finished it, my friend Sergei “Jonesed” me — on a small level, but I still think it’s worth mentioning.

I switched from Sencha Touch to Corona SDK for the latest app/game I’m working on. The Corona SDK is $349/year to build for the iOS app store and Android Market. The art has cost ~$200 so far. I was complaining to Sergei about how I hate having to pay over $500 when I don’t even know if my little app will make any money.

He said, “$500 — not bad. For hands-on training with a cross-platform mobile development framework.”

I started thinking about that, and I like Sergei’s perspective. Saying that I’m getting “training” implies that someone is teaching me, though, but I guess one could argue that the entire Corona SDK community is teaching me (through API docs and forum posts), and I’m teaching myself the rest.

Yeah, it’s a little expensive (for an individual developer in his spare time) to develop this mobile app, not knowing whether it will be a success or not, but, for the cost of one semester at a local community college, I’m getting a lot of experience with stuff that I’ve never had the opportunity to play with as a .NET developer, and at the end of the day, it will help me build better apps.

Computer Science Teachers, Get My Book Free!

Dave Haynes — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 13:04:58 +0000

While supplies last, I’m going to give away paperback copies of my book How to Find and Land a Microsoft .NET Development Job to computer science teachers for free.

If you teach software development at a high school, college, university, or whatever, just contact me and send me your name and mailing address (preferably your school/university mailing address), and I’ll send you a book! (U.S. addresses only.)

Hurry because I only have limited quantities available!

Sometimes Developers Just Need To Be Licked

Dave Haynes — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 19:38:36 +0000

The following post originally appeared on http://developerjobresource.com.

I’ve been reading a book lately called The Magic of Thinking Big by David J. Schwartz, and I totally recommend it. It’s very motivational. While there are newer editions, I suggest searching amazon zShops or ebay to get one of the old versions from 1959. It’s like stepping into a time machine.

Dr. Schwartz uses a lot of terminology that was probably hip with the youngsters of that time, and it makes for a very amusing read. He talks about the top salesman at the company making a whopping $25,000/year, while the other salesmen are only making $5,000. There is a lot of stuff like that in there.

The title of this post is referring to a quote from the book:

“Being licked is valuable if we learn from it.”

I know you probably came here thinking this was going to be a post about a programmer getting a good ol’ fashioned tongue bath (but really — why would you want to read about that?), but I urge you to stick around anyway.

Dr. Schwartz is using the term “licked” to mean “beaten up” or “defeated.” And I agree that there truly is value in being beaten, as long as you learn why you were beaten and keep trying your best.

One of my favorite quotes is by Thomas Watson, founder of IBM, who said:

“If you want to succeed, double your failure rate.”

I like that quote because I’ve at least tripled mine. Now let me pull back the curtain on my personal projects…

I wrote and self-published a book called Shove It FizzBuzz! How to Find and Land a .NET Development Job. I originally tried to sell it as part of a resource kit that included the ebook, a resume template, and interview preparation software for Windows.

Let me tell you — it was not a success.

I had no idea how much to charge for something like that. I tried $49, then $39, then $29, then $199 (as an experiment — raising the price to raise perceived value at a friend’s suggestion). I dropped the price to $19, then finally $9. I think I sold around 12 of them in a year at those various prices. (None at $199.) My only marketing was the occasional blog post and google ads, and most of the time I paid more out in google ads than I made in that month.

It was an extremely humbling experience for me. I had assumed that what I had created was great stuff, and that everyone would want it. (I still believe it’s great, but I know now that not everyone wants it.)

So, for a time, I gave up. I was discouraged. Then I started reading The Magic of Thinking Big, and a few other motivational books – Crush It by Gary Vee, The Traveller’s Gift by Andy Andrews, and I don’t know what happened, but a switch flipped inside me, and suddenly that fire in my belly was back, and now I can’t put it out.

I edited and rewrote portions of my book, added some new content, then self-published it through Createspace.com so that people could buy a physical paperback copy of the book if they wanted (it had been requested). I took the time to format it for the Kindle and used kdp.amazon.com to put it up for sale on amazon.com. I formatted it for the Nook (ePub) and used Smashwords to put it up on barnes & noble and some other sites.

I created a mobile version of my Interview Preparation software using PhoneGap and Sencha Touch, leveraging my existing web development skills so I could get it out more quickly.

I changed my site to more effectively push my new products.

And now I sit back and relax as the UPS guy delivers boxes full of money to my door.

Oh wait — that hasn’t happened.

Here’s the reality of what has happened though. I sold 12 resource kits the first year. I’ve sold 24 paperback books since May 29th of this year through Createspace alone. It’s still not great, but that’s twice as many as I sold the entire first year! I’ve sold 33 copies of the Kindle edition in the same time frame, and 4 copies through Smashwords (which means it might have come from barnes & noble or one of the other stores that offer it in ePub format).

My .NET Interview Prep app is only on the Android Market right now (it is finally “Waiting for Review” in the App store). It’s been in the Android Market since approximately August 1st, so it’s been about a month and a half, and it’s been purchased 55 times already. The free “lite” version with fewer questions was released on August 20th, and it’s been downloaded over 700 times.

Those are the facts. If you add all that up, factoring in the low cost of the Kindle version of the book and the mobile app, it’s not a lot of money, but I’m fine with that. It’s still a lot better than it was last year, and I’ve learned a lot from the licking I got. More importantly, I know there is still more to learn.

If you’re not failing regularly, you probably aren’t pushing yourself to experiment with new things. You don’t need to make big mistakes to learn from them; you can learn something from a simple syntax error in a line of code. I don’t know how often I’ve run into what seemed like a minor bug that turned into a much larger issue requiring a ton of research to figure out. I may have felt like my ass was kicked, but I also learned something; probably about regular expressions, as they quite often crane kick me into oblivion.