Mike Daisy lied to everyone. After being ousted, he states plainly that he crafted a story “in the context of theater”[1]. Daisy is not alone, as many (if not all) documentary films tell stories disguised as truth. Many documentary films craft a story that is mostly fact, but often times key points of the film are untrue. Here is a few examples: King of Kong, Bowling for Columbine, The Cove.

Novels do this too, but as works of fiction, they state clearly up front that they are just stories. Upton Sinclair was an brilliant story teller and his novel ‘The Jungle’ actual helped create social reform[2]. His stories were fiction, inspired by real events he witnessed himself. But The Jungle wasn’t a news report and never claimed to be fact. There was a true story there and Journalists investigated the situation and did report actual news of the conditions. When President Roosevelt himself sent investigators to the meat packing plants, they found conditions to be worse than then the book described.[3] Social reform happened because Upton Sinclair’s novel told a fictional story about something true.

Television commercials are all made up, embelished, and fantasical. We don’t care and we certainly don’t beleive them because we know they are commercials. We expect a certain amount of fibbing in commercials. Whether it’s right or wrong, we definitely prefer the commercial version of what a BigMac looks like to the real version we actual buy. The bounds of these falacies are defined by our culture and our tolerence may fluctuate up and down on how far the lie can go.

It’s ok for novels, movies, commercials and lots of entertainment mediums to tell stories that entertain us. We know they are just stories because it’s made very clear to us. Where Mike Daisy and even most documentaries go wrong is that they put on the appearance of being factual. These crafted stories are usually so good we want to believe they are true.

The tradgedy with the Mike Daisy fiasco is that “This American Life” was involved and catapulted the story into the main stream as “news”. And although the show has done their part in correcting the mistake, I can’t help to think of the millions of people still thinking it’s true.

If it’s too good to be true and the story is just too perfect, it’s probably not all it’s cracked up to be. Being Hyper cynicle is not what I’m proposing, but a little critical thinking might be in order for all of us.

[1] http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/460/retraction

[2] http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/sinclair.htm

[3] http://www.capitalcentury.com/1906.html

The idea was let players create a “tag” which is tied to a location. Other players would move the tags around the globe, earning points for each mile moved. Players had to physically move the “tags”: walk, drive, or fly kind of move. (It was inspired by Geocaching if you know what that is. ) This seemed like a simple idea, but it turned out to be a lot more complicated as I started building the game.

Technically you do a postmortem soon after the project is finished. It has been 3 years since I finished the game so here it is, better late than never.

The game was split into a client iPhone app and server side web service. The server side used Google App Engine with python and the client was obj-c and UIKit. I spent about 6 months working on the project and the first 2 months was spent just learning the platforms and languages. I'd never worked on either before so there was indeed a bit of a learning curve.

The goals for the project were kind of lame. I never expected any financial success and my ultimate goal was to learn iOS and python, and hopefully walk away with a fun game to play.

The problem with choosing a social/multiplayer game is the need to have many players for it to be fun. Because the game was so hard to figure out, it was kind of doomed from the start.

In the end it had around 500 registered players and 50 - 100 active players. The top 30 players really enjoyed the game and we got a bit competitive at some points along the way.

It definitely had some flaws, and it took a lot of effort for me to make improvements. The largest problem I faced was in explaining how the game worked. This was mainly due to poor UI design.

People did enjoy finding tags and moving them, it was a matter of getting them over the hump of learning to play the game.

So what did I learn? What would I do better next time?

Things I learned

-execution is hard to get right on the first try
-making a game fun and addicting takes much experimentation, so be prepared for a lot of R&D time
-coding the iPhone app, the server, and a test suite made for a lot of work. Testing simple ideas was not a trivial process. I chose a difficult subject matter for my first game.
-seemingly simple features turned out to be very hard to implement without drastically changing the existing game. The rules got complicated fast. This was on top of the fact that each feature essentially took layers of code: client, server, test suite.
-the rules of the game became complicated for such a simple idea. This also hindered progress.

What would I Do better next time?

-design the UI first, then write code
-allow instant play, no sign up screen
-put in single player activities, many players didn’t have anything to do in the areas they were in
-don’t make an app that depends on social or requires a server—this more than doubles the code you must write
-discuss ideas with as many people as you can. Find out who your audience is and see their reaction.

Conclusion

In the end, I was limited on what I could code by myself within the time constraints I had. But, it was a blast making the game and it taught me many important lessons.

I am a working on another iOS game. Just not something that requires a server or a test suite.

iPad 3

I don’t think they will ever make iPad 2S, because the size and long battery life allows the iPad to take larger steps than is possible on the iPhone.  So it will be an iPad 3.

iPad 3 gets announced and it will have:

-gets 2x Retina display running 2048 x 1536.

-gets A6 processor and be amazingly fast

-it will still have the home button—this is never going away

-photo app gets new filters like Instagram and Camera+ have. They will demo this extensively!

-it will get a better camera, but not as good as the iPhone 4S camera

-new 3rd party games and software will be demoed showing how cool the retina display is

AppleTV

Then the big announcement, “just one more thing”, a new AppleTV will get announced!

-it will still be the small box that sits next to your TV.

-it will have an AppStore, which is the big announcement.  This will create another AppStore goldrush like iPhone and iPad AppStore’s did.

-you will use an App on the iPad and iPhone to control the interface, play games, enter text.  It will be an amazing new way to interface with your TV.  Using the iOS as a controller will become so popular, we’ll soon see it on all the game consoles and other players (Roku, Google TV, etc..). 

-if you do not own an iOS device to control the AppleTV, you can use the IR remote, but be unable to play games, enter text etc..

-it will connect to the iPad 3 and stream 1080p video

Conclusion

That is what I would do if I was Apple.  I’m excited to see what really happens!!

So I took the plunge and am doing what I wanted to do 3 months ago.

I’m using my benford.me domain and I’ll redirect benford.name over when this site is finished.

Moving to squarespace presents a few challenges.  Benford.name was hosted on webfaction.com (they are an awesome host by the way) and I also hosted a few trac sites and subversion repositories with them.  Github to the rescue!  Not only is Git a much happier SCM than Subversion, but Github has bug tracking, wiki, and other cool features.

I’m a bit unnerved about this but it helps to know that all decisions are temporary, you just make them and move on.  

Relearning UI is frusterating and annoying, but it is a temporary problem.  When XCode 4 was launched last summer, the transition away from XCode 3 was horribly difficult.  But 6 months later I’ve forgotten that XCode 3 even existed.

Change is hard, but change is good too.  Embrace it baby!

I didn’t know you, but I sure will miss you.

Thanks Steve Jobs!

It’s not all roses though. My site is pretty ugly and the blog has no features. I really thought long and hard about dumping my entire site and going with something fancy like squarespace or a nice hosted wordpress blog. I even tried them out and was duly impressed. Squarespace was so great I signed up and started converting things over. But alas, I cancelled that idea in the end.

Keeping my django blog seems like a silly decision. I have no time to play around with a web framework I only partially know. But I can’t give up on the things I want to be good at. I love the web and although hand typing HTML makes me feel sick inside, it’s something I will never give up.

Django really hits home with me. It’s powerful, written in python, and the built-in admin panel is the cat’s meow. Building my own blog engine keeps my web skills alive. The more I focus on non web projects, the less I remember about my good pal the web.

It’s about the journey not the destination. So I’ll continue poking along with my half-assed blog engine. And I am going to start blogging again, so things may improve a bit around here.

Joel Spolsky wrote a great blog post back in 2001, and he said:  “If it’s a core business function — do it yourself, no matter what.” So this meant I’m going to need to take on some form of visual design.

I started with the fundamentals.  Learning the tools was the easy part.  But getting results I was happy with has been insanely difficult.  It hasn’t been impossible though, and I’ve finally reached a phase I can start creating passable game art.

My core competency had to grow to fit my entrepreneurial goals.  

This focused attention on growing new skills forced me to lose old skills .  It’s hard to admit to yourself that you can’t do everything, but it’s a sure a relief when you let go of things that are holding you back.

I’ve slowly been abandoning web development and focusing on iOS development and visual design. 

Gitbox is my favorite. It’s simple to use and still has the most important features. Branching, merging, diffs, and history-of-a-single-file (awesome!!) are the things I use over and over. Just try it out, it’s free to use for 3 repositories and the full version costs $49 dollars.

The other app is Git-Tower, which has more features but also more UI to get in your way. I used the beta version but decided not to purchase 1.0 because it’s missing the one feature I can’t live without: ability to view the history of a single file.

I can’t live without source control and git is a tool I use daily. If you’re like me: lazy and hate the git command line, give one of these a try.

They are all locked-down, closed, curated markets that that are difficult to get into into. Once inside, if you have a decent product you can make a lot of money.

Each of these chain stores is exactly like the App Store. You may never get approved and you may get kicked out at any time.

But I would argue that chain stores make the App Store look like a playground.

I worked for a company that attempted to enter the national chain-store market—it was a nightmare:

• They can kick you out without notice for having poor sales.
• They charge “slotting fees” to stay in their stores.
• They’ll make large orders of your product and then return the entire thing one month later.
• Payments come in 180 days after your product goes on the shelf (which can be 6 months after you’ve shipped it to them) and they still give themselves discounts for paying “on time”.
• etc..

No one complains because a lot of successful companies make a lot of money. Strong competition and the difficulty of getting into a store only strengthens the companies that are there.

None of this stops people from shopping at these places. In fact, more people buy from them because they are curated marketplaces.

Open markets like Android Marketplace are not bad, but they may never be as profitable as the App Store. As a user, you’re more likely to get garbage apps and viruses—which is why Apple’s store is the way it is.

In the end, the App Store is good for the user. For now, it’s a little rough on developers, but it could always be worse. Most likely it will only get better.

This is why I stay on the iOS platform, knowing what I know about the App Store approval process