One less platform to program for?

Rim's been doing bad recently.  Really bad.  They still shipped 13.2 million blackberries last year, but that's they're seeing a big dent in sales.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/17/technology/17rimm.html?_r=2&adxnnl=1&hpw&adxnnlx=1308330047-HDNUdfFRnqWwle14CfkG4w

It's crazy to think how badly they're doing considering that at one point, they had the only "smartphone" (smart for the time at least) in the game.

Algorithms

So, after slaving away for the past couple of weeks on some algorithms assignments and getting ready for my midterm, I got my first mark back from the class.  It was for the first midterm, and still no word on the assignments that were handed in.

I thought I nailed the midterm and in the worst case scenario I could imagine I would have gotten an 80, but it turns out I got a 66.  And the prof didn't have the midterms with her in class and wasn't going to return them until after the midterm.

This is a 2 month class that ends at the end of this month.  Dropped that class like a sack of bricks.  Can't have that poor quality feedback and expect me to stay - I dunno what the prof was thinking.

Good news resulting:  less time studying, more time to work on this game!

Programming songs

Every once in a while I get listening to a song when I start doing a new kind of programming and I just start associating the two together.  For example, when I was taking C++ and I started getting into it, Ke$ha's Tik Tok had just came out and was playing all the time on the radio.  Now I associate the two and every time Tik Tok comes on, I feel like programming some C++ and every time I do some C++ I HAVE to go to youtube and put that song on. 

I know... the song isn't even that good.

This time around, I've started listening to a much better song, and I think I'll be able to live with having to put this on every time I do some server side java programming.  It's got this big sexy hook I think you guys are going to dig.

More books

So I've been planning some more stuff out for how the game is going to work, but I'm going to have to have a better idea of what to use on the server side.  I've been talking about it with some of my computer science friends and while some of the students see no problem with using PHP for the server programming, one of the guys (who actually works with a lot of server programming) recommended specifically not using PHP to handle anything at all because it's completely unthreaded.

He recommended something like Java with EJB3 or something more like that.  I've only taken enterprise server programming courses in .NET (which seems pretty similar with the whole "not caring about what the client is" deal and the whole "on an application server" thing), but I don't want to have to spend money getting that from Microsoft if I actually start making money.  1 student license probably won't cut it.

So, I went and picked up a couple of books on some JEE stuff, a book called EJB3 in Action and JAVA Concurrency in Practice.  That last one is just for a bit of fun.

Looks like a got quite a bit of learning ahead of me!

As a side note, I think I may have found an artist for the game. I still have to send him a message about what kind of stuff I need done up (probably after my midterm tomorrow), but I've seen some of his work and it's good.

iPhone 5 release

So it looks like Apple got their stuff together for this next release and it's not going to be a staggered release for AT&T and Verizon like it was for the iPhone 4.  It's a shame, more Android phones could have been sold if they had.  Guess I'd better get started working on programming for the iPhone as well in order to do a simultaneous release too!

http://gear.ign.com/articles/116/1169681p1.html

Devices

There's so many more devices that I need to plan for than I had originally anticipated.  I didn't know so many Android phones / tablets had come out in the last year.

Testing to make sure stuff comes up on all of them is going to be a pain.  Hopefully tablets stick to 7 and 10 inch models.

I guess I'm going to have to include some sort of money-back if we can't get it to run on your Android device type of guarantee.  With how painfully slow the new virtual device manager / emulator is, I'm probably going to have to test, at most, to see if something actually shows up on the test screen.

I wonder how other app makers do it. 

Some questions about this for you all though:

How would you all feel if you bought a game for your phone and had to send an email to the creator to get something small fixed? 

Would you bother doing it? 

Would you prefer to just be able to get your money back?

Windows Phone to take over? I'll get over it

So yea, just a quick note, this is another reason to make the game platform independent:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-20061820-75.html?tag=rtcol;pop

No matter who wins, I still win!  I'm thinking I should do a simultaneous release though... Beta with Android at least.