@kylerichter

‘Nuff Said

Okay well it has been a little bit more then a month but the point remains valid. Trivial has been out for a little over a month now and I thought I would share some of the things that have happened over that time. 

Well it has certainly been a roller coaster ride to say the least. iPhone development has it good days and its bad days. Apple has made some significant improvements that benefit iPhone developers that I will touch on as well. 

The entire time I was working on Trivial I was really worried that I would be beaten to the market by another trivia game. When Trivial was released it was the first iPhone trivia game, and it allowed me to relax a little bit. That relaxation was brought to a sharp end two days later when the competitors started to show up. I remain confident that Trivial is by far the best trivia game out there still, and continues to improve all the time. 

There have been several upgrades to Trivial over the month to bring in feature request and improvements and I have many more to add in the near future. I have added multiple game modes, iPod music support, a new interface, high scores and a plethora of other enhancements. There are also 5 new versions of Trivial coming through the pipe and in approval with Apple right now. 

Network play is a major feature request and I am happy to announce it will be available in the next major version 1.3. The networking system that I will be using will allow head to head play with anyone in the world and will allow the player to find everyone else playing Trivial nearby. It is very “Apple-Like” and will be a very smooth type of networking. Most of the networked iPhone games out there require a LAN to play on. Trivial’s networking will work seamlessly across LANs, Edge and 3G networks. Look forward to these new features “soon”.

Apple has made major improvements both with developer relations and with the iPhone itself. Developers are now able to look at daily sales results instead of just monthly. The portal that we mange our Apps through have seen significant improvements as well. The iPhone 2.1 firmware has fixed several issues that plagued developers such as the infamous crash on launch bug that was often blamed on the App itself. 

I have begun working on several new iPhone Apps that will be appearing in the App Store soon. Also don’t forget to look for Trivial Science, Trivial History, Trivial Technology, Trivial Movies and the free Trivial Lite in the App store next week.

Today, well yesterday if you want to get technical Dragon Forged Software released Trivial for the iPhone. Trivial is that secret project that I have spent the last several months of my life on. Trivial is the world’s first native iPhone trivia game. 

We initially released 3 question packs for the game engine; general, sports and pop culture. Plans are in place to release many additional versions including history, geography, technology, TV, movies, and specialized sports such as baseball, basketball, hockey, ect. If you would like to see any specialized questions drop us a line. 

Getting Trivial to the market was our first priority, however we have many features planned for the future. Already in the works is web based high scores, multiple game modes, and resumable play. I have also started to look into iPhone networking and the possibility of network play is strong. 

Right now I am just happy it is out and I can slow down for a few days, the last couple of months have been a nonstop ride and it feels good to be able to catch my breath. 

For the last couple of months I have been working on getting some iPhone software out into the world. I have put in very long hours and have neglected a great deal of sleep to do so. The good news is our games are finished. While it is still too early to disclose exactly the nature of what I am releasing I can say that I will be submitting a set of 3 games to the App Store for Apple’s approval. I hope to have everything submitted by Monday the 4th, a bit later then I hoped but I want to make sure everything is working right the first time. Rumor has it that there is up to a 4 week delay for application approval which freaks me out a bit since it will be a painful month of watching and waiting. Hopefully I get lucky and get in quicker. 

The paranoia comes from the fact that we currently have no competitors on the iPhone, not one. It is not like the software we have designed is especially original. It has just been a strangely overlooked market. Which also means that I have no comparison for how to price the software. Every day when I wake up a look on the App Store in utter fear that someone else has beaten us to the market. We have been very lucky so far since like I said it is not a complex idea, and I personally believe it has a very large market. 

So through all these months of NDA and secrecy we are just about ready to finish the first official iPhone experiment here at Dragon Forged and I am very excited. I have picked a price point which I believe is very fair to our users, in fact my original price point was significantly higher when the project was started. 

We still have a lot of loose ends to tie up before we can go live, the race is not over by a long shot. Granted the engine is done and the code is all but finalized. Our music is completed and working well, our graphics are inserted and all known bugs have been crushed. We are still waiting on our icon designer to finish up our 3 icons and most importantly one of our content providers (this will make more sense when I release more app details) is still finishing up the finial stages of his work. Our content provider has assured us everything would be done by “this weekend” and my original time frame for the icon designer was by this upcoming sunday. So pending any disasters, which wouldn’t shock me, you should see Dragon Forged in the App Store sometime in August. 

The iPhone is an amazing platform for both an end user as well as a software developer. For the benefit of this post I will be talking about the iPhone strictly from a developer standpoint, although I hope that end users will benefit from some of my insights. 

Programming on the Mac has greatly improved over the last several years. The tools have gotten better, the support is unmatched, and the users are amazing. Many developers will notice more Mac sales then PC sales for the same product even with the much smaller market share. This can be caused by several factors such as less programs available, but it is true nonetheless. 

When talking about areas like NYC, LA, Seattle, Phoenix, and Chicago you could easily fit all the Mac shareware developers from each area into a single room. It has become a very tight knit community over the last few years and it is not uncommon to have heard of developers before meeting them.

Even with all these great benefits of programming on the Mac one of the hardest things to do is let people know about your software. It is hard to target only Mac users on the internet unless you are going to a mac specific site. Even then the majority of Apple users do not regularly visit sites like MacUpdate, TUAW, and VersionTracker. Apple downloads section is a bit better but still not great. In the Apple Menu on every Mac there is a link for “Mac OS X Software…” which takes you to Apple’s Downloads section, but how many of you have ever clicked it?

Well before I start to get even more off topic, I better explain what this has to do with the iPhone. The iPhone and the “App Store” that will be included with it is what we call a captive market. What this means is that every single person who owns an iPhone will have access to your software. Not only will they have access but they will have access wherever they go. This is something that really has never been available to shareware developers before.

Let me shed some light on how vital this is. You are in a bar and want to look up some new drinks, hop onto your iPhone and grab a drink mixer application. You are waiting to see a doctor, hop on the iPhone and purchase a $2 game to pass the time. You are lost in NYC’s Subway system and can’t find a map, again onto the App Store. The ability to purchase software when you want it anywhere in the country (world) is priceless. It will create a whole new type of software consumer. 

Plus the market is much wider then only people with Macs, iPhones are very popular and with the upcoming introduction of the iPhone 3G even more people will be buying them. Apple is handling all credit card and billing processing so that even eliminates a good deal of the support arm of the software. All in all it is a tremendous opportunity for a platform. It would appear that tons of non-mac developers are realizing this as well and starting to write software for the iPhone. This is where the problem (for me) starts. 

There is currently an iPhone NDA, which basically states you are not allowed to talk about any code or anything you are writing for the iPhone. Add that to the surge of people making iPhone software and what you have is thousands of people coding applications with no idea what anyone else is doing. This creates several issues.

   • There will very likely be several of the same kind of application available. How many people do you think are working on things like tic-tac-toe right now?
   • There will very likely be a wide price range for similar products, since no one has any idea what to price their software at. 
   • As a developer you have no idea what the requirements will be needed for software to be accepted, I would like to think that through Apple’s screening process it will be hard to get software into the App Store. Otherwise we could be completely buried by hundreds of “Hello World” applications.
   • As a developer I have no idea what anyone else is working on, whenever I come up with a good iPhone idea I convince myself that 10 other people are already writing it and plan to release it as freeware.
   • Navigating on the iPhone is as easy as it can get but it is still a small screen it will be very difficult to search through 10,000 applications.  

In light of these issues I have taken a wait and see approach. Seeing what is in the App Store on launch and what the prices are will give me a good idea of what projects I can work on for the iPhone. It is going to be a very exciting year when it comes to iPhone development and I hope to be able to have enough time to write some software and contribute to a historic era. 

Late last night I released Renew. Renew is a new application based off the time tested Looking Glass engine. A couple of months ago while handling some Looking Glass related business it occurred to me that the engine itself could be used to virtually download anything as a desktop image. The exact time that the idea for Renew occurred to me has unfortunately been lost to the ages. 

With Looking Glass the user selects a webcam and displays the feed from that camera, one of the tradeoffs of using live images is the quality is normally very poor. What Renew does is scour the web for desktop images and adds them to a giant randomized list. Renew at a set interval downloads an image from this list and uses it as your desktop picture. The result is thousands of full quality images from all over the internet. 

There was some hesitation to ever program Renew because the images it was finding and downloading did in no way belong to Dragon Forged Software. All the images it finds are on publicly accessible free desktop websites. Since the license for the images is typically for private and personal use we would be unable to bundle them with Renew in anyway, without contacting thousands of artist and photographers. This would also swell the size of renew to a couple of gigabytes. To keep everything on the up and up Renew downloads these images in exactly the same way that you would with a web browser, it does not store the images locally or on our servers at all. As a benefit this also means the Renew is constantly evolving and finding new images as well as removing images that are no longer available. This creates a constantly new and fresh desktop. 

Renew was released in what we call a cold release. It is a technique that I have used for the last three software releases I have done. The software is released but we do not tell anyone. Only people who stumble across the website are aware that there is new software available. In the event that the software has a major bug the amount of effected users is much lower then would be with a typically full scale launch. Tuesday I will send out my normal press releases, thursday when initial demand has cooled I will publish to the update sites, and next week I will look into promotional ads on mac related websites. The software is slowly released over a period of about a week, which also greatly reduces the surge on our website as well. 

I hope everyone enjoys Renew and I look forward to hearing back from our users with suggestions for future releases. 

With the SDK(Software Development Kit) for the iPhone now available and the increase market share of OS X the need for companies to integrate the Macintosh platform into their work flow is greater then ever. Many companies have begun seeking independent contract programmers to code Mac software for them. 

Dragon Forged Software is pleased to bring consulting and programming services into its mainstream product line. With over five years of Macintosh development experience and previous contracting experience Dragon Forged Software is the perfect solution to your Mac software needs. We are available to work on both the iPhone and OS X projects and look forward to diving into this blossoming market. 

As some of the frequent visitors of the site may have noticed the blog has recently been revamped. I migrated from Moveable Type to Wordpress and removed all the personal blog post. My personal blog has been moved to weirdinternets.com and this blog is now strictly a Dragon Forged development blog. If you are looking for my old blog here it is achieved at www.dragonforged.com/blog. 

Well it is kind of a moot point since I won’t update the links to the new Blog until Renew is released in the next couple of weeks and I add the product links for it. 

Yes this blog will remain ad supported for the time being, it takes a slight load off the company and allows us to absorb the hosting fees for the entire site. So in the end it saves everyone a couple of cents on the software. I have tried to keep the ads as unobtrusive as possible, hopefully they won’t get in the way.

When I returned to actively working on my own software after a two year hiatus working on other people’s projects I had a list that was slowly building of things I wanted to code. Every time I got one of those “I should write that” moments I tossed it into my iPhone. After I rewrote Looking Glass to slow the number of emails I was getting about it I was ready to move onto new projects.