iOS/Web Developer's Life in Beta

Boomle is by far the lowest-selling app I have published on the iTunes App Store, and sadly as a result I just haven’t had the motivation to dedicate more time to it. However it’s times that I see people using it in person that I see just how much people enjoy playing it. I really hope I’ll have time to revisit it, because it’s one of those games that people just “get”, and is enjoyably challenging throughout the whole game.

Most anyone reading my blog won’t know what the game is, so let me explain a little.  Boomle is a relaxing game featuring balls bouncing around the screen.  They move slowly and peacefully, but if you tap anywhere on the screen you set of a small explosion.  If it encounters any of the floating balls, the ball it comes in contact with will explode as well.  This causes a chain reaction, detonating any other balls in their path.

The goal of the game is to eliminate a minimum number of balls per level, but extra points are awarded if additional balls over the minimum requirement are exploded.  And when each ball explodes, it makes a chiming musical sound.

Most people using the game for the first time will:

1. Instinctually tap in the center of the screen;
2. Try to tap directly on a ball, instead of in empty space (but in a place where a ball will travel to);
3. Try to tap more than once to set off more explosions per level (which isn’t permitted).

My hope is that I can improve on the game to take advantage of the default actions people find most familiar or intuitive.  For instance, add a better scoring system that can keep track of your score over time.  When you have enough of a score you can get a second “bomb” to blow up in your level.  Each new level will give you a new bomb to detonate, but if you do well, you can acquire more bombs that you can use up on some pesky levels.

Another thing I’d like to add is an initial “Tutorial” level that has some text overlays to show how to play the game.  And to make the game more challenging, and to allow for more than the current 11 levels, I’d also like to add obstacles to make the bounce pattern of the balls inconsistent, or special balls that you should avoid detonating.

Unfortunately because of the way the game is built there are a few minor bugs, but more importantly the way the code is written makes it difficult for minor refactors.  In fact, I’m fairly certain the game will need a complete overhaul or maybe even rewrite in order to improve upon it.

In light of my limited time to work on my personal projects, as well as the aggressive roadmap I have for myDrumPad, I doubt whether I’ll have any time in the next few months to work on Boomle. Normally I’d just chalk a project like this up as a failure (the app itself works, but failed to net any large amount of sales) but since the game is so fun, and everyone I see actively playing the game absolutely enjoys it, it makes me feel guilty for leaving it behind in the dust.

If people were to discover the app and give it a try, I’m sure it would do a heck of a lot better. But due to the app’s poor visuals on the app store, it’s not something most people would try out just for the heck of it. Game Center support might help, as well as a way to share goals and achievements with friends on other places such as Twitter, etc. Beyond that, it seems like the mobile gaming space is just too noisy for a quiet and unassuming game like Boomle to be able to compete.

For as long as I’ve been a developer, there was only ever once when I had a machine that I felt was an adequate development workstation. That was around 2001 when I had a dual-proc 667MHz P3 768MB RAM and three 17″ CRT monitors. This baby put out enough heat that my home-office didn’t need a heater on during the rainy Seattle winters; in fact, it was so warm in there that I’d wear shorts, a tee-shirt, and left the window wide open.

Since that time though, my computer has typically been limited to a laptop, my biggest since that dual-proc furnace being a 17″ Powerbook G4. Being a developer, there are three priorities that stand out above all others: screen real-estate, memory and CPU speed. Due to my history of being a web developer, only the first item on that list was a big priority. Since becoming an iOS developer, where your productivity is directly related to how fast you can compile your app, and how fast your performance profiling tools can run, I’ve encountered the other barriers developers face.

In the past though, I’ve largely been a cheap developer, opting to get by with what I have, or doing whatever I can to improve my productivity in other areas. However, for the first time since that space-heater with a RAID array, I have an opportunity to get the workstation I’ve been dreaming of.

Since I run my own personal business on the side, I can take advantage of tax deductions that normally wouldn’t be available to me. Computer purchases, like other capital expenditures, can be tax deductible, so the money I would have to pay the Government in the form of taxes, can be deducted from what I owe them. Normally only a certain percentage of that purchase price can be written off per year, in a process called amortization, so it’s effects are only moderately felt.

In Canada, as part of their economic stimulus package they put together to boost small business spending, they instituted a limited-time Capital Cost Allowance for 100% tax deductions on computer hardware and software purchases made between January 27th 2009 and February 1st 2011.

Think of it this way: assume I had a decent year of app sales on the iTunes App Store, and because of my extra income, let’s say I owe the Government $10,000 in taxes. Normally my only recourse is to dig up $10k (which, since I’m a good little business owner, has been sitting in a savings account all year long) and hand it over to Revenue Canada.

But because of this stimulus package, I have an option. I can instead buy $4,000 worth of computer hardware necessary to effectively run my business, and then only give $6,000 to the Government. No need to spread that deduction out over several years, no need to have the accounting hassle of carrying that equipment value over year after year. I see, I buy, I save.

There are limitations of course. Just as with other business deductions, you can’t cheat and take advantage of the system for your own profit. At home I use the equipment in support of my iOS development, web development, and any testing I need to do.

So what do I get for my last year?

This is the last year you can take advantage of this deduction, which really is a shame. But now that my side work is taking me to more and more demanding areas, such as Core Audio, OpenGL, and a little bit of video work, I feel that now is the time to invest in that dream machine I’ve always wanted and needed.

The question is, what’ll it be? Do I add on a cinema display to my laptop? Do I get a fully pimped-out quad-core iMac 27″? Or do I splurge and get both?  Based on my preliminary estimates for how much I’ll be owing in taxes, here’s my shopping list:

I’m probably going to wait until mid-December, or perhaps in January when I get back from my various weeks of travel.  What are your thoughts?  And if you’re a Canadian iOS business owner, what are you going to do to take advantage of the capital cost allowance?

Today, I’m proud to announce that I’m officially a Canadian Citizen!  I’ve lived in Canada for 7 years now and almost all of my family lives here, but since I was born in California, I’ve technically been an American for all that time…until today.

No longer will I have to sheepishly explain myself when US teams play against the Canucks.  No longer will I have to carry a stupid Permanent Resident card with me when flying home to Canada.  And probably most importantly, I no longer will I have to worry about losing my immigrant status if I need to stay out of the country for more than 6 months in a year.

There is one interesting drawback to all of this: I neglected to realize that once I became a citizen, I’d lose my Permanent Resident card, required for a landed immigrant to return to Canada when travelling abroad.  Normally this wouldn’t be too big of an issue, but I have to fly to San Francisco in a week for business with Salesforce.com.  ACK!

I’m doing the mad-dash rush to apply for my Canadian passport, booking my flight, getting passport photos taken, and all the other machinations needed to get from here to there without being detained by airport security.  This is the only black mark on an otherwise awesome occasion.

Go Canada!

I’ve been working recently on getting more exposure to my existing apps, especially myDrumPad.  It’s a fun app, and I have a few more updates that are in the works when I get a couple of free weekends, but frankly I’d like to see its sales figures climb a bit higher than they are now.  Of course, if you’re an iOS developer, you’ll know the biggest thing that can improve your sales rankings is to be featured on the AppStore.  A large part of getting featured is left up to lucky chance, but to improve your odds, one of the things you can do is to target Apple employees with Facebook ads of your application.  Read on to see the results I’ve had so far.

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Some of you who follow me on Twitter may have noticed recently that I’ve been talking about working for a new company.  This week is my first week working for Salesforce.com.  I’m really excited about the move for a number of reasons, some of which I’ll go into here.

As of this past Monday, I’m now a full-time iOS developer, instead of being limited to evenings and weekends.  I’m a new addition to an amazing team of developers at Salesforce.com developing apps to be released to the App Store, utilizing their amazing cloud-computing infrastructure.  From a technology standpoint this is right up my alley, and the company seems to have a great commitment to quality, agility and a good work environment.

This is a big change for me not only because it’s a new company, but because it’s an entirely different identity.  I’ve always referred to myself as a “Web Developer” when asked by friends, family, etc.  For 15 years I’ve worked in the web space, developing server- and client-side applications using Perl, JavaScript, and any number of other technologies in between.  But now when people ask, that answer no longer fits.  So starting this week, I have a new identity in my career.

I’ve always preferred to be on the leading edge of whatever technology it is I’m working in.  When I started, I wasn’t content simply building static sites; I pushed myself toward dynamically-generated sites.  When that became the norm, I instead focused on multi-lingual and multi-view sites.  That later turned into rich client-side applications, which later became known as “Ajax” webapps.  In recent years this too has become a bit passé.  This is what drew me to mobile development in the first place.

While I’ve been developing mobile apps for the past 2 years, I now can officially refer to myself as a professional iOS developer.  It feels good.

P.S.: I’m still continuing my work on my own personal iOS app business Decaf Ninja Software.  I’m continuing to maintain my existing apps, as well as develop new and interesting apps.  I learned to develop mobile apps through my side business, which is what launched this new career direction.  It only makes sense to continue that practice to improve my skills in areas such as Core Audio, OpenGL-ES and other more meaty areas that my work at Salesforce.com may not include.

I’m an avid “Idea Man”.  I love coming up with new ideas; for iPhone apps, for web apps, and even for real-world inventions.  Most of my ideas only sound great in my head, but when I open my mouth the idea seems to turn sour.  A smaller number of ideas manage to survive the thought-to-word boundary.  An even smaller minority of those ideas manage to make it down onto my “Idea Book” that I use to keep track of all the potential projects I’m going to work on.  Admittedly it’s not so much a single “book” as a collection of binders, scraps of paper, and in some cases 3×5 index cards.

Suffice to say amongst all those ideas, some gems manage to stand out above the rest.  A few I’ve actually finished, such as Boomle and myDrumPad.  The end product is seldom what I’d planned when I came up with the idea, but either due to time constraints, or the project evolving during the course of its development, things change.  Mostly I’m pleased with the end result, but there are some things I wish I had time for.  For instance, I’d like to re-implement Boomle using Cocos2D to make the animations smoother, and maybe add some extras such as obstacles, more challenging levels and Game Center integration.

Unfortunately, while I absolutely love myDrumPad, my original plans for it involved the creation of loops and patterns within the app.  Once I built it and started playing with it in real-time, as opposed to my ideas jotted down on paper, I discovered that the interface — while easy to use for quickly tapping out beats — doesn’t lend itself easily to creating loops.  I could create loops, sure, but my goal was to create an app that could be used in live performances, and sadly the interface just doesn’t lend itself to real-time editing of loops.  That’s not to say that I’m unhappy with myDrumPad.  Sales are going fairly well, and I have a few more updates planned.  I’m still adding additional languages to it using ICanLocalize.com (currently it has native support for English, Korean and French, and Japanese and German are following soon).

One of my constant loves for as long as I have been programming has been music and sound production.  And since I’m a rather unconventional thinker, I’d like to try my hand at an unconventional music interface.  I like the idea that someone without any knowledge of music notation or performance can learn to use my apps to produce the music they hear in their head, and to express themselves in ways they wouldn’t otherwise be able to.

I’m still formulating an idea in my head, but the loop and patterns features I was planning for myDrumPad are going to be built into a new application instead, with a completely different interface.  Like myDrumPad, it will be an experiment to see if producing music in this new UI metaphor will be successful.  It’s hard to explain, so I’m going to wait until I have a more accurate prototype to show.

But this app idea doesn’t exist in isolation.  In my little book of ideas I have several on-the-go prototypes just itching to get started, but since I still maintain a day job (and will for the foreseeable future) my time is limited to a few hours per day, and weekends.  My web-based space game, my photo sharing web application, my sonar-based iPhone utility app…all these ideas are stuck in my head as fantastic ideas I’d love to pursue, if only I had the time.

I’m sure it will be an interesting adventure to see which idea wins out in the end.  Do I build a web-based MMOG space game set in an infinitely-scalable universe?  Or do I build a Core Audio-based iPhone utility?  How do I determine which project has the highest likelihood of succeeding, or at least have the greatest likelihood of being finished in a reasonable time-frame by a single developer?

In an ideal world I’d build all of them.  Unfortunately, as an idea man, I think of ideas of varying awesomeness faster than I can build them.  As long as I require sleep, I suppose I’ll be stuck in this situation.

Wow the past few months have been quite a wild ride, and a ton of things have happened!  So much has gone on and I’ve been writing so much software that I haven’t had the time to blog about it.  In the time I’m not writing software, I’d rather spend it with my wife than spend it writing about the software I’d written.

Over the past few months, while the PhoneGap team started a major refactor of their codebase, I spent some time learning more about Objective-C and UIKit, and discovered that writing native software on the iPhone is a heck of a lot easier than I’d previously expected. It shouldn’t have surprised me, because I’ve heard rave reviews from developers I have a great deal of respect for, and it also shouldn’t come as a great shock that Apple treats their developer SDKs with the same degree of polish and attention-to-detail that they do to their hardware. So while I was working with PhoneGap I’d contributed a number of plugins exposing the iPhone’s native UI elements to JavaScript-based apps, I’ll no longer be updating or adding any new plugins.

While my blog was collecting dust, I also finished a PhoneGap-based app, Parking Mobility, and while it was nice to start the project in familiar languages like HTML and JavaScript, a ton of time ended up getting eaten up chasing random bugs, memory leaks, and strange UI behaviours that required odd work-arounds to eliminate.  In the end I discovered I’d spent more time getting the application to market than if I had built it in native code.  Starting this past weekend I’ve begun doing just that, writing the application in UIKit and Objective-C in order to get more performance and a better user-experience out of the app than we have currently.

One of the other big reasons why I haven’t been as chatty on my site as usual is, of course, the launch of the iPad and the iPhone 3.2 SDK.  I decided to hit the ground running with this platform, and used this new SDK as my playground for learning more native development skills.  I developed two applications for the initial launch of the iPad, Boomle and myDrum Pad.

Boomle is an easy-to-play game featuring peaceful sounds, low-touch interaction, and an addictive gameplay.  It was a lot of fun to build, and got me started working with OpenAL, manually drawing displays, and dealing with real-time games.

myDrum Pad in contrast is an interactive drum pad that aims to allow people to tap beats out with a variety of sound packs along to music, or create their own riffs.  It’s still in active development, but this has been a blast.  I’m developing it with CoreData, OpenAL sound playback, multi-touch displays, In-App purchase and asynchronous downloads from Amazon S3.  It’s a highly dynamic UI with a smooth user experience.  It’s also the first iPhone project that I’m directly involving a graphic designer with the whole process, and once we get a beta ready, I’m sure you’ll like the screenshots and demo images we’ll be putting up.

Last, and certainly not least, I’ve changed roles in my day job at Sophos, and am working once again in the Email Security team developing our Email Security Appliance.  I get to play with all sorts of complex problems, web-based administration interfaces, and pretty much every technology under the sun.

Now that these projects have all stabilized, I’ll hopefully be blogging more about Objective-C, Javascript web applications, and technology in general. Plus Summer’s quickly approaching, so hopefully I’ll have some pictures of my motorcycle and any trips my wife and I take this summer up here soon.

Finally, what we’ve all been waiting for.   Apple just announced that they’re allowing In-App purchases for free apps, and not just paid apps. This means, as an app developer, I can develop a single app for the app store for free, but can allow my users to upgrade to the full paid version without having to split it up into a “Lite” and “Full” version.

I can’t wait to apply this to my apps!

Things have been busy over the past few days, which is the reason why I haven’t had a chance to post about this until now. But for the PhoneGap community, I have some good news and some bad news.  First, the good news: I got a phone call from the Apple app reviewer that was reviewing my test app.  And before I go any further, I want to say a few things.

When I crafted my original letter to Apple, I was very cautious how I wrote it, because I don’t want to give anyone the wrong impression. I don’t have any problems with Apple or the fact that they have an app review process. I actually think the strict regulations Apple has with its review process is a good thing for users. If left to their own devices, app developers would release anything and everything whether it had merit or not, in the hopes of earning even a tiny bit of a buck.

That’s not to say that I have nothing but a big warm and fuzzy feeling for the review process, just that it’s like going to the dentist. It’s painful, but you’ll thank them later in life when your teeth would otherwise be falling out – or, in the case of the App Store review process, when the app store would otherwise be overrun with endless seas of buggy and non-functional crap.

Most developers out there seem to vilify the app reviewers, making them out to be legions of sadistic bureaucrats who like nothing more than to waste developer’s time. I’ve never been comfortable with that, because people simply don’t work that way. The app reviewers don’t have an easy job.  They’re not developers, they don’t know how to write apps, they just review them to ensure they meet the guidelines Apple sets forth.

So when they reject your app, it’s not because they’re out to get you, they’re just enforcing policy.  If they make some assumption about your app, perhaps you’re not giving enough information to help them along?  There’s a comments field that you can use to help the reviewer of your app do their job, instead of throwing an app over the fence and saying “Here, take that”.  They don’t owe you anything, and are simply making sure that they cover their asses.  Could you imagine how bad it looked on the guy who reviewed the “Shaking Baby” app? I’m not sure if he lost his job, or just got seriously reprimanded, but this is the sort of thing these guys are trying to prevent.  But because of the black-box nature of the whole process, it’s easy to jump to conclusions.

Finally, before I dig into the meat of my conversation with my App Store app reviewer, I want to point out a few things that many developers seem to have forgotten in their haste to get their apps released:

1.    The app store is a voluntary process; you don’t want to play by their rules, you don’t have to.
2.    All developers signed an agreement that states Apple can choose to reject any apps they want based on their own reasons. There’s no human right’s violations committed when Apple decides that your app isn’t fit for the store for some reason.
3.    Apple is a business, whose goals are to advance their stock and market position for their investors. While some of Apple’s decisions may seem confusing from outside the black box, keep in mind that they are prone to keeping secrets until they throw down their big announcements at whatever annual conference they’re attending. So there are sometimes more reasons why they wouldn’t want some feature leveraged by app developers if they plan to do something much the same themselves. Is it fair? No. Is this what they’re doing? I have no idea, this is speculation on my part.

Now that I have that out of the way, I’d like to relate to you my conversation with Steve from the App Store.

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At the suggestion of my friend Scott McWhirter, I decided to go to Ideas On Tap and keep an eye on the pulse of the Vancouver technology community. And after spending an evening drinking beer and talking with various people from companies around Vancouver, I began to feel like the only married guy in the middle of a speed dating session.

I have a stable and intellectually stimulating day job that I have no plans of leaving anytime soon, but it was still a nice ego boost to be flirted with by so many companies looking for bright talent. In Vancouver, at least, it seems like if you’re smart and you are a creative developer, there’s work out there to be had. In fact they can’t seem to get enough. But unfortunately for them, a lot of developers here are in the same situation I’m in – happy with their current jobs, challenged but not over-worked, and not too interested in changing anytime soon.

I had an opportunity to meet John Chow with his camcorder, trying to get footage of women kissing one another, but the whole evening was basically one giant sausage-fest, as this tweet from him can attest.  I managed to meet one of the guys behind Mobify.me which seems to be quite an interesting product.  In fact, part way through the conversation he mentioned a great project called “PhoneGap” that they were recommending to people looking for more from their mobile platforms.  We both got a kick out of the irony that I’m one of the main developers of its iPhone branch, but nevertheless it was good to hear that other companies see the value in PhoneGap that we do.

The amazing thing was that the entire night was almost exclusively focused around mobile development and the mobile web.  It makes me confident that I’ve decided to play in the right area.  Not only is mobile development a blast, but it seems to be where the biggest focus is of entrepreneurs are these days.