MJ writes about the iPhone for games:
- The tools for building are readily available and free (though there’s a £50 charge for the certificate)
- Due to the App Store distribution, the customers are accessible and many of them are looking for new software to load
- The hype machine is already built
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I think this outlook on the existing mobile gaming market is misleading. The tools for building games are free and stable (Java Mobile has been out for over five years, and is supported on every modern handset) and virtually every carrier has their own equivalent to the App Store. While in the UK, I downloaded about 10 games from Vodafone Live, because it was simple and built into my phone.
Most of them are quite complex games. Yes, they are not up to the standard that we’re used to from desktop or console gaming, nor even necessarily as good as what I got from my DS Lite, but most of that was because of the form factor of the phone, not limitations of the tools or the publishers. Given the cost of the game was a fraction of what a game costs for any of those platforms (between 1 and 5 GBP as opposed to 30-50) it lowered the barrier of entry for me to buy – having it easily available and categorized made it simpler still.
However, MJ’s second and third points are the critical ones. People with iPhones are early adopters and are keen to try new things, and there is a lot of hype. Someone with a great game has the potential to have a huge following in a very short space of time. Having an entry point at $5 (or something similar) means that for most people they won’t even think about the spend – that’s the same price as a large cappuccino – and given how easy it will be to communicate about how good the games are (you’re using the ultimate communicator after all) I would expect that several games will swiftly become a staple on everyone’s iPhone.
A word of caution: iPhone development is not like any other platform, not even the Mac. Game development is not like developing any other type of software. And this cross-section of markets will likely be very cutthroat.
Anyone using Wordpress should beware some nasty hacks, like that recently suffered by my good friend. Creators of malware should every bone in their hands broken. Twice.
MJ recently blogged about identifying one’s own strengths. I thought it would be useful to share a tool that I’ve used over the last seven years as a herder of cats (read: software development manager). I call it the self-development window (or the career development window, as I often use it for that purpose). It looks a bit like this:
(The astute among you will notice some similarities with SWOT Analysis).
To use the window, just fill in something in each of the first three boxes. Don’t worry about filling them in in order, just put them in whatever order occurs to you.
Strengths
This area includes the skills you use on a daily basis, or that people come to you ask questions about. Often (especially with software folks) we think in terms of technical skills – i.e. the skills where we actually do something or produce something, so don’t forget the so-called softer skills: communication, planning, leadership, etc.
Areas for Improvement
Things that you want to get better at. This might be particular skills that you want to learn, or some area of other knowledge you want to acquire. Many people find that they want to improve in many things, so sometimes this area gets crowded – don’t worry, that’s normal.
Goals
Goals differ from Areas for Improvement in that they are things that you can check off to say you’ve accomplished. For example “Learn to program in Objective-C” is an Area for Improvement, but “Write a commercial app in Objective-C and sell a copy to someone I don’t know” is a goal. Also, goals tend to include things that are much longer in time span than Areas for Improvement – e.g. “I want to become CEO of a company with more than 100 employees”. Make sure it’s easy to measure that you’ve accomplished them – ‘checkbox’ style items work best in my experience.
Tasks
Once you’ve finished with the first three sections, put a time frame on the Tasks section (I usually say three months) and then put specific tasks in there that you can accomplish in the next three months. These tasks must help you improve in one of your Areas or help you achieve one of your goals (or both!). Often you use your Strengths to help accomplish these tasks.
OK, so now what?
I get each of my team members to do this every three months. Then every two weeks we have a chat about how things are going (those chats are not solely about this Window, but it does come up – my job is to help them achieve all their tasks) just to make sure there aren’t any roadblocks and that all the tasks still make sense. If you’re doing this for self-development, it’s probably worth looking at this every week to see if you can accomplish any Task in the week, or work on it. Make sure you:
- check off any Task or Goal that gets accomplished
- do the exercise again after your allotted Task time elapses (i.e. every 3 months in my case)
- move Areas for Improvement into Strengths once you’ve learned what you set to learn
- look back over your Windows for the year to see what you’ve accomplished and to help motivate for the next year
I’m not sure if the form-factor of a Window actually makes any difference: it evolved from my need to write it all on a whiteboard. I do think it’s useful to have all four areas up on the board at once because sometimes your mind goes blank and writing other things helps jog your memory.
http://tinyurl.com/5b98j8
(Creative Commons Attribution license)
mj writes:
- are university degrees worth the bother?
- are universities correctly servicing the IT industry (and specifically the games dev market) with skills, knowledge, toolsets?
- why have IT graduates decreased from 1900 in 2004 to 600 in 2007?
- are we seeing a knock on effect from technology failures in the province, e.g. Nortel, Seagate
- with the improvement of toolsets, a lone hobbyist can create ‘flickr’ or ‘facebook’. Is this relevant?
- will we see an upsurge again with demand from Citigroup, Aepona, ATG etc?
Degrees are only useful to get you your first job. If you’ve got your first IT job without a degree, then you don’t need one. After that, it should be possible to achieve what you want with a bit of hard work. At least that’s what I’ve found.
I don’t think universities can be blamed (too much) for not servicing the industry, just given the nature of each. A degree takes 3-4 years to complete, and the content of it is usually created before the degree starts. 3-4 years is a long time in computer terms: 2-3 generations of processor speeds, anywhere from 1-4 major releases of software/language/OS. Really, the best a degree can hope to do is teach good guiding principles and a reasonably relevant language (and yes, I do think Java is probably the best language to learn at Uni).
As a recruiting manager, I’ve found that IT graduates are decreasing for two reasons: the pay is not what it used to be, and you can’t become a millionaire overnight any more. Ironic, given that starting pay has now gone up and some 2.0 companies *are* becoming overnight millionaires. This same trend in hiring is across the world, not just Northern Ireland.
Technology failures: maybe – however, both of those companies are large multi-nationals who opened an outsourced hardware plant in the province. To jump ahead to your last bullet point, these new companies are doing the same but for software/services, which (arguably) has a lower capital investment and, given the more dynamic nature of it, a higher chance of success. I think Northern Ireland really needs some more home-grown successes, and preferably ones that aren’t as staid as Lagan.
Toolsets: it’s semi-relevant. See my earlier post.
Software is not about code. It is about your company’s relationships. I have started seen companies with innovative products that use cutting edge technologies fail, simply because they didn’t understand their relationship with their customers, or didn’t understand it in time. Likewise, companies with demonstrably crap software (or even vaporware) thrive because they know who and what pays their bills.
This is both good news and bad news. Given how easy it is today to create any kind of app (and it’s getting easier, with Apple, Amazon, Google and Yahoo! all pushing open source frameworks and cheap services to lower the barrier of entry) the bad news is that your cash cow is easily copied by a Small Team with a tight focus. The good news is that if you are doing things right, it’s not about your software it’s about your relationships. So, once Small Team has created a faster, more scaleable, prettier version of your app but fails to get anywhere because you have your market sewn up, why not just buy them instead of spending money trying to compete on features? That works for Small Team too, because they get to continue to focus on what they do best (innovating) while someone else handles the money.
This approach seems to work well for non-software companies. I’ve seen software companies acquired by more “brick-and-mortar” enterprises, simply because said enterprise needed the technology to compete and didn’t want their competitors to be able to buy it.
I’ve had my MBP since November. Thanks to Moore’s Law, there is now a faster and shinier version available, which means that the price for a used 2.4Ghz MacBook Pro with the same specs as mine has dropped to about $2000 (according to eBay).
This is actually good news for me. I was considering selling the laptop so I could help fund various other things I needed to do. By the time I’m able to sell, the price will be low enough that it won’t be worth my while 
I just recently finished taking a course as a rescue diver. In it, I learned techniques for dealing with a panicked diver on the surface and underwater, dealing with unconscious divers, rescue breathing, CPR and many other things I’d never done before.
The instructor pointed out that I kept apologizing every time I did something wrongly. She pointed out that I’d never done it before, and that I was on the course to learn how to do it. This seemed obvious, as soon as she mentioned it, but it got me to thinking about why I was apologizing.
There’s an old saying about not being able to teach an old dog new tricks. People apply this to themselves as they get older as a way to say they can’t learn anything new.
The conclusion I reached is that I was apologizing for being incompetent. I’m used to being good at the things I do: whether it’s professionally or personally, after 31 years on the planet I’ve become reasonably competent at a whole bunch of things. Trying to learn new skills makes me incompetent again, and there’s a fear of failure that goes with that. It’s a lot easier to deal with now that I’ve acknowledged it – this fear is purely a fear of appearing foolish or incompetent.
Next time I’m learning something new, I just need to acknowledge that it’s OK to be incompetent
I was out on a boat trip just off the coast when we spotted some dolphins. The adults came over by the boat and led us away from where the babies were feeding, which of course made for some great photos. Here are a few – apologies for small file size, but uploading from here is a pain.
