Comment Re:Wait until the Jews see this... (Score 1) 347
This is why the
This is why the
"Touch surfaces don't want to be vertical" absolutely completely obviously true to anyone who's used one for any length of time.
After 15 seconds you're already thinking "uh oh" and after five minutes it become torture.
I hear Chuck Norris uses one while hanging completely inverted suspended only by his toenails.
"Professional" mobile games (i.e. by commercial dev companies) are almost universally written in straight C/C++ with minimal ObjectiveC / Dalvik wrappers to get to the phone hardware.
If you have a hit title, do you -really- want to have to rewrite the whole thing from top to bottom to port it to other platforms?
I spent several months a few years back working hard to convince my employer (a certain US carrier) that going ahead and launching a J2ME-based mobile platform (in the last 00's - this is post-iPhone, people) was would elicit nothing more than mockery (and, at best, shovelware) from the developer community. My employer subsequently canned the idea, and I like to think that my steely knives helped kill the beast.
My main argument was that forcing developers to rewrite significant portions of code almost guarantees you won't get major titles, regardless of your hardware lineup.
One of the smartest things Google did with Android was the NDK; I recently ported a top-10 iPhone 3d game (written 99% in straight C/++) to Android NDK and including my getting-to-know-you time I was done in 3 weeks. Was scorchingly fast on the Galaxy Tab compared to iPad.
The frank reality is that iOS is very obviously the largest mobile platform for developers, and others (Android, WP7, WebOS etc) must make it as easy as possible to port titles over.
Google did a marvellous job of adding this capability; NDK gives you plenty enough bare metal to port easily from other platforms.
I've not looked at WebOS
Android and iPhone can handle running native code apps just fine. If WP7 can't make itself a viable (easy!) porting target like Android, it's going to be spending a lot of Saturday nights at home watching TV waiting for the phone to ring.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/
Skip to 5:20 in.
Gene Cranick (interviewed sitting in front of his incinerated house) is politely presented faced with many of the above arguments.
The interviewer does his best to be nice... you can actually hear his brain start to boil at 8:50
He went to *Israel* and offered them dishwater-grade intelligence?
Well it saves Akamai the hassle of doing staff intelligence tests.
for a Burning Man project, using a spherical screen and a 6-channel sound system;
http://frickinlaserbeams.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5muJOcAd7c
Various construction vids at
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=EAEC79EF55D409D2
Works great but green's really where it's at. Blue and Red are much, much dimmer and have shorter persistence.
Alas my shit was not together in time to work properly on the playa... I'll be back this year with the real thing...
"Confound these ancestors.... They've stolen our best ideas!" - Ben Jonson