For some excellent examples of apps in the vaunted league that he mentions, check out Beautiful Pixels.
The user interface is everything if you want to compete in the major leagues (e.g. top 100).
It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass iPhone App
51–60 of 93 posts
Re: It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass iPhone App
#52do android developers have many of the same issues?
The quality bar is lower and the customers are miserly and fickle. For lack of a better term, iOS customers are snobs and Android customers are middle class.
Re: It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass iPhone App
#53Are there many examples of iPhone apps that are simultaneously (and somewhat objectively): (1) beautiful, (2) easy to use, and (3) useful, that still don't go anywhere? I've been trolling around the app store for awhile trying to understand the market and what I see are tons of novelty apps, fugly apps (by anyone's standards), buggy apps, and apps that break usability in all kinds of ways. And judging by the lack of…
I been a completely self sufficient iOS developer(i.e I make a living from selling my own apps) for the last 3 years and I can't disagree with you. When I initially started 3 years ago maybe you could get by with just meeting 2 of the 3 criteria you mentioned. My apps at the time were useful and easy to use, but not really beautiful. The free version of one of these apps was getting about 400-500 daily downloads. Aft…
My hat is off to you.
5 of the 6 really good iOS developers I know personally work for clients. The 6th works for a mobile startup and has turned more into a manager.
However, most of them are getting into product as they have done enough consulting to see it is just like a normal job in many ways, no ownership.
I will buy your app later, look forward to showing it to some friends who dabble in music.
Re: It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass iPhone App
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm an indie developer on Android, just starting to make an iOS version of my first app. My app is very well polished (look here http://www.pillowfightgames.com/jargoneer/ ) but it's still insanely hard to do marketing-- probably because I have no idea what I'm doing yet. Although the overall quality level of many apps isn't very good, good quality is still not enough to ensure good sales. Marketing is key, I think.…
Hey, judging by the video I don't agree that your app is 'very well polished'. Check out Cut the Rope, that's the kind of polish that is expected from an App Store game. Suggestions: - Add a tweening for picking up and dropping letters - centering of the board should happen automatically - put the restart button somewhere else. It looks weird when you drop a letter on top of it and it appears behind it (e.g. the 'm'…
I think the app is indeed polished. It looks really good. But you do have a point in that users, specially iOS users, expect a lot of feedback from the app in the form of animations. I remember reading the guys from @mikamobile talking about how they even added a little bounce animation to the characters of Battleheart (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/battleheart/id394057299?mt=8) when the user selects them with a tap. That's something you barely see because the character is under your finger, but it speaks for the amount of animation feedback necessary for a game to look "amazing" in the eyes of a current iOS user.
Re: It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass iPhone App
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is Objective-C a lot better than C++? What do you mean by "the software game industry is wrong too"?
1) Objective-C is a very dynamic (think Smalltalk), less cluttered and more nicely designed language than C++, that can just as easy fall back to plain fast C. 2) For writing applications, desktop or mobile, nothing in the C++ libs ecosystem comes close to Cocoa/Touch. 3) For the task under discussion (iOS apps), it's the standard that get's 100% of official support from Apple, C++ is not.
DirectX is a pretty nice lib in the C++ ecosystem. OpenGL is comparable but I'd argue DX usually leads the cutting edge of graphics capabilities.
Re: It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass iPhone App
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think it's a lamentation over framework per se, but rather a step back from the web-hysteria of a few years ago, where you can pretty much, with a lot of elbow grease (aka Perl) tie together component A with component B and feed it into component C to do something cool/wicked/useful, where they're all giant open source projects. Think of all the crazy things we did pluggin ImageMagick into PHP backed by giant…
"""Think of all the crazy things we did pluggin ImageMagick into PHP backed by giant MySQL instances.""" While I agree those were easy to use, I can't think of any crazy/cool things from that era websites. Most of the cool/useful/nice web stuff is from the Ajax/fast JS/jQuery etc era of late. """I recently pulled in some image recognition libs to my app, and it's an extreme struggle keeping a large, legacy, C++ lib f…
Most of the cool/useful/nice web stuff is from
the Ajax/fast JS/jQuery etc era of late
web development is seldom CPU/Memory-bound
nothing stops you writing plain apps for mobile that
just do the same stuff you did on the web
Re: It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass iPhone App
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
1) Objective-C is a very dynamic (think Smalltalk), less cluttered and more nicely designed language than C++, that can just as easy fall back to plain fast C. 2) For writing applications, desktop or mobile, nothing in the C++ libs ecosystem comes close to Cocoa/Touch. 3) For the task under discussion (iOS apps), it's the standard that get's 100% of official support from Apple, C++ is not.
DirectX is a pretty nice lib in the C++ ecosystem. OpenGL is comparable but I'd argue DX usually leads the cutting edge of graphics capabilities.
Yes, it is. But on mobile at least, I don't think there is much difference, is it?
I mean, if Windows Phone 7 uses DirectX, that is, compare to OpenGL ES.
Re: It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass iPhone App
#58But the reason why developers are shackled to Objective C is to make sure processes finish in human time, and this is fundamentally a performance bottleneck in mobile hardware. I use monotouch. Compiles to ARM assembly. Not seeing any problems. For a generation of coders accustomed to limitless managed memory, high-level programming abstractions, and thousands of deeply functional opensource libraries, mobile is a st…
Yes but Moore's law is applied to phones differently, because battery life is as important as processing power, or even more so.
This is the reason the 600Mhz processor in your phone will have worse performance than a normal 600Mhz processor. Mhz is useless as a measure for performance and it became popular only because of marketing campaigns by Intel, when they had an edge in the Mhz race. A more useful measure (other than running unbiased benchmarks) would be MIPS (millions of instructions per second) and MFLOPS (millions of floating-point instructions per second).
For example an ARM11 from 2002 at 412 MHz was able of 515 MIPS (millions instructions per second), while a Pentium Pro from 1996 was capable of 541 MIPS at 200 MHz. Also an Intel Core i7 EE is capable of 177,730 MIPS at 3.33 GHz, while an AMD Phenom 2 X6 from 2010 is capable of 78,440 MIPS at 3.3 GHz.
Basically your 600Mhz mobile processor is not the same processor you had when playing Counter-Strike a couple of years ago. That's because it is optimized for consumption rather than performance.
Re: It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass iPhone App
#59Making an iPhone app is relatively easy compared to most app development for the history of computing. Doing it well is significantly harder, but then again so is any craft. I dare say it's quite a bit easier than writing your program on a stack of punch cards and waiting 24 hours for the output. Or for that matter, making a chair that will last 100 years.
Re: It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass iPhone App
#60But the reason why developers are shackled to Objective C is to make sure processes finish in human time, and this is fundamentally a performance bottleneck in mobile hardware. I use monotouch. Compiles to ARM assembly. Not seeing any problems. For a generation of coders accustomed to limitless managed memory, high-level programming abstractions, and thousands of deeply functional opensource libraries, mobile is a st…
Yes but Moore's law is applied to phones differently, because battery life is as important as processing power, or even more so. This is the reason the 600Mhz processor in your phone will have worse performance than a normal 600Mhz processor. Mhz is useless as a measure for performance and it became popular only because of marketing campaigns by Intel, when they had an edge in the Mhz race. A more useful measure (oth…
While I agree with you that the instructions matter, are your numbers x86 (or arm) instructions, or are they micro-instructions that your high level instruction set is translated in to? If so, the other factor is how many micro-instructions your instruction is broken down in to.