Links - Mike Cohen

Links for 2011-5-10 through 2011-5-14

May 14, 2011 by Mike Cohen

Links for 2011-5-10 through 2011-5-14:

Is Nathan Myhrovld’s Intellectual Ventures behind the iOS in-app purchase patent troll job? Intellectual Ventures was founded in part by former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold. The company’s business model is simple – it purchases and applies for a ton of patents. It then licenses out those patents to others under the threat of litigation coupled with a promise not to sue if a deal is struck.
Setting up an Amazon EC2 instance: A beginner’s guide
How to have personality: Lessons from Trader Joe’s 1.4 million price tags – Matt Inouye Trader Joe’s knows marketing. They don’t want you to know this however. Their displays, signage, and advertising (including their kitschy “Fearless Flyer” newsletter) all convey the message that Trader Joe’s is just like the simple grocery store of yesteryear–healthy food, friendly staff, and a store that has a personality.
CocosBuilder – Graphical Interface Builder for Cocos2D CocosBuilder is a free graphical editor for building scene graphs in Cocos2D (iPhone & Mac). With CocosBuilder you can visually layout your objects and load them with a single line of code. Please note that this is still a very early version, the interface is very unpolished and it probably contains lots of bugs. Use at your own risk!
Qualitative Game Design [Alex Evangelou, Angry Fish Studios]
Is Being an Indie all Fun and Games? « Majic Jungle Blog
Huckabee pal Janet Porter believes Obama is a Soviet Spy Mike Huckabee is the scariest GOP candidate. He hides his evangelical extremism behind an aw-shucks facade so successfully that even normally astute people like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are fooled by it. There is nothing friendly about Huckabee’s beliefs, nor in his advisors like Janet Porter. Scary, scary people who wouldn’t think twice about sending liberal, secular humanists like myself to re-education camps.

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Links for May 6th through May 9th

May 9, 2011 by Mike Cohen

Links for May 6th through May 9th:

Microsoft brings out Azure toolkit for iOS An iOS version of the Windows Azure toolkit is now available for developers, according to the official Microsoft blog. The download simplifies coding for Microsoft's cloud-based OS platform. Included with the iOS toolkit are compiled code libraries, a sample app, documentation, and an Azure deployment package….
cocos2d-javascript Cocos2d-javascript is a 2D game/graphics engine based on cocos2d-iphone but designed to run in the web browser. It uses the latest features available in HTML 5 allowing real-time rendering of 2D graphics without the need for plug-ins such as Adobe Flash.
cocos2d-android – cocos2d for Android: A framework for building 2D games for the Android platform. – Google Project Hosting cocos2d for Android is a framework for building 2D games, demos and other graphical/interactive applications. It is based on the cocos2d-iphone design: it uses the same API, but instead of using objective-c, it uses Java.
Slow and Steady Wins the Race: the Optimistic Numbers Post But what really happens is one app makes a certain number of sales per day, but two apps make more, and three apps make even more. The sales don't double each time you release an app, since sales of each older app decline over time. But the water level of
Achievement Design 101
Microsoft posts Bing Maps Control for iOS

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Links for 2011-04-29 through 2011-05-02

May 2, 2011 by Mike Cohen

Links for 2011-04-29 through 2011-05-02:

How awesome is your iPhone app, really? [Greg Dunn, Unseen Things] – A lot of things seem like a good idea at the time, and the program *always* works right especially if the person using it is the one who programmed it, right? Of course not…getting fresh eyes on a project is more than a good idea; it’s essential.
OpenGL Render to Texture – Render to texture is a very handy functionality. Imagine your game allows for some character customization. You have the body, some different hats, different clothes and other small stuff. Now the easiest way to render this is to just draw it piece by piece every frame. With the proper Z coordinates everything falls in place. But you now have like 4-5 draw calls for one single object. Worse, you might have different textures and swamping textures is expensive..
Could a Smartphone App Have Been Used to Locate Bin Laden? Unconfirmed sources report that an iPhone app called Tactical NAV may have been used during the mission to locate Bin Laden. An elite crew of American forces killed bin Laden during a daring raid on Monday, capping the world’s most intense manhunt.
Someone Live-Tweeted the Osama Bin Laden Raid Without Knowing It How does someone unknowingly live-tweet the biggest news story of the decade? @ReallyVirtual knows. The IT consultant was just "taking a break from the rat-race by hiding in the mountains with his laptops," when he heard a helicopter, then a "huge window shaking bang," and then the helicopter going down. Reading his tweets, it's obvious he had no idea what was going on—nor how life-defining that moment would be for so many people.
Subtle Patterns | High quality patterns for your next web project Nice collection of background patterns perfect for tiling.

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Links for 2011-04-28

April 28, 2011 by Mike Cohen

Links for 2011-04-28:

Angry Birds | MetaFilter –
inessential.com: Design + code –
Some holoalphabetisms – in Japanese –
Early portable (?) synthesis: the Hammond Solovox | MetaFilter –
don’t talk yourself out of marketing [Aaron Griffith, [a Weblog by Aaron Griffith]] –
ShareKit : Drop-in Share Features for all iOS Apps –
Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies –
Why Instapaper Free is taking an extended vacation – Marco.org – Marco gives some very good reasons for NOT having a free version of your app:

Only people who buy the paid app — and therefore have no problem paying $5 for an app — can post reviews for it. That filters out a lot of the sorts of customers who will leave unreasonable, incomprehensible, or inflammatory reviews. (It also filters out many people likely to need a lot of support.)

I don’t need every customer. I’m primarily in the business of selling a product for money. How much effort do I really want to devote to satisfying people who are unable or extremely unlikely to pay for anything?

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Links for 2011-04-15 through 2011-04-21

April 21, 2011 by Mike Cohen

Links for 2011-04-15 through 2011-04-21:

3 Major Issues with the Latest iPhone Tracking “Discovery” | Alex Levinson – Funny how people get their panties in a bunch over something like this. Every cell phone can track you through cell tower. This is no different.
With Apps, First Impressions Are King. Here’s 3 Keys to Getting Them Right | Co.Design –
Converting a Subversion repository to Git, (7 steps to migrate a complete mirror of svn in git) | JohnAlbin – Instructions for converting a subversion repository to git. I did this with my Removr repository so I could switch my server to nginx, which doesn't support subversion.
Make Your Game a Purple Cow – Seth Godin points out in his Purple Cow book that no one will pull over, take pictures and call their friends to see a cow that looks just like all the other cows you’ve ever seen. However, if you were driving along and saw a cow that was purple… you’d ha
Icon Search Engine | Iconfinder –

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Links for 2011-04-05 through 2011-04-14

April 14, 2011 by Mike Cohen

Links for 2011-04-05 through 2011-04-14:

Inspirational Roundup! 40 Great Examples of App Site Design | Webdesigntuts+ –
Mobile UI Patterns › Activity Feeds –
Recent / iOS UI Patterns –
52 Ways to Promote Your iPhone App –
If you’re not using these, think again. – Who says the best things in life aren't FREE? The past 23 months of running Kuyi Mobile has been one, if not the most exciting learning experiences of my life. Running a business is never a joke. Over the course of running the business, I came across vari
Call Me Fishmeal.: Success, and Farming vs. Mining – You can either see founding a company as something you’re doing because you want to produce good software, or you can see it as something you do so you can sell your stock and make a killing and move on.
Connick v. Thompson: Clarence Thomas writes one of the cruelest Supreme Court decisions ever. – By Dahlia Lithwick – Slate Magazine –

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Links for 2011-03-28 through 2011-04-03

April 3, 2011 by Mike Cohen

Links for 2011-03-28 through 2011-04-03:

Peter Gabriel – Digging in the Dirt (1992) music video by John Downer – Analysis of the music video
Atlassian – Angry Nerds –
Integrating cocos2d and UIKit – Cocos2d layer subclass that contains a UIView.
Why Your App Name is Dumb — The Brooks Review – Have you noticed how absolutely stupid some iOS app names are? I really mean this — just calling your app “InstaX” doesn’t mean it is as good or as cool as the original. 1 When I am browsing the App Store you have two chances to catch my attention: With your icon. With your app name.
On a personal note, I realize that Removr failed on both of those.
Useful SQL Tricks for WordPress Blog –

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Links for 2011-03-17 through 2011-03-27

March 27, 2011 by Mike Cohen

Links for 2011-03-17 through 2011-03-27:

Amy Ziari – The Newsroom – PR Case Study: Where Color Went Wrong – By now, you may have heard of the little app that could(n't), Color. Funded to the tune of $41M pre-launch, co-founded by a prestigious Silicon Valley entprepreneur and already brimming with 27 employees, you'd expect the product to be decent if not extraordinary.
And you'd be wrong.
The Art Of The Reveal –
Haiti and Louisiana – an interesting piece about the link between Haiti and Louisiana
Stop Wasting Promo Codes! | BitWit.ca – Every time a developer updates or releases an app, Apple gives them 50 small marketing opportunities. These opportunities come in the form of promotional codes to a free copy of your product. Not everyone needs to use their codes (at least not all of them), but if you are small and are looking for more attention you do. Wasted promo codes are wasted opportunities if you are struggling with visibility. Everyday I see developers wasting promo codes in all sorts of ways.
TE-snippets | Because expanding text is what the web is all aboutTE-snippets | Because expanding text is what the web is all about –

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Links for 2011-03-10 through 2011-03-16

March 16, 2011 by Mike Cohen

Links for 2011-03-10 through 2011-03-16:

Custom Controls for iOS and Mac OS X – Cocoa Controls – Collection of open source custom controls
Why I am not worried about Japan’s nuclear reactors. | Morgsatlarge – blogorific. – A good, factual, non-hysterical explanation of exactly how a nuclear power plant works and what happened in Japan. Up front, the situation is serious, but under control. And this text is long! But you will know more about nuclear power plants after reading it than all journalists on this planet put together.
Hausa Party –
Why Angry Birds is so successful and popular: a cognitive teardown of the user experience –
In depth: How Rovio made Angry Birds a winner (and what’s next) (Wired UK) –

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Links for 2011-03-04 through 2011-03-07

March 7, 2011 by Mike Cohen

Links for 2011-03-04 through 2011-03-07:

4 Golden Rules of iPhone Game Design | Ezone.com App News – At the core of your game you need a simple, fun game mechanic. And I stress simple. In this A.D.D. world if you don’t grab players in the first 10 seconds, you’ve probably lost them. Unlike a console game they haven’t invested $50 (in all likelihood it’s $0.99 or nothing), so they have not made a big commitment to your game. If they don’t get it in the first 10 seconds, then they are going to hit the home button and launch something else.
Onramps | eliolhan – Luckily* I have techniques to get back on track when I feel blocked or unmotivated. Without adding any new code, I’ll clean things up:
Conform code indentation to my house style
Fix whitespace and tabs
Remove stray blank lines
Delete superfluous comments
Remove commented-out NSLog() statements
Group and label related methods
Fatal Distractions | eliolhan – I want to talk about what I’ve learned in the last few months about Distractions and how to fight them.
The 3 Ingredients of Successful iPhone Apps | Tapity – To me, say I put in 300 hours to make an app; I’ll call it a success if I make over $23,000 in the first year.
He Thinks Many People Will Like To Read It –

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