Big Bucket Software’s upcoming game, Pocketball now has its very own twitter account: @pocketballapp. You should go ahead and follow it for any Pocketball related news and updates.
It is currently with the beta testers and I will be submitting it to Apple in the next few days.
In the meantime, if you’d like to know exactly what the heck Pocketball is all about, you can check out the new Pocketball website.
One of my favorite shows as a kid was My Secret Identity. The basic premise of the show was that the main character, Jerry O’Connell, was struck by what I think was blue lightning. The blue lightning gave him superpowers. My recollection is hazy but I believe these superpowers involved superhuman strength and the ability to run very fast. He could also float. He used weights to keep him grounded and spray cans to propel himself and direct his flight. I also recall that he was bulletproof; he was shot in the chest once and it didn’t hurt. He did complain that his new shirt was ruined though.
Of course, I wanted to be Jerry O’Connell. 1
For some reason, Jerry O’Connell didn’t tell anyone that he had superpowers except for his professor friend. So My Secret Identity was Jerry and the professor. Everyone else was background. The professor was a genius. And like most TV professors, he was self-sabotaging. That is, he was demonstratively capable of inventing things that could make him rich beyond his dreams and yet for some reason he decided to never bring any of his gadgets to market. He was also known to wear a white lab coat and silly glasses.
I remember very few episodes of this show – only a handful have really stuck with me: The pilot, the one where Jerry briefly loses his powers, the one where he gets shot (this likely happened more than once) and the one where he goes to China. As it turns out, it was actually Chinatown but when I was 9 I didn’t know what a Chinatown was.
The China(town) episode was “The Eyes of the Shadow” (S01E12). This episode began with the professor testing out his latest gadget. I remember that it was about the size of a shoe box. In reality it probably was a shoe box. In the TV show though, it was a translator; Jerry would speak to it in English and it would repeat his phrase in Chinese. Conversely, if it was spoken to in Chinese, it would reply with the spoken phrase in English. This episode aired in 1989 and this shoe-box-sized-translator-gizmo was from the future.
The rest of the episode is kind of a blur. I know that Jerry fell for a (bilingual) Chinese girl and intended to use the translating shoe box to ask the girl’s father for permission to date her. Unfortunately, the translator exploded and so the Chinese girl had to act as a translator instead. Funny right? No. It was stupid. Who cares about that stuff. The translator was awesome.
Today, 20 years after that episode aired, the professor’s invention has finally been released.2 But it’s not a shoe box, it’s an iPhone app. It’s called Jibbigo and it costs $29.95. We live in amazing times, right? Of course, nowadays, we’re a little harder to please. When we hear about Jibbigo we think, “$29.95 is too expensive because it only translates between two languages and it’s slow. 1 star.”
And for those of you complaining that it crashes your iPhone, just be thankful that they fixed the spontaneous combustion problem.
1. When I was a teenager, Jerry starred in Sliders. Again, I wanted to be Jerry O’Connell.
2. Just replace Chinese with Spanish.
Conrad Hilton to Don Draper in Wee Small Hours (Season 3, Episode 9):
You’re like a son. In fact, sometimes you’re more than a son to me because you didn’t have what they had and you understand.
Betty Draper to Don Draper in The Gypsy and the Hobo (Season 3, Episode 11):
I knew you were poor, I knew you were ashamed of it. I see how you are with money, you don’t understand it.
I love this show.
tap tap tap’s App Store pricing advice:
For any iPhone developers out there that are considering making a run for the charts, it’s definitely worth noting that even with a minimum of 1,100 daily sales (Friday’s level), and averaging around 1,200 per day for the past week, that it wasn’t enough to keep it in the Top 100. Compare this to around the time the App Store opened and all it took was around 100 daily sales to get into the Top 100.
TV Forecast was #100 the day after its release. It got up as high as #69 before ultimately plummeting. This is just another reminder of how the App Store has changed.
So there it is; now you know what Pocketball looks like. It should be ready for release in (a few) weeks. Beta testing has been going well and people are really enjoying it. I am pleased.
I’m still deciding what action, if any, I’m going to take regarding the new “In-App Purchasing available to free apps” feature that Apple rolled out last week. I will likely play it safe and release a full version and a separate lite version. I’d rather not be on the bleeding edge of this game-changer; I want to see how it plays out first.
As for getting my first game out and, heck, my first application since TV Forecast (has it really been a year now?) let me just tell you it’s exciting stuff. Did I say exciting? I meant terrifying. The App Store is a different beast to what it was a year ago. Will Pocketball be a huge success? Will it even be noticed? Who knows. All I can say is that I enjoy playing it and I am confident that a lot of other people will too. Certainly it will be a big milestone for Big Bucket Software and I know I will feel relieved to have it released.
An interesting code snippet:
y = -0.79999995231628417968750000000000000000000000000000f; x = 0.60000008344650268554687500000000000000000000000000f; NSLog(@"%.50f", atan2f(y, x));
Why so interesting? Well, it’s interesting because the iPhone simulator and the iPhone device produce a different result for atan2f(y, x).
iPhone simulator:
-0.92729508876800537109375000000000000000000000000000
iPhone:
-0.92729514837265014648437500000000000000000000000000
(For non-programmers: atan2f is a function that computes the arc tangent of two variables.)
Have you fallen off your chair? No? Right, well anyway, although I’m confident that there’s a compiler flag that will bring the two platforms into agreement, I couldn’t find one. Hint: it’s not -ffloat-store. My current suspicion is that this problem stems from “y” and “x” being stored in two registers. This would give them extra precision. That is, more precision than the IEEE prescribes.
Ok, but who cares, right? Well, say you’re developing a physics based puzzle game. For the sake of argument, we’ll call this game “Pocketball”. So in Pocketball, you’ve got these objects that bounce around the world, obeying the laws of physics, more or less. Months into the development of Pocketball, you discover that the physics is performing very slightly differently on the device as it is on the simulator. Specifically, objects bounce off other objects at angles that are very slightly different between the two platforms. These “very slight” differences eventually become big differences and, in the end, the configuration of the world is completely different.
So what can be done? The most important thing is just to be aware of this. Like I said earlier, I’m yet to discover a compiler flag that resolves the discrepancy. So for the time being, just add this fact to the list of reasons why you always test your software on the device and not solely depend on how it behaves in the simulator.
Guy Kawasaki:
“Basically, for 99.9 percent of people on Twitter, it is about updating friends and colleagues about how the cat rolled over,” he said. “For a tenth of a percent it is a marketing tool.”
So you’re either pimping yourself or you’re boring. Got to love how it’s all prefaced with “basically”.
There seems to be some confusion regarding what “apply time zone correction” really does in the iPhone version of TV Forecast. So here we go.
TVRage.com is awesome. They include time zone information with (almost) every TV show. Each show specifies the time zone from which it is originally broadcast. For practically every US TV show, this is eastern time, currently, GMT-4. “Time zone correction” means adjusting for the difference in time between the broadcast city and the user’s city. Plain and simple. It usually works.
People living in the pacific time zone/US west coast, (currently GMT-7) will almost never want to apply time zone correction to US TV shows. That’s because, in the west coast, TV shows are rebroadcast at the same local time as they are broadcast on east coast, i.e. 3 hours later (GMT-4 – GMT-7). Stay with me. People living in the central time zone (e.g. Chicago) will want to apply time zone correction. This is because they are almost always receiving a pacific/eastern broadcast.
Mountain time, is altogether different. Also, this is where my understanding gets hazy. Basically, applying the rule of, “adjust for the difference in time between the broadcast city’s time zone and the user’s time zone” can’t work for mountain time. That’s because mountain time gets its very own broadcast. To illustrate, LOST airs at 9:00PM Wednesday in New York (Eastern Time). It airs at 8:00PM in Denver (Mountain Time). When a user in Chicago applies time zone correction, the air time is adjusted to their local time zone, currently GMT-6. That is a difference of -2 hours. The result: 7:00PM. The person ends up waiting an hour for LOST. The person uses this hour to leave a bad review for TV Forecast on the iTunes Store.
This is the time zone correction dilemma. So what is the solution? The solution, (I think) is to make the adjustment that TV Forecast performs between the eastern time zone and the mountain time zone into a special case. Specifically, it should only subtract 1 hour from eastern TV shows when the user is in mountain time. Am I nuts?
Are there any TV Forecast 1.2.2 users out there who live in a mountain time city and are actually happy with the results they’re getting from TV Forecast? I’d love as much feedback as possible on this one please. Specifically from central and mountain users. I say 1.2.2 because this version fixes a daylight saving adjustment bug. In the absence of this fix, mountain time users could, by a happy coincidence, end up getting the correct time zone adjustment.
Well, it took me longer than I originally anticipated but I finally got around to migrating the TV Forecast Dashboard Widget over to TVRage.com. On the surface, everything looks pretty much the same. You will find, however, that it is much faster. The reason: No more screen scraping. No more modifying the widget every time there is a markup change. That’s a huge relief. Thanks for all the words of encouragement in the comments of the previous post. Enjoy.
