Fugu Talk

Some of the App Store ratings I’ve received puzzle me. For example, there’s the person who game me a one-star rating and called my app the worst ever (that’s hard to believe – out of 85,000 apps?), but then when I checked that reviewer’s other ratings, all were just one star or five stars. A binary reviewer. Another one-star review was actually a rave review except for a complaint that I didn’t support pre-OS 3.0 – it promised an upgrade to five stars if I rectified that. (and to add insult to injury, I think both of those reviewers used promo codes – they didn’t even have to pay for it).

On the other hand, I’ve been the beneficiary of five-star ratings, too, so it probably cancels out and I probably shouldn’t look too closely or obsess about it. But that has made me consider I should be more conscious about how I rate other apps. It’s not exactly a formula, but I do have some rules of thumb:

• A few apps don’t even run. Those get one star (“avoid”)
• Some apps are so obnoxious in some way that I remove them immediately. One star.
• An app with any redeeming feature gets at least two stars (“adequate”)
• An app that requires you to login to some kind of internet account just to get past the first screen is two stars.
• An app that has had decent work done on it, not slap-dash work, gets at least three stars (“OK/average”)
• An app that has repeatable playability/usability, that you want to promote, tell your friends about, gets at least four stars (“good”)
• An app that has ads will lose a star – it’s never unobtrusive, and to put it another way, ad-less apps should be rewarded. I deducted two stars from one app that had flickering ads on the screen during gameplay – the equivalent of flashing web banner ads.
• An app that is so good or useful that I try to avoid deleting it when making room for new apps gets five stars.

I’m not saying it’s a great system, but it’s a system. Maybe the biggest defect is that it doesn’t consider price – shouldn’t a great free app somehow rate higher than a great $10 app? Also, this isn’t a problem with my rating system so much as the Apple rating interface – I only bother rating apps when I delete them, so my least-favorite apps have the greatest probability of getting their ratings, while my favorite apps never get their deserved five stars. A stat I would really like to see? app-lifetime-on-device.

This is a “community” project on Blue Mars:

After two weeks in submission, HyperBowl Rome, the second HyperBowl lane, is now on the App Store.

For performance reasons, I removed a lot of the transparent/translucent objects but added some particle fire effects not available in the originalgame.

Written on epinions, June 2003.

Software development is often compared to architecture, to the extent that “software architect” is a job title, and the now-common “design patterns” in use by the industry originated with a methodology developed by architect Christopher Alexander.

But as a career programmer, and on whimsical occasion an aspiring author, I’ve always thought that programming is more like writing. Aside from the obvious parallels in entering text and following syntax and grammar rules, good code is expressive, succinct and has style. And I have speculated that the organizational and structural challenges in developing large, complex programs are analogous to those posed by novel writing.

Now I feel validated after reading Terry Brook’s account of his creative process in Sometimes the Magic Works: Lessons from a Writing Life. In spite of the reference to magic, Brooks discourages the aspiring novelist from simply brainstorming some ideas and jumping into writing mode. Instead, he urges the writer to structure the work with an outline beforehand, paying particular attention to creating an incisive beginning and compelling end to the story.

As an exercise, he takes the reader through a sample story creation, explaining efficient and unobstrusive character development, noting subtleties such as the choice of character and place names. (The sample story features the protagonist Maud Manx and nemesis Feral Finch in a town called Octegenarian, Montana. OK, it’s not that subtle.)

In a novel-like fashion, Mr. Brooks frames this book with a relaxed yet compelling account of his writing life. His literary parents, childhood role-playing and early attempts at writing would seem to foretell of his eventual success, but he credits much of that to serendipity. Nearly thirty years ago, he happened to submit the right manuscript (The Sword of Shannara) to the right editor (Lester Del Rey) at the right time. (Del Rey wanted to prove that science fantasy was a viable genre)

Mr. Brook’s longstanding good relationships with his editors and publishers apparently limits the type of advice he can dispense – there are no examples of how to deal with difficult editors or even how to find a good agent. (He didn’t use an agent until negotiations on the novelization of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace) But his honest retelling of difficult choices made (abandoning his law career, starting over on a novel after writing 400 pages) reinforce his warnings and encouragement to those who feel they have the “magic”. And his experience with Hollywood (besides The Phantom Menace, he authored the book version of Hook) is downright hilarious.

I’m not a science fantasy reader and therefore I haven’t followed Mr. Brook’s bread-and-butter work. But his self-deprecating and easygoing style is delightful enough for me to consider reading his novels. (Even the Phantom Menace novelization. Maybe it’s better than the movie.)

Unity doesn’t have a public bug database, but their email acknowledgments for bug reports do allow access to all of a user’s reports. I’ve always been a fan of open bug databases, starting with Sun’s Bug Parade, which as I recall allowed you to check if anyone else has already submitted the bug you found, aggregate information instead of duplicating it, and vote for the ones you need fixed first. So in the spirit of open bugs, here’s the link to my latest Unity bug report, a feature request for static batching on desktop Unity.

Written on epinions, September 2003:

Recently, I’ve had the opportunity to work on the voice-over script for a video game, which prompted me to dust off a copy of J. Michael Straczynski’s The Complete Book of Scriptwriting. I’ve had this book sitting around for several years (it was published in 1997) since I first moved to LA and caught the Hollywood bug.

Now, after countless hours of sitting in front of the TV and exclaiming, “I could write better dialogue than that!”, I have a better handle on the pragmatics of scriptwriting – the differences between TV and script formats, don’t submit entire unsolicited scripts (it won’t be opened for legal reasons), film pays better than television, and the importance of joining the WGA and getting an agent.

Straczynski doesn’t provide any convenient formulas for scriptwriting, but he does give some useful common-sense tips. Sound out the dialogue as you write – it might look great on paper but turn into a tongue-twister for the actor. Research your genre (in the case of TV, familiarize yourself with the series you want to write for). Start with an outline. Don’t set the pace too slow and thus lose the audience in the beginning.

This book is oriented largely toward television and film scriptwriting (the author was the creator of Babylon 5 and producer/writer on Murder She Wrote – I can’t wait to see the crossover episode). It begins with a history of the television and film industry that explains some of the current technological and business constraints that screen writers face, and ends with a sample episode script from Babylon 5.

But the author does include some treatment of playwriting and script writing for radio dramas and animation features. The latter is somewhat related to video game script writing – dialogue for animated characters must not rely on distinct “acting” such as gestures or facial movements. With the increasing number of video games produced with movie-like production values (some of them tied into actual movies), for example the Grand Theft Auto series and The Matrix, I hope Straczynski will include a chapter covering game script writing in his next update of this very useful book.

My first epinions book review, of Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs, written on May, 2003. And I did visit Hachiko’s statue afterwards.

This book made me laugh, it made me cry. And it made me join Epinions.

The crying (just a manly tear) was inspired by the story of Hachiko, the famed Japanese dog who waited loyally every day for his owner to arrive at the train station from work, long after the owner had died at work and failed to return. After Hachiko passed away, still waiting for his master at the station, a statue was placed there in his honor.

What does this have to do with “the next social revolution”? Well, nothing, but it is one of the early backdrops in Howard Rheingold’s book, where he notices the profound integration of wireless communication, in particular the vastly popular i-mode service from NTT Docomo, into the lifestyle of Japanese teenagers.

From there, the author jets around the world, observing Scandinavian text-messagers, MIT geeks wearing computers (this is the part where I laughed), wi-fi activism, and self-moderating peer-review communities like Epinions, eBay and Slashdot.

The title “Smart Mobs” aptly describes the mass demonstration orchestrated by cell phone and pager that resulted in the downfall of a presidency in the Philippines. It seems a stretch to cast the same label on the book’s other elements, which are rather loosely connected by the element of, well, being wired (and in some cases, wired wirelessly, so to speak).

In fact, reading this book is somewhat like reading two year’s issues of Wired magazine. After turning the last page, I have the reader’s equivalent of an ice-cream headache. Mr. Rheingold writes in a first-person travelogue style interspersed with musings, but the tasty treat here is the pure breadth of topics, ranging from the enabling technologies to the behavior of the sociological groups and the philosophical, legal and mathematical implications of it all.

Consequently, as you read this book, you’ll find yourself bouncing in a web-surfing manner from the congregating habits of short-attention-span teenagers to the state of the cell phone industry in the U.S. versus Japan/Europe to game theory to internet-based peer-reviewing/self-moderating communities to Lawrence Lessig’s work on the Internet as a commons for the public good to the frequency-hopping technology invented by Hedy Lamarr and government policy on allocating spectrum.

Don’t expect any in-depth explanation and don’t take anything at face-value in this enthusiastic and breathless rush through the wired present and potential future. For example, the author repeats the marketing-invented tidbit that eBay was created to provide a way to auction Pez dispensers on-line. And while i-mode has been a spectacular success, both wireless internet and wireless games have had a tough go both in the US and in Europe.

But this book is a great starting point for any topic you find interesting, and there’s bound to be something to interest you. For example, I’ve googled onto Epinions before, and as a programmer I’ve glanced at Slashdot, but only after reading this book have I taken a closer look. Now I’ve tried my hand at a few reviews for Epinions, and I’m comparing the peer-rating and community moderation systems at various open-source sites like Slashdot and Advogato. After I read up on game theory and Lessig’s treatises, maybe I’ll take a trip to Japan and visit the statue of Hachiko.