iPhone Usability

Everyone interested in iPhone development should read this blog entry on iPhone usability heuristics by Suzanne Ginsburg. They are not game specific but the heuristics that Suzanne has identified are all good ideas that relate to  games as much as any application on this platform.  The only other usability issue that I would raise on iPhone is taking care to not obscure notifications or actions with the users’ hand, although that is more game-specific than Suzanne generally considers.

Anti-Agile?!?

I was on a panel at ASWEC in Perth yesterday, talking about Agile development.  There was some people that seemed to think that Agile was close to Anarchy and a nuber of people challenged the idea that code is the best documentation.  One thing that I wanted to ask everyone; do you normalise your data?  If you do, then surely for all the same reasons you avoid duplication of columns in your tables, you should avoid duplication of models of your system.  The code is the only complete set of documentation for any system; any other documentation will be wrong.  This doesn’t mean you don’t want some of it for different reasons (users, perhaps) but unless the model directly generates the code and changes can only be made to the code by changinge the model… once the code exists, the value of any abstract models (including documentation) decreases very rapidly.  I don’t want to start a flame war but can anyone disagree with that?

What Languages Fix…

Paul Graham writes:

Kevin Kelleher suggested an interesting way to compare programming languages: to describe each in terms of the problem it fixes. The surprising thing is how many, and how well, languages can be described this way.

He then goes on to describe most of the significant languages…

Cobol: Fortran is scary.
Ada: Every existing language is missing something.
Basic: Fortran is scary.

I’m sure that a lot of people will disagree with such an unsubtle approach but I liked it.

Emperor by Stephen Baxter

I really enjoyed how the fall of Roman Britannia was described in this book. I’ve never quite grasped how/why unsophisticated “barbarians” so completely destroyed not just the economy or culture but a civilisation. A good friend of mine refuses to read historical fiction because he claims it confuses him about what really happened…  in this case personalising it and weaving it into a story over several generations has really helped me understand a process that I probably wouldn’t have looked at closely enough otherwise.

GDC Shanghai/Austin

I’m currently flying to GDC Austin and the bulk of my reading materials are slides from the sessions I didn’t manage to get to from GDC China! I guess I should be counting myself lucky that the two conferences aren’t being held on the same days… but I’m really hoping that CMP thinks this through a little better next year!

Gloria Jeans Sucks

Okay, so I take my coffee way too seriously but I really don’t like this idea of flavoured coffee and these guys seem to take this idea way too far… along with being a sterile franchise. Even *$ at least make sure they serve decent coffee.

Free Play 2007

I’m honoured to have been invited to present a keynote address at Free Play 2007, the Independent Game Developer’s Conference (in Melbourne). Developed by the indy game community for the indy game community, Free Play provides a forum for Australian independent game developers to share knowledge, showcase their work and initiate new projects.

ChinaJoy

I’m in Shanghai for ChinaJoy this week and it’s been an interesting trip as we work on establishing our Chinese studio and recruit talented Chinese game developers.