I'm a bit skeptical on backgammon too after playing the 'real' (non-capturing) version against turks/lebanese. Certainly it's not chess, but substantially complex.
It's even provoked at least one advance in game theory. Some mathematicians at (iirc) the University of Alberta tried to use game theory to analyze poker, and found it was intractable. That led them to invent a systematic way to approximate complex games. (They built some good poker bots out of it, too, and sold one version as a training tool.)
Go has also provoked some interesting developments in Combinatorial Game Theory. Conway got started with "On Numbers and Games" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Numbers_and_Games) basically got started by analysing end-game situation in Go.
Note: Combinatorial Game Theory has almost no overlap with Game Theory. Interestingly Combinatorial Game Theory has some analogies in topology. You can for example give meaning to the temperature of a game.
"If you are thinking of building an iPhone/iPad app I would set aside one-two weeks just to navigate the certification process, and setting up all the legal stuff that you need to have set-up just to be able to sell games (rather than give them away for free)."
Uhhh seriously?!
I know the certificate/provisioning profile stuff was broken and hard to get right in the beginning. Like 2 years ago. But now you spend 3 minutes in a Wizard and you have setup your certificates and profiles.
This popped out at me as well. Especially with recent versions of Xcode, the process is incredibly simple. Run the wizard, download the files it gives you, and then open them. Boom, you're ready to run the app on your device and submit it to the store.
Sure, parts of the process are now a lot easier (and Google-able), but getting everything together for the first time would still a bit of an overwhelming process.
Yeah, 2 years ago, when I first set this up, it was a hair pulling experience and took me a solid evening to get sorted. Now it's literally a 10 minute job
The life cycle is weeks; you probably need several apps in the store at various stages of lifecycle, and several more in development simultaneously to "make a living"
Only if your plan to make money is to make a cheap, one-time-use $.99 app. If you're working in a niche or two, you can make $100/day, consistent for months/years.
Thats firsthand experience, by the way. Not me blathering on about what I think is possible.
Curious to understand whether Appcelerator is the best choice currently for building native apps based on HTML5 and JS.
I'd like to build an app for iPad and Android tablets so HTML5 seems the way to go. I've looked at Appcelerator and also Sencha - the latter seems to be geared more towards mobile sites rather than apps (though these can be wrapped into apps using something like Phone Gap).
It'd be a nice bonus to have a separate mobile site but native apps are my first priority.
OK so I've looked into this more. From what I understand the difference is:
- Appcelerator transforms HTML and JS (built around its own client library) into native apps with native components.
- Sencha builds HTML5 sites using CSS3 to mimic native components and behaviors. These sites can potentially be wrapped with Appcelerator (using a Web View), Phone Gap or similar to be submitted to the Apple App Store/Android Market.
Looks like the advantage of Appcelerator is the speed and UI consistency of using true native components - and perhaps a greater chance of Apple including it in the App Store since the output (I think) is entirely Objective C. Advantage of Sencha is getting a HTML5 mobile site "for free" (if your main aim is to build apps) and in some cases more flexibility since the Appcelerator libraries don't exposure all the native functionality.
In my case I want to build something around Maps. The Appcelerator Maps component is just too limited to fit my needs right now so I'll be going down the Sencha route.
Hope this is helpful to someone. Let me know if I've missed/misunderstood something along the way.
Almost. Appcelerator Mobile is a cross compiler with a component framework. It takes Javascript and compiles it into Objective-C and links it against their framework. You can build completely native apps in it.
It's a little confusing in Justin's case as he is using it to host a UIWebView which is running his game. You can do the same thing in Objective-C with a few lines of code and some magic mousedrags in Interface Builder. However, I believe he is also using Appcelerator's sqllite bindings to save game state from the UIWebView. You can also do this in Objective-C by making your own bridge from the UIWebView using intercepted custom URLs (which always feels like a dirty hack - not as clean as Flash's DOM injection using ExternalInterface).
Btw, Justin is part of a two person podcast I listen to regularly. I'd recommend subscribing:
>>"Day 5 4 Sales
Day 6 27 Sales (5 reviews – 10 ratings)
Day 7 59 Sales (Front page of iPad Games in New & Notworthy)
Day 8 68 Sales
>>For me these stats and reviews are amazing. More than I could have hoped for."
59 and 68 sound like very low sales/day numbers for an app that is featured on the front page of "New and Noteworthy"
The numbers may indicate that the market for this app is fairly small or that some changes (in feature or price or ....) are needed to make the app more attractive to users.
The game costs $9.99 so I wouldn't epect it to sell in the thousands. If he'd have had it at $0.99 or $2.99 when it hit the front page he'd be talking about "how I made 10k sales in a week".
Good testimonial. I don't have an iPad to try it out. It seems like he created a quality product: a novel game. Yes, he created it using Titanium from Appcelerator, and he had to deal with some nasty, niggling Javascript performance/implementation issues. Key to his success was the 'First Follower' (positive reviews).
Great article but when I read the article title I thought the game was sold outside of the app store. Is there a centralized online store for selling web apps that live on the home screen and act like native apps?
In case it wasn't clear, his game isn't just a web app that lives on the home screen as a bookmark. It uses the Titanium Appcelerator, which is a thin native wrapper around a Webkit view. The app logic is written in JavaScript, rendering is done using HTML/CSS and/or SVG or so. FWIW, this actually obeys the arbitrary App Store rules: C, Objective-C, C++ and JavaScript (if run in Apple's supplied runtime) are allowed.
Thanks! I wonder what is keeping Apple from trying to cash in on some of these apps as well. Looks like there is a submission process and possibly a review process for these apps as well.
Because it's not a storefront to sell apps, it's just a catalog, and the developer of the webapp needs to take care of anything like that on their own. The submission/review for these is basically a cursory look to see if it's actually an iPhone webapp, categorized correctly, etc., not much more. How would Apple try to cash in on these when most of them are free or tied to a service that I assume a lot of developers created the webapp for in the first place, rather than have to fork over 30%/pay the $99 iOS Developer Program fee/deal with review hassles with Apple?
Because it's not a storefront to sell apps, it's just a catalog, and the developer of the webapp needs to take care of anything like that on their own.
I understand that it is a catalog and not a store. I didn't mean to imply that the exact webpage you linked was a storefront.
How would Apple try to cash in on these when most of them are free or tied to a service that I assume a lot of developers created the webapp for in the first place, rather than have to fork over 30%/pay the $99 iOS Developer Program fee/deal with review hassles with Apple?
Other than the OP I have seen other complete applications built on top of web technologies. I can believe that there are some web devs who would be willing to have their app reviewed and do the revenue share if it meant they didn't have to worry about setting up a store front and handling payments.
I bet a big factor in his iPad sales is the "gold rush" effect of being one of the first batch of iPad-only/iPad-optimized games. That's not to take away from whatever good qualities it might have. But I'm sure it is a factor.
uhhh, if it's "much deeper than chess" then it definitely takes decades to master.
One shouldn't claim to be deeper than chess without knowing the first thing about how much it's possible to study chess.