Archive for the 'Marketing' Category

Ultralink: The Hyperlink, 2.0

September 4th, 2013
Spencer Nielsen Follow snielsen42 on Twitter
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Some of you might have noticed that I haven’t written any blog posts here in a long while. That’s because I have been head down, cranking away on my latest exciting project. It is a very bold, new concept unlike anything that has been seen before. I call it the ‘Ultralink’.

To explain what an ultralink is, let’s first examine it’s ancestor, the hyperlink. The hyperlink is the most basic grammar of the internet. It’s assumptions and usage quickly permeate anyone who has used the web for more than five minutes. Even grandma knows what a hyperlink is and how to use it. I want to take that foundation and evolve it forward into something even more useful, more valuable and more user friendly. I want to re-write the most basic grammar of the internet.

The easiest way to understand what an ultralink is, is to go to https://ultralink.me and watch the introduction video there on the front page. Then install one of the browser extensions and take them for a test drive on any page on the internet.

We have finally decided to declare public beta and are now putting ourselves out there for all the world to use. We want feedback so that we can continually make our products more awesome. I would ask that you please take a look at the resources we have for ultralink above (and share/like/retweet/etc.), try them out for yourself and send me feedback on what you thought was awesome and what can be improved.

Hyperlinks still have their place, but ultralinks can do much of what they do better and some stuff they just can’t do at all. It’s the hyperlink… 2.0.

iOS 6 Predictions

March 6th, 2012
Spencer Nielsen Follow snielsen42 on Twitter

It is always fun to try and guess what Apple is going to do next. You can guarantee that there will always be surprises and sure bets, letdowns and magical moments. The Apple rumor sites do a decent job of soliciting leaks, reading between the lines and making educated conjecture. As a developer, I often like to take a good look at where Apple’s technology is right now and make logical extrapolations as to where things are headed. Oftentimes, when Apple announces some new feature or technology it seems obvious in retrospect if we had only connected the dots. Based on 2011’s release schedule, it is a fair bet to say that Apple is going to announce iOS 6 at WWDC sometime this summer and distribute a developer beta. That means that in the coming months little trickles of information are going to get doled out to the rumor sites about what kind of changes and additions we can expect. Just for fun, I wanted to get my own predictions out in the open before any of that started. Here is my very developer-oriented prediction list of what we might be expecting in iOS 6.


UPDATE: WWDC and the iOS 6 beta have come and gone. Some of my predictions now have conclusions. You will notice however that most of the predictions have not yet been updated. That is because there is the potential for Apple to be keeping a few more surprises up their sleeve for the fall when iOS 6 goes GM. Inline below are the results so far.


UPDATE2: iOS 6 GM is here which means that the NDA has lifted! Check down below to see how well I did. (more…)

iOS Caster Now Has 60beat GamePad Support

January 6th, 2012
Spencer Nielsen Follow snielsen42 on Twitter

Here’s demo of the new 60beat GamePad with my friend Mike‘s game Caster HD. I added support to both Caster/Caster HD and the update has been submitted to the App Store for approval. It shouldn’t be too long before the update actually hits the App Store. (UPDATE: Both updates are now live on the App Store!)

In the video I demo the controls starting with the cursor. The Mac/Win/Linux version of Caster has game pad support for the in-game cursor and so it was easiest to just hook into that. You don’t need to worry about switching between touch and game pad controls. Caster has no on-screen control overlays and both control styles will work concurrently so you just plug in and go! No setting switch required.

After getting into the game I demonstrate the settings for the camera movement which is controlled by the right analog stick. The start button will pause the game and give you access to the options menu. There you can tweak the camera sensitivity and invert the axis if you want.

A lot of the other controls are doubled up so you can use whichever you prefer. The left analog stick or the directional pad control walking movement. Button 3 or R2 will jump. Button 4 or the R1 will fire. Buttons 1, 2 and L2 will rotate through the different weapons. By holding down L1 you initiate a dash when moving.

(While I’ve got you here, be sure to check out my new 3D physics shooter Invader Zurp if you haven’t already. It is a ton of fun and there is nothing else like in on the App Store. 🙂 )

Zurp 1.0 Postmortem

December 15th, 2011
Spencer Nielsen Follow snielsen42 on Twitter

Last September I wrote a blog post introducing Invader Zurp which revealed a little of the back story on how I came upon this new game idea after it’s first 2 months in development. Fast forward to 3 months later and Invader Zurp had just hit the App Store! I thought it would be useful to sit down and review the last 5 months of development, kind of plan out where I want to go from here and go over the events and insights that I thought were most influential during development.

The Story So Far…

So to recap the original blog post a bit, it was the middle of the summer (2011) and I had been working my brains out on Cannonade for the previous 6 months. I was a little discouraged at that point because progress wasn’t coming quite as quickly as I had hoped. Reception from my testers (just friends and family at that point) hadn’t been as positive as I had wanted either. I still had a very clear vision of what I wanted Cannonade to be and still believed that there is a ton of untapped potential for multiplayer-only games on iOS. But there was only so much I that could do as a one-man team and testing a multiplayer game can be quite time consuming. I took the family on vacation in early July and was able to step away from things for a while. It was then that I got an idea for a single player experience that distilled the core gameplay mechanic of Cannonade down to it’s essence. Thus Invader Zurp was born. Within two weeks I had modularized the Cannonade game engine, re-written the graphics sub-system in OpenGL ES 2.0 and had a working prototype. And it was fun! I found myself on very long “testing” sessions playing even after I had verified my fixes. I seeded the first alpha version in early September and wrote the introductory blog post. Then began the journey of finishing the game and kicking the darn thing out the door. (more…)

Startup Grind.app 1.3 (October Update)

October 18th, 2011
Spencer Nielsen Follow snielsen42 on Twitter

The Startup Grind is expanding! You may or may not have heard that we have recently opened up a Los Angeles chapter of the Startup Grind and to coincide with that we have added multiple chapter support to the Startup Grind.app! Now if you are a member of the Startup Grind LA your upcoming and past events should be visible when you log into the Startup Grind.app with your Meetup account. If you are a member of multiple chapters then you will be presented with a top level pane allowing you to switch between them at will.

As we open up more chapters of the Startup Grind you will be able to access all the information and interactive elements for the events for every new meetup that we get going. More awesome features are in the works so stay tuned!

Language Aid: A Postmortem

August 27th, 2011
Spencer Nielsen Follow snielsen42 on Twitter

Language Aid is a system-wide text lookup tool I developed and sold for the past couple of years. I recently decided to make it free and release the source code. This is the story behind it.

Rewind to 2006, I was just winding down active development of Vision, my OpenGL Window Sever/UI Framework. I had started work on Vision in college 3 years earlier and had been churning on it full-time for the previous 2 years. I had decided that it was finally time to get a job and so I interviewed around and accepted a position at Apple. I had two weeks until my start date and I wanted to do some programming for fun that was completely different from what I had been doing.

Iron Coder[0]

It was during that two week period of not yet working for Apple that Wolf Rentzsch started the (now defunct) Iron Coder contest. The way it worked was that the organizer announces an API that each of the contestants must use somehow in their entry and then 24 hours later a theme is announced that entries must also somehow incorporate. I thought it was just what I needed. A fun, small-scoped project with a little bit of competition. So the day of the very first Iron Coder arrived and the contest API was announced: The Accessibility API. Accessibility API? What’s that? Until that moment I had not been aware of it but it was actually just what I had been looking for to solve a different problem I had. I started researching it and immediately there were portions of it that were very interesting to me. Specifically, the ability for programs to inspect and copy data (like displayed text) out of other running applications was of particular interest to me.

(more…)

Language Aid 1.2

August 27th, 2011
Spencer Nielsen Follow snielsen42 on Twitter

Language Aid version 1.2 is out! The big feature of this release is that it is free and open source! This will also be the last release supported by Aoren Software. Development has pretty much wound all the way down at this point and the source has experienced some code rot as Core Foundation has progressively become more and more obsolete and Mac OS X has marched forward.

So it occurred to me that the time has come to set Language Aid free. Anyone care to take the code and modernize it? Maybe even release it on the Mac App Store? Let me know and I can work with you to make that happen. Be sure to check out my tell all Language Aid postmortem.

Startup Grind.app 1.2 (August Update)

August 19th, 2011
Spencer Nielsen Follow snielsen42 on Twitter

The Startup Grind.app version 1.2 has been approved and is live on the App Store! This update features some substantial re-design and refinement. The biggest change has been a complete re-design of the “Questions” pane. Now you can down-vote questions that you don’t like, redundant questions or non-questions. If a question gets to a value of -2 or lower (the equivalent of three negative votes and one positive vote) then the question will no longer be displayed. Remember, you can submit questions to the speaker far in advance of the actual event if you want.

Try it out and let us know what you think of the changes.

Play MAME On Your iPad/iPhone Without Jailbreaking

July 25th, 2011
Spencer Nielsen Follow snielsen42 on Twitter

 

 

As a partial follow up to my previous article “Play SNES Games On Your iPad Without Jailbreaking” I have now made a similar patch to the imame4all project which will allow it to build for non-jailbroken iOS devices. Everything appears to be in order except that I havn’t figured out a way to get the BTDaemon to run on a non-jailbroken device. This means that it can’t currently use Bluetooth controllers like the Wiimote. Digging into the btstack source it looks like you can configure it to talk with a BTDaemon process even if it is running on another machine like a Mac. I havn’t had time to fully investigate that yet though.

How To Get It Working Yourself

I have created a patch and script that will create everything for you automatically and set you up so that you can just build, run and go. Like the SNES-HD- patch before, you are going to need a current copy of Apple’s Developer Tools (tested with Xcode 3.2.6) and a copy of the iOS SDK (my changes assume the 4.3 SDK). You will need to be a paid iOS developer with Apple and have correctly configured your development machine and iOS device so that you can sign code and run said code on your device.

(more…)

Startup Grind.app 1.1 (July Update)

July 20th, 2011
Spencer Nielsen Follow snielsen42 on Twitter

The Startup Grind.app version 1.1 has been approved and is live on the App Store! There are some cool new features in this update! Try them out and let us know what you think.

Info Pane

First, we have condensed a lot of information into a new “Info” pane:

  • The complete details about the speaker and event.
  • A map of where the event is being held (touch it to go look it up in the Maps application).
  • A sponsor banner so you know who to thank for your free pizza that night (Wanna be a sponsor? Email Us).

This pane is the new hub of every event and is the pane that you now start in.

(more…)

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