Category: Programming

Flappy Bird disappears, but Google’s mobile advertising inventory will grow

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Now that everyone on the planet knows that Flappy Bird was earning the author $50,000 a day (that’s set in stone, no matter what the numbers say), every developer is going to try and replicate that success. Not the big boys, but the bedroom coders and the hobbyists will think that ‘the next title’ will be the one to make it big. And they’ll carry on churning out countless ad-supported games that bring in maybe $100 in total for a ridiculously low per hour rate for the developer. In the meantime , Google slices a significant percentage off the top

Are smartphone app stores better than the ‘Pass’ line at Craps?

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Here’s why the App Store game is great for the handset manfuactures but useless for the majority of developer and entrepeneurs. From the NY Times on releasing an app into the iTunes store before Christmas.  Mr. Barnard and his small team have built apps like Tweet Speaker, which reads Twitter messages aloud, and Mirror, which turns the iPhone screen into a mirror with the help of the front-facing camera. “If we can get that snowball rolling and get it right, we can ride the momentum,” he said. “We’re going to give it a shot.” I’m sorry, but releasing an app should

Apple switches soup for silos, and I’m sad.

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While it’s the “modern” way, part of me is disappointed to read about the silo-ing of applications that Apple is looking to enforce in the Mac App store. It is a natural step to mimic iOS (and another step on cross-compatibility), and it echoes the approach Microsoft will have on the Windows 8 store, but when you look back at the data storage on the Apple Newton, there’s a complete 180. For those of you not aware, the Newton stored all your data in a “soup” of information. Think of it like a cloud of data in your PDA. And any application

Over the Air 2010: Quadricopters, iPhones, Ferraris and Wipeout

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So a week or two behind schedule, but here’s the video from “The Ben Collins Appreciation Society",” the team I was involved with in this year’s Over the Air at Imperial College. To recap, I had seen an early prototype of Parrot’s AR.Drone, and at the time I thought that I could do something impressive with the technology at the next Hack Day I attended. So with Over the Air approaching, Parrot popped over the commercial release of the AR.Drone in time for the event, and my brain got to work. The result was two fold – to replicate some