[PIGMI] Android apps one month on

[chrism]

Hey Jack,

On Fri, 12 Nov 2010 11:37:18 +0800, Jack Casey <beetlefeet at gmail.com>
wrote:
> Are all your apps paid for apps?

I have one free app (memory card game) which has been there for much
longer. It has had 816 installs and has 350 (42%) active installs. It's
got a 3 star rating whilst my other apps are 4 and 5.

> Do they have free versions?

No. They are all Free Software, so if someone wanted they could
download the source and compile it and install it onto their device
themselves. I don't expect ordinary users to want or be able to do that.
I suspect they'd rather pay the $1.49 or $0.99 price than go to the
trouble.

> Do any version of your apps have ads?

No ads, sorry.

> On a side note I played with app inventor for android, it's nifty and fun
> but a little on the simple side for doing much serious stuff. Though it
> can certainty serve for some simple specific types of apps.

Cool! I have been meaning to check out some of the game engines too.
All of my UIs are done in HTML in a WebKit window, which seems to work
pretty well. It's not as slow as I expected. For simple apps I would say
it's definitely feasible to develop them in Javascript/HTML and use that
technique, plus you get all the great web stuff thrown in for free like
nice rendering, network requests etc.

I've done some experiments with using the HTML canvas element in a
WebKit window for games on Android but the framerate is just a little
bit too slow on my phone (probably the slowest phone on the market). I
expect in two years the phones will all be fast enough to do this easily
and so I am continuing to invest in that technology with my jsGameSoup
library. <plug> It now has an animated sprite engine, vector drawing,
collision detection, input events management, entity management, and a
seedable random number generator.
http://mccormick.cx/projects/jsGameSoup </plug>

Here are two demos written using that library (view source!):

<http://mccormick.cx/dev/blogref/FallingGame-15/>
<http://mccormick.cx/dev/blogref/AsteroidsTNG-59/>

Last night I stayed up until 2am working on multiplayer for that second
one. :)

To me this is the future because it's truly "write once run
everywhere". Once complete your game can go on a website, PC, iPhone,
Android, whatever, with minimal packaging required. Anywhere you can run
a browser you can run your game.

Hey, you and Nick should port that awesome GameJam game you were doing
to HTML5!

Cheers,

Chris.

-------------------
http://mccormick.cx