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08/30/07
I’ve been in this business now for almost 12 years. The business of offering free online games. When I started, there were just a handful of personal homepages with a few Shockwave games posted. Now, there are tens of thousands of Web sites out there. But very very few of them feature original games. Most, in fact, are from people who are not game developers at all, but who have simply taken some of these free games and put them at a domain using a cookie-cutter content management system. Almost no work is involved. As a matter of fact, I’d bet there are more game Web sites than there are games.
I liked it when I was competing against other Web game developers. But I no longer feel that I am. I’m competing against Web sites built in bedrooms and garages. And I don’t foresee a shakeout either, as it costs almost nothing for these sites to stay up.
I’ve been adding some new features at GameScene.com recently, like medals awarded for good scores, and a customizable favorites page. I’ve got more on the way. I hope this allows us to keep our head up above water in the sea of junk.
I’m curious what others think about the state of the free web games industry. Leave a comment and let me know.
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08/24/07
After using the iPhone for 2 months, here’s my list of favorite features.
1. Google Maps. The map is easy and quick to use, even while driving. And the traffic feature has saved me many times.
2. Lots of free games. 3rd party developers have risen to the challenge and made lots of games, like the iPhone games at MacMost.com. Best of all, they are free, which means that you’re not adding to your phone bill.
3. Wifi Web surfing rocks. If you have WiFi at home and work, then most of the time you are browsing the Web, it is very fast.
4. The Edge network isn’t too bad. In urban areas, it seems downright zippy. Not the best, but very usable for finding out quick bits of info or checking your email.
5. You can use it as a Remote Desktop. Several apps have appeared. I’ve been using telekinesis. I can log into and control a desktop Mac.
6. Camera plus 8GB. The camera isn’t great, but being able to store tons of pictures means I’ve been using it a lot. This beats phones that have a limited amount of storage.
7. Video looks great. Watching video on the iPhone is very nice. I almost prefer to watch video podcasts on it over my laptop.
8. Built-in speaker. I was always frustrated that I couldn’t even listen to a simple audio podcast or book unless I used headphones or plugged into something. Now I can keep listening to a podcast as I walk from my car to the office.
9. Camera plus Contact List plus Sync. So I started taking pictures of friends and then adding the picture to their contact. Then when you sync to your Mac, the picture moves into the Address Book and now appears when they email me. Nice touch.
10. Reading News. The iPhone beats a newspaper. I use the Google RSS Reader to look at news every day. It works so well on the iPhone that I can get all my news this way. Digg and some other sites have iPhone versions too.
11. FaceBook. The iPhone FaceBook application is great. I can do most of the basic tasks and keep my account up-to-date. It is a pleasure to use.
12. Getting Podcasts Direct. If you forget to sync or subscribe to a podcast, you can usually browse to their Web page and listen directly, or WiFi or Edge. So you never run out of things to listen to.
13. Photos. No one was ever too impressed looking at photos on my video iPod. But when I take out my iPhone to show family pictures people love the look and feel of the photo app. I love the fact I’ve got the last 3 months of photos in my pocket.
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08/22/07
For years, the Shockwave installer has had a big, fat, ad for Shockwave.com at the end of the install process. Originally, Macromedia owned ShockRave/Shockwave.com and thus the ad. But then Shockwave.com split off, and the ad remained. Some sort of business arrangement. Shockwave.com since merged with Atom Films and then was bought by MTV.
I’ve always hated the ad. My business is games. I make them and publish them. It burned me up that when someone wanted to play one of my games, and had to install Shockwave to do it, that they were shown an ad for a competitor. It basically appeared as if I was advertising Shockwave.com on my site, but not getting paid a cent for it.
Anyway, the day has come that the ad is gone. The Google toolbar install option is still there. But at least that isn’t a direct competitor to my stuff. Now if only we had an Mac Intel version of Shockwave…
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08/21/07
So I was imagining a war of Web video dominance between Adobe and Apple. Would it be Flash video or QuickTime with h264 that would win. Supporting my imaginary war was the fact that Apple refused to let Flash YouTube video play on Apple TV an the iPhone, and instead made YouTube switch to h264, with Flash players not available on either platform.
But now Adobe announced today that a new beta of the Flash player will support h264. Not completely sure what that means. Will Flash be able to play .mov files? Or .m4v or .mp4? Assuming, of course, that they are h264 compressed?
Does this mean that the war was only in my mind? Or, is it real and Adobe has just struck a brilliant blow, assuring that Flash will remain the dominant media player, even though producers will no longer need to buy Flash to make Flash video?
Also, does this mean that YouTube will completely switch to h264 eventually? Maybe that is why this is happening? If that is the case, will be finally get good quality video at YouTube? Of course, current Flash video (On2 codec) is very capable of producing good video. You can see that on just about any other video site. But for some reason YouTube’s compression settings are too high. Or, I’ve heard they use the older Sorrenson compression instead of On2. Either way, I’ve avoided putting my own YouTube videos on my sites because I get better looking video from other services or my own hand-made video.
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08/15/07
It is rare that you upgrade software to get fewer features. But this is the case with iMovie 08, a compete rework of previous versions of iMovie. I used to use iMove for all sorts of quick and simple video edits, but I can’t anymore as basic timeline functionality is gone. My main move was to record me talking about something, then separate the audio from the video, then splice in b-roll footage in segment. So you ended up with all the audio of me talking, but only me on the video at the beginning and end. I’ll be keeping iMovie 06 around to do that. On the bright side, GarageBand finally has the ability to export directly to an MP3 file. You don’t need to go to iTunes first anymore, play with the iTunes preferences, and convert to MP3. MP3 export should have been in 1.0. But there still isn’t a way to export as an AIFF or WAV. So to use music in projects I still need to export as .m4a and convert with QuickTime Pro.
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