#1: Cocos2d for iPhone 1 Game Development Cookbook

Tweet this: I’d like to read this book on cocos2d! http://is.gd/uMGIcA

#2: Unreal Development Kit Game Programming with UnrealScript: Beginner’s Guide

Tweet this: I’d like to read this book on UnrealScript! http://is.gd/D59QkK

#3: Android 3.0 Animations: Beginner’s Guide

Tweet this: I’d like to read this book on Android animations! http://is.gd/T0g0Wi

#4: XNA 4.0 Game Development by Example: Beginner’s Guide – Visual Basic Edition

Tweet this: I’d like to read this book on XNA4 game development! http://is.gd/R42Uoa

And if you don’t so happen to be a lucky winner, fear not, you can still get your hands on any of these for a little quid pro quo, that being to post a review on your blog and Amazon and the like: just drop a line to Shaveer Irani of Packt with the subject “book name- review request copy” to join our Distinguished Fraternity Of Review Writers!

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the iBooks Author EULA

… Let’s say, for giggles, that “book stealing” was Apple’s intent, and such an intent was found to be both legal and the actual intent of the contract, and Apple decided to exercise those rights to steal my books. You know what? Even with all that, it’s still a hell of a lot better deal than I’ve ever gotten from a traditional publisher. Apple is offering 70% of the sale price to me. The most favorable contract I’ve ever gotten from a publisher starts at 12% of the net price the publisher gets from the distributor, wholesaler, or retailer (which is half or less of the retail price). That percentage does slowly escalate up to 20% if I sell a ton of books, but if I publish a new edition of an existing book, the escalators go back down to 12% and I have to start all over. To put this in more concrete terms, if I were to sell a book in the iBooks Store for $9.99, I would get $6.99 per book sold, which is about four times what I get when one of my current $39.99 books sells, and I’d get that money months sooner. Oh, and guess what? I don’t own those books published through a traditional publisher, either. My publisher can even have someone else update the book and can continue to use my name to promote it, even if I don’t like the revisions or think the update sucks…

Wow! We were vaguely aware that writing books was for most people a pretty low return endeavour, but we had no idea that terms were on the order of a twentieth of the cover price. That rather puts all the huffing and puffing from excitable quarters into its proper context, doesn’t it now?

UPDATES :

A rather more amusing take on the huffing and puffing types: In Favour Of iBook Author

Lots of thought-provoking iBooks Ideas from @mattgemmell!

How does — how can — anyone adequately eulogize such a person?

You don’t. You take inspiration and move forward.

And we’d like to present to you our candidate for the appropriate tribute to Steve Jobs, from an incident most of you probably wouldn’t expect:

“What have you done that’s so great? Do you create anything?”

Ask yourself that. Every day.

Answering “yes” is the best tribute that you can give Steve Jobs.

TROLL: So, let us get this straight: you carry around constantly on your person a radio station whose intrinsic function is to ensure that your location and your conversations are continuously broadcast to the world, and this doesn’t make you bat an eyelash at the privacy implications; but you find out it looks like said radio station is keeping some notes, and that makes you freak out.

DRAMA QUEEN: APPLE EEEEEVIL! SUE! SUE! SUE!

TROLL: Right then. We’ll just be on our way looking for how to get back to Sane Person Land now.

(UPDATE: It’s not just iPhone users that find their devices working as designed to be actionable. Heh.)

Actually, to be perfectly honest our immediate reaction to the very first we heard of this (h/t: @mattgemell) was “The phone can let us know where on earth we were last night? That’s awesome!” However, we recognize that the number of people who tend to find themselves presented with utterly unfathomable mysteries along the lines of “Where did we go and what on earth happened last night that we have a broken arm this morning?” and would therefore find actual location tracking a valuable service is probably quite low. As most people do not go out and relax quite as hard as trolls have a way of doing.

Any-ways, for the benefit of any of you who might find this a concern, or need to deal with someone who finds this a concern, Oliver Drobnik has posted what looks good enough to serve as the definitive statement on this brouhaha:

Locating Controversy

So there you go then. Personally, we find Apple’s statement reasonable and perfectly believable; it fits just fine with the “history” our phone has of where it’s been jaunting around to since the iOS 4 upgrade:

Let us zoom in on Central America in particular:

And most specifically on the area formerly known as the Netherland Antilles. Of which we were only on Bonaire diving with sea turtles (pretty nifty, that), not Curaçao. Although we’re sure it’s a very nice place too, all our Curaçaoan readers, we’ll catch you next time.

As ought to be utterly evident even if you weren’t along with the phone as it was out walkies collecting this data, there is nothing resembling serious location tracking going on here. What you’re seeing is, well, perfectly consistent with what Apple says this location database is. And furthermore points out nicely that they apparently do not have a good stock of Central American data at all … so if you’re still all in a kerfluffle about this, hey you know where to move to now, pretty much anywhere between dots on that middle map!

UPDATE:

Hey, want to do some good with that data?

We would like to combine as many of these log files as possible, create an open database of wifi and cell networks and thus visualize how these networks are distributed all over the world.

So please contribute your iPhone log files and help us to create an open wifi und cell database.

You can find out more on this project on our blog.

Sounds like a project worth supporting!

The Ultimate Guide To Social Entrepreneur Funding Options: Crowdfunding

As the name implies, they’re generally focused on social entrepreneurial endeavours, but hey, no doubt you’ve got some socially worthy good ideas to go along with “the next Angry Birds”, yes?

Speaking of which … there’s a little bit of kerfluffle going on in the Twitterverse about just what constitutes acceptable approaches to entrepreneurialism. We’re pretty much in agreement with Daniel Jalkut here:

Some of my Twitter friends are buzzing about Alex Payne’s arguments on what constitutes a respectable entrepreneurial pursuit. In case you want to catch up on the pre-reading, it starts with a post by Justin Vincent, basically promoting the idea that indie “mom-n-pop” businesses are a reasonable alternative to massive, venture-funded pursuits. Payne responded with a snarky comment, provoking a heartfelt defense from Amy Hoy. Finally, Payne posted a retraction and clarification…

Heh. Oooooh, drama! But hey, if you’re looking for some kind of higher purpose than “pay the bills” with your work, it’s probably worth reading through the different perspectives here. Again, we think Daniel says it best:

… Focusing on what I know and appreciate is the balance that keeps me self-funded, intellectually stimulated, and productive…

Yeah, we’d say that’s the important thing. As do others. In practice, it works out pretty much the same as the Justin Vincent post mentioned above. Hey, that’s why we’re Trollwerks, and not the CTO at an ambitious startup we were before the iPhone SDK was released! Gee, was that almost three years ago? How the time does fly when you’re having fun!

Oh, and one last note, getting back to the original topic here: Messr. Justin Vincent has some resources for those taking his approach seriously:

Bootstrappers’ Kickstarter Kit – No Investment Required

Goes along with the crowdfunding idea pretty nicely, yep.

h/t: @appbackr!

UPDATES:

13 Crowdfunding Websites to Fund Your Business

This one is specifically for indie games: GamesPlant

How to setup a complete Project Management, Subversion and Issue Tracking ecosystem

Interesting because whilst the recommendations pretty much mirror exactly the setup of the Trollwerks code foundry, they include a project management system we had not heard of before, the open source self-hosted ProjectPier:

ProjectPier is an open source online management system very similar to the ultra popular Basecamp from 37signals. It doesn’t have those hard features of project management (like Gantt Charts, etc), it simply deals with projects as Tasks, Messages, Files, Milestones, Tickets and optional Wiki per project…

Using Project Pier is very easy and straightforward:

1. Create a project.
2. Create a “Client Company”.
3. Add users to the client company.
4. Set these users to the created project and give them appropriate permissions (permissions are related per project, which means that you may have hundreds of projects and the client will only see his related projects).
5. Add milestones, tasks, files, etc, don’t forget to check notifications checkboxes when applied.

Now you can center everything related to your project in Project Pier and access everywhere: brainstorming, files, tasks, bug tracking, etc. Explain and invite your clients to not directly send project related emails, but to post Messages in Project Pier (everyone receives them by email after that).

Note that you can add “Private Items”: private milestones, tasks, etc that the involved clients won’t see. Those can be internal tasks/files/etc that you don’t want the client to see nor participate…

Hmmm. That sounds like a pretty darn attractive solution for working with clients that don’t have their own project management set up. Currently, when left to our own devices we pretty much rely on the amazingly awesome Things for short-term GTD-style task management — all there is in a client project, generally — and stash longer term issues in a free Lighthouse account accessed through the sweet Lighthouse Keeper native client. However, it would be nice to have something with a bit more structure, that

A) we could add our rather long and ever growing list of projects and clients to without paying ridiculous monthly fees, and

B) is simple enough that it would be realistic to convince non-technical clients to actually use the thing. Which eliminates popular programmer-centric alternatives like Trac, Redmine, yada yada yada, right there.

A) is a given here, and surfing around the web a bit it seems that ProjectPier has a pretty good chance of qualifying under B) as well. And since it sounds like it should be pretty simple to set up on our DreamHost account, why we do believe that soon as we have a bit of a break around here (ha!) we will indeed look into setting that up and seeing how it works. Any of you Dear Readers tried out ProjectPier? How did it work, or not, for you?

UPDATES:

Here’s a roundup of online project management tools to check out — ProjectPier is the only self-hosted one on the list, we note, which keeps it front and center as the one we’re likely to try out whenever we get a chance.

And here’s a May 2011 roundup of 30 Best FREE Project Management Software. Free is a good price! Desktop and web both, ProjectPier is on that list too.

And a June 2011 40 Most Influential Project Management Tools roundup.

An atom-based product, developed in bits

Step 1: The Idea.

In this case, a tripod adapter/kickstand for the iPhone 4.

Step 2: Crowdsource some financing.

Throw your project up on Kickstarter, get 5273 people to pledge $137,417 as we write this.

Step 3: Design the product.

Use Rhinoceros 3D design software — which is really cheap if you use the free OS X beta.

Step 4: Prototype the product.

Ship the files off to Shapeways for pretty cheap 3D printing. And start selling them immediately to the impatient.

Step 5: Produce the product.

And you can do injection molding production in the dozens to thousands production run at a practical unit cost at Protomold — the article quotes $10,000 as breakeven for the mold and the run, which presumably would be a 500 unit run at the $20 pledge price. So although it’s not a trivial investment, it’s certainly vastly quicker and less expensive than conventional manufacturing.

Compared to how hard this would have been a decade ago … no, wait, for all practical purposes this would have been completely impossible for anyone except a very large company a decade ago. Even five years ago it would have probably taken a good order of magnitude more investment to get through to salable product. It’s just so darn empowering to be alive these days, isn’t it now?

h/t: Cocoanetics!

How Social Games Ate Our Lunch

… It’s unintuitive to think that games where you actually do not ever directly interact with another person could have a community, but what social games do is generate an asynchronous cloud of persistent community formed by the constant exchange of gifts, tools, and requests sent by other players. It’s generosity-driven, but transactional – if I send you a gift, I’m feeling happy because I helped you out (especially if I’m responding to a request you’ve put out), but I’m also hoping you’ll send me something back. And the more I send and receive, the more I plant, the more I return every day (or more than once a day) – the more hardcore my play becomes. Watch a hardcore FarmVille player. They move fluidly and attentively around the tiniest change in mechanics, and play not for some whimsical dollhouse experience but for tight, fast, controlled optimizations, seeking the fastest path to a clear goal, and putting in as much time as it takes to get there…

Okay, but we’re still not seeing, like, the point here.

… What World of Warcraft did to Everquest’s mechanics – making them smoother, faster, and more elegant, and so earning unprecedented millions of players – FarmVille, though we don’t like to admit it, did to World of Warcraft. FarmVille distills the active components of a game down to a handful of clicks, and massively leverages social and viral communication channels to create the feelings of shared mission and victory, all while carving out a player-expressed space in the online world. And while it’s doubtful that even its creators would call FarmVille “elegant,” it is the first step in a new evolution of games, new (and resented) the way World of Warcraft was in the beginning – and its mechanics are so powerful that it has compelled a head-popping number of new gamers even without being polished the way WoW was…

Yikes. We’re not completely sure whether to be flabbergasted or horrified at this evolution of gaming, because we sorta have the apparently old school idea that a game ought to be, you know, fun, and these seem a lot more like work, but hey, the argument does hold together well, so if you’re interested in game design it’s definitely worth a read!

h/t: @gaminghorror!

Very very excited.

Yes, it’s quite the time. As the slogan has it,

Indeed. Our condolences to all of you out there who are in cities that aren’t Vancouver. Although we’re sure that yours is very nice too. And almost certainly a great deal quieter, at the moment…

Furthermore, whilst there’s certainly no shortage of JavaScript frameworks from Apple that could be used for this, we’ll bet that it’s going to be based on PastryKit.

Oh, you’ve missed that PastryKit thingy? Well, it’s not officially acknowledged, and the first mention of it anywhere appears to be this StackOverflow thread. It came to general attention when the esteemed John Gruber waxed poetic on Daring Fireball about it; that set off a minor feeding frenzy of digging deeper into it all over teh intertubes, like here, and here, and here.

The thing that really gets our spidey sense tingling is that PastryKit is fairly self-evidently the basis for TuneKit, the official method for creating iTunes LP and iTunes Extras for the desktop and for Apple TV. It just kinda seems to follow to us that the technology they’d pick for that is one that they’ve got bigger plans for. Like, doing to the mobile visual content marketplace what they’ve done to the mobile audio and application content marketplaces — that is, pwned them completely,

Apple responsible for 99.4% of mobile app sales in 2009

iTunes Beats All with 69% Digital [Music] Market Share

in case you’ve been in a coma or something.

So really, even without the various leaks from content providers pointing that way, it does follow that Apple would be working on assimilating magazine and book publishers … because, when you think about it, who else is there left for them to go after? But you’re not going to have each content provider write their own application like on the iPhone’s App Store, you’re going to have a content framework for them to design to. And it just seems like a pretty darn good bet that the above-referenced TuneKit is the first step in that direction; and it also fits with the kind of application that the PastryKit sightings in the wild have been in connection with.

On the other hand, we could be completely wrong. You’ll be able to check next week!