Thoughts on Mike L. and Thorsten H.

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Last night the news broke that Mike L. and Jim B. were stepping down as Co-CEOs of RIM. While this move will be loved on Wall Street, the thought of the company’s founders being pushed out scares me a bit in regards to the future of the companies products. Historically when the founders of a company step down the results are not good (as seen with Apple without Jobs and Yahoo without Yang).

Still things to seem to be promising about Thorsten Heins as CEO. For one he is being promoted from within the company. Secondly is that he has master’s degree in science and physics. My opinion is that technology companies need to be run by engineers rather then by businessmen.

Yesterday morning on twitter (well before any news broke) I linked to a piece in the Democrat and Chronicle about Kodak. The relevant part is below…

“You can trace the problems to when the MBAs kind of took control of the company,” Shippey said. There were plenty of people, he said, who saw the change coming and alerted the company. But it would have taken an innovator, not necessarily an MBA, to make the moves that were needed in a timely way.

So far the rumors about Heins are positive, so there is reason to be optimistic. But RIM must remain a technology driven company (even if that isn’t really what Wall Street wants).

BlackBerry

10,000 Farkle hits its second anniversary

Two years ago 10,000 Farkle was released as my second game in BlackBerry AppWorld. Here are the highlights of the last two years.

History of Farkle

  • January 2010 – Version 1.0 released The first version of 10,000 Farkle was released in BlackBerry AppWorld.
  • May 2010 – Version 1.1 released This update added support for achievements.
  • September 2010 – Version 1.2 released Vast improvements to the animations, and support for OS6 devices.
  • February 2011 – Version 1.3 released Improvements to graphics and further OS6 support.
  • August 2011 – Version 1.4 released Support for OS7 devices was added.
  • January 2011 – Version 1.5 released Added auto-saving of game progress.

How to Play

Farkle gives you six dice to roll and awards points for a straight, three pairs or three or more of the same number. Fewer points ares also awarded for each individual 1 and 5. Any dice that do not score can be re-rolled for additional points. If all 6 dice can be scored, all of the dice can be re-rolled on the same turn.

The skill in this game comes from knowing how far to push your luck, and which scoring combinations to take, and which to re-roll.

The default game mode gives you 10 turns to score as many points as you can. The 10,000 point mode is the traditional way to play, where the goal is to reach 10,000 points in as few turns as possible. The two competitive game modes “vs Friend” and “vs Computer” both use the traditional race to 10,000 points.

Links & Information

BlackBerry, Farkle

Black Out now available on the Nook

Black Out is now available to be downloaded onto the Nook Color and Nook Tablet, from the Barnes & Noble Bookstore.

How to Play

The goal to Black Out is to tap the tiles, so that they all get ‘blacked out’. This is complicated because whenever you tap to flip a tile, it also flips all of the tiles surrounding it. As such it requires a well laid out strategy.

In order to accommodate different difficulties, the game supports board sizes from 3×3 all the way up to a 10×10 grid. Furthermore, there is also a hint button in case you find yourself in need of help.

Links & Information

Black Out, Nook

PlayBook OS versions

The above chart shows the breakdown (as of last month) of PlayBook OS versions currently in use. As was the case in September, the vast majority of users are running the latest OS.

Because I feel that it is unreasonable to expect end users to be running a beta version of the software, users of OS 2.0 (and other unreleased versions) were included in the group of OS 1.0.8 users. The percent of people running the beta was in the low single digits.

Data comes from December 2011 downloads of the free strategy game Pixelated.

BlackBerry, PlayBook, Statistics

Farkle updated to version 1.5

10,000 Farkle has been updated to version 1.5 in BlackBerry AppWorld. The biggest improvement in this update is that you can now exit the app in the middle of a game, and then resume the game, when you restart the application. This new version of Farkle also makes some improvements to the efficiency of the app, as well as some visual tweaks.

How to Play

Farkle gives you six dice to roll and awards points for a straight, three pairs or three or more of the same number. Fewer points ares also awarded for each individual 1 and 5. Any dice that do not score can be re-rolled for additional points. If all 6 dice can be scored, all of the dice can be re-rolled on the same turn.

The skill in this game comes from knowing how far to push your luck, and which scoring combinations to take, and which to re-roll.

The default game mode gives you 10 turns to score as many points as you can. The 10,000 point mode is the traditional way to play, where the goal is to reach 10,000 points in as few turns as possible. The two competitive game modes “vs Friend” and “vs Computer” both use the traditional race to 10,000 points.

Links & Information

BlackBerry, Farkle

Xploding Boxes updated

Xploding Boxes has been updated in BlackBerry AppWorld, and the Nook Bookstore, adding 20 additional levels, bringing the total up to 260.

About Xploding Boxes

Xploding Boxes is a strategy game for BlackBerry and Nook, where the goal of the game is to start a chain reaction that will explode all of the boxes on the screen. Each level gives you a different number of touches, and requires a different strategy to solve. The first 25 levels are free, while the full 260 levels can be accessed by making an in-application payment and requiring no further downloads. This game is available for the PlayBook, most smartphones running OS 5.0 or higher, and the Nook Color and Nook Tablet.

Links & Information

BlackBerry, Nook, Xploding Boxes

The Majority of PlayBook users are Canadian

The above chart shows the country of PlayBook users based on downloads of the game Pixelated in the month of December. The game was downloaded in 122 different countries during the month, but more then half of the downloads came from Canada.

The top 10 countries were (in order) Canada, United States, United Kingdom, Mexico, United Arab Emirates, Australia, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Argentina.

There may be some sampling errors due to regional popularity of the game Pixelated, or the fact that the game is only available in English, Spanish, Dutch, French, and Portuguese. Also because data was only used from the month of December, these numbers may be affected by regional promotions and discounts during this time frame.

BlackBerry, PlayBook, Statistics

BlackBerry OS distribution

December showed an uptick in usage of OS 7.0 which is now up to 11.4 percent. This growth however, mostly came at the expense of users of OS 6.0 which saw little to no growth. There was also no significant growth in the use of OS 5.0 in the past month.

This data was taken from downloads of the popular BlackBerry strategy game Pixelated. Data shown on the chart is from the beginning of December 2010 through the end of December 2011.

BlackBerry, Statistics

The opportunities of NFC

From the BlackBerry Developer’s Blog…

“In terms of NFC as an emerging technology, one thing that’s important to understand is that it’s not restricted to payment-related functions. As a developer, you can utilize NFC in a number of interesting ways, from tag-reading smart posters to emulating something like a campus card.”

NFC is a big deal, and it’s ability to replace a corporate/student ID is far more useful then its ability to replace a credit card.

BlackBerry

The PlayBook’s useless keyboard language button

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Above is the default keyboard layout for the BlackBerry PlayBook. For the most part it is your standard keyboard. But it has one button that instead of a letter, is a picture of the planet. This button is completely useless.

Technically this button can be used in order to change the keyboard’s language, but nobody every uses it. Instead of this waste I would like to see something useful on this part of the keyboard. Something like @ or $ or ‘ or ” or & or anything else. Screen real estate is already at a premium with a full two pages already being used for additional symbols. Is it really too much to ask to get something useful promoted to the default keyboard?

Changing the language is something that is never done by most users, and is done rarely by those that do need to do so. The option to change the keyboard language should be on either the existing Language options page or the existing Keyboard options page (or both). It should not, however be on the keyboard itself, when something useful could take its place.

BlackBerry, PlayBook

Year in review

2011 has been a great year to be an app developer. These are the highlights in chronological order.

Here is to a great 2012!

BlackBerry

The myth of the Christmas sales spike

There seems to be a belief that there is a spike in downloads and purchases of apps on Christmas, due to people receiving devices as gifts. However the data fails to back up this theory. Downloads shot up for free games, but there was no change at all for paid games, or any other apps. After selling apps for a few years now I expected this, but now I have the charts to prove it.

First downloads for the free game Pixelated in December 2010, and 2011 are charted below. While downloads do shoot up on Christmas day, the increase doesn’t actually exceed where the download rate happened to be earlier in the month. Additionally in both years, the peak actually comes on the day after Christmas.

Despite this small increase there is no corresponding increase in purchases of Pixelated Plus. Neither is there any significant increase in the number of launches of the game. The next chart shows the requests to the ad server each day in December. This value continues to be as steady as ever.

Next looking at my other popular apps, there is still no spike in sales. The free date tracking/sharing app Twinkle shows no increase at all. In fact downloads hit their monthly low on Christmas day.

Downloads of Xploding Boxes follow a similar pattern as we saw with Pixelated. In short there is a modest spike in downloads, and no corresponding increase in purchases of the full version of the game.

So while Christmas day may be slightly above average in terms of downloads, it certainly is not as off the charts crazy as it is sometimes made out to be.

BlackBerry, Statistics