The highest grossing app in the Apple app store is a slot machine app that is free. The second most popular in-app purchase is $20, are we seeing a new generation of problem gamblers because of the ease and allure of in-app purchases?
When you’re a university/college kid wanting to get a break in the world, you naturally try and get a internship for extra credit or just because you want the experience to give you that extra edge when you leave and head into the real world and actually start earning money. Internships or as they’re commonly known as “work experience” in non-Sillicon Valley circles are nothing more than legalised slave labour.
There’s a good chance whenever you see one or more of your work colleagues on Facebook or Reddit you immediately assume they either haven’t got much work to do or they’re slacking off, it’s this kind of backwards thinking that has effectively created a corporate work environment in non-corporate work environments (design studios, game development agencies, internet startups). Procrastination is healthy, it allows us to break out of the tunnel we sometimes dig ourselves into from concentrating too hard to solve a problem (like why an element is behaving different in Firefox and not Chrome) or because we’re stressed out due to all kinds of different variables.
As a developer you’re sometimes given a web design that has certain elements that theoretically can be done with CSS, but don’t look quite the same. One of those I recently discovered isn’t quite the same are dotted borders. If your designer uses Photoshop as their web design tool of choice, there’s a high chance any dotted borders in a design are in fact decimals, styled text. While not all designers would care if their dotted borders don’t look the same, like I did recently the difference can really affect a design. I came up with a crafty solution that allows you to create dotted CSS borders the Photoshop way. This only works if it’s a line on top or bottom, not a dotted border that wraps around an element.
If you live in the South-East Asia region (Australia, New Zealand, etc), then you’re probably aware that computer games, amongst basically everything else, costs you an arm and a leg, sometimes twice the price people in the US pay. Case in point is my recent purchase of Diablo III, I admire and respect Blizzard and the games that they make, but I’m pretty pissed off after paying $79 for an online copy via the Blizzard store, which is using 8 GB of my internet bandwidth (bandwidth I have to pay for and yes, Australian internet is expensive). Yet, most of my friends bought a physical copy of Diablo III for $59 from Australian retailer Dick Smith Electronics.
Wil Wheaton recently posted this blog post titled, “an example of the usefulness of bittorrent for entirely legal purposes” here and pointed out that Bittorrent can be used for legititmate purposes like downloading Ubuntu which is quicker than using a web browser, this isn’t entirely true. While I agree that Bittorrent is definitely faster, I did a test of my own on a basic cable connection here in Australia downloading an official Ubuntu installation .iso from the official website in Google Chrome, the below screenshot speaks for itself. I would recommend downloading it via Bittorrent because you can resume and pause your download amongst other advantages like not costing the hosting provider money by downloading it from the official website.
Today I kicked my nasty Firefox habit for good. At first it was great, opening tabs of your favourite sites and debugging code with Firebug, blocking ads with AdBlock and all was well. Then once everyone was hooked, Firefox became a drunken abusive browser drunk off of its rising popularity and usage. What was once a, “how was your day sir” type of relationship then turned into a, “fuck you I’ll load that website in a few seconds, give me more ram and CPU” relationship.
You know what would be awesome? Being able to go to the cinema, see a movie you really liked and being able to purchase a copy of it on DVD or Blu-Ray as you leave the cinema, at a slightly higher price than a retail store, of course. You know what else would be awesome? Hearing that your favourite band has finished recording and mastering their new album and not having to wait 3 months for it to be released while the band and label try their very best to hype the album up as much as possible only for it to leak way before its release date.
Looks like Zynga made a great purchase… It appears as though popular mobile game Draw Something growth has stagnated if the amount of games I’m waiting for responses on for a couple of weeks now, perhaps even more are anything to go by.
Hi, my name is Dwayne and I am a serial entrepreneur. I come up with one new idea at least once day I think is awesome, I fire up my IDE on the train ride to work, I fire up my IDE during my lunch break, I fire up my IDE on the train ride home and then I fire up my IDE and code sometimes for a whole weekend. I can’t help myself, it’s an obsession, it’s a problem and my brain won’t switch off. If I’m not on the computer, I’m sketching ideas in one of my many notebooks full of untapped ideas, brand names, database schema’s drawn on paper and problems written in big letters with question marks.