Categories
entrepreneurship startup advice

Mike Monteiro | F*ck You. Pay Me

“Starting work without a contract is like a putting a condom on after finding out you got someone pregnant”

For this and other great pieces of advice on life as a services company, trying to get paid, watch this great talk from Mike Monteiro:

http://www.wikio.com/video/mike-monteiro-ck-pay-5196884

Categories
programming server admin

ImageMagick followup: they’re not going to fix it

Response from ImageMagick folks, when I asked them to either re-instate the working binaries, … or stop building as Lion-only:

“We only host and maintain current versions of ImageMagick on one OS
release level. We have a small development team and do not have the
time to support multiple releases and multiple OS levels. The fix is to
download the MacPorts version of ImageMagick which runs under Leopard.
Another solution would be to donate a Mac with Leopard installed so we
can create binaries. We only have one Mac and it hosts Lion.”

Fine – it’s their software, they can do whatever they want. And I think they’ve done a great thing over the years by sharing this command-line tool with the world.

Except … their alternatives aren’t as reasonable as they sound.

Firstly, MacPorts is incredibly difficult to use (even as a former sysadmin and programmer, I find it painful). Simply put: I know it will take me at least a day to get that working, possibly several.

Secondly, deliberately deleting their own working software, and replacing it with non-working software, is deeply irresponsible. If this is how they approach the overall product, how long before you get “caught out” as a user when they pull some other rug out from under you? “Using ImageMagick today? Well – get it while you can, because tomorrow, they might arbitrarily delete it.” (this is what just happened to me: in the space of a few weeks, the first version I downloaded was deleted and replaced with a knowingly-broken version. My backup copy got corrupted, and I thought I could re-download from the web – nope!)

Asking them about this, they pointed out that the version from a few weeks ago had a bug which was a potential security hole. Fine, so they should discourage people from using it – but that doesn’t excuse *deleting* it, and providing only upgrade paths that are painful or expensive (Lion is not free).

It pains me to say this – as noted above, I think the IM product has been a great thing – but I have to conclude:

Don’t use ImageMagick. Just when you need it, it’s liable to let you down.

As for me, I see no other choice but to give Adobe more money, buying a more expensive copy of Photoshop that I don’t really need. I can’t afford to waste days fiddling around with MacPorts – and not even be guaranteed of success. I just need to do one, tiny, simple operation (an image resize!), but unless I can find a kind person who’s got an archived copy of ImageMagick, it’s not going to happen :(.

Oh, well.

Categories
programming server admin system architecture

ImageMagick: no longer runs on OS X, except Lion

The IM maintainers seem to be taking a leaf out of Apple’s book: if you don’t purchase the latest Apple OS upgrade (that most people don’t need), you can no longer use their software.

If you follow their 4-line install instructions, you’ll get:

dyld: Library not loaded: /usr/X11/lib/libpng15.15.dylib
Referenced from: …. /ImageMagick-6.7.2/bin/convert
Reason: image not found

…because that precise version of that library isn’t included in OS X generally, it’s only part of Lion, and it’s not included with ImageMagick – and ImageMagick for some reason has been compiled to refuse to run with anything except that precise version. Why? no explanation of this on the download page. I assume it’s just someone wasn’t paying attention, and went and linked a specific library. If so, it’s very frustrating that a simple noob mistake has just locked out anyone who’s not running Lion. Sigh.

Yes – I could go and download the source, and debug it, and fix it myself, because it’s Open Source. But if I’m going to consider that, then it would be cheaper to:

  1. Buy a new Mac
  2. Buy an extra copy of Photoshop
  3. Buy lots of RAM
  4. Throw away IM

And what about if I were running this on a server (which, after all, is what IM is really here for)? Basically, I’d just be screwed :(. Unless I was happy building from source, with all the pain and suffering that entails.

Overall, it gives me the strong feeling: stop using ImageMagick. It’s too risky. Which is very sad, because in the past it’s been very popular in some (server) teams I’ve worked on, where it helped us do lots of great things (and, IIRC, some of the people I worked with contributed some small minor fixes back to IM. Although this was so long ago I might be imagining that).

Categories
fixing your desktop

Did Google+ break gmail?

One of the features of Gmail that I’ve long relied upon is the:

“Default: Reply to all, instead of Reply”

In 95% of cases, this is correct – it’s only rarely that you want to actively remove everyone else from the conversation.

…but this stopped working shortly after Google+ came out. Coincidence? I’m not sure.

Certainly, it’s caused MASSES of problems – people being dropped from email conversations, with associated obvious problems e.g. not hearing that a meeting’s been re-arranged.

I’ve bug-reported it to Google, but going on previous experience, there will be just silence.

Categories
computer games games design

Alarm bells for Game Design failure: “evolving” someone else’s IP

There’s a new Syndicate game in development. After one of the most facepalm moments in game design – taking a unique game-genre and replacing it with an FPS, at a time when FPS market is massively over-saturated – the studio has gone one further:

“we’re taking the Persuadatron and evolving it”

It’s always possible that they’re going to make it better. On the balance of probability, that’s unlikely.

Even leaving aside the amazing decision to remove the single most important feature of the original IP – the genre itself. NB: this has been tried before: Syndicate Wars changed the core gameplay, and was a commercial failure (given the previous sales of the IP).

Sadly, it seems that in press conversations, “evolving” is often short-hand for “putting our own “stamp” on it, by changing it; it’s the change that matters, not the improvement. We MUST be able to claim this is “our” game, and not the original designers'”.

Often, it seems the thought process has gone something like this:

“the original idea was unique. At our studio, we don’t have many unique ideas – so we’re CERTAINLY not going to let anyone see how weak they are when contrasted with the genuinely strong ones in the IP we’ve just taken over.

Our cunning plan is to remove all the unique, innovative aspects of the IP, and replace them with dumbed-down, crappier mechanics that we thought up ourselves. But stick the original name on the new mechanics.

This way:

  1. we won’t be made to look stupid by our own game
  2. google searches will turn up YouTube videos of our scuppered mechanic, and people hearing “X was a great idea” will look at it and go: “Hmm. Not really”, without realising they’re looking at the scuppered version

(I’ve worked on two teams that tried to get approval for re-making Syndicate (not Wars!) over the years; I’m a big fan of the original, and still occasionally play it on an emulator. It’s amazing how much people want to over-complicate it – somehow forgetting that the original studio (Bullfrog) was reknowned for it’s quirky/bizarre/unusually inventive game designs, and that they’ll have a lot to live up to if they want to “extend” that)

RPS says it best:

designer Rickard Johansson: “I don’t want people to stop playing the old games, but time has moved on.”

Has it? Has it really? Perhaps he didn’t notice that Starcraft 2 outsold most of EA’s (and everyone else’s) portfolio last year. Perhaps he didn’t notice that SEGA refer to Total War as one of the major jewels in their crown. Perhaps he didn’t notice that Valve are spending a fortune on a DOTA remake. Perhaps what he really means is ‘publishers will give us a bigger development and marketing budget if we make it a first-person shooter.’

Categories
amusing games industry

Side effects of treating everyone with suspicion

Today I was forwarded what looked like an interesting little event: “The Gamification of Everything”. I applied. Or … tried to.

The process on all event websites today is:

  1. Type in your name
  2. Type in your email address
  3. Click “attend”

3 steps.

This event has a process with … 15 steps (!).

The website claimed to have registered me for the event.

Your registration is cancelled

And then, after all that, they emailed me to say they weren’t accepting my request to attend, apparently because I didn’t give them an acceptable company name (I put “n/a” in the field, as I was attending as a private individual):

I noticed that you’ve signed onto our website and want to register for the next Convergence Conversation meeting , but you don‘t say which organisation you represent nor where you are based. But you are the ‘founder’ of what?! I would appreciate more information please – if you are self-employed I can use your name as the organisation.

Maybe you were in a hurry – but as I’m sure you will understand. we like to know who the attendees are, the field of work they come from/represent.

The price of suspicion

To be clear: I signed up for their event, and the website accepted it. I put it in my diary. Then they contact me acknowledging that I “wanted to register”.

What? No: I *did* register.

Will I find myself turned away at the door when I turn up on the day? WTF?

Thanks, but no thanks:

“I’m not going to risk turning up to an event and being turned away on
the door. Just the thought of that is unpleasant. Feel free to delete
my application. I’m sorry to say that I won’t be coming ”

It amazes me how many people seem unaware of the effect it has on others when they pre-suppose guilt and nefarious motives. I mean … what on earth did they imagine I was going to do? Burst in and scream:

“Death to the infidel Gamifiers! Gamification is the scourge of mankind!”

…and start knocking over tables?

PS: that 15-step signup in full

The process for this event is:

  1. click signup
  2. type in
    1. name – WARNING: YOU MUST GIVE US YOUR REAL NAME, AS PER OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS
    2. email
    3. where you live
    4. the company where you work
    5. the city where your company’s office is situated
    6. the *postcode* of your company
    7. the *country* of your company (yes, really – these are all required fields, form won’t submit without them!)
    8. your job title
    9. …some other bits I’ve already forgotten
  3. wait for a confirmation email
  4. click the confirm email link
  5. wait for a password email
  6. login to the website using the new password (most sites at least auto-login at this point; not this one)
  7. return to the event page
  8. click the “I’m attending” button
Categories
android fixing your desktop funny Google? Doh! iphone

Google Street-View on iPhone: a lesson in UX design

Today I finally discovered that the iPhone has StreetView.

That means it’s only taken me THREE YEARS to find this secret feature that Google has worked very hard to make sure no-one ever uses.

The best bit? The top two Google results for “iPhone Streetview” were both incorrect, and useless – but claimed to “solve” the problem (one of them was a Yahoo answer, the other a blog).

Eventually, courtesy of this amusingly-titled (yet poor in terms of Google hits) blog post, I found the solution:

  1. There MUST be a pin on screen – either because:
    1. you did a search for a place, and Google has found it and created a pin
    2. you tapped the curled paper in bottom right, then pressed the “drop a pin” button (incidentally: instead of letting you “drop a pin”, that button arbitrarily sticks a non-moveable pin in the center of the (now-hidden) screen. Terrible UX and GUI design. Google’s designers: what were you thinking?)
  2. The popup that’s attached to the pin has a standard button, and a standard icon – BUT THAT ICON IS NOT AN ICON
    1. …it’s an invisible button…

When we’re building iPhone apps for clients, this comes up typically once on every project: if you want to do custom user-interfaces, do NOT make them look like Apple standard interfaces. Apple has trained 200 million (total number of i* devices) to expect that (in this case: ) “a map-popup has exactly one button”. You are fighting against the work of one of the richest companies on the planet, a company famous for its marketing, interface-design, and visual-obsessions.

Worse is if you then go and break all the standards on what a “button” should look like, so that (in Google’s case), they:

  1. Put something in the place that is reserved for a non-clickable icon
  2. Used an icon-image instead of a button-image
  3. Provided no other ways of triggering the feature…even though this is usually NOT the place the user would want to click to get that feature

I laughed out loud when I discovered this – 3 years it’s taken me to get this to work, and me a professional iPhone developer too! How long is it taking the average “normal” user? If nothing else had convinced me Google is fundamentally f***ed by their refusal to design for anything other than “engineers who are exactly like us (and the rest of you plebs don’t matter)”, this would have nailed it for me.

Categories
entrepreneurship startup advice

Inside story on raising $24m funding, and working with VC’s

I believe this is the best post I’ve seen on startup funding since the creation of Venture Hacks:

Raising money for a startup is an inherently risky proposition. You step up to the plate knowing that the odds are slim and that, for every story of success on TechCrunch, there’s two hundred companies pounding the street, getting nowhere. We went the opposite route – letting investors come to us.

This is the story of that experience – being “pitched” by investors, the decision-making and negotiation processes and the end results.

Rand writes in detail the complete story of a major funding round for his startup, where other CEO’s are “too busy” or don’t have the balls to share publicly.

He talks about what happens when you “practice” things that leading-lights of the VC and Entrepreneur world have long been “preaching”.

He lays out a strategy popular with armchair entrepreneurs, and relates his experience of how it can go wrong.

This should be required reading for any serious Tech Entrepreneur / Startup team…

Categories
android entrepreneurship

Google: “A patent isn’t innovation. It’s the right to block someone else from innovating”

A delightful quote from Google.

Although equally, Florian Mueller has an interesting analysis on whetherGoogle really wants to kill patents – or just kill “patents which Google doesn’t already own”?

note that Google’s discussion of its intellectual property rights starts with patents. They could have started with copyright, trademarks and trade secrets, putting patents last. No, they put them first.

So are they against patents? It seems they like their own patents very much (including the absurd Google Doodle patent, which they spent ten years fighting for) and are only against other people’s and companies’ patents.

Based on their activity over the past 5 years, I’d say Florian’s view seems closer to the truth: as a corporation, they seem to be well aware of such things as patent law, but uninterested in doing anything about it until it suits them. That’s fine, but it makes people less interested in working with them when they later cry “foul!” … Google seems much like a fairweather friend, in reverse.