Software Development from Ryan

What a wonderful thing to hear from a company I have a tremendous amount of respect for. KDice Trainer is featured this week on the App Store and shown as the #2 icon on the front page. It started with an email from Apple the other day:

“We love the game, KDice Trainer. Can you send us the artwork for it - according to the specs below by Friday morning?”

Of course I rushed to get this to them ASAP knowing that communication from Apple of this sort meant some type of promotion and App Store promotion typically gives an app a large boost in exposure. The artwork was sent, now the app is featured, and I see some sales coming in.

So I’d like to give a big welcome to all the new KDice players out there! Practice up. I’m getting the multiplayer code ready for you.

KDice Trainer for iPhone is now on the App Store! I worked on making a fast single player version of KDice that captures all of the elements that make kdice.com popular. You play against up to 6 out of 99 bots and work your way from 100th place up to 1st if you’re lucky.

The interface is clean and clear and allows you to configure the type of game (2-7 players, map size, difficult) without a configuration screen. Configuration screens are confusing and often make things more complex than required. In this app there is no configuration screen but instead these configuration options are built into the leaderboard where you select who you want to play.

The leaderboard has 99 bots named after some of the top KDice players. The AI is fairly complex giving each bot unique decision making combinations. As you work your way up the leaderboard the bots get smarter and harder to beat.

The touch screen on iPhones is a natural fit for selecting areas to attack. You simply slide your finger from the territory you’re attacking from to the territory you want to attack. Even with a full map attacking is easy and accurate.

The landing page:
http://iphone.kdice.com

On the App Store:
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=310652813&mt=8

Do you want a free copy?. I’ll be giving away 10 (9 left) free copies to people who can promote KDice Trainer for iPhone most effectively (blog post, tweet, digg, etc). Simply email me what you’ve done and I’ll send a free copy to the top 10.

I just ported chapter 10 from my GWT book to the Java App Engine. I’m very impressed with Google’s release today. I had to:

• upgrade Eclipse to use the new Google Eclipse Plugin and create a new Web Application Project
• change the code to use JDO instead of Hibernate since this is what App Engine uses
• click the “Deploy App Engine Project” button in Eclipse

and it was up: http://gwtapps10.appspot.com

I really value GWT for the way it solves the software engineering issues with Ajax and thick web clients. I always discourage selecting technologies based on how quick it takes you to get a app compiled and running from scratch but damn, this is by far the quickest way to deploy a full stack web application using the absolute best possible technologies available (google’s scalable infrastruture, async http, image bundling, monolithic javascript compilation, easy RPC)
Thanks Google!

I’ve attached the source code if you’re interested. Send me your thoughts and updates!
GWTApps-DatabaseEditor-AppEngine.zip

(I’ve removed the jars from the zip because they were too big (war/WEB-INF/lib). You should copy the required libs back to this directory. Use the Google plugin to generate a new App Engine web app and copy the jars from its lib directory.)

It’s not easy to be swayed to try something new, especially from advertising, and definitely if you have to pay for it. Old marketing doesn’t really work well even though it still lingering around. I find the only way I try something new is if its recommended by someone I know and this doesn’t happen very often.

Lately there have been a few blips on my radar for Chipotles. It was recommended both as a company worth investing in and having burritos worth tasting. So recently, being in the area, wife, baby and I decided to try it and it was an educational experience. Not only is their food pretty good but the whole customer experience, while simple, is well polished.

I’ve been looking a little closer at customer experience over the past couple months. It’s essentially the consumer version of software’s user experience. In both cases a product is not the focus of design. Instead, the focus is the experience surrounding the product. I suppose these thoughts stem from having read Do you matter recently (the one takeaway point I got from this is that a solid culture of design is necessary on a team that builds good customer experience). Making this link between the two types of design broadens the horizon of inspiration for designing software experiences. And of course, of particular inspiration is Chipotles. Here’s a few design ideas taken from Chipotles customer experience:

1. Limit Selection. I hate ordering food when the menu is long. It’s a lot of work figuring out what the best thing is to order. With long menus its a research project. Why do these restaurants make me do all this work? In contrast, if you go to Chipotles you can get Burritos or Tacos either with Chicken, Steak, or Pork, all for the same price.
2. Don’t Limit the Extras. They aren’t part of the product but contribute to the experience. These are generally the first things that get cut when trying to reduce costs but they’re usually the cheapest and contribute the most to the experience. For example, Chipotles lets you choose how many napkins you need, lets you help yourself to sliced lemons and full bottles of tobasco sauce. That my not seem like much but the experience is miles better than hot sauce packets and napkin dispensers. Google follows this technique with GMail’s ever increasing limit. You may not ever come close to that limit but its nice to know its high.
3. Care. This is more than a customer service smile. It’s caring about the details. When ordering there was a notice that the meat they used was free of chemicals and vegetable fed. When we sat down we received a bib for our baby (although she was not eating burritos!). When we used our napkins to clean up what became a messy burrito we saw, on the back of the napkin, instructions on how to unwrap and eat your burrito without making a mess.

I’m curious to see what other companies are paying attention to details like this in the software world. If you bump to any, send me an email!

Although Kongregate won, KDice was nominated for the Best Time Sink category at The Crunchies. TechCrunch, a very big blog reporting on technology start up news, put on the event in a style similar to award shows you’d see on TV. Award winners included Digg, Facebook, and Tesla Motors - pretty amazing companies. Here’s a screenshot from the Time Sink category which KDice was nomiated in:

Google Web Toolkit Applications has been out for around for one month and a couple reviews have come in.  Joseph Ottinger from The Server Side says in his review:

Google Web Toolkit Applications is an excellent book, well worth the list price of $49.99 (USD) if you’re doing any serious GWT development. It’s well written, very much in depth, and shows application patterns that will be very useful for anyone using GWT, in many cases showing concepts that are very difficult to find elsewhere.

The second review is by Chris from GWT Site:

Google Web Toolkit Applications is an excellent book. It is easy to read and does a really good job covering all the major GWT topics and more. The applications demonstrate software development best practices and cover a variety of interesting techniques.

The conference was amazing. The only negative point, and this is the most tiny negative relative to everything else, would be that there was a bit of a pro Java slant at times which alienated developers using many other technologies. I guess its a sure fire way to get a positive response from a largely Java based audience. This however, was not something that any speaker from the GWT team did making a point to convey Java as a pragmatic, rather than religious, choice.

On the largely positive side of things, some of the most interesting people I’ve ever talked to were there. Bruce Johnson is an extremely practical no-compromise web purist and his dedication to GWT makes me feel lazy and Joel Webber’s depth of thought about the most specific details was wonderful. The rest of the GWT team were just as incredible. They all evoked a great amount of trust in the development of the toolkit. Their priorities are for the users of web apps and nothing else, not even Google itself - except in the sense that what’s good for the web is good for Google (of course helping the developer helps the user in many cases). The people attending the conference weren’t slouches either. Some of the brightest and most progressive developers were there. I found myself enthusiastically listening day in and out.

Adding to my positive experience was seeing my GWT book in print for the first time, watching it sell out by the second day and climb to #5 on Safari’s top books. Woo hoo!

Ajax is a bit of a browser hack.  Isn’t it one of these Web 2.0 trends that are going to eventually fade away into obscurity?  You would think it would be gone by now in the same way we’ve found better solutions for things like frame sets and animated gifs. But it’s not. People have embraced websites that use Ajax.  It’s not that they’re simply attracted to the latest technology.  Most people don’t know that browsers aren’t meant to do these Ajaxy things. For that matter do most people even know what Ajax is? Mostly no.

As software developers our intuition tells us to build something that does the same thing with different technology, something more elegant. But the reality is people love the internet and their web browser. There’s a sense of safety (browsing compared to installing software), and infinite content. It seems that we need to suck it up and see what we can do with this Ajax thing.

Progress has been made over the last couple years to deal with this software development problem starting with quality frameworks started to popup like Prototype, Ext, and Dojo. Then we started to see better tools. The tool I’ve been most impressed with for Ajax software development is the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) since it lets you leverage software engineering tools from Java.  At this point I think we have this Ajax thing handled pretty well. Frameworks have abstracted the limitations of the browser allowing us to focus on writing application code with a solid foundation. Software engineering tools now provide us with the proper environment to scale our development process and application complexity.

So what’s next? Let’s nail performance…

Google’s open social has a web page now and it looks like a fairly straightforward technology to use. I’ll definitely play around with it a little bit. Unfortunately it’s not quite ready with the social networks. Only a few of the networks listed support it today including Orkut, Plaxo, and Ning. It sounds like Facebook may even support it even though Google left them in the dark.

This is a pretty big API announcement for Google. Probably the biggest over the past year or so. It supports standard web technology, which means you can build sophisticated apps using GWT too. It’s a very good move by Google and helps with their image of being open and not evil (although supporting MySpace and not talking with Facebook looks pretty bad). They even held an little event called Campfire to announce the API. Campfire is Google’s attempt at a Barcamp/FooCamp/DemoCamp style unconference, but unfortunately it had that fake corporate video/infomercial feel instead.

The price tag is said to be around $50 million for New York based Gametrust as reported by TechCrunch. In January 2004 RealNetworks acquired Seattle based GameHouse for $34.6 million. In February 2006 they acquired Dutch game company Zylom Media Group fo $21 million. In February of this year they acquired Brazil game company Atrativa for an undisclosed price. RealNetworks has been heading in the wrong direction as they had with online music, however the acquisition of Gametrust should put them back on track for better social gaming.