Photics.com

My next game has foreign language in it. I’m currently in the process of adding German and Polish to… my secret project. Yet, it’s a bit frustrating to type special characters. I usually launch Windows Character Map and I try to locate the letters with little hats, dots, accents and slashes. From there, I copy and paste the letters that I need. If this process seems archaic, I was even more bewildered when I wanted to send special characters via text messaging. I wondered if it was even possible. Generally, I have low expectations for mobile device performance. Yet, it was actually much easier to type special characters on Android than it was on my PC.

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Adobe Flash, I’m not seeing a bright future for you. It seems pretty clear that HTML 5 is going to be a new favorite. Look at the big three rivals – Microsoft, Apple and Google. Microsoft has Silverlight. Apple just announce the iPad – without Flash support. And as for Google, they do things with AJAX and basic browser features. If video is going to be a standard function of future browsers, why should I keep wasting money for upgrades of Adobe Flash? Why should I force photics.com visitors to use a third-party plug-in? If rival companies are coming to the same outcome, a world without Flash, then why should I support it?

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I’ve been looking at the new Android phones and a lot of them do not have keyboards. I don’t know why the industry is still playing “me too” with iPhone-like interfaces. But as an app developer, I have to be aware of this issue. Considering that keyboard-less android phones have few buttons, the menu button becomes more important. That meant I had to get past a developer hurdle – learning how to add menus to my android apps.

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When I would publish my Android Apps, the Google Developer Console would give me an unusual error. “The apk is not zipaligned. Please run the…” Blah, blah, blah… what’s Google complaining about now? Typically, I would just ignore this warning. Why should I care? Google didn’t prevent my app from being published, so I would just let it go. But recently, I decided to give this another look. How do I zipalign my apps? I went digging through the Android Developer documents and I was finally able to publish my apps properly. Although, as usual, it was a bit of a struggle. That’s because I hadn’t updated my Android software in a while. It seems that some things have changed in Android land.

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Imagine waking up and finding $25. It has a little note, “Thanks for the hard work, love Google!” That’s a nice feeling right? Imagine the next day, finding $40 from Google. Imagine the following day, finding $75 from the big G. Wow, look at all this money! It keeps coming and coming. Now imagine this. A month later, Google comes in the middle of the night, punches you in the head, yells an insult at you and then takes back the money. That’s what my experience was like, being an Android developer.

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I had such a hard time signing my Google Android application that it makes me wonder how many developers just gave up. How many applications rest unfinished because the process for signing applications is not as simple as it could be. When you’re finished with your application, it’s all debugged and tested, you don’t just simply press a “make money” button. No, if you want to play in Google’s playground, you have to be tougher than that.

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