What is Photics? What does it mean? That’s a common question when people inquire about my website. Photics is an area of science. But in regards to this website, Photics is my Internet publishing business. With the success of The Unofficial GameSalad Textbook, I’ve been thinking about traditional book publishing again. Although, with the iPhone, iPod Touch, iBook, the Nook and the Kindle, publishing a book today is not so traditional. I had to learn about the ePub format.
Continue reading “Learning About ePub – Making Books For Mobile Devices”
I read some bad news today. It seems that GameSalad is heading in a new direction — down a road I cannot follow. With the new “GameSalad Direct” business model, games are published directly through GameSalad to the iTunes App Store. That’s great, if you’re not already registered with Apple. I am a registered developer and Photics is an Internet publishing company. I’m not pleased with GameSalad pushing into my publishing business. That means I’ll have to move my iOS apps to another platform. Corona is the likely choice.
I don’t trust Google. I think that they’ve grown too large and it could be harmful to the health of the Internet. Competition is good for the consumer. It keeps big business honest. Because of this belief, I’ve been attempting to phase out Google products from this website. Google Analytics was really tough to beat, but I finally found a suitable alternative – Piwik – open source web analytics software. Last night, I installed Piwik on Photics.com. My preliminary experimentation with the software has yielded favorable results. In other words – Piwik is awesome.
After a week of using a Mac as my main desktop computer, it’s as if life has changed. It’s like I joined some elite club. That was evident by the encouragement on the GameSalad forums. Apparently, a lot of Mac fans frequent the website. They were happy to hear that I was choosing a Mac over a Windows machine. Although, I’m still in the process of resolving some issues with the switch. The biggest issue is software. During the last decade, I acquired a lot of software. Some programs did not survive the transition.
Around the same time I started this website, I switched from a Mac to a PC. Over a decade ago, Steve Jobs was back at Apple. He had introduced a fishbowl of a computer – the iMac. With a hockey puck shaped mouse, and limited expansion options, it was clear that Apple was heading in a different direction. The iMac was strictly USB — no ADB ports, no SCSI. That setup rendered about $1000 worth of external hardware obsolete. The iMac didn’t even have a floppy drive. If I had to start over, I figured that I should switch to Windows.