WWDCs Past (2014 edition)

March 31, 2014

It’s that time of year. Here’s an updated table of information about WWDC dates and announcements over the last 9 years.

Year Announce Date Announce Day of Week Conference Date Week In June (full) Days Notice Time to Sell Out
2005 Feb 15, 2005 Tuesday Jun 6, 2005 1st 111 days n/a
2006 Mar 8, 2006 Wednesday Aug 7, 2006 n/a 152 days n/a
2007 Feb 7, 2007 Wednesday Jun 11, 2007 2nd 124 days n/a
2008 Mar 13, 2008 Thursday Jun 9, 2008 2nd 88 days 60 days
2009 Mar 26, 2009 Thursday Jun 8, 2009 1st 74 days 30 days
2010 Apr 28, 2010 Wednesday Jun 7, 2010 1st 40 days 8 days
2011 Mar 28, 2011 Monday Jun 6, 2011 1st 70 days 12 hours
2012 Apr 25, 2012 Wednesday Jun 11, 2012 2nd 47 days 1h 43m
2013 Apr 24, 2013 Wednesday Jun 10, 2013 2nd 47 days 2 minutes
2014 Apr 3, 2014 Thursday Jun 2, 2014 1st 60 days lottery
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What I’ve Been Up To

March 27, 2014

Where to begin…

You probably can’t tell from looking at my site, but I’ve been really busy over the last year or so. Most of that time was spent creating a game that I hope to release soon, but the last few months that work has taken a backseat to a diversion into crypto-currency (bitcoin, litecoin, etc). The shininess is at last fading from crypto and I’m starting to spend more and more time on my game again, so hopefully things are getting back on track and I’ll actually ship one day.

During the time working on my game I thought about keeping a development journal here, but as development progressed I never knew quite where to start or how to catch up with all that had gone on, so it just never happened. The same thing happened when I went off on the bitcoin tangent. I have so many thoughts about bitcoin and crypto in general but they’re all over the place and I just couldn’t take the time to untangle them and write them down here.

While it might have been interesting to follow along as I learned about bitcoin, it would have been even more worthwhile to have documented the creation of my game. Besides maybe helping others by sharing the resources and pitfalls I’ve encountered along the way, I’d have had a chance to get some feedback on decisions that I’ve made and maybe someone would have said, um it’s been four months since we’ve heard anything about your game, did you give up? Of course expanding my group of beta testers to more than three people might help too.

So, what I think I’ll do is create a condensed timeline of my goings on since development started and later maybe post more regular updates. I won’t get into too many details about the gameplay itself yet because I think I might have something bordering on an original idea and I’d like to wait until I’m closer to release before I dive too deeply into that. So here’s what I’ve been up to:

May 2, 2013

Initial commit in proof of concept project. Not yet playable.

May 6, 2013

The commit message on this date was “should commit at some point”. So helpful. It occurs to me while skimming through my commits that I’ve never had a repo where I said to myself, “this repo has way too many commits” or “these commit messages are far too descriptive”. I find that I’m far more lax about commits and commit messages in my personal projects than I am elsewhere. Definitely an area I need to improve upon. Side note: This is also the date of the first commit for the level editor repo.

May 9, 2013

I believe this is the first date that the game is truly playable. The game is built on top of box2d and at this point was using mostly CAShapeLayers for rendering since I didn’t (don’t) really know OpenGL. Nor did I know that SpriteKit was just around the corner.

May 30, 2013

v0.1: Most of the game elements are already present in this release and haven’t changed significantly since. The shape layers are gone at this point, but all elements are still CALayers. At this point, the most complex level only has 80 elements (layers). But, as I’m managing the the images that back them, I can be very efficient with memory usage. From the Core Animation Programming Guide:

Assigning an image to the contents property prevents the layer from allocating memory for a backing store. Instead, the layer uses the image you provide as its backing store. When several layers use the same image, this means that all of those layers are sharing the same memory rather than allocating a copy of the image for themselves.

June 10 – 14, 2013

WWDC and iOS 7. Still not thrilled with iOS 7, but I’ve made peace with it I guess. Kind of funny since my game was designed from the beginning with a sort of flat / minimalist look. As for the conference, I probably should have showed the game around more while I was there, but only a handful saw it. There never really seemed to be time for a full critique either. Just short demos. Regardless it was good to see everyone again. And, as WWDC announcement time approaches again this year, I’m beginning to waffle on my threat to quit WWDC.

July 3, 2013

v0.2: I got a lot of feedback about that initial release. Far and away the most popular complaint was that the game was too hard. Initially I wanted it to be really hard. Some of the most satisfying moments I’ve had gaming are finally beating a level / solving a puzzle that you’ve been banging your head against forever. Eventually I conceded that those times are probably past. With so many distractions available today players are probably more likely to just give up completely rather than keep working at it. The original 11 levels were scrapped. 17 new ones took their place. Here I also start trying to figure out how to get levels to progress smoothly in difficulty. It’s really hard to judge when you’ve been playing for nearly two months and I’m still struggling with it. The levels also start to grow in size here. In the original set the biggest level was about 900 x 900 points in size with most about a quarter of that. The new levels are generally much larger with as many as 500 CALayers. v0.2 also added a few more game elements, scoring, and a lot of optimization. Normally I wouldn’t be too concerned with optimization at this point, but I need to have an idea what sort of limitations I’m going to have when it comes to level design and hardware support.

August 4 – 11, 2013

v0.3 – v0.3.2: Another go round with levels although they are mostly evolutionary at this point. Also a new level picker, better camera control and zooming. Zooming was another feature that was added after listening to feedback from testers. As the level designer I know exactly how each is laid out so not being able to see the whole map didn’t bother me as much. However, I still wanted some element of discovery so decided to limit how far you can zoom out. Also decided that I would not add the ability to pan. You get a very brief glimpse at the entire level as it loads but I’m not yet convinced there is a need to see the entire level on demand.

September – October 2013

v0.4 – v0.4.3 (aka two months in hell): It all started innocently enough when I asked my wife “I wonder how hard it would be to add multiplayer support?” This is my first real experience creating a game (unless you count some of the nonsense I wrote in high school a million years ago) and along the way I made pretty much every mistake it was possible to make. If you’re thinking of creating a game, run, don’t walk, to this site and read all of the words in the Game Physics and Networking sections. Before I could even get to networking issues I had to separate my rendering and integration. I also had a variable timestep. Because rendering and integration were combined it was the only way to reduce frame rate if needed. So basically the whole game engine had to be re-written. Once that was complete I remained convinced that I could somehow write networking code that could basically see into the future. It turns out this is not possible. I finally came to the realization that multiplayer would not work unless I used lockstep synchronization. Sadly this means I have a ~200 mS minimum control delay when playing multiplayer, but it’s not terribly noticeable in practice. Lastly, floating point determinism. I won’t get into details in this post but basically the solution required me to add a separate set of transcendental functions (pow, exp, atan2, etc) and use them in place of those included in the standard C library. Perhaps there was another way, but it’s done now. There were many times I nearly bailed on multiplayer and to be honest it could still use some fine tuning, but what I have is a good start and a lot of fun.

November 19, 2013

v0.4.4: This release should have been v0.5 but it didn’t involve much change to the actual code itself. By v0.4.3 I was up to 24 levels but I still wasn’t happen with the progression. And there were also some inconsistencies I wanted to address. v0.4.4 actually had fewer levels but they were all completely reworked. I think I am, at last, pretty happy with the level design and progression. Maybe.

November – March

The Great Bitcoin Interruption: I’m not going to get into many details about crypto-currency, except to say that I find it pretty fascinating for a variety of reasons. I have no idea if it survives and actually becomes useful as a currency, but it’s a lot of fun to play with. Coincidentally it solves the Byzantine Generals Problem that I was running up against while trying to work out networking for my game, although not in a way that I can use.

February 10, 2014

v0.5: Somewhere in between the mining, writing my own wallet, contributing to dogecoin, etc, I managed to push out another update. This one adds some more refinements and levels bringing the total up to 29. Nine of these levels span an area greater than 1,500 points2 including one massive level with ~1300 elements spanning ~2300 x ~2600 points.

Ongoing

During that time I also sprinkled in five updates to Goalposts and three for Super Speller. So much to do. So little time.

Now

So where does that leave things? I figure at a minimum a have the following items left:

  • 2 more single player levels and 1 multiplayer level bringing the total to 32.
  • Tutorial section.
  • Soundtrack / Sound effects.
  • Scoring changes and rework for Game Center leaderboards.
  • Lots of refinement. Especially multiplayer.
  • Pricing decisions. Probably IAP. I would much rather charge up front but I don’t think I’d get any traction this way. This could be the topic of a post in itself.

Besides those items I’d really like to loop back and record some more thoughts here. Including using Parse to gather analytics during testing, a very handy technique using Dropbox to record logs from multiple devices into a single Dropbox folder (invaluable while I was working out multiplayer), thoughts on designing levels (it’s hard), floating point determinism (grr), and how I’m loading levels and whether or not to release the level designer so people can create their own. 90% of the work is done but we all know about that last 10%.

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Fragmentation

June 21, 2013
93% of customers are using iOS 6.
93% of customers are using iOS 6.

So Apple’s published this chart recently that I’m sure most of you have seen. It claims that 93% of customers are running iOS 6 and 99% are running iOS 5 or later. If accurate it’s pretty amazing. And why wouldn’t it be accurate? Well it’s possible that this only includes those devices that are capable of running iOS 6.

In any case it got me thinking, especially as I believe this is meant to encourage developers to adopt iOS 7 sooner rather than later, just how many sales have there been for each iPhone model? (note: I only looked at iPhone sales and not all iOS devices which may also be the reason Apple’s chart tends to skew higher) Turns out this isn’t really easy to find, but you can kind of / sort get an idea by looking through Apple’s quarterly reports. Here’s a breakdown of sales, that I’m pretty sure is accurate, grouped together by iPhone models as of Q2-2013:

Model/s Period Sales (thousands) % of Total
iPhone Q3-07 – Q3-08 6,124 2%
iPhone 3G Q4-08 – Q3-09 20,254 6%
iPhone 3G / 3GS Q4-09 – Q3-10 33,254 9%
iPhone 3GS / 4 Q4-10 – Q4-11 86,395 24%
iPhone 3GS / 4 / 4S Q1-12 – Q4-12 125,046 35%
iPhone 4 / 4S / 5 Q1-13 – Q2-13 85,219 24%
Total Q3-07 – Q2-13 356,292 100%

That’s a lot of phones. But notice that of the 350 million or so iPhones sold, at the very least, 26 million (8%) are incapable of running anything later than iOS 4.2.1. And that doesn’t include those iPhone 3Gs (not 3GSs… I don’t know how to make that plural). sold between Q4-2009 and Q3-2010. A fairly conservative guess puts that number closer to 40 million or 11%. That doesn’t really line up with Apple’s chart. Of course a lot of these phones are probably no longer functional or in service but 90% of them? Another possibility is that the people using these phones just don’t visit the App Store that often.

So, for various reasons, we’re not seeing many original iPhone and iPhone 3G users represented in Apple’s chart, but will we see the same adoption rate with iOS 7? I personally see a lot of iPhone 3GS users still out there. It’s not even been a year since it was discontinued after all.

It difficult to know exactly how many iPhone 3GSs were sold, but I think a reasonable estimate is around 73 million, or 21% of the total iPhones. If you add in the old crusty iPhone and iPhone 3G models it’s almost one third of all of the iPhones ever sold. And even if, let’s say, only half of all of these phones are still in use, that would work out to about 11% of active iPhone users that won’t be able to make the jump to iOS 7 even if they wanted to. Now add to that the people that won’t update because… who knows (these are the 7% in the current chart) and those that refuse to update because they don’t like the new version (yay polarization!) and it could be a while before iOS 7’s adoption rate gets anywhere near where iOS 6 is today.

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50,000,000,000 Downloaded

May 15, 2013

This afternoon the 50,000,000,000th app was downloaded from the App Store and Apple is celebrating by giving away $10,000 in App Store credit to some lucky person that pushed them across that threshold. This was pretty cool. Not the giveaway part. I mean it’s nice, but after Apple takes their 30% cut, they’re really only giving away $7,000. Also, if I have it figured right, the download rate was about 25% higher than average during the last hour of the contest, which may have been worth as much as $500,000 additional revenue for that hour. Not too shabby. (See The Surprising Numbers Behind Apps)

Anyway, that’s not the cool bit. The bit that I thought was cool was the code driving Apple’s fancy app counter. It turns out that it was driven by actual download numbers provided by Apple and updated every hour. It gave me a chance to see if there was anything to be learned looking at real download data. Were there any patterns? Could we learn anything about the time people are most likely to be using the App Store?

It turns out that the answer is yes. Very clearly in fact. Check out this fancy (not actually fancy) chart I made:

Downloads per hour 5/2/2013 – 5/15/2013

Sorry, it’s a little tiny, but basically, like clockwork, the download rate peaked at 11AM (EDT) each day, including weekends. Except for that bizarre spike at the beginning. Not sure what that was. But otherwise, big spike at 11, then tapering off to a low between 7PM & 8PM followed by a mini-spike at 10PM before drifting down to the nadir at around 3AM each day.

This is perhaps a little easier to see if we look at the average number of downloads by hour. Look another graph!

Average downloads by time of day

This might come in handy if, for example, you’re looking to make sure you time your app’s release for maximum exposure. You probably want to make sure your app is ready to go ahead of the crowd which begins building at around 7AM EDT.

I was hoping I could continue to monitor the download rate after the contest ended and see if any longer term patterns materialized, but sadly, Apple seems to have shut it down. Ah well, it was fun while it lasted. While I wouldn’t count on it, maybe they’ll fire it back up again at some point. In the meantime, if you’re interested, you can grab the spreadsheet containing everything I collected during the contest. Please note that this is a Numbers spreadsheet. Also note that I missed a few hours here and there and Apple didn’t seem to update their stats at 6AM GMT for some reason. I interpolated and highlighted those cells in red for those cases.

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Winning the Lottery

April 26, 2013

What a crazy day yesterday was. First, Goalposts, my new app, was released yesterday. When I submitted it for review I just happened to select April 25 as the availability date. I kind of wanted to manually release it after it was approved, but didn’t see the option so, whatever, fine, April 25 sounds good. Little did I know at the time that WWDC tickets would also go on sale on that date. I thought briefly about changing it but, you know, once an app is submitted for review it kind of scares me to mess with any of it, so I left it. It went into review and was approved Wednesday afternoon, so here we are.

You know when I first had the idea I thought it was going to be really great. Scratch that. I thought it would *do* really great because it was different, useful, fun, cute, what have you. Of course I believe it’s really great, why would you write something if you felt otherwise?! But as the project progressed I was less certain how well it would do and my expectations gradually drifted back down to reality. By the time yesterday rolled around I had no expectations at all.

While we didn’t knock WhatsApp from the top of the charts (as if), I am nevertheless so grateful for the response we received. Just blown away. And not because we finished the day amongst the top 100 in Lifestyle, although that was a pleasant surprise. No, what really got me was the support from friends and fellow devs.

I spent all those nights and weekends cranking out code, and at certain point it’s 4 in the morning and you’re re-writing the timeline layout for the third freakin’ time, you start to wonder why am I doing this? Is anyone even going to care? Then yesterday arrived and I start seeing people re-tweeting my announcement, sharing it on Facebook, passing along their congratulations, and I swear even just a “hey looks pretty good, nice work”, feels a little like winning the lottery. It really meant a lot and I just want to say thank you all. It also made me think: you know I see friends release stuff all the time and I think to myself, oh good for them, that’s awesome, but don’t actually *say* anything. I need to do a better job at actually taking a few moments to pass long an attaboy. It takes so little effort, but means so much.

So, speaking of winning the lottery, anyone hear about that WWDC thing yesterday!?

Yeah.

Like so many of you I waited anxiously for 12 o’clock to roll around so I could purchase my ticket. And like so many of you I was denied. Shortly after all this went down, the complaints about process of purchasing WWDC tickets began again this year. Don’t get me wrong, WWDC is definitely broken. I just don’t know what the solution is. Daniel Jalkut (whose fine app I’m using using to compose my thoughts…. attaboy!) went so far as to suggest that we should just give up on WWDC altogether. While that seems a bit drastic, something needs to be done. And you know, honestly Apple did try something different this year. Didn’t work out too well, but clearly they’re aware of the problem and trying to come up with a solution. Part of that was the pre-sale announcement and the other was announcing that videos will be made available while the conference is underway. I believe they did that in hopes that maybe that would lessen demand. Doesn’t seem to have worked, but still.

So my last WWDC was 2011, which was coincidentally Steve Jobs last WWDC as well. I remain somewhat optimistic that my chances of going to another WWDC are slightly better than his. I’m actually still thinking about going maybe for altWWDC or just to hang out for a few days. Half of what makes WWDC so special is getting to meet up and hang out with your peers. I’m never so fired up about what I do for a living as when I get back from a conference, especially WWDC, so it’s very tempting. I think I’m going to take the weekend to mull it over and decide what to do then.

In the meantime, thank you all again for the kind words yesterday. And perhaps I’ll get a chance soon to express my appreciation in person. We’ll see!

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