Thinks

SLIPS (Slippery Liquid-Infused Porous Surface) is a super-slippy surface that wins the Quite Nicely Contrived Acronym Award. Bio-inspired from carnivorous pitcher plants the surface will be useful in fluid handling and transportation, optical sensing, medicine, and as self-cleaning and anti-fouling materials operating in extreme environments. And getting the last bit of ketchup out from the bottle.

(via slashdot)

Thought-provoking article by Blair MacIntyre on the different mentality people have when approaching board games versus computer games, and what the implications are when these to giants start to cross over in the space of augmented reality board games. This is an area of particular interested to me and my work at Optricks where we created a very successful on-line game based on trumps-style card packs.

Blair’s main thrust here is that in board games the players enforce the rules between themselves, and sometimes choose to adapt them. Conversely, a computer game enforces the game rules on the player and the player is therefore encouraged to push rules to the limit, or even find ways around them.

Exploring how these two different play patterns can some together to create new play patterns is one of the things that makes working in this area particularly exciting.

FYI, there’s an interesting masters thesis that touches on this subject by Lotte Harmsen.

From article on 2010 iPhone development stats:

“Survey of sales data from 124 app developers with market applications ranging in price from 99 cents to $79.99”

“The average total number of units sold was 101,024 copies within an average period of 261 days. The average number of units sold per day was 387.”

“Average total development cost amounting to $6,453”

“on average here, iPhone developers are seeing a return of more than 15 times their initial, albeit small, development costs”

“However, when the top 10% of the most successful apps are removed from the data set, the numbers skew much lower, giving a far better impression of what the iPhone industry looks like for most developers. In this scenario, the average sales were 11,625 total units, averaging 44 copies/day.”

Digging a bit deeper:

This last statement is quite telling. Most developers sell closer to a 10th of the global average, making the statement “seeing a return of more than 15 times their initial, albeit small, development costs” look more like 1.5 times the initial development costs. Rather small margins for the average app developer.

The article states that the average cost of an app is $5.49 but admit that this is skewed by outliers. And the have not weighted the app costs by sales volumes. When you do this you get an average cost of $1.81. Alternatively, look at the median cost. They only provide details on 50 (not clear if these are random) so, looking at them, the median cost of an app is £1.99. These figures feel much closer to reality.

Anecdotally, a comment by Seligman Ventures Ltd developer in the article states that his suite of 35 apps make circa £160 per week, although I would not describe these as premium apps.

Google launches Dart, an open source web development language aimed to overcome Javascript’s failings. The code will run natively in a VM or cross-compile to Javascript.

Specifically, their design goals are:

• Create a structured yet flexible programming language for the web.
• Make Dart feel familiar and natural to programmers and thus easy to learn.
• Ensure that all Dart language constructs allow high performance and fast application startup.
• Make Dart appropriate for the full range of devices on the web—including phones, tablets, laptops, and servers.
• Provide tools that make Dart run fast across all major modern browsers.