Ho appena scoperto (immagino in ritardo) un videogame estremamente divertente: Desktop Tower Defense. Scritto da Paul Breece e David Scott, il gioco ha avuto un successo estremo in poco tempo, al punto che ha spinto i creatori a licenziarsi (è una scelta logica) e a creare una mini azienda (che per ora credo abbia solo due impiegati, ossia loro stessi).

Ci sono altre piccole aziende dedite al “casual gaming”. Ad esempio la Kongregate, che ha molti più giochi come numero, e (mi sembra) sempre gratuiti in versione base. La Kongregate ha un modello di business piuttosto elaborato ma intelligente: vende le versioni “plus” dei suoi giochi, fa pubblicità (a tema, non troppo fastidiosa) sul sito, e infine condivide i profitti con gli sviluppatori dei giochi (!) che lavorano a contratto.

Ho letto che la pubblicità in ambito gaming non rende molto. Ciononostante, la Kongregate ha ottenuto 6 milioni di dollari da investitori (venture capital) in due round nel 2007, come riporta CrunchBase/TechCrunch, sito dedicato alle startup.

Il futuro del capitalismo, l’unico con un volto umano, è proprio questo secondo me. Mini aziende messe in piedi da pazzi, folli, appassionati: the crazy ones. (Se poi magari rimanessero umani, non guasterebbe.)

1. Open a document in your favorite text editing app (TextEdit, Smultron, even M$ Word).
2. Put the cursor where you want the text square to begin.
3. Shift-Option-click somewhere else, et voilà! Les jeux sont fait.

I think it should work in any editable text areas of any Cocoa app, although it is working even in some non-Cocoa apps like M$ Word.

Some of my favorite deviations:
uno
due
tre
quattro
cinque

At least I wish I had a chance to streamline my installation; maybe all I need is a better installer. OS X system installer sucks. I’d prefer that over a hundred new features that I won’t use. Why keep adding stuff? Can’t we just improve what we have? Fix bugs, improve performance, that sort of thing?

An analogy comes to my mind. Marble Madness. A wonderful, genius arcade game designed and developed in 1984 by 17 years old Mark Cerny at Atari. (Interesting to know it was developed in C, not in assembly, which is quite unusual for the time.) Marble Madness is conceptually simple, beautiful to watch and play, and has a unique atmosphere, and that’s it. There’s not much more than that. No fancy intro, no fancy hi-score table, even the score and messages on screen are in a simplistic font on a solid background. Yet they do work. We don’t really need more, we just need the Marble Madness.

Now, how come there’s no such a game today? If you want my opinion, I sort of feel like all the additional crap they put in games today is affecting really cool ideas. (After all, if you need 157 developers/artists/managers to develop a game, it’s just normal that something gets lost in the process.)

• the application level “find” is located under the “Tools” menu (!?), and has a CTRL-E shortcut; moreover, there’s an “Advanced find” feature with a CTRL-SHFT-F shortcut. (By the way, why using two different letters for the same shortcuts? My head gets easily confused!)
• the message level “find” is located under the “Edit” menu and has a F4 (?!? another one?!?) shortcut. There’s no advanced find.

So, for one single concept (“finding stuff”), there are three different, distinct, non-substitutive approaches. Nicely done.

On the Mac, things are a little better. Finding stuff on the Mac is – at least – a coherent experience throughout all applications: the system provides a default search panel, usually located inside the Edit menu, with a default keyboard shortcut. That is, the find function is recognized as a common applications feature by the system native frameworks. However, even Apple’s design is flawed. The default find panel (the one you find in TextEdit for instance), has a dual function: Finding stuff, and (!) Replacing stuff. Why? To save some coding. Yet this is illogical: although the latter subsumes the former, it is not intuitive to click on “Find” to perform a “Replace” operation. I know that to actually replace something you’ve got to find it first (and so there IS a logic in clicking on “Find”), but wasn’t the Mac supposed to be for everyone? It seems like Apple just wanted to reuse the same software component (and same UI) to do two things at once. This is cool, but it makes me angry because it would have been incredibly easy to achieve the same level of code reuse, and make two separate Find / Replace panels. Or even simpler, add an explicit “Replace” menu option that actually calls the same exact panel of the “Find” option.