Tina Seelig, PhD (pictured in red jacket, above, teaching a Stanford course on creativity) is the Executive Director for the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, the entrepreneurship center at Stanford University’s School of Engineering.
Our team at the Stanford Technology Ventures…
Finishing a Game
As I work towards completing my own game, I’ve been thinking a lot about finishing projects in general. I’ve noticed that there are a lot of really talented developers out there that have trouble finishing games. Truthfully, I’ve left a long trail of unfinished games in my wake… I think everyone has. Not every project is going to pan out, for whatever reason. But if you find yourself consistently backing out of game projects that have a lot of potential, it could be worth taking a step back and examining why this happens.
Earlier generations have weathered recessions, of course; this stall we’re in has the look of something nastier. Social Security and Medicare are going to be diminished, at best. Hours worked are up even as hiring staggers along: Blood from a stone looks to be the normal order of things “going…
An iOS Developer Takes on Android
Recently, we released the Android version of Meridian, our platform for building location-based apps.
We didn’t use one of these “Cross Platform!” tools like Titanium. We wrote it, from scratch, in Java, like you do in Android.
We decided it was important to keep the native stuff native, and to respect each platform’s conventions as much as possible. Some conventions are easy to follow, like putting our tabs on the top. Other conventions go deep into the Android Way, like handling
Intents, closing oldActivities, implementing Search Providers, and being strict about references to help the garbage collector.Now, our platform leverages HTML5 (buzzword, sorry) in many places for branding and content display, so we got a fair amount of UI for free. But there was much platform code written in Objective-C that needed translation into Java, such as map navigation, directions, and location switching.
So, we rolled up our sleeves, downloaded the Android SDK, and got to work.
