After all the talk about the iPhone 5 in this big week of Apple announcements, I thought it would be interesting to put my thoughts on paper. After all, I’ve been talking about it with my fellow game developers for about a week now. If you follow my blog posts, you know that I am an indie developer who spent the last year making Zig Zag Zombie, a puzzle game on Android, Mac, and iPhone. But like most mobile games, at this point, we have to really pay a lot of attention to the iPhone market, because it’s still where people download our game the most. That being said, the schedule and nature of hardware releases by Apple has a pretty profound effect on game designers. So I’ll talk about the basic points here. Changing resolutions and dimensions so often is un-Apple If you see in my previous posts about Apple products, you’ll know that I’ve given a pretty unbiased lover/hater account of Apple’s decisions to keep a limited amount of devices and prevent third party devices from using their OS. Well, in the last year, I’ve felt that some of the device releases have fragmented the line-up. One of the things designers love the most about making games for Apple devices is that  you can test on a limited amount of screen resolutions, yet reach a huge amount of people. So basically, the cost/time to test a game per devise vs. the potential sales on the marketplace are great. For Zig Zag Zombie, we made high resolution art (for an iPhone 4 retina display), and we were able to adjust the game slightly so it displayed well on iPhone4 screens, iPhone 3gs screens (because they are half the resolution but the same proportions),...

Just where has Nerd in Transition been? She has been commuting from downtown Los Angeles to downtown Long Beach five days a week, traveling two hours each way on our cities brilliantly engineered mass transit system. The reason for this oft repeated time suck? Free rehearsal space in Long Beach. As you may know from a long ago blogumn I wrote, I took it upon myself to produce a version of the play Night Mother. I picked a director I have known for a few years, yet never worked with, approached her about coming on board with me and she said yes. We cast the Mother role, I took the daughter role, and rehearsals started. Halfway through the woman playing the Mother dropped out. Looking at this as an welcome opportunity I pushed the show dates back from June to September, recast the mother role and started rehearsals back up a month later. This is the first time I have produced anything. It’s kinda a big deal. Aside from the obvious career push and artistic actor fulfilment performing in this particular show could provide, my reasons for taking on the producer role go much deeper. I have a horribly destructive habit of starting things and not finishing them. So I decided that the next step up in my period of transition would be to take on a rather large project and see it through to the end as the leader. I also have a wonderfully constructive habit of attacking a problem head on. Such as the time I decided to conquer my fear of singing in front of people by performing the National Anthem in the middle of a roller derby track surrounded by almost 2000 people. The way I saw it by producing...

. A Proof of Nerd ID by Brian Viehland Apple is the Borg…  and I’m OK with my assimilation so far. Although I have not switched to a Mac due to the limited availability of some of the software I must use for my business, I have dumped my Windows Mobile smart phone, gone through a short stint with a Palm device, and have landed on the new 3G i-Phone by Apple. This is by far the coolest portable device I have ever had. Although there are a few obviously missing functions for those of us who are business users (tasks don’t sync, and you can’t accept appointments), the best argument of why Apple isn’t ready for business users comes from the Apple store itself. The Apple store, if you haven’t been in one, is far from a standard shopping environment – it is a retail experience.  Not only is it hands-on and over-staffed with hand-picked nerdy youth, but it also has this great checkout system: most of the employees carry a small hand held device that can scan your items, swipe your credit card, and email you the receipt! How awesome is that?! No waiting in long lines – no idiot writing checks in front of you or counting out change – just swipe and go! Awesome, right?   This is obviously the future of shopping and Apple was so on top of their game when they developed this business model. As I checked out, thinking how awesome this whole experience was and how Apple was clearly advancing in the business world and how this was the example I needed to convince me that Apple was really ready to fight the big fight against Microsoft, I noticed it: The Mark Of The Devil.  It...