I recently wrote a letter to my representatives in congress. I feel we need to immediately kill bills such as SOPA and PIPA. Here is that letter:

Please end your support for this bill. It would harm technological innovation and grant powers to government officials that they are not qualified to use. This bill harms our society.

There are strong lobbyists on behalf of copyright-reliant organizations such as the MPAA, that have framed the argument to make you believe that they are losing billions of revenue. Simple supply and demand explains that NOT ALL of the pirates using a piece of software represent lost revenue. When the price of a product goes down to nothing, the number of individuals willing to partake goes up greatly. To believe that 100 acts of piracy equate to 100 cases of lost revenue is lunacy.

This is further compacted by the fact that often, piracy ENHANCES the use and desirability of a product. Users uploading popular songs to YouTube for free distribution, has now been adopted by the record labels as a key way of increasing sales for example, although this was originally percieived as copyright violation. Supporters of this bill show that they don't have the technical understanding to participate in the future economy.

If you use this bill to allow companies to resist exploring new markets and opportunities, the American economy is going to be left behind.

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All of the source code for HexSLayer is on Github. I'm going to try running this game as an open source project, and do all issue tracking using the Github issues list. If you like the game, or hate the game, or want to learn more about how it was made, follow me on github, or leave me a message.

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One of the recent trends I have been seeing is the idea of additional functionality for donors-only. This raises several questions for me, most important of which is Is this really a donation? There are a couple of different aspects and implementations that have me divided on this topic.

Ad-funded / Donations

Some of the applications out there, such as Titanium Backup, Rom Manager, and many many more offer a free version of an application with advertising embedded, and a non-free version that removes the advertising. The important thing to note with most of these applications is that they grant identical functionality to both paid and non-paid users. In this case, I see any payments here as an optional donation, because being a non-paying user doesn't lose anything, you only gain advertising, which is trivial to ignore. The correlation I draw is to things like Google or XDA, where they exist for free with full functionality, but I'm presented with Advertisements to support the further development of the free service.

Donations for Functionality

These types of applications have only started cropping up in the past year. In several cases, it looks like these are an evolution of the previously mentioned model. What went wrong, however, was that the owner was unhappy with the donation conversion ratio. In these cases, the company started adding features only for the donation version of the software. Two examples of this include Subsonic, and Mellenaire (a Minecraft Mod). With Subsonic, users cannot stream video unless they have made a donation. In Mellenaire, donators receive the ability to automatically download the right binary in the installer.

With Subsonic, I feel that these restrictions go beyond mere optional donation, and turns the software into a paid product. I have no issue paying for a service or product, but calling it and marketing it as "donation-only" is dishonest, and probably an attempt to avoid regulation, taxation, etc. With the Mellenaire example, it's definitely on the border. From one perspective, the core application (the Minecraft Mod) functions the same with or without donation. On the other hand, users who don't pay the creator lose functionality that would be useful and save time.

What to do about it?

If you see an application or service being provided that removes functionality for non-paying users, reach out to the creator and start a dialogue, and share your concerns that the payment is no longer a donation, but a purchase. Ask questions about the money transfer, assuming it's a purchase. This would include asking about the return policy, any warranties or guaranties, and upgrade policy. Do not let "donation" marketed payments stop you from having the same expectations you would have for a purchase.

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Just like Google's popular Analytics program, it appears that the statistics for publishers in the Android Market are fuzzed as well. After about 8 hours of having my app in the marketplace, and having 5 independently confirmed users install and run the application, including myself, the statistics shown in the store are as follows:

It reports 3 total installs, and 4 net installs. This doesn't make any sense. These statistics mean that 3 people have ever installed my application, but 4 installs remain in production?

Looking depeer into the devices and versions of the users as reported by the control panel also shows some strange data. First of all, none of my devices shown up in the devices list. This is odd, because I was one of the first to download it. Second of all, despite having 4 equal chunks in the pie charts, the numeric breakdowns don't show 50% of my traffic.

These types of errors are common for Google, which processes trillions of petabytes per day. The only thing developers can do is hope that the data is correct and complete, with no additional information or assurances from Google. Google did a great job of Real Time search for Google Analytics. This offering provides up-to-the-second updates regarding visitors to the site. This leads me to trust their data. Google could do several things to improve the reliability of their data.

• Show real time data for statistics
• State assumptions, such as time updated
• State when you are excluding data, such as installs by the owner

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For the new year, I wanted to actually put one of the projects I have been working on out to the public. The game is called HexSLayer.

You should Download HexSLayer now!

History

I released a linux .deb on hexslayer.com about a year ago, but I haven't really tried promoting it or talking to anyone about it, due to the small market share of desktop linux. Hopefully now with this Android release, I'll actually get a few users, some feedback, and hopefully make a great game.

I built HexSLayer for Android by originally writing the game in Python using Pygame. About a month ago I noticed that they had released a tool called Pygame subset for Android that allows you to add a few minor calls in your game, and then you can package and deploy Android apps. There were a few headaches, such as an issue with the package that made me learn how to build android applications with Ant, but the game is playable on all of the devices I have tested it with.

Current Release

There are a few remaining issues, that seem to be limitations of using Pygame subset for Android. Among these are the inability to determine the screen size in-game. Additionally, it seems like the splash screen doesn't work on 100% of the devices I have tested it with. Overall, I'm not sure how happy I am cross-compiling from Python into Android using Pygame and the NDK, but it's pretty cool to be able to do almost no work and deploy on a great big new platform.

I didn't have to do much work to get it running, but I spent a lot of time focusing on usability on the new platform. I resized and moved everything on the screen so that it is relative to the screen size. I increased the size of the icons while you are dragging them, as a finger blocks the view of a small icon. The game works well on phones, but it works really great on tablets.

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