Great job, it's amazing how accurate it is. Getting this tool to be reliable had to be a substantial struggle.
If you find this extension useful, there might be a situation when you need to measure stuff that is not inside your browser. SnapRuler (http://www.snaprulerapp.com) is an OSX tool that can measure anything you see on screen.
It's become part of my daily work flow. For the price and time saved, I can't recommend it enough.
Its on my list with ColorSnapper (another small dev made utility), between the two, I rarely take screenshots anymore. I find it more useful than browser plugins as often my rendering issues are with old browsers that lack such utilities.
We wanted to make Snap Ruler as smooth and light as possible. We didn’t want to suffer from the first GitHub for Mac problem - gorgeous, but mainly unusable.
Snapping to objects is quite computationally-heavy, especially detecting rounded corners and such. Therefore we make all the heavy-lifting on the GPU.
Making the animations smooth, even on the older machines (like the 1st gen MacBook Air), was possible by carefully setting the Blending mode and buffering every CoreAnimation layer that we could.
But, to be honest, most performance gain comes from not redrawing anything until absolutely necessary.
Development and design took 1.5 months, with just the two of us: me (design, UX, UI, features, hallway testing, keeping it all together) and my fellow co-founder Tomek (Cocoa magic).
I've heard many good things about Chef -- seems to be the tool get job done. Could you guys share your Chef script/config so we can all benefit from learning by example?
Yes, I've often heard people say this is the way to go, but please blog about your own django server setup process using chef / puppet so we can see the details.
I would be very interested in some sort of summary how this HN post increased your sales.
Seriously: we (Blade Polska s.c.) have been through this also. We did everything according to common marketing wisdom about Tap4Two (even the landing page! [1] and real-life video [2]) -- it concluded in 10-20 sales each day. Mostly on the German Store.
We're planning runnig a facebook campaign targeted for Germans, spending all the revenue game has made so far. We will share the outcome for sure.
Your game looks like a lots lots of work with 3d engine, very impressive. What framework did you use?
Yeah, I definitely plan on follow-up posts with any changes that occur.
As for engines, I used cocos2d for all of the 2d (imagine that) stuff like menus and the HUD. The 3d objects I made using blender, modified some code I found online[1] to load them into the project, then pretty much just cobbled together a physics and rendering engine by hand. Good times.
It is nice to know that we are not alone in this, so let me tell you our story.
Background: we are following the HN community for good 4 years now and it inspired us even more to start our own business. We are loving it and it is a dream come true.
To the topic: yesterday we launched our first own product, iOS game Tap4Two. That made us very proud - we shipped! But what would make our day is - if it sold.
We found a niche - there are very few games for 2 players to play on one device. Real gaming has always been about few friends coming over to play on a console/pc. And that's exactly what we were missing on
the App Store. We made a game, in which two players compete simultaneously in a series of challenges - who will be first to spot the right solution. If you get it right - you get +1 point, if you tap
your button when the wrong solution is shown - you lose 1 point.
We hired an art student to draw a nice logo for Tap4Two, but we have drawn and polished the graphics and the landing page ourselves. We are happy with them. When the first version was ready to ship - we
launched the landing page, pitched it everywhere we could, made a gameplay video (homemade tripod for iPhone 4 - great fun, take a look: http://tumblr.com/x1a1pmizw9), submitted the app to review. Then it went a bit downhill: we set the availability date to 24th March, but the game has gone "Ready for Sale" on 21st. As it seems, this "feature" of App Store has not been changed, even though lots of people are saying otherwise - game has gone live on 24th with the release date of 21st, which made it debut on the new releases at 81st position in puzzle category. Not a very good start. As expected - it has not been found by almost anyone - it was bought by all of our friends and just a few real customers. It made 30. position on the Polish App Store (as it's our home country) - but Poles are not buying much. Actually the only review we've got comes from a real customer, and it's very heartlifting.
We've pitched the reviewers, posted on forums, facebook, twitter, everywhere - without luck so far.
Any suggestions guys? Do you think the graphics could be more polished? Any tips with marketing strategies?
Today: zero sales so far.
TL;DR: Made, pitched, shipped, did not sell all that well.
Here are some promo codes, if you would like to try it out:
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YXH3X7FXARF4
4JYKM7AKWWHR
APK74H36NETW
YNYPAFJ66HXA
OK. But who's your target market? How do you envision people using your game? In a game that is strictly multiplayer, I think you really have to understand the social context.
While I quite enjoy playing board games like Carcassonne or Arkham Horror with friends, or even stuff like air hockey on the iPad, I don't really see much lasting appeal in a game like this which is quite simple and so directly competitive.
In short, I think you need more interesting game modes.
Great job, it's amazing how accurate it is. Getting this tool to be reliable had to be a substantial struggle.
If you find this extension useful, there might be a situation when you need to measure stuff that is not inside your browser. SnapRuler (http://www.snaprulerapp.com) is an OSX tool that can measure anything you see on screen.