Apps/Games for Children – a parental update

Posted by on April 27, 2012 No comments

Sort of a graphical update…wpid-graphical-elements-2012-04-27-15-26.png

Apps/Games for Children – a parental view

Posted by on April 23, 2012 1 comment

I just listened to episode 38 of the podcast IRQ Conflict. In the podcast they touch on the topic of apps for kids.

This really triggered me so I decided to write a blog entry about it. In this blog post I will primarily focus on game apps.

I have two sons, Sylvester and Villads aged 5 and 7 and they love playing games on Playstation 2, Nintendo DS, iPhone and iPad. Recently the focus has been primarily on the iPad. I have configured the device in such a way they are not able to acquire or delete applications without my password. So I can take it easy with them using the iPad – and this access control even for games that are free are really useful.

Villads my oldest son however are discovering new games at a rate were I am unable to keep up. Normally I would try out the games prior to letting them play. This mean that a lot of games are played without me knowing the gameplay of the games and he is really good at finding free games.

My biggest worry is not the content of the games. When I am requested to enter my password by the boys I can often judge a game quite fast, by evaluating the screenshots and related information – and they do seem to find games that are aimed at their age. Compared to the Nintendo shop, I really like the App Store since it gives me a good overview of what I am requested to acquire.

There are however a few things that bother me with iOS games and especially the free ones.

In-app purchases are a good idea. I have no problem with that and the in-app purchase model, does offer the opportunity of getting the games for free and you can play them, evaluate the gameplay and then evaluate whether you want to go further with the game – most often we don’t.

The model, that works best for is the games that are limited in gameplay in the free version and then lets you click a fancy link to take you to the full version is what we most often have used in acquiring paid games.

My biggest problem is with in-app purchases are in the games, where you are actually required to buy assets in the game in order to complete it. Kids are not the most patient (mine aren’t anyway) and the opportunity of being able to move on, be stronger, or complete the game faster is very intriguing to them and they do not always understand that I find it a bad idea that they spend their money on these micro-payments to get these assets. In my opinion this is bad gameplay considering that we are dealing with kids, luckily the model is not dominating in the gaming category.

On the topic of bad gameplay a more serious problem however is with games that run around the clock. This is a horrible concept for gameplay. Games should be turn on play and turn of when you are done. Gaming is entertainment and should not be so intrusive. These games are influencing non-game time and sets the kids and their parents in a very problematic situation and causes conflicts.

As I wrote earlier I have used to evaluate the games prior to letting Sylvester and Villads play, so I have experienced getting caught up in games with this particular gameplay. After a period of playing as the first thing I did in the morning and the last thing I did before I went to bed, I decided that this sort of gaming was bad for me. It influenced my concentration and my productivity, so I deleted the games.

If this gameplay concept is problematic for adults, so it should not be used in games focused on kids. Game time and real time is not the same and the games are becoming too imposing.

Ads are primarily seen in games aimed at adults, but I have seen ads in games also played by kids. This is just dumb. Ads ruin the user experience and kids do not get them anyway. Developers should decide on another economic model when games are targeted at kids.

I am very interested in improving my gaming experiences with Villads and Sylvester, so any comments or advice would be most welcome, even suggestions for titles we should try out as long as they are not founded in the bad practices mentioned in this post.

Fixed it (again, again)

Posted by on April 21, 2012 No comments

A sort of follow-up to ‘Fixed it (again)’ – the script has been changed to reflect the fact that the iTerm2 settings are shared between my computer using Dropbox. At some point I had also mixed up the plist files, but since the contents were almost identical I did not notice. So this version should work properly with iTerm2 and Dropbox.

  1. #!/bin/bash
  2. #http://mkaz.com/ref/macosx/iterm.html
  3. #http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20070409141256538
  4. arg=$1;
  5. if [[ “$#” = “0” ]]; then
  6.     echo “Usage: ‘it bookmark name’ or ‘it list’” && exit 1
  7. elif [[ “$1” = “list” ]]; then
  8.     defaults read ~/Dropbox/com.googlecode.iterm2|grep -e ‘\bName =‘|awk ‘{$1=“”;$2=“”; print $0}’|tr -d ‘;’
  9. else
  10. osascript <<ENDSCRIPT
  11. on run argv
  12.   tell application “iTerm2”
  13.     activate
  14.     tell the current terminal
  15.        launch session “$1”
  16.     end tell
  17.   end tell
  18. end run
  19. ENDSCRIPT
  20. fi

The above code can be downloaded from Dropbox

Update: I have created a page dedicated to iTerm2 in my notes Wiki and added the script there for future reference.

Featured on Slideshare

Posted by on April 21, 2012 No comments

My presentation on Stackato is featured on Slideshare today.

wpid-slideshare-2012-04-21-08-49.png

Fixed it (again)

Posted by on September 19, 2011 3 comments

A sort of follow-up to ‘Fixed it’ – Minor adjustments to the script I propably use the most. I now use iTerm2.app.

The script provides me with the following features:

#gives me a list of terminal profiles
% it list
#open a new iTerm session with the specified profile
% it <profile>
  1. #!/bin/bash
  2. #http://mkaz.com/ref/macosx/iterm.html
  3. #http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20070409141256538
  4. arg=$1;
  5. if [[ “$#” = “0” ]]; then
  6.     echo “Usage: ‘it bookmarkname’ or ‘it list’” && exit 1
  7. elif [[ “$1” = “list” ]]; then
  8.     defaults read ~/Library/Preferences/com.googlecode.iterm2|grep -e ‘\bName =‘|awk ‘{$1=“”;$2=“”; print $0}’|tr -d ‘;’
  9. else
  10. osascript <<ENDSCRIPT
  11. on run argv
  12.   tell application “iTerm”
  13.     activate
  14.     tell the current terminal
  15.        launch session “$1”
  16.     end tell
  17.   end tell
  18. end run
  19. ENDSCRIPT
  20. fi

I wonder if it should default to the default profile, so no arguments would just open a default terminal?

Module::Build 0.30

Posted by on March 7, 2011 No comments

I was evaluating an issue with an older Module::Build when I fell over this in the Changes file of Module::Build:

0.30 – Thu Sep 25 20:57:36 2008

– First non-beta release since April 2007. In the meantime, Sarkozy
became president of France, the 35W bridge fell in Minneapolis,
Phelps won a lot of gold, a new tribe of indigenous people was
discovered in the Amazon, and Bob Barker stopped doing The Price Is
Right. As of this moment though, the U.S. economy still hasn’t
collapsed completely.

Fixed it

Posted by on March 7, 2011 1 comment

I am using iTerm on OSX. A nice alternative to the Terminal application delivered as part of the OS. well I use both happily anyway.

I fell of this script called ‘it’ at Mac OS X Hints, which I am using constantly. iTerm has been upgraded on several occasions since and I still use ‘it’.

At some point I cleaned up my bookmarks listing and to my surprise, ‘it’ was still showing old bookmarks. After brief googling I found out that the resource file had changed it’s name from: iTerm.plist to: net.sourceforge.iTerm.plist.

So I changed the script a little and it worked again, check it out if you are using iTerm.

  1. #!/bin/bash
  2. #http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20070409141256538
  3. arg=$1;
  4. if [[ “$#” = “0” ]]; then
  5.     echo “Usage: ‘it bookmarkname’ or ‘it list’” && exit 1
  6. elif [[ “$1” = “list” ]]; then
  7.     defaults read ~/Library/Preferences/net.sourceforge.iTerm|grep Name|awk ‘{$1=“”;$2=“”; print $0}’|tr -d ‘;’
  8. else
  9. osascript <<ENDSCRIPT
  10. on run argv
  11.   tell application “iTerm”
  12.     activate
  13.     tell the current terminal
  14.       launch session “$1”
  15.     end tell
  16.   end tell
  17. end run
  18. ENDSCRIPT
  19. fi

Nemid

Posted by on November 2, 2010 2 comments

Nemid is the big system to make it easier to be a citizen in Denmark.

So you can log in with a single ID and control all of your relations to the public sector and related. All in all a good idea (I am not going to discuss the technical details, which might beg to differ).

Anyway – it is nice when it works… but it is having it’s share of system hiccups.

nemlogin-2010-11-2-14-171.png
I have marked a little thing here that changes with every reload of the page indicating that an error happened.

Should we trust people who display debug information in production with all of the information relating to taxes, pension, banking etc.?

It would be so easy to obtain this information by other means.

Twitter fun

Posted by on October 19, 2010 No comments

Sometimes tweets come in an order, where you somehow think that they are related. Should of course be read bottom up.what_are_you_waiting_4-2010-10-19-15-25.png

The next one is funny in Danish. It is one of those where a nick means something unintended, but funny in another language.

balletrusse-2010-10-19-15-25.png

Nike+ GPS app for iPhone

Posted by on September 27, 2010 3 comments

Not long ago Nike launched a new app for the iPhone to integrate with Nike+ their social site for runners.

The app looked very promising and it was only $2.99. The app utilizes the built in GPS, so you need to have a newer iPhone like 3 GS or 4.

The app has some really cool features like route maps, including a pace indicator on the map, visualized as a heat map.

It has customizable spoken feedback something the Nike+ app from Apple does not have.

In general the application holds a lot of potential and it is most certainly a welcome application comparing to the Apple application, which holds only back functionality.

The only major drawback, which is a bug with actually kills the app totally and makes it useless is it ability to synch with Nike+, which does not work. So I posted to the Nike+ forums requesting assistance.

If you look at the thread a lot of people was experiencing the issue, no particular pattern standing out.

A post to the forum about changing the clock from 12 hour to 24 hour representation got me thinking.

Being a computer programmer myself, I often see that bugs are related to one of the 3 E’s

  • Execution
  • Environment
  • Encoding

In this case it would fall under the encoding category. What encoding covers all issue related to expectations and assumptions about data and it’s representation. I am not going to bore you with the details, but it is a beautiful example I am going to use for a presentation on application testing tomorrow, when I am doing a presentation for some fellow software developers.

Please note the 3Es is a term I am using, it is definition work in progress, so it is not a common term.

So I changed my International settings to ‘United States’ instead of ‘Denmark’ and it worked (post about it in the forum)

Here follows a graphical version of the guide to make the change.

Select settings on your iPhone:

IMG_0016-2010-09-27-10-09.png

Select ‘General’:

IMG_0017-2010-09-27-10-09.png

Select ‘International’:

IMG_0018-2010-09-27-10-09.png

Your ‘Region Format’ is probably something else. If it already says ‘United States’ you might have another issue, which is not fixed by this approach.

IMG_0019-2010-09-27-10-09.png

Changed to the ‘United States’ and go back to the Nike+ GPS app and try to synchronize again. It might takes several sync if you have more than one run, if seems to be in batches in the vicinity of 5 or so.
IMG_0020-2010-09-27-10-09.png

Happy sync’ing…