Do you remember, in the ‘before’ times, when the phone would ring? Are you at the age where the phone was a plastic thing with numbers on it, which was connected to a special socket in the wall? So it rang. Ring. Ring ring. Who is it? Wait! Skip a few years later, and this other plastic gadget-thing which dad bought showed us the number that was calling us. Nope, we don’t know this number. Ring ring. Sync A few
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By Ran Arad | July 14th, 2010 | Filed under Standardization
This isn’t a link blog, but I think this link should be shared, and I don’t have a Twitter account. So without further ado, here is Dan Teasdale sharing Design Lessons Learned From Rock Band – make sure you download the slides (that’s where the beef is). I started reading it because I love Rock Band, but Dan brings up issues of design, redesign, software development cycles, management, communities and dealing with the unexpected that are much more universal than game design. It’s a long slideshow, so I’ll let you digest. My Impressions of it, especially on “The One Question”, in a later post. (not my band, but I like the drummer’s stage)
By Ran Arad | April 8th, 2009 | Filed under Development
Have you ever been to Japan? My experience was very strange. Everything seemed familiar at first glance, but when I tried something – walk the streets, ride the train, buy at stores, use the washrooms – I realized that nothing is as it seems and everything is different. So different it might just as well be another planet – complete with strange glyph writing, unexpected underground passages, and strange stuff for sale. Remind me to tell you about the half
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By Ran Arad | April 7th, 2009 | Filed under Development, SDKs
I’m probably late on the wagon with this, but I just discovered that standardized protocol interfaces are fast becoming commonplace – and I’m not talking about the network-side interface, I’m talking about the application-side interfaces, also known as APIs, or should I say open APIs. APIs used to be a matter of taste and design, pride and prestige; they were known to make or break an SDK. All this is about to change, as APIs are being standardized, and SDKs
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By Ran Arad | March 25th, 2009 | Filed under Development, Standardization
Last week, Mrs. Code of Contact decided to upgrade our internet connection. She talked to the ISP representative, who informed her of a special deal: she is entitled to a server-side service, either an anti-virus or anti-spam for the mail service, or something called “Safe net”. “Safe net” scans sites for malicious scripts and prevents access to sites that may harm the user’s computer. Since Mrs. Contact knows we have anti-virus and anti-spam, she selected the “safe-net” service. To make
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By Ran Arad | November 26th, 2008 | Filed under Development
The road to hell, they say, is paved with good intentions. For protocols, the intentions are usually: to “make it simple” to “integrate it into the existing system” or to “allow it to work independently” Where the “hells” are, respectively: under-defined standards inconsistencies ambiguities It’s very hard to write a standard that avoids all these. In fact, if I took the time, I could prove that from the theorem “any
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By Ran Arad | July 30th, 2008 | Filed under Development, Standardization
HTML clipboardUpdate: Sony put her foot down: no more incompatibilities. Thank the great Playstation-in-the-sky. Jeff Atwood for Coding Horror already mentioned the better looks of Guitar Hero 3, and concluded that presentation matters. Reading it, I concluded that he has not played the game for more than half an hour, since after half an hour you hardly see the presentation, except for when it annoys you. My favorite game at the time was the first Guitar Hero, since it was
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By Ran Arad | June 2nd, 2008 | Filed under Standardization
I have previously mentioned Joel Spolsky’s brilliant post about standards. If you’ve not read it yet, it is really worth your while. In that post he quotes Jon Postel‘s robustness principle and Marshall Rose’s critique: Counter-intuitively, Postel’s robustness principle (“be conservative in what you send, liberal in what you accept”) often leads to deployment problems. Why? When a new implementation is initially fielded, it is likely that it will encounter only a subset of existing implementations. If those implementations follow
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By Ran Arad | April 7th, 2008 | Filed under Interoperability, Standardization
There are two kinds of protocol wars: one is between competing protocols, and the other is between protocol implementations. I would like to offer a glimpse into the reasons and ways in which companies implementing the same protocol compete with each other. However, I will first need to make a small disclaimer: any example I give here is not meant to imply that any company involved has any intention of malice or foul play. In fact, I am sure that
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By Ran Arad | March 31st, 2008 | Filed under Interoperability
I took a break after the last time discussing standardization of human behavior, but now I’m back with a new problem: if I call someone, and I hear the call waiting tone, how long should I hold? How long must I back off before I call again? Back-off time is especially problematic here, since humans are notoriously bad random number generators. Random back-off time is critical to prevent crowding of servers, but how do you prevent parents to a new
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By Ran Arad | March 24th, 2008 | Filed under Standardization
