hyung

- Adding a metronome, even at very slow tempos, adds good subtle variation.

- Starting from different points in the piece also provides a good subtle variation.

- Playing the piece at different octaves.

Looks nice! Have you thought about adding screenshots on the landing page (maybe one each for "Log Expenses", "Tag Expenses" and "Analyse Expenses")?

I think a lot of people would like to see what the app might look like before giving away their email address.

This question might be too broad, but how would you compare the infrastructure, English level, technical talent, etc. of Rwanda with other African nations?

I really like how you send a link to the game via SMS. May I ask which service you're using to do that?

This is what I do. Please feel free to contact me (details in my profile).

I think it also depends on the type of operations you're looking to hire. I've found that people with stronger skill sets (for example, engineers), are very difficult to hire for swing or overnight shifts, even if salaries are double or triple the daytime shift.

(I run 24/7 operations in Vietnam, I'd love to talk shop.)

If you're on a Mac, ImageAlpha provides a good GUI that lets you preview different quality settings:

http://pngmini.com/

Also, ImageOptim provides a GUI that does lossless PNG compression:

http://imageoptim.com/

A cross-platform game engine sounds awesome. But I wonder what kind of game can truly be write-once, run-everywhere, and considered "fun" on all platforms.

A few major challenges:

- Designing a game that is fun and intuitive to play with a wide variety of input controllers (touch, mouse, keyboard, joystick).

- Handling the entire spectrum of screen resolutions, from older iPhones to high-end desktop computers. The game would also probably need to work in both portrait and landscape modes.

- The QA effort alone could be huge. Testing on quirky desktop browsers or buggy Android devices alone could be a dealbreaker.

- I'd argue that the time spent trying to figure out a game design or technical workaround for a particular platform would be better spent focusing on one platform and making the game more fun. In my experience, trying to make a fun game involves a lot of trial and error and iteration, and I personally don't think I could do it if I also had to keep in mind multiple distinct target platforms.

I can envision a couple one-button games like Angry Birds or Tiny Wings possibly having a chance, but even in those cases, I'd argue it'd be better to nail one platform first and then incrementally add other platforms instead of spreading oneself too thin.

The pressure to censor content often comes from advertisers. A lot of advertisers don't want their ads showing up next to photos with even minimally offensive content.

(This doesn't explain everything for Google, but I'm sure it was a factor.)

This reminds me of stories of kids setting up lemonade stands in Times Square, and even making a lot of money before getting shut down by the cops.

I can't find the exact news article, but this one is close ($200 profit/half day!):

http://www.dnainfo.com/20110628/midtown/kids-set-up-lemonade...

At its core, our networking layer uses long-polling, but we added several modifications to attempt to keep the requests alive. We also drastically changed the timeout values based on testing directly on the mobile devices.

We found that vanilla long-polling works sometimes on iPhone and some Android phones. But it often introduces huge latencies, and it often just fails for no apparent reason on some Android devices.

I'd like to add that, in practice, socket.io doesn't work well for mobile HTML5 multiplayer games. We found that long-polling requests tend to get dropped without informing the mobile client.

Our solution so far has been to roll our own mobile networking layer, with redundancies and timeouts especially tuned for mobile.

Congrats Anand!

I've been working in the crowdsourcing field for several years now (our workers are from Vietnam), and can understand that the profit margins can be very thin for some of the more basic tasks.

Drop me a line if you're interested in branching out to Vietnam.

Can you PM me? My contact info is in my profile.

Thanks, this is the first I've heard of it.

Reading through the link, I believe it does a combination of skin tone detection and human body pattern matching. Typically, this solution can detect a fully nude human pretty well, but fails on something like a close-up/partial shot of a penis.

I only know about CrowdFlower/Mechanical Turk at the moment.

I know of other teams that moderate photos, but I don't know anyone that's put together a publicly available API/web service for it.

Do you happen to know the names of any existing services?

Thanks. I'd argue that our team's error rates and response times are lower than CrowdFlower, and last I checked, our rates are better as well.

We have good technology and an experienced team, which lets us check a lot of photos faster and more reliably than the competition.

Do you happen to know anyone that uses CrowdFlower for this? I'd love to chat and see what they think of the service.

I've worked with a number of companies that have tried an automated solution (including teams with PhDs in Computer Vision), but it's just not there yet. I'm sure within the next 5 years someone will figure it out, though.

I've been a developer for iPhone/Android for a couple years now. Making livable money on iPhone, just barely breaking even, if not losing money, on Android.

- Your best shot at Android is to make an app that doesn't push the hardware. We built a high-end game, but we couldn't afford to keep supporting the latest devices. In fact, our game crashes hard on the Xoom/Gingerbread, but it's not making enough money to justify a fix. Fragmentation is a huge problem on Android, so for indie devs, staying low-end is the only real alternative.

- Our games have been featured by both Apple and Android, and been in both top selling lists. Our Apple revenue was easily 50x our Android revenue.

- I think you'll have better luck from a free, ad-supported app instead of a paid app on Android.

- If you want to make livable money, then your options are: (1) get as iOS app featured by Apple, or in the top 200 apps for a long time, or (2) create a stable of smaller apps that work well on all iOS/Android and don't need to be ported/tested on each individual device.

I think the site would really benefit from having a video.

We've gone through the same problem. In our case, we wanted our game to resume exactly where the user left off (i.e. no splash screen).

Our solution was to use a pure black Default.png, and design our game to have very low upfront load times. On iPhone 3GS, our game takes 1-2 seconds to fade in from pure black.

This also fixed the problem we had where some users that preferred to flip the game upside down (landscape mode).

I'm an US ex-pat living and working in a developing country, and I see this situation all the time. For the first couple years, I would lose my mind when it happened. Then I realized that it's not an intelligence or skill thing; it's a cultural and communication thing.

- A friend of mine here once hired a guy to paint his ceiling. The painter did a good job on the ceiling, but didn't put down tarps and got paint everywhere on the walls and floor. My friend was understandably angry, but the painter couldn't understand what the problem was. From the painter's point of view, my friend didn't specify that the floor and walls not get paint on them.

- I hired a crew to build an addition to our office. After they put in the floor, I realized that it was lumpy and misshapen. When I confronted them about it, they didn't consider it a problem. I didn't say the floor needed to be flat.

- I asked a smart, college-educated colleague to fix one of our broken clocks. She ended up just switching the clock with one of the working clocks. I had to go back and specify that all clocks need to work.

If you're going to outsource, you absolutely need someone who can bridge this gap. What feels half-ass and unacceptable under any circumstances to you and me, could just be normal and expected for a lot of people. And similarly, what feels normal and acceptable to us can feel obnoxiously strict and overbearing for others.

The trick is to understand that for any given situation, the meaning of "acceptable" varies from culture to culture. And it has nothing to do with skill or intelligence.

"If the founders are the top managers in the company, then the typical "non founder employee ownership" will tend to be between 10% and 20%."

Does this mean that all the "non founder employees" would split the 10-20% of the equity?

I'm looking for an EventMachine and/or Cassandra (with Ruby) expert.

2-hour phone conversation to help us get up to speed with the technologies and to double check our assumptions and architecture.

Thanks everyone for the advice! I've updated the landing page with everyone's comments.

- Moved the call to action to above the fold

- Changed the copy to focus on the player, not the game

- Added another image (more on the way)

http://pocketcafegame.com/

Direct link: http://pocketcafegame.com/

Disregard the motivation problems, that's just bad phrasing.

I'm wondering how well it would work for the senior programmer to explain a very small, 5-minute task to the junior, then work on something else while the junior guy finishes the task, then check the work, and repeat.

I'm more interested to hear if anyone has ever actually tried this, and if there were any surprises or if it didn't work, why didn't it work?

I should clarify. After some more thought, what I really mean to ask is:

Would a senior and junior programmers' combined productivity be significantly higher if they were paired up instead of working separately?

Assuming, for the sake of discussion, that the senior programmer has 15+ years of experience and the junior has <1 year.

There's also typically a big price difference between domestic and international bandwidth.

From just quickly glancing at the website, the 1Gbps is only for local servers, and they don't seem to guarantee any international bandwidth.

Be careful with the type of app you want to make. For example, we're trying to port our iPhone dual-thumb shooter and we've run into touch-recognition problems on the Nexus One and Droid.

Nexus One doesn't handle multitouch correctly: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsSUqkh8pcI

Droid doesn't register a tap if one finger is already touching.