I stumbled across this informative  Overview of Lean Software Practices, a transcript of a talk given by Tim Wingfield.

If you have been asleep the last 10 years, it lists Lean Software Development best practices in a metholodgy-agnostic way, like

• Eliminate Waste
• Build Quality in
• Create Knowledge
• Defer Commitments
• Deliver Fast
• Respect People
• Optimize the Whole

Then again, chances are if you have been asleep, you won’t be reading this blog anyway…

Fact is, Flash is here to stay – at least for the next 2-3 years, I assume, until maybe HTML5, Unity and/or others have gained more traction.

A question raised by a friend in a recent discussion was: What features, advantages etc. can Flash list on the “plus” side, besides an enormous installed user base? My reply was: “You already answered your question.”

The thing is, it does not actually matter how “bad”, performance-hogging, 3D-features lacking Flash actually is, if you want to reach a very broad audience, there still is no alternative to it.

Perhaps (un)surprisingly, little has changed since early 2008 when we decided to develop AT.LANT.IS in Flash.

Daniel James of Three Rings confirmed that with the Java version of Puzzle Pirates they majority of users did not even see the start screen of the game, because they needed to confirm to “Trust” the Java applet before – something they were not used to doing, raising their suspicion and in result leaving the game before it had even started. When they changed to Flash with Whirled, that problem was gone. (He was giving some exact numbers, as he likes to do, but I can’t remember exactly).

So, still a good opportunity for all you Flash coders charging a fortune for some AS3 lines…

“Children and family focused iPhone applications are gaining in popularity and have become big business” said Jason Petralia, CEO of People Operating Technology, a New York-based iPhone application publisher. “We’re happy that Greystripe is pioneering research into this market.”

Highlights include:

• Over 59% of iPhone moms let their children use their iPhone with 41% downloading entertainment applications 20% downloading educational apps specifically for their kids.
• 89.25% use their phone for entertainment, whether this is listening to music, browsing the Internet or using various entertainment apps.
• 96% are involved in their household purchasing decisions, with 40% being the sole decision maker.

The complete report is available as PDF.

If you have not already done so, please have a quick look at the slides:

Or you can watch a webcast of a live talk by Eric on the same subject, “How to Build a Lean Startup, step-by-step”:

Earlier this year, a Google Group was started.

During the test, all items in the shops will be available for only 1 ORI, to encourage lots of item purchases and new avatar renderings at a short timespan.

So, if you always wanted to check out how that golden shark helmet fits you, register now and login tomorrow evening!

(As a side note, all beta users will receive 3 months premium membership for free !)

In one of his latests posts he cites a discussion with Matt Humphrey of Bumba Labs, reminding that seemingly small differences in retention rates have a big impact, actually:

Having month-to-month user retention of 92%, 96%, and 97.3% will get you on average 1, 2, and 3 user-years respectively per user that ever signs up on the site.

Okay, in English? If each month you lose 8% of your existing users (92% retention) from the previous month, the average use will stay for 12 months. If you can hold just 4% more of your users (96% retention), then they will stick around for 2 years. If you can hold only 1.3% more than that (97.3% retention), they will be in for 3 years.

The multiplicative effects are just enormous over time. And, 90%+ seems a rather unrealistically high number.

Retention-focused features are very powerful
The point of all of the above is that retention-focused features are very powerful because they let you create dramatic improvements in all the important metrics, across the board – be it pageviews, total time usage, revenue, etc.

In real life, it seems to me that this mindset to focus on features that increase user retention is difficult to grasp for people coming from a retail history. They tend to follow a “big bang” mentality in terms of feature scope for launch, marketing, launch dates, etc., rather than

[...] put a tremendous amount of time into a whole host of retention-driven features like:

• A great product and value proposition
• Targeted notifications
• Fresh news and content on every return
• Desktop app-integration (which has a much lower rate of uninstall)
• The number of friends on the site (the more that are there, the more notifications can be generated)

All of the above contribute meaningfully to this user retention number.

And, related to my previous post, here is a demo explaining how to setup BlazeDS and Flex in IntelliJ IDEA, including debugging both the client and the server side – nice!

The most interesting features, like the Live Cycle Data Services, allowing server push-based RIAs, are very expensive, and I did not had the need for anything else that I could not handle using some simple (Y)UI thrown together and hooked into a DB using Grails.

Now, the current implementation of our Atlantis backend polls every n seconds from the server and new messages are added, via AJAX. This led to some browser stability problems and a general bottleneck if several AJAX-”windows” are opened and each of them refreshed every n seconds, respectively.

Affter some research, I stumbled across BlazeDS, which might solve this problem – another part of Adobe technology that was released open source, and should provide the basic functionality needed to access hibernated Java objects from Flex, plus allowing push subscriptions and notifications from the server to the client.

I will check out this tutorial about getting Flex, BlazeDS and Hibernate to work together.

Also, there is a great post about the differences of the various flavors and licensing details, as well as another one.

I will post my findings here.

I worked with Alex Champandard during my time at Rockstar Vienna.

He launched his site AiGameDev.com a while ago, and is now re-opening the premium section:

We’ll be reopening the Premium Membership Area on Wednesday, May 6th. In the process of relaunching, we’ll fill you in on what’s changing in the world of game AI, show you the techniques and ideas you need to stay on top of, and give you a whole bunch of bonuses and extras from our very best content.

If you are even remotely interested in AI, check it out!