aoakenfo

professional gamers have incredible hand/eye coordination and the ability to process and react to events in near realtime. but from the outside, it just looks like some button pushing.

Same. I was just looking at the new courses last night on Lynda...all business-oriented. I left the site with relief that I had canceled my membership. With the acquisition news this morning I see now why new developer courses have been lacking.

UE4 is a complex beast that will take a long time to master. It takes a team of specialists to truly leverage its power. UE4's market is high-end PC and console titles. UE4 is pretty.

Unity targets small shops and indie devs. It has quick iteration times for rapid prototyping of gameplay mechanics. It takes more work to make things pretty in Unity.

It will be easier for Unity to ramp-up its visual fidelity than it will be for UE4 to revamp fundamental workflow. We're already beginning to see these changes, like new GI (global illumination) system and physically-based materials in Unity 5. Perhaps Unity v6 or v7 will have graphics on par with UE4.

So...a JS interface to a server that creates native views. I don't get it, what is all the hype about? You've got an extra layer and level of abstraction (read: complexity) in your pipeline. I don't see how you can abstract away the idioms of a platform - they're native. 'Write once, run everywhere' has failed time and time again. So marketing changed its tune to 'Learn once, run everywhere' and now people are gushing how HUGE this is?

Somebody should start a new computer company (out of your garage of course) by customizing Linux for Mac hardware and call it Orange

Orange computers in a nutshell:

- beautiful hardware

- minimal OS features. no bloat.

- works out of the box

- a solid Unix environment for development

A flurry of hacks tends to beat the "correctly designed" way: http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

I think the more thoughts you can process per minute, the more time begins to slow. Drugs could be a way to achieve this.

take any job you can. once you have a job, it's easier to get another one.

and of course, portfolio, portfolio, portfolio. i find a blog is better than github -> if that blog has pictures of your projects, and teaches the reader with clear code examples. it's much easier to get past HR with beautiful images/videos of your app/side projects in action. if i were to apply for a new job, i would send links demonstrating my work, not a resume

I agree with the "long tail of details". The big wins are championed while seemingly infinite little gotchas are glossed over. Native development appears to be linear and straightforward because there is one language and one API - "one thing" to reason about. Contrast that to all the context switching involved in a hybrid app. Portions are written in Obj-C, portions are dynamically built using data, portions are written in JS, CSS, HTML, and Rails. What about additional tools like SASS, jQuery, JS MVC of choice, etc, etc? A lot of moving parts can be hard to juggle, and slow development as app complexity/entropy sets in.

I have a Mac/PC drawing app that I never released: http://www.conceptualinertia.net/aoakenfo/forkira-flash-draw...

demonstrates an immediate connection with their tool: http://vimeo.com/36579366

I make $0.70 cents (1 sale) every month from my iOS puzzle game: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/simpl/id672601351?ls=1&mt=8

In a few months I'll be able to buy myself a coffee! =)

Establish a feedback loop early. For example, I frequently show progress to developer friends. Their comments and encouragement fuel motivation.