scottchin

Thinking about this topic some more, it seems hard to gain the critical-mass of contributors for such an open-source tool.

Place-and-route for example, requires a very specific set of knowledge in both optimization (comp-sci), and hardware (electrical). Most of the people who have these skill sets are probably already employed by the major FPGA vendors and under NDA to not contribute to such an open-source tool. I've seen this first-hand having been in the academic space of FPGA research. New masters and phd grads typically go straight to Xilinx or Altera. And without really really good place-and-route, you won't have a competitive tool.

I'm not sure how you would solve this problem.

First, just wanted to say that I find this topic really interesting. I'm trying to understand who the target user is for open-source FPGA tools.

For many hardware companies, the risk of using an unproven tool is too severe. Unlike software, you can't just push out a patch if there is a bug. I mean, in theory, I guess you can since FPGAs are reconfigurable, but it is probably not very straightforward from a deployment point of view (I actually don't know so feel free to correct me).

So, since you cannot push out fixes easily, it's quite scary for the engineering teams to work with unproven tools. For the consumer electronic space, product life-cycles are quite short (mobile phones get updated every year!). So you definitely don't want to risk cutting into your product's time-to-market due to bugs in the FPGA tools.

Also, the bigger the company, the more likely that they will have high-priority direct-support from the FPGA Vendors. Whereas, it's probably harder to get support for open-source tools. So I can't see consumer electronic companies choosing open-source tools.

So again, I'm not against this work at all! Just trying to understand the target audience.

Having done my graduate studies in FPGA architecture and software, I can definitely see where the author is coming from. In fact, it seems like the entire hardware development industry has to face the issue of most tools being closed-source. Although I don’t have a solution for the technology specific phases (Place and Route, Bit Stream Generation, etc.), I am actually part of a company that is trying to help solve this problem higher up in the tool chain.

One of the biggest barriers to developing EDA (electronic design automation) software tools is knowing all the nuances of the various hardware-description languages like VHDL, Verilog and System Verilog. We learned this the hard way through our previous startup (later acquired) which built a hardware verification tool.

I don’t want to be self-promoting here, but in case anyone in this thread is interested, we are building a platform called Invio that lets you build your own EDA tools. We try to solve more than just the language support side of things and all of our platform’s inputs and outputs are open standards: Python, TCL, Verilog, SystemVerilog, VHDL, etc. You can look at my profile to find more info, or google “Invio”.

One of the major challenges in creating a competitive FPGA architecture is tuning the architecture. Commercial vendors do this tuning through direct insight into their customer's designs. And since the vendors have a large portfolio of customer designs, they have a lot of data points to perform this tuning. That's one of the many reasons why we haven't seen a successful FPGA startup in a long time (decades probably). Kind of like a chicken and the egg problem.

Congrats on the release and thanks for open-sourcing! I downloaded it and left a positive review!

Thanks for the links. I wasn't clear. I didn't mean to imply that what the source was saying is not possible. Since I wasn't familiar with the credibility of RPS (which I now hear is very credible), I just felt like reading the article didn't tell me anything concrete.

Although I'm not thrilled with the launch experience and DRM of SimCity, I don't think that this article adds any validity due to everything coming from an anonymous source.

> And to get us back in your good graces, we’re going to offer you a free PC download game from the EA portfolio.

I can't help but think of the "20$ off your next purchase" pre-order bonus. Which, if you read the fine print, must be used within 2 weeks, and from a select list of really old games, and only applies to a purchase of 30$.

Looks great! Congrats on the release!

Did you work on this game by yourself or with other people?

Did you use any existing game frameworks like Cocos2D or Unity?

Congratulations! And thanks for writing this post. I find these types of post from developers extremely insightful and inspiring.

I particularly found your experience with improving Chinese SEO very interesting.

Keep up the good work!

I have registered three developer accounts on the App Store (two for companies and one as an individual). Disclaimer: This was some time ago though.

If you have already registered a developer account, you will have already decided on whether it is for an individual or a company, in which case, your tax/banking need to follow that.

If you want to register a new dev account for a company, you should give yourself a few weeks since you will need to do some back-and-forth paper work with Apple. It's not that complicated but it takes time. Plus you will need to actually do the incorporation stuff for your government.

The following are things that I wish I had done from the start. If you go the company route, I would recommend that you consult a lawyer to get all of the incorporation paper work done correctly, and consult an accountant to learn about your financial reporting responsibilities. It will give you peace-of-mind down the road. Also, be on-top of your accounting. Again, for peace-of-mind down the road. It's easy to put off.

One more tip. Don't rely on iAd alone. Do backfill to something. Admob for example.

Also, have a realistic expectation for a purely ad-supported app. They do work, but require significant activity. E.g., let's say you get $1.50 per 1000 ad impressions (cpm) on 60s ad rotations. How many total user minutes per day do you expect? You can use this to get a very rough estimate.

Best of luck to you!

Great to hear! How did you get started? Any comments/thoughts on how things are different now in terms of getting started?

Does anyone have insight into any of the following questions?

1. Which Chinese Android App marketplaces are the most popular? In other words, if I wanted to target Chinese Android users, which app stores should I focus on submitting my app to?

2. Are there any barriers to submitting to such app stores for north american developers? Specifically related to getting paid.

3. Which Android mobile ad networks are best (cpm/cpc) for China?

Would love to hear any personal experiences working with China's Android Market!

Interesting idea! I only had a quick look around the website but still have a couple questions:

1.How does the poster verify a solution?

2.If verification involves looking at the code, what's stopping the poster from just copying the code?

Wow! Nice job! I haven't had a chance to download it, but just by looking at App Store page, the app looks fun and makes me want to download it!

How much time did you spend making it?

Some of the top (grossing) apps in the Entertainment section are Emoji apps that have been around for a long time (dating back to before native iOS support). Those devs must be reeling from this.

One of the key comments made by Jon Stewart:

What we need to do in this country is make it a softer cushion for failure. Because what they say is the job creators need more tax cuts and they need a bigger payoff on the risk that they take. … But what about the risk of, you’re afraid to leave your job and be an entrepreneur because that’s where your health insurance is? … Why aren’t we able to sell this idea that you don’t have to amplify the payoff of risk to gain success in this country, you need to soften the damage of risk?

I'm quite excited about a new SimCity game. One thing I do wonder about is whether there will be an 'In-App-Purchase' type marketplace in the game. EA, on mobile at least, seems to have fully embraced the freemium model, and has been quite successful at it monetarily speaking.

I hope any IAP aspects don't get too out of hand.

As mentioned by someone in another thread, one possibility is that Surface is partly meant to set the bar for third-party manufacturers.

It's high enough make the competition (Dell, HP, etc) put out good products that won't tarnish the new Windows platform image. But not so high as to make third parties not want to bother competing.

This was a problem with early Android. There were so many poor devices that the entire Android brand was hurt (but since recovered).

That's a very interesting article. I wonder whether search, in general (as measured by traffic on the major search engines) is declining, or whether people are using more specialized search websites/apps (this was kind of touched up in the article).

For example, when i have programming questions, my first place to look is StackOverflow as opposed to Google. or for restaurants I look at Yelp or Urbanspoon.

In other words, is search traffic just becoming more fragmented across different sites (Yelp, Amazon, StackOverflow, etc.) and apps?

I'm interested to see where Siri will lead to in terms search. Will it eventually divert significant traffic from Google's mobile search marketshare (on iOS at least)?

One thing that I find incredibly fast and easy to do on iOS6 vs. iOS5 is implementing post-to-Facebook (and Weibo) using the new Social Framework. In iOS5, you would have to

- Register your app on Facebook

- Integrate the FB SDK (or maybe a third-party wrapper)

- Implement various authentication/delegates/callbacks

- Test that you did all of these things correctly

This might not sound like a big deal but it does save some time.