So, after a long period of inactivity on this blog, I’m finally back. I had lot of things to do last weeks like new projects for new customers, old project for new customers, new project for old customers and old projects for old customers. Now I’m back with lot of interesting news and projects. I write here down a quick list, linked to the various posts I’m ready to write:
Ormai ci siamo, la Social Media Week è alle porte! Si tratta di un evento mondiale, rivolto alla connessione multimediale tra talenti, appassionati e professionisti di ogni settore. Seguendo questa serie di eventi, chiunque potrà toccare con mano la potenza di questo mezzo di comunicazione, che non può più essere preso sotto gamba.
PlaySys ha realizzato lo Splash Screen dell’evento che sarà presente in apertura di tutti gli eventi e di tutti gli spot promozionali, sarà impossibile non vederlo 🙂 Presso NABA Milano, sono docente di Web 2.0 Lab e tratto l’argomento in maniera approfondita durante il corso, dando agli studenti delle valide conoscenze su come destreggiarsi in questo villaggio globale, all’interno del quale si annullano le distanze fisiche e culturali e dove stili di vita, tradizioni, lingue, etnie sono rese sempre più omogenee e internazionali.
Visita il sito ufficiale dell’evento SOCIAL MEDIA WEEK e preparati ad essere il protagonista.
Come richiesto dall’amico e collega Marco Accordi Rickards, annuncio l’adesione di PlaySys alla petizione lanciata dall’ECA, l’Entertainment Consumers Association, e sostenuta con forza da AIOMI, l’Associazione Italiana Opere Multimediali Interattive – Movimento per la Cultura del Videogioco, per il riconoscimento del videogioco come medium culturale al pari di film, libri e musica, in occasione della discussione in appello alla Corte Suprema statunitense del caso Schwarzenegger v. EMA, soprannominato anche come ‘caso del videogioco violento’ Si tratta della prima volta che la Corte Suprema approva la discussione proposta da uno degli Stati per considerare restrizioni sulla diffusione e l’utilizzo di determinati videogiochi. Finora, infatti, tutte le leggi simili sono state bloccate dagli stessi tribunali di primo grado come restrizioni incostituzionali della libertà di parola protetta dal Primo Emendamento della Costituzione americana. La petizione, firmata da grandi attori dell’industria videoludica internazionale come Atari, Electronic Arts, Sony, Bethesda Softworks, NCSoft e molti altri ancora, si propone, nello specifico, di sensibilizzare la Corte Suprema di fronte al caso Schwarzenegger v. EMA. Se la Corte Suprema concorderà con quanto stabilito dal tribunale di primo grado dello stato della California, confermerà i videogiochi sotto la protezione del primo emendamento, uno status che li equipara agli altri media culturali; se la Corte non dovesse concordare, i videogiochi verranno invece trattati differentemente, con la possibilità di limitazioni future all’accesso ad essi nei diversi stati del Nord America. L’ECA, che promuove l’iniziativa della petizione, è un’organizzazione non-profit che rappresenta i consumatori delle opere multimediali interattine negli Stati Uniti e in Canada. L’associazione è nata per dare ai videogiocatori una voce colletiva per comunicare le loro necessità e proposte e stimolare cambiamenti a livello istituzionale e sociale. Nello specifico, la petizione promossa verrà sottoposta alla Corte Suprema degli Stati Uniti il 2 novembre 2010, ma le adesioni vanno espresse entro il 17 settembre, a QUESTO LINK
Sensazionale: due bambole sono state sorprese mentre giocavano a TheDreamers sul loro Nintendo DS rosa! Lo scoop è di Pamela De Lorenzi, blogger e collaboratrice di PlaySys, che ha testimoniato il fatto.The Dreamers è un nostro videogioco ancora in fase di sviluppo ma a quanto pare qualcuno ha avuto l’anteprima 😉
Per leggere l’intero reportage e vedere altri scatti clicca sulla foto qui sotto.
È finalmente disponibile per il download gratuito la nostra App per Honeywell. Sebbene si tratti di un’App molto semplice e specifica è sempre entusiasmante terminare un progetto con successo.
L’App è molto tecnica poiché si tratta di una Utility per i tecnici Honeywell, quindi non aspettarti la cosa più interattiva e divertente del momento 😉
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Qualche giorno fa sono stato intervistato dallo staff del blog di 3D Again, clicca sull’immagine per leggerla.
Oltre alla lettura della mia intervista, consiglio fortemente la visione dei lavori presenti sul blog di 3D Again, davvero molto ben riusciti!
Domani sera (21 Luglio 2010) parteciperò al programma radiofonico VERy LAUd, condotto da Laura e Veronica, su Radio Pianeta FM 96.350 Mhz. L’argomento che tratteremo sarà il telelavoro: si parlerà delle possibilità che offre, gli strumenti, i vantaggi e gli svantaggi per l’imprenditore che si avvicina a questo genere di svolgimento delle mansioni. In passato ho avuto esperienze come pioniere del telelavoro. Il mio progetto di tesi, ad esempio, era stato realizzato per il 90% tramite telelavoro assieme a Cédric Guillemet, a quel tempo programmatore per Sony PlayStation 2.
Durante il 2009 ho usufruito di questo sistema di affidamento degli incarichi e ho avuto diverse impressioni, più o meno positive. Se volete sapere di cosa si tratta non vi resta che seguire il programma alla frequenza indicata o tramite i link qui sotto 🙂 Ovviamente un grande ringraziamento per l’opportunità va a Valentina Barreca. Attualmente Valentina è al lavoro su un docufilm che tratta l’argomento del telelavoro, cercando di sviscerarne tutti i vantaggi, dalla comodità alla tutela ambientale. La mia presenza in radio è stata organizzata interamente da lei.
IMPORTANT: WE CAN WRITE A CUSTOM STEP-BY-STEP TUTORIAL, RECORD A DETAILED VIDEO OR HELP YOU REMOTELY TROUGHT THE iPHONE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS. CONTACT US FROM THE AGENCY WEBSITE: www.playsys.it
I would like to write something about my experience as iPhone developer, because it was an interesting and useful experience. I (or we, because it was a team work at PlaySys) spent about 30% of the development time to become registered Apple Developers, then we spent 20% to practically develop the App and then we finished with a long 50% to compile & upload it on App Store. Yes, these were the timings, and it’s not a joke. I don’t want to say that Apple is wrong, it’s not great or other things like this, I want only to write about my experience, maybe it can help someone else. Before starting I would like to thank two key people that made the development of this App possible: Andrea Benedetti and Valentina Oggioni. So let’s begin! The ingredients of the recipe to obtain an iPhone App are: – a customer – clear ideas of the final result – clear idea on what you’ll have to modify at the end of the project – a skilled and motivated team (programmers+graphician) – lot of motivation – knowledge between Objective-C and Photoshop (not so much, the team will manage them, but to manage it you should know a bit of everything) – XCode, iPhone SDK, Snow Leopard, a Mac and so on… – a sad life to spend in a office, behind a monitor The first thing to do is to become a registered Apple Developer, so you have to apply to be recognized by them. In this phase you have to prepare some legal/economical information about your agency, and have to prepare your bank account. This phase requested us about 2 weeks or maybe a little more because a little misunderstanding with Apple. After this step you’ll have a new account to access at the registered developer area. You’ll find some good stuff there inside: – iPhone SDK – XCode – Utilities – lot of step-by-step guides and videos – references, tech manuals and discussion areas I suggest to read the more as possible about the process of development. It’s a bit different from Windows, were you download your copy of Visual Studio Express and the .NET framework, you develop and post your executable online somewhere. Now with XCode you only limit is your imagination, and of course your budget and your knowledge. In my specific case I can do more with a piece of rope. Helpfully Andrea helped us a lot, writing the 99.9 % of the code; the remaining part was completed by me with some //copyright information 🙂
Now some questions: Q- Do I need some coding knowledge to develop this kind of App? A- Of course a lot OOP knowledge is required.
Q- Do I need to know a lot about Photoshop or other graphic program? A- No. There is the Interface Builder that can visually help you to place in the canvas your elements. If you are planning to develop a videogame the answer would be completely different. Q- Do I need an iPhone to develop my App? A- No, at least at the beginning of the development. The device could be necessary depending on the App you are developing. For a simple calculator you can manage everything without an hw device. Remember that you can use an iPod Touch to develop App for the iPhone, at least if you don’t use the phone, the microphone, the camera and the 3G connectivity. While your programmer is developing and your graphician is creating cool stuff, you as project manager, have to prepare the certificates. It’s important to know that there are 2 different kind of certificates: Development and Distribution. The Distribution one is split again in 2: AppStore and Ad hoc. Remember that you don’t need only the certificates, you will need Provisioning file too. Working on this I understood this relation: Certificates <–> OSX Provisioning <–> XCode and of course there is a connection between XCode and OSX 🙂 So start opening your Keychain and request a new certificate from Authority. This creates 2 keys, a private and a public. Choose a 2048 bit RSA encryption and save it on your desktop. Login on your apple developer page and go in the certificates area. Here you can create your first Provisioning certificate. Simply go in this section of the site, choose to create a new certificate, upload your request and everything will be done automatically. Now you can save your certificate for provisioning. Do the same thing for the Distribution one. For the first time you need a simple in-house distribution: a distribution file that manage the connection between your device and the XCode project, so you can deploy the project on the physical hardware instead of the simulator. Back offline add the certificate inside the keychain and the connection file insider XCode (or iTunes). You’ll need to setup XCode for the “local” distribution, it’s not difficult and Apple has a nice step-by-step tutorial on the site.
Remember to create at least 2 icons for you App: a 57×57 and a 512×512. These will be very necessary to publish your app on the AppStore. When you finished your development the troubles will arrive 😉 I really dunno why, but we encountered lot of terrible problems in the last part of the development. It was really frustrating and we loose lot of time: Apple’s automatic system rejected our zipped App, saying it was not signed with a proper certificate. Searching online I found hundred and hundred post about lot of developers that encountered our same troubles. Of course the certificates were valid, we were sure about this, like the other developers were sure about theirs. As said I don’t know what happened: someone solved this reinstalling XCode and the SDK, someone create a new project and pasted inside the main work and we, after 7 hours of desperate things solved in this way:
– we inserted a jpg image in Interface Builder – we compiled the project – we removed the jpg – we recompiled again – worked! 😀 I think there is an unknown bug inside the website App validation, something that sometime works and sometime not. We tried with the jpg because watching inside the compiled App we noticed some png files were damaged during the compile process.
This was a simple App, but we are planning a new one in these days and I hope not to encounter these frustrating bugs. Enjoy App development, it’s really fun and interesting! IMPORTANT: WE CAN WRITE A CUSTOM STEP-BY-STEP TUTORIAL, RECORD A DETAILED VIDEO OR HELP YOU REMOTELY TROUGHT THE iPHONE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS. CONTACT US FROM THE AGENCY WEBSITE: www.playsys.it
Yes! we are online with a new website, social network, documents and mobile version. Main Web Site
The new payoff is clear and direct: The wire between virtual and real. What are these “wire”, “virtual” and “real”?
It’s simple: the wire is a link, a connection, a “bridge” that keeps constrained the virtuality and reality. The virtual is everything is done with the computer or every idea inside your head and the real…it’s Matrix 😉
Our work is to take your real idea and to construct a virtual project. At the same time, you can consider your idea a virtual concept, not yet realized…we can help you to make it real!
The web site is hosted on our www.play-sys.com. We have a index.php, that contains a device recognition and relative redirection to the proper html page. This is useful because iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch devices have some troubles with flash player.
The main page is constructed with Adobe Flash (player version 8 + Action Script 2). Our swf is inserted in the page, using Adobe Dreamweaver…simple, quick, cool.
The graphical idea behind the site is something clear, with little text, big renders and images. The site is English language only: who works in this business should speak it, and it sounds better than Italian.
We activated some extra sections:
PlaySys Tech
is a series of simple html pages that explains some technical things behind our work. Actually it’s in Italian because I started these pages some months ago, when we had the previous website version (the actual one is 5.3). Dunno if I’ll translate them, Italian language is better when speaking technical facts to Italian customers. http://www.play-sys.com/playsystech/index.html
PlaySys Legal
This is really important, it’s the work done by our lawyer staff (that costed lot of money) and that guarantee our legal shield in the case of stolen data, pictures grabbing, pdf sharing, images extraction, watermark removal and so on. http://www.play-sys.com/legal/playsyslegal_index.html
Facebook Page
We created a Facebook page to connect all our friends and customers, and to let them discuss about us. This raise our “transparency” that is one of our most important aspects. http://tinyurl.com/playsys-facebook
Youtube Channel
Of course a Youtube Channel is important to explain our projects, and to explain what we can do with CG. A video explains things better than thousand words. http://www.youtube.com/user/playsysstudio
