Discussing release dates with my best friend Scott got me thinking. People will be receiving iPod Touch and iPhones as gifts on Christmas day. The first thing you want to do when you get an iPhone is to try out some apps. You are hesitant at first to spend money so you look for freebies. Beat the Boss will be there for the taking. I believe after playing one level, $1.99 upgrades will happen naturally. Good conversion rates have been 40% or better for other games.One of the big differences between owning a Sony PSP and an iPhone is the price of the games. When you spend $25-$40 per game you are much more discerning about your choices. You can get a decent iPhone app for under $5 dollars. Many people have dozens of paid apps at a time. Each person's app line-up changes, just like their songs. What is different about Beat the Boss is that it will be consistently updated with user's suggestions. This should result in a longer shelf life. That would be great for songs now that I think about it. If musicians updated their songs you would remember it more on your list. My goal is to get submitted and approved by Christmas.
Posts
I was just introduced to this blog yesterday and I read it all the way through. The most recent posts are at the top so as you read through you feel like you're digging deeper and deeper into the history of the ideas and the central project: the iPhone app called "Beat the Boss" that Mike has been working on for at least a year now. As you dig, you encounter Mike himself: his charm, his very high intelligence and skill as an artist and comicist (is that the word?)
ReplyDeleteThis blog is remarkable, not mainly for the information it contains (and there's a lot of useful informaton here) but for the author's personality that it reflects. This blog is a story of seeking, and aspiration, and spiritual struggle, discipline and inner growth. There is a mashup here of many of the qualities we find in Augustine's CONFESSIONS, Ben Franklin's AUTOBIOGRAPHY, and PEANUTS.
Mike tells us how his ambitions and aspirations have had to change as the world changed: it was no longer feasible to make a career following in Charles Schultz' footsteps because the world of the internet requires something else. Mike leaves us a record of his thinking and of his diligent effort to find a new direction and prepare his path with modesty and earnest work. He talks about living in a dream house that's falling apart because it's 100 years old, aged and out-of-date [Evolution of an Art Career, post 9/22/09] He had to change his dreams.
In a world where so many blogs are empty drivel and where most bloggers just construct a false persona and try to project it, Mike's blog is remarkable for its honesty and for its confessional quality. It's remarkable also for showing the quality that Japanese call "sunao" - which means humility, openness, and a willingness to learn. Unless we are "sunao" we can't really learn and grow: most of us resist our teachers, so the Japanese have a word for this rare quality. Mike's blog exhibits this quality - in spades.
Everyone who reads this blog is going to be rooting for Mike and wishing him success with the launch - which we believe, now, will in fact come very soon.
Anyway, once I started reading this blog I couldn't put it down -- and that's not only because it's a blog and not a book!
Rafael Chodos
Mike's friend, sometime client, less ambitious iPhone developer, and classmate in tai chi