I don’t think that as of right now, you should buy a folding phone. A folding phone is just too bulky, too big, not refined enough, and way too expensive. Your money would be better spent elsewhere.
The folding technology would be better served, I think, in tablets. Portable tablets that you can fit into your pocket while you’re going to your flight sound much better, to me, than a phone that can turn into a tablet.
And, in the future, phones will be able to. But for now, the thickness of the device coupled with the space between the two slabs of device renders it a choice I’m not even gonna consider this year or the year after, until they get flatter and cheaper.
I’m not saying that this wasn’t expected. It is. This is the natural early release of any revolutionary technology or product. The first iPhone compared to the 5th was a WORLD of difference in only a few short years. The same will be true of the folding phones. I just recommend not jumping on the bandwagon just yet, as I have faith that the technology will make leaps and bounds and be nearly unrecognizable from the clunky device that we have in front of us right now.
EDIT 2/7/2022: The Flip3 from Samsung is almost there. Few more years and it’ll be mainstream 🙂
Download the program from here that is called “Custom Native Tile” and run it. Type your search query into the bar at the top to filter for programs. Click on the program path listed in the viewing window and then click SELECT IMAGE. Click the image that you’d like to use for the tile image (recommended: square aspect ratio and about a 300×300 resolution), and hit SAVE. That’s it!
Patrons get early access to programs like this and a bunch of other perks!
$125 is a chunk of change. $125/month is even more. When a monthly subscription is offered, it’s because that subscription is consistently bringing in value.
This is exactly what Unity3D, a widely used game engine, is asking from “freelancers”. They recommend using their “Pro” tier, which is $125 per month, if you’re in a team or you’re a “freelancer”, whatever they define that to be.
If you’re a “hobbyist”, you should apparently pay $35 a month, or ~$25 per month if you prepay for a year.
If you’re a “beginner” (or don’t have $300 laying around to pay per year), then you should use the free version.
Now, let’s talk about benefits that these versions give you.
This screenshot may be out of date to their current pricing.
The Unity page lists “benefits” of their Pro and Plus versions, while listing nothing for the Personal version. However, in my opinion, the benefits listed are virtually worthless. I have never used or wanted to use any of them, and I own the Plus version.
Here are my “benefits” that I get with my Plus license:
Support to accelerate learning & development
Benefits with Prepaid plan only:
Learn the essentials of game development with 12 months access to Unity Game Dev Courses ($144 value)
Get 25GB Unity Cloud Storage ($60 value)
Attend monthly Expert Live Sessions. Speed up your development with technical know-how from Unity engineers ($240 value)
Limited access to a Customer Success Advisor: get help finding the tools and resources you need to succeed
Save 20% on top-rated assets in the Asset Store*
Personally, I don’t care about any of these things. You might. However, there are two features I DO care about, being a professional software engineer who wants the things they make to look polished.
Some of you may think, “so what?”, but I can tell you that the light theme is an absolute eye-sore, especially if you’ve been staring at a screen for 8 hours.
The Splash Screen
And of course, the main reason why everyone who’s serious about developing games purchases a license for Unity: the splash screen.
You see, Unity forces non-subscribers to display an obnoxious “Made with Unity” or “Powered by Unity” (depending on which version of said engine you have), that looks something like this:
This is a bad move. You may be thinking to yourself right about now: “Well, makes sense, because they want to get at least SOMETHING out of distributing their engine for free. Why not popularity?”
This is true. Except it will be bad popularity. Let’s walk through this.
Let’s imagine there are two people using Unity. Bob, who has never developed anything in his life, and Kyle, who is a professional at developing games. Bob makes a crappy little box simulation with built in assets and it runs like crap because it is crap. No offense to Bob, he’s just completely new to developing games. He’s also using the personal version of Unity, obviously, because he’s brand new and wants to try to make something cool. He happily publishes his creation online, and some people download his game and see what an absolute mess it is. They also notice a very large, long, “Made with Unity” splash screen that displays for five seconds. Their parting thoughts? “Wow, Unity must be for people who don’t know how to make games.”
Kyle, on the other hand, is a professional. He buys Unity Plus for ~$25 a month because he hates the Unity splash screen, and wants to remove it so that he can put his own splash screen or logo. When Kyle uploads his professionally made, polished game, people enjoy it. And they also don’t know it’s made with Unity, because he removed it.
Notice a pattern here? Unity has received a very bad reputation among the gamer community (and somehow no one can figure out why), because every terrible game ever has a “Made with Unity” splash screen. What Unity SHOULD be doing, is PAYING developers such as the ones who made Cuphead (which is made with Unity if you didn’t know before) to put the Unity Splash on their game, and letting beginners remove it. Beat Saber is an immensely popular VR game that is made with Unity, but no general consumer is aware of that fact. Unity should be trying to control the positive PR as much as possible to drive more developers to their platform and rid the “terrible game engine” stigma from the engine’s name.
Unity states that they’re “the world’s leading real-time engine”, and is “used to create half of the world’s games”. They might want to start trying to put their name on the good ones.
Continuing on from last time’s blog post, here’s some more bad news. Security researchers believe that Collection #1 was part of a larger series of data breaches. Seven of them in total so far.
“ANTIPUBLIC #1” (102.04 GB)
“AP MYR & ZABUGOR #2” (19.49 GB)
“Collection #1” (87.18 GB)
“Collection #2” (528.50 GB)
“Collection #3” (37.18 GB)
“Collection #4” (178.58 GB)
“Collection #5” (40.56 GB)
This amounts to an absolutely HUGE amount of leaked data.
What should I do?
The same as before. Check your passwords on this website once a week for a month or so. Make sure you’re using passwords over 8 characters with a mix of symbols and other characters. Ignore any emails that claim to have hacked your email address and want Bitcoin from you.
To make a long story very short, someone discovered a massive email + password combination leak on a public forum. This included passwords from 2008 onward. It’s the largest data breach ever, exposing over 21 million passwords. They’re calling it “Collection #1“, and the breach is 87GB in size.
There are two steps you should take. One, check your passwords you use on this website right here. It’s perfectly safe, and will not steal your password. If it says you should change your password, you should change it. Two, update any insecure passwords that you use anywhere important. You also should not use passwords that are older than 2019 onwards.
To prevent stuff like this in the future, be careful for which websites you sign up for accounts for, use differing passwords for websites, use a password manager, and use 2FA. All or some of those is better than none.
Verizon, the telecommunications giant that everyone dislikes as much as Comcast (who, by the way, is the voted the worst company in America), is now trying to get into the gaming industry. How, you ask? By creating a service called “VerizonGaming”, which they plan to operate like Netflix. It will be an app on the Nvidia Shield (which is a streaming console-like thing) that you can sign into with your Verizon account and play games.
Verizon, hilariously, spent $1.2 BILLION dollars on something called Go90 in 2015 that was targeted towards millennials and was positioned as a social entertainment platform. “How did that go?” I hear you say. My response is: Have you ever heard of Go90? Probably not, and you never will again since they shut down last year in 2018.
Personally, I do not want to touch anything game, or even internet related that has Verizon’s logo on it. There are plenty of better ways to stream content to your TV than signing up for their wildly overpriced (not confirmed, but I’m making an educated guess) streaming service that would have been billed monthly or annually.
Participants in their closed beta tests apparently get a free $150 Amazon gift card after testing the service for them, so you can bet I looked into how to fund my latest keyboard. Spoiler: it’s already closed. 🙁
Verizon is not alone in their venture into cloud streaming services though, Microsoft is working on their “Project xCloud”, and Google is working on “Project Stream”. To the surprise of probably no one, Amazon is also getting in on the action and developing a streaming game service of its own, but it’s not named yet.
Time will tell which the best one will be, but I think I can go out on a limb and make a safe bet here: it’s not gonna be Verizon.
This week was the release week of Stay in the Circle (Android), and release days/weeks are always fun and informative. Sometimes not as fun, but always informative.
First off, reception has been very positive. Initial impressions are very good. People have ignored the settings menu mostly, which leads to most users not knowing about being able to set a custom game position or the battery saver feature.
Retention has been high. 50%+ day 1, and similar numbers for the other days.
The title of the game seems to be very important. The first app I released, Hopper, has been almost impossible for people to find because of the ubiquity of the keyword across many other apps. “Stay in the Circle!” is unique enough that it’s the first result if you search the title on the iOS App Store. This has helped with visibility and should be noted for future projects.
The simplicity and forgiving nature of the game is also a big factor to acceptability. Spin Ninja has overall been regarded as too difficult for many to enjoy, except skilled gamers. I was going for a Flappy Bird esque game with that title, but it didn’t work out that way. Most people decided they’d just rather not play it and gave up.
The game dynamically adjusts difficulty depending on how good the player is, which allows any player to feel like they’re sufficiently skilled. Additionally, the implementation of the “Perfect” mechanic which rewards successive hits for skilled players, and allows them to quickly reach a difficulty threshold that feels challenging and enjoyable for them, which is an issue I’ve noticed with a lot of games. Even games like Jetpack Joyride start out slow enough to feel bored, but ramp up too quickly in difficulty, leading to short, boring, frustrating sessions.
Overall, I’m happy with Stay in the Circle’s release so far.
