It's a perfect secondary application for your tablet, and it's only one of the company's offerings. Oculus is developing the Rift, a user-worn headset designed for gaming.
Turn your head in the real world and it turns your character's head in-game. It's still raising funds via Kickstarter, but this could quickly change how games are conceived and developed. Dark Sky has quickly become the only weather app we care about any more. It tells you down to the minute when it's going to start raining. No fancy bells and whistles, just a beautiful radar and a countdown to precipitation. Mike Bithell's beautiful minimalist game "Thomas Was Alone" puts you in a world of rectangles and music as you explore and complete each level.
The design is thoughtful, the puzzles are engaging, and the music complements the aesthetic of the game perfectly. Here's an obvious but excellent application -- one that lets you speak words into it and returns a translated phrase. The company was formed by Kyle Gabler and Ron Carmel when they left their jobs at Electronic Arts to stick it out on their own, and they've succeeded in a big way. Ouya aims to remake the world of console-based gaming with its new Android-based hardware.
Will it be enough to change the gaming world? We don't know, but such a valiant independent effort deserves to be acknowledged. Donut Games has been around for a while, putting out loads of App Store hits our favorite being Traffic Rush. It's consistently figured out how to create games that appeal to a wide variety of people regardless of their gaming tastes. Don't let the cartoony style fool you -- strategy is the name of the game in this top-down turn-based battle.
It's all at once simple, fun, frustrating, and addictive. Nicalis released a mainstream port indie mainstay Cave Story, which has since found its way onto computers, consoles, and iOS devices. The company has received loads of awards for its efforts in the gaming business and we look forward to seeing its efforts continue. We love watching video on the go, and there's no better way to do it than by remotely accessing your video server on your home computer and having InMethod's Air Video stream content to your delight.
This novel solution to the limited space on iOS devices has earned the company a big place in our hearts. Ever wanted a more fully-featured Instagram? Sure, you can apply cool quirky filters to your images, but there's a cool auto-correct feature, a Selective Adjust feature for calling attention to specific objects, and loads of borders that make a cool finishing touch. Realmac stripped down the idea of a to-do list app to its bare essentials and made the interface shine when they released Clear.
Tapbots has put together one of the most widely-loved Twitter clients for iPad and iPhone. We pretty much consider it essential iOS software. Illiger keeps himself out of the spotlight pretty well, but it's okay -- his hit game Tiny Wings speaks for itself.
Sign In Register. Sign Out Sign In Register. Latest Insider. Check out the latest Insider stories here. More from the IDG Network. Review: Visual Studio breaks new ground. Up, down, and out: 20 years of Internet Explorer. How Salesforce. VisionMobile Click to enlarge. Other small things may suddenly matter, like being awake during business hours, answering your phone promptly, and having suitable clothes to wear to meetings with prospects and clients.
The hip slacker image that works so well in your laid-back office job may not fly when you and only you represent the entire business. People will perceive you according to their inherent expectations, and you cannot control or change that -- but you can be aware of it, and prepare accordingly.
Focusing only on the paying work in front of you and letting everything else slide is a good way to code yourself out of a job.
Pay attention to additional opportunities with current clients, ask for referrals, continually prospect, and keep your pipeline full. Marketing and sales are not evil; they are necessary.
Even the best of clients can have sudden downturns; you do not want to be at the mercy of one client. To paraphrase Naomi Dunford of ittybiz. Since you are responsible for everything, you must be organized.
Whatever you choose, get things out of your head and into the system, and review it consistently. It is far too easy to think that you can remember everything you need to be doing, and perhaps you can, for a while, but the effort is draining and wasteful. An organizational system is not supposed to be a straightjacket or a dictator; it is a tool. Apply your organizational system consistently to all of your areas of responsibility -- not just technical ones -- to ensure that you are always on top of everything that needs to be done.
There is a huge difference between going independent and getting promoted to management. If you get promoted to management, you become responsible primarily for the work of others, along with a load of administrative issues that you may not enjoy. If you go independent, you get managerial responsibilities and keep all your technical responsibilities as well. Many good programmers have been ruined when turned into managers; many excellent technical people are simply not happy in management roles.
If this is you, that is fine, just be aware of it and plan accordingly -- perhaps by hiring an assistant or designating one day a week as "admin day. Don't be your own barrier to business growth. You can raise your rates, but only up to a point. Learn how to delegate, sooner rather than later. Many businesses that are otherwise doing well reach a tipping point where they fail because the person in charge cannot delegate, and that bottleneck strangles the business.
If things are falling behind because everyone is waiting on you to do something, take this as a warning sign. When you hit your limit, you can contract or expand. To do less, consider firing "bad" clients, raising your rates, and making better use of your time.
To expand, consider hiring help, delegating or eliminating tasks, and diversifying your products and services. In " The 4-Hour Work Week ," Tim Ferris recommends several tactics to reduce the work you must do to a bare minimum, while maintaining the same income level. Some of these tactics will work for software developers, such as outsourcing administrative tasks to trusted assistants virtual or otherwise , while other tactics are appropriate only for product-based businesses.
The point is not to blindly follow anyone's advice -- especially strangers on the Internet -- but to know what your options are and choose wisely. Products have a distinct advantage over services: Products scale.
You can only sell an hour of your time once, and it's gone, but you can sell a product over and over, even while you sleep. Of course, products have their own overhead: First you have to write it, then you have to sell it.
But once it is selling well, the only drain on your time is support, and counting your money. Consider building products that people actually want while supporting yourself by selling your services.
If you can transform some of your services into products, so much the better. People need to know about you. Whether you call it promotion or marketing or branding, the requirement is the same: Get the word out, with a consistent image and message about the kind of services and quality you provide.
You can start a blog, join the local Chamber of Commerce, answer questions in LinkedIn groups, post instructive videos to YouTube, and so on. Choose a few ways that you are comfortable with, and start.
Be creative, use your imagination, find ways to stand out that represent you well, but above all make sure the channels you choose are populated with likely prospects. Try several approaches, track where your leads come from, and then concentrate on the avenues that prove fruitful.
Eventually you may decide that you've had enough of being responsible for every aspect of your business; that's the time to replace yourself. You can replace yourself with one person, if it's the right person. More likely, your responsibilities will be divided among multiple people. This can be good, especially if the people you find share your philosophy and work ethic and are better at their jobs than you are. Finding the right people can take a lot of effort, and you may have to go through a few to find the right one.
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