"Remember, dear brothers and sisters, that few of you were wise in the world’s eyes or powerful or wealthy when God called you. Instead, God chose things the world considers foolish in order to shame those who think they are wise. And he chose things that are powerless to shame those who are powerful. God chose things despised by the world, things counted as nothing at all, and used them to bring to nothing what the world considers important. As a result, no one can ever boast in the presence of God."
Firefox 6 seems to ignore the encoding declaration in the xml prolog. Setting a content-type meta tag should fix this (or setting the encoding in the http headers).
I'm an independent iOS developer. My paid apps have sold over 100,000 copies at 99¢ or higher. In total, my iOS apps (including free apps) have been downloaded over 7 million times.
I took a look at your app in the App Store.
Here's your problem: your icon.
The icon is the most prominent thing the user sees when first looking at your app in the App Store.
Change your icon, and you'll get more downloads. Trust me :-)
Feel free to contact me if you'd like to discuss good icon design, or other under-appreciated aspects of selling an app.
So could you post here a summary of what makes the icon good? I got professionally designed icon for one of my projects, but still got bunch of quite different opinions about it from various people.
The Icon is bad, the copy is bad, and the name is bad. A factory? I have trouble associating factory with anything fun. Call is something like Ball Crusher, sounds more fun.
This is my stupid opinion, and I could be wrong, but try to make the copy more fun, leave the technical explanation to later. Most people only read the first few lines anyway. Get a simple icon, don't try to convey too much info. Just have a colorful ball on a nice background.
Oh, and thanks for putting yourself out there for criticism, is help you and us all. There are some great ideas in the thread, and the game looks like fun.
Yeah, it's looking like a lot of people agree with you that the icon needs work. You've been contacted.
I'm definitely not in love with it, but it's better than the other ideas I had. The problem I was having was trying to depict the in-game action in such a small space. 3D stuff just seems to get cluttered or lost.
An angled disc-bullseye exploding into pieces? The actual depiction won't be as important as the graphical touches. Right now, your non-3D graphics are a little amateur.
Also, can you make the balls a little more spherical? They're the main focus of the game and the background kind of overshadows them.
Actually, why are they spheres and not discs? Discs would look better (more traditional) and add difficulty when they rotate.
Or even better, use spheres on some levels and discs on others (where it makes sense.) definitely crank up the poly count on the spheres and anything else.
Here's a free idea. Let the user use any photo as the texture for the targets. User just got dumped? Let him select a photo of his ex from his photo library and blow her visage to smithereens!
This was my first thought too -- when I saw the icon at the top of your page, I was bracing myself for an awful-looking game and saying to myself "well there's the problem right there". But then the game looks great, compelling even. Talk to this guy about your icon!
You're right that it can't be strictly enforced, but I think the added inconvenience would be enough to subtly change the behavior of the majority group. Most people won't bother to create multiple accounts or install a browser extension.
In a similar fashion, nothing prevents someone from writing a browser extension to add comment scores back today, e.g. http://hnpoints.com/ ; The scores aren't official, but they serve the same purpose. Most people aren't going to install a browser extension. Of course, some will. But most people will just use the site as-is, out of convenience.
If there's a consistent pairing of views between two accounts, this could be flagged as suspicious. If the person isn't proxying one of the accounts' access, all the more so. Of course, more overhead.
Or new accounts could be disabled from viewing scores, much like new accounts are disabled from downvoting. The only benefit a person would obtain with this would be to see a score with a main account and upvote it with a throwaway, where upvotes aren't really what we are trying to prevent. That would take down the overhead of trying to pair two random accounts together solely by comparing behavior and IP addresses.
My personal opinion is to let it run it's course. RiderOfGiraffes at the beginning of this whole dilemma posted single page mirrors of the frontpage of HN taken once a month (or week) for the past few years. Looking through that, specifically the comments, the only difference I saw was that the commenters were much more buddy buddy and on a first name basis. Unless PG wants to redo the entire site and use some sort of invitation system much like a private BitTorrent tracker uses, I highly doubt a public community site would ever "avoid the Eternal September". Open registration means anyone can come in and be themselves. This will always change the community. Moderation can only go so far. If further action is desired, further action must be done.
"Remember, dear brothers and sisters, that few of you were wise in the world’s eyes or powerful or wealthy when God called you. Instead, God chose things the world considers foolish in order to shame those who think they are wise. And he chose things that are powerless to shame those who are powerful. God chose things despised by the world, things counted as nothing at all, and used them to bring to nothing what the world considers important. As a result, no one can ever boast in the presence of God."
- 1 Corinthians 1:26-29 (NLT)