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Unity3D vs Shiva3D

April 17, 2013 admin No comments

In the hours following the news of Shiva’s (temporary?) demise, I purchased a copy of the Indie version of the Android compiler for Unity. I already knew that it would be suitable for what I wanted to do, so it wasn’t really a leap of faith. The only real concern I had was how long it would take me to get up to speed.

It did take a few hours to wrap my head around the way scripting works in Unity, and although it does work, I find it a bit untidy. Because of Unity’s strict object-oriented design, everything in a scene is derived from a basic object, which then has numerous scripts attached to it, to grant it the properties and methods that define it. Shiva’s approach is to uniquely define the properties of every type of game object, and then provide a collection of functions to manipulate it.

While I find the structure messy, I can see the benefits of doing it Unity’s way – in particular, with 3rd party plugins. The standard objects that Unity provides can easily be enhanced simply by attaching scripts defining new methods and properties.

Speaking of plugins, Unity has lots of them, and many are high quality. Shiva belatedly acquired an asset store late last year, but due to the smaller community there hasn’t been many plugins added, and potentially useful plugins are largely API wrappers for iOS.

Besides the smaller user base, I suspect Shiva’s biggest issue is that the plugin structure isn’t very flexible. It’s not straightforward to integrate with Shiva’s API, especially trying to call back to the game API from a plugin. Plugins also have to be written in native code, not Shiva’s scripting language, which makes it hard for anyone who only knows Lua.

I started off browsing through Unity’s asset store, and despite tremendous willpower, my cart was repeatedly loaded up with the following add-ons:

NGUI: like Shiva, Unity’s default GUI needs some love. I’d written an elaborate GUI layout tool that used XML files for my Shiva apps and I didn’t want to go through that again. I’ve read that Unity will be getting an improved UI system, but since it’s not happening this week (or on any specific date), I’m going with NGUI. I doubt learning it will be wasted time, because Unity’s solution should be similar as they are both being created by the same developer.
Playmaker: Increased productivity through code avoidance. I had a bit of play with it today, and I can see that it could be very useful in many situations, especially prototyping.
Easy Touch 2.5: A package to handle touch gestures. It was only $20 and included a joystick which was a pain to setup in Shiva the first time I did it. I may still buy FingerGestures though, because it supports Playmaker, assuming I become a Playmaker disciple like so many others. One day perhaps, Unity might be considered an essential add-on for Playmaker?
Localization Package: An efficiently titled, simple method for handling basic app localisation. I’d actually written something similar to this for Shiva too.
Multi-platform Toolkit: Very important, and yet again, something I’d crudely implemented into my Shiva apps.
2D Toolkit: Sprites! Another module I’d written for Shiva. I gave up on my sprites because Shiva hasn’t yet been given the ability to directly call functions in one script from another. Everything has to go through events, which are slow. This meant that in order to implement sprites, I’d either have had to write a plugin in native code, or copy all the sprite functions into the scripts that needed access to them, resulting in code duplication and maintenance issues. Couldn’t be bothered.
Rage Suite: After I’d bought 2D toolkit, I found out about this gem. 2D vector sprites, similar in style to Flash. I ended up buying the full pack, including Rage Spline and its add-ons, because I wanted the SVG importer which is going to save me a lot of messing around.
Edy’s Vehicle Physics: I bought this out of curiosity. The last thing I’d played with on Shiva was the vehicle physics demo that is supplied in the samples. Shiva’s version works, but would need a lot of work to bring it up to the standard of Edy’s, which also runs surprisingly well on mobile devices.

I started writing this as a comparison of Unity and Shiva, and it’s turned into a quick review of some of Unity’s 3rd party plugins.

At the end of the day, both Shiva and Unity do the same job. A Unity game might look more professional because of its shader support, but Shiva is easier for a novice programmer to learn, and it has better cross-platform support.

What really sets these apart are the 3rd party plugins, of which Unity has far more of far higher quality, thanks to the way it’s implemented and the larger user base.

In total, I’ve probably spent $500 over the past few days of testing. For that money, based on my experience, I’m convinced that I’m going to save myself many, many months of my time, which is incredibly important because the software industry moves so fast and I’m just a team of one.

Solar Explorer: Black screen of doom

February 20, 2013 admin No comments

Occasionally, despite the best of intentions, things can go wrong.

I released an update to Solar Explorer for all markets on the weekend, both paid and free versions.

As a special bonus, it came free with a limited edition bug that that basically caused the app to start up with a black screen and do nothing, except burn CPU cycles.

It was a really simple error – a file the app expected to exist, had accidentally been dragged and dropped into a sub-folder between the test builds and the final release.

To top it off, my mail server had crashed from a spam overload the day before the release, so although people were sending me a big “WTF?”, I wasn’t receiving any messages.

It was 24 hours before I realised there was a problem, and I released a quick fix, but it took me a further three days to notice that I wasn’t getting any email from my apps account.

I’ve now reactivated my email, so thanks to anyone who posted a query here, or sent me an email.

I’ll have to have a stern chat with the quality control department!

Blackberry Apps

Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for Blackberry to get around to testing the apps I submitted to the final port-a-thon, so long ago.

I’ve been busy submitting updates for all of them, and they’ve just been piling up – one app has actually got three versions waiting for release.

Unfortunately, Blackberry don’t provide a way for me to delete the obsolete versions, so I hope they notice the higher release numbers and don’t waste time on them. It could explain why they are so slow, if they have to slowly make their way through obsolete versions, while even more are piling up.

Because of this, I have bothered to submit the latest Solar Explorer update yet, because it’ll just slow them further. I’ll release it once they’ve cleared the backlog.

At this point, I’ve technically had only one app accepted or the $100 port-a-thon payout. I hope they don’t just ignore the other four apps because they haven’t had time to test them. Admittedly, they were rejected the first time because of screen orientation issues on the new BB phones, but that was beyond my control because hardware for testing wasn’t available at the time.

Blackerry’s final Portathon: a huge success

January 20, 2013 admin No comments

It’s been a busy couple of days because I decided to take part in the final Blackberry Portathon, after missing out on the previous two, because I thought I didn’t really have anything to submit.

A bit late, I know. There was lots to do and I really wasn’t prepared, but I succeeded in submitting 5 new, free apps for the BB10 launch.

Four are games, the first being Transmutation which has been on Android for a while. It was originally written with a framework that I created for the purpose of making apps quickly, but due to time limitations last year, I wasn’t able to complete anything else.

The second app is called “Impulse”. It’s an updated version of a classic game called Thrust. I’d actually written it more than a year ago, but I could never figure out what to do with it, so I dropped it at about 90% complete. It still needed a UI, so I squeezed it into the framework that Transmutation uses, and released it.

Three is called “Meteor Defence”. It’s soft of a missile command style game that I was playing around with over the Christmas break.

App number four is an RSS feed of my blog using Blackberry’s App Generator. So far, I’ve submitted it twice but it keeps bouncing back to “ready for submission”. Hopefully it’s just a temporary bug.

RIM are going to offer up a number of BB10 devices to developers who release five or more apps, so about 14 hours ago, I decided to create a new app from scratch. Browsing free flash game sites revealed that with 16 hours left on the clock, I only had time to create a classic bug-squashing game.

All of this was done in a bit of a rush, so over the next few weeks there will be a flurry of updates and modifications to improve all of these and make them worthy of appearing on RIM’s new devices.

I’ve signed out of the Portathon now, and at last count, they’d passed 17,000 apps with about two hours to go. Amazing!

Resolving difficult issues

June 17, 2012 admin 3 Comments

For some time I’ve been copping flack from people who’ve installed unsupported custom ICS ROMs on their Android devices, because sometimes the touch screen stopped working with my apps, Solar Explorer and Exoplanet Explorer, resulting in misleading comments on Android Market such as “ICS fail” which are not true as the problem only started after the unofficial ICS ROM was installed.

Despite this, I’ve done everything I can to figure out what’s wrong, but I cannot fix issues in a custom ROM, without becoming a developer on every custom ROM project, which I don’t have time for. There is the possibility of working around the problem in code, but it has to be done in the Shiva runtime engine.

Shiva is the 3rd party tool, developed by Stonetrip, that I use to write my apps. It handles all the low level code for graphics acceleration, audio, etc., and deals with a lot of the “fragmentation” issues. Because the issues have only affected custom ROM users, Stonetrip hasn’t investigated because they don’t support custom ROMs.

To be honest, I can’t blame Stonetrip. There’s loads of different custom ROMs out there with a constant barrage of patches and hacks being released to get them running on many different devices with varying levels of success. It would be impossible for a company to be able to provide support for all these projects, ones that often feature little in the way of quality control because the ROM developers themselves have few resources.

Although my apps work fine on all the ICS test devices I have access to (running official manufacturer ROMs), in the last week or so I’ve started to receive reports from Sony phone owners of a touchscreen problem present in the official ICS 4.0.4 that was released earlier this month.

Thanks to a couple of users who’ve given me the log output from their devices while running my apps, I’ve been able to report the problem to Stonetrip, and after looking into it, they think they know a way of solving it.

The plan is that they will release a new Shiva runtime engine in the next couple of weeks, after which I’ll rebuild all my apps a do a new release on Android, and Playbook, although RIM devices aren’t affected by the problem.

At the very least it will most likely fix the issue on Sony devices, and with luck it’s the same problem that is affecting custom ROM users, and it’ll be fixed too.

The next update of Solar Explorer will also includes a couple of new features that I’ve been working on. In the current version of the app, although the planets are positioned accurately based on the date, the Moon isn’t. The new release will fix that and you’ll be able to see the Moon in the right location on dates that feature a Solar eclipse. There’s also been some improvements made to the planet position calculations so they will be more accurate.

In the meantime, work continues on my Rockets app, but at a slower pace because I’ve got a full workload at the office for the next few weeks. I have however completed the Saturn V since my last update, which was a lot of work, and by far the most complex to date. As usual, the payload is included, which in this case is a model of the Apollo 11 Lunar Lander with it’s landing legs folded up, inside the final stage, below the Command Module.

Barnes and Noble’s Microsoft deal is a mistake

May 01, 2012 admin 3 Comments

I read with alarm the news today that Microsoft was making an investment in Barnes and Noble and the ridiculous patent lawsuits were going away.

This news is of particular interest to me because I found out a few days ago that B&N finally decided to allow non-US developers to release apps on Nook back in November last year. I signed up to their developer program and was investigating the implications of getting a US tax id, which is the method that B&N use to allow foreign developers to sell apps.

With the news of the Microsoft deal, I now wonder if it’s worth bothering.

I am unaware of any company that has accepted a significant joint-venture type investment from Microsoft that hasn’t ended up being ransacked or trashed because of it.

Two recent examples include the stealth takeover of Nokia and Yahoo, both of which have been crippled by business decisions that have been made after “former” Microsoft execs entered their respective boards. Yahoo continues to lose market share to Bing after their board decided to shut down the search engine R&D department following a Microsoft investment, while we all know about Stephen Elop’s bizarre decision to publicly trash Nokia’s major bread-winner in his infamous burning platform memo.

Given Microsoft’s history, I have to wonder how long it will be before we hear that Microsoft execs have begun taking up positions on B&N’s board, followed by a decision to drop Android and switch to Windows 8 for ARM.

I believe the real winner from this deal will be Amazon because Microsoft’s self-interest will not do B&N’s business any good at all.

A Berry busy day

March 01, 2012 admin 9 Comments

Earlier today this blog and my app, Solar Explorer were both posted to CrackBerry.com, causing a spike in Playbook app sales (over 120 so far) and a big surge in traffic to this site.

Normally I’d see about 75 visitors a day, but in the last 11 hours there’s been nearly 1,000!

As a result I’ve been playing with the caching settings on the site because the it’s managed to chew through about 20% of a normal month’s bandwidth allocation.

It’s got a fairly big buffer, but it’s almost midnight here in Australia and I don’t want to wake up to a dead site.

If you’ve seen any strange behaviour in the past hour, don’t worry, it’s just me breaking stuff.

It should be working again now and I promise I’ll leave it alone for a bit.

Thanks to everyone involved, today has been a lot of fun

I’ll see what I can do about getting more Shiva devs to bring their native apps to the Playbook as well.

I know a few others are in the same boat I am, waiting for a Playbook to arrive to use for testing more apps.

Announcing Transmutation

February 22, 2012 admin 6 Comments

One of the problems I’ve been struggling with recently is a lack of exposure for my apps, Solar Explorer and Exoplanet Explorer. This has caused them to lose rank positions in the Education category in Android Market and I believe it was the result of changes I’d made to the apps in late December, which although improving them, also caused them to be shared less.

I made some adjustments a few weeks ago, and it has had a positive effect, resulting in a doubling of the rate at which my apps are shared. This has significantly boosted downloads of the free versions on SlideMe and AppsLib markets, but hasn’t translated into increased sales. Sharing on Android Market increased from such a low level that it’s only really stopped the decline, and has yet to turn into measurable growth.

Because of this, I’ve decided to branch out and produce a series of free apps to stake out a presence in other categories besides Education, which will hopefully draw more attention to my work from people who don’t frequent the education category. As Shiva3D is really designed for producing game and multi-media applications, I’m going to write some simple games, but I’m going to make them as awesome as possible.

Simple and awesome. What could possibly go wrong?!

Transmutation

After two weeks of development, the first app is ready, and it’s called Transmutation, available now on Android Market and SlideMe and later on various other smaller markets.

The player controls a microbe located at the corner of the game board, and has the ability to change it’s colour using buttons arranged along the bottom of the screen. The colour changes will spread across the board to other microbes that are the same colour as the player’s, but only if they are touching it, or another that is the same colour. The player only has a limited number of colour changes for each level, and a level is only complete once all the microbes are the same colour.

Much of the last fortnight was actually spent constructing the menu system that you see in the game. I’ve written it in such a way that it’s easy to configure is reusable, so that I can take the menu system, apply a coat of paint, and use it again in the next app. The framework will be shared between all the apps I write, so that if I upgrade the framework for one, I’ll only need to recompile the others for them all to inherit the improvements.

It’s actually been a fascinating project so far, especially now that it’s been uploaded and I can see how people are playing it. There’s only been a handful of downloads so far (damn you Android Market’s lack-of-discoverability!), but it’s nice to see that most of the users who have tried it have actually kept it installed and played it a few times.

This is actually the second game I’ve written, the first being a shoot-em-up called “Scumble” written way back in 1991 on my Commodore Amiga, which was released to Aminet and is probably out there on the Internet somewhere. I’ve long since lost the source code, so I’ll have to track it down one day and relive the olden days with an Amiga emulator.

Why such a large gap? I, like many programmers, was afflicted with the chronic inability to finish a project because I’d get bored after the fun bit was done and think of something more interesting to write. I’ve since learned secret of how to deal with that phase of a project: I start to lose interest, I write up a list of everything that’s left to do and then make myself complete each item, one at a time.

It’s a painful process, but it gets the job done.

That’s the first game out of the way, so it’s time to start on number two. I expect this one will feature monkeys and bicycles, and should be complete with less than 14 days of development time.

But you never know, it could turn into something completely different.

Playbook update

RIM have finally confirmed that I’ve scored a free Playbook, and that it’s going to ship shortly. Exoplanet Explorer will appear on App World soon after the tablet falls into my hands.

The struggles of an app developer

February 08, 2012 admin No comments

You might have noticed in the past few weeks that there’s been a string of updates to the free version of Solar Explorer and Exoplanet Explorer.

These haven’t been random improvements, I’ve actually been wrestling with a problem.

Back in July last year, about a month after I released Solar Explorer, I implemented Flurry into the free version so that I could count the number of installs that were occurring. This was done because Google’s install counter was hopelessly broken, so that it didn’t update for weeks at a time and Google refused to respond to bug reports. They seemed completely uninterested in dealing with developers regarding any issue.

Not knowing how many people were installing my app was serious because I had no way to judge whether the changes I was making were improving the app or turning people off. In general, very few people will actually leave a comment about an app, and of the ones that do, many will only do so if they have a complaint. Comments alone are insufficient to determine whether an app is popular.

Since then I’ve been watching my apps slowly grow in daily downloads, right up until Christmas where there was a big spike when new tablet owners began exploring the wide world of apps with their toys. I’d been told to expect that, followed by a decline as things went back to normal after the holidays.

Daily downloads did decline, but in my opinion they’ve fallen too far for it to be “returning to normal”.

The evidence I present is the chart of daily downloads generated by Flurry since July 2011. The purple bit is the aftermath of Google screwing up the market up by breaking search results and other assorted nonsense. Following this you can see the clear up-trend, marked in blue, that ran from September until mid January. After this the up-trend broke down and a clear down-trend is now in place, marked in red.

With the breakdown in mid January, I started seriously to consider making adjustments to my app in an effort to promote sharing of it and hopefully halt the decline. I suspected that some of the changes that I made to the apps in December resulted in them being less likely to be shared, but that the effects were masked by the seasonal boost from Christmas downloads.

Android Market is notorious for lack of discover-ability. Users are constantly bombarded with the same apps over and over and it’s very difficult to find anything new without manually going through page after page of search results. Because of this, most of my free version downloads on Android Market are being generated by app listings on rival markets such as SlideMe, or by word of mouth (sharing), leading to my conclusion that it was probably a decline in sharing behind it.

My two paid apps are the result of about six months of full time work spread over a ten month period, and from December they’ve been generating about 50% of the money necessary to cover my basic monthly living expenses. Most of this money is from app sales, not ads – in fact, ad revenue for the free versions is barely enough to buy a cup of coffee each day. The free versions weren’t really intended to be revenue generators though, they are supposed to be a sample of the full versions.

In the three to four weeks since the trend broke down, daily app sales haven’t really been affected because Solar Explorer is quite highly ranked on the educational charts and I believe that the release notes screen, which was introduced in December, has helped inform people about the benefits of the full versions of both apps. With this in mind, I’ve now added a share button to the release notes screen and highlighted the share and more apps buttons with icons to make them more obvious.

Realistically, it’s all part of the learning curve of being a small developer. I have to figure out how to promote my apps on the cheap and be proactive about issues like declining downloads, unlike larger developers who can grow their presence with paid advertising campaigns.

Exoplanet Explorer: V2.0.0 arrives

January 08, 2012 admin No comments

What looked to be a relatively straightforward update to V2.0.0 turned into a monster that raged out of control, consuming vast swathes of my leisure time.

So, what’s new?

Probably the most important change in this release is that the app can now automatically update its database whenever new planets are discovered. The data for this is created by a tool I developed and then sent to my server where the app can download it. Downloading is disabled by default, but you can activate in the options menu, after which it will check for new data every time you start the app. The update procedure should be pretty quick as it only downloads the changes and then modifies the database that ships with the app to bring it up to date.

Another improvement is the inclusion of binary star systems! This turned out to be a lot more work than I thought it would be because I was unable to find a comprehensive online source that provides enough information about the component stars in a binary system to be able to estimate their orbits. Most binaries start off being identified as a single star, before further research reveals that there’s more than one body and most/all online references (including the Encyclopaedia) include the stats for the original discovery when it was thought to be a single star. Currently, there’s seven binaries identified in the app, and a further 19 that the data extraction tool thinks are possible binaries but have been left as solitary stars due to lack of data.

There’s a lot more stats filled with this release. The source of the data is the Exoplanet Encyclopaedia which is missing data for a lot of stars and planets, mainly because there’s no single location to get all the data, so it is collected from various sources all of which have some info. Because of this, I invested a lot of time in modifying my data extractor to calculate and estimate missing values. When this wasn’t enough, I then went and filled in the data manually. There’s still a handful of stars and planets missing enough data to create them, amongst which are the majority of the WASP systems.

Because of the increased time and maintenance required for the new release, and the bandwidth costs for providing the data updates, the app’s price has had to increase a little, to about US$2.99.

Other changes include :

Rreferences to “stars” now reading “systems” which was necessary for to be able to display binary systems.
Navigation between stars is now smoother thanks to code borrowed from Solar Explorer.
An on-screen keyboard for entering planet and star names when filtering.
New preset searches and more sort ordering for finding things like binary systems
Planet temperatures and last update date are also included now

You’ll probably spot a new “Optional Extras” item in the options menu which is intended to add a miscellaneous list of enhancements to planets and stars when viewed close up. Starting with this release, enabling the option will add a ring system to a random selection of gas giants in other systems The reason I’ve added this is that 100% of the gas giants in our Solar System feature ring systems composed of rock, dust and ice, though only Saturn’s and Uranus’ are easily visible. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that planetary ring systems are common, especially around planets with large masses and moons. The app won’t feature rings around hot jovian or hot neptunian worlds because I would expect that high temperatures and solar winds would evaporate ring material and blow it away. Even rock will evaporate at a high enough temperature.

Another notable change is that stars are now sized more accurately, though if you try to zoom in to one of the few pulsars in the app, you’ll find that you can’t actually get very close. This isn’t just to protect you from the intense gravitational field, it is also caused by the fact that these objects are so tiny, about 24km/15mi across, that due to the scale of the typical solar systems, the 3D engine can’t render objects so small when they are close to the camera. To actually make them visible, I’ve had to set it up so that the camera stays back.

Kepler-20

A few weeks ago, while I was working on this update, the media was running stories about the first Earth sized planets discovered. You’ll find that if you visit Kepler-20 e and Kepler-20 f that they will actually be classed as super-terran and neptunian respectively. The reason for this is that Exoplanet Explorer uses a mass classification system based on the maximum estimated mass for a planet, which puts these planets at 3 times and 14 times the mass of Earth, whereas the media used the radius estimates which estimates their size as similar to our home world. Hopefully NASA will be able to improve the accuracy of their mass estimates in future and that they will show that the mass of these worlds is close to ours so that they will end up in the Earth category at a later date.

Known issues

There’s a minor glitch that affects a handful of systems that have planets that orbit incredibly close to their parent stars. In these rare cases, the planets will actually end up in side the star, which usually isn’t the case in the real world. There’s also one instance of a jovian world orbiting a pulsar which has the pulsar inside the planet. This is caused by the scaling of the system to fit it on screen and the extreme size differential between two bodies that are orbiting ridiculously close to each other. I’ve got a solution in mind, but I decided to do the release since 99% of systems look OK and I didn’t want to delay any longer.

There’s also a few instances of habitable zones that don’t look right, particularly around binary systems. In general, the binary systems that have been discovered so far won’t have a habitable zone at all, so I’m contemplating disabling habitable zones for binaries until I can implement a better function to calculate zones for these sorts of stars. I also want to recheck the figures for the stars in the binary systems because I’m not 100% sure the orbits are right. If I find any problems, a minor data update should be all that’s needed to fix it.

The final issue is one that affects some Tegra 2 tabs running Android 3 when the Detailed Planets option is enabled. I’ve been informed by the developer of the tool I use that they’ve found the problem and I’m just waiting on them to release the fix. When it arrives, I’ll do a quick update to V2.0.1, and release a similar update for Solar Explorer since it is also affected.

As always, report any issues here on my blog as I generally can’t help if you post on Android Market because I can’t contact you with a solution, or ask for more information.

Finding apps designed for Android Tablets

January 01, 2012 admin No comments

I was browsing the web on my Android tab last week when I came across a type of app in Android Market that I hadn’t seen before: tablet app indexes.

It’s about time!

Google isn’t really on the ball when it comes to Android Market, probably because they are an advertising business, not an app selling business. To Google, Android OS was all about stopping iOS and Microsoft becoming dominant which would have permitted them to cut Google out of the advertising market.

You can see what I’m referring to just by taking a look at the web version of Android Market. At the moment, the two top sections, “Featured” and “Trending apps” largely list the same items just in different orders. The “Best Selling Games” section is mostly composed of the 10c deal games from a few weeks ago because all those downloads they got threw out the averages and pushed them to the top of the rankings.

Boring.

Then we come to the “Featured Tablet Apps” section which appears to just have been slapped onto the market with no thought at all. It’s basically the same Featured app list all over again, just with any completely tablet incompatible ones excluded.

Not only is this situation awful for discovering new apps, it’s even worse for people who’ve just taken delivery of a shiny new dual or quad core tablet. If they don’t like what’s on offer or tire of the handful of apps on the “Featured Tablet Apps” list, then how are they supposed to find new ones that are designed to make proper use of all that lovely screen real estate?

That’s where the Tablified Market website or Tablified Market app for Android 3 or better come in, providing an indexing service that allows users to find new and interesting apps that work properly on their device.

The interesting thing about Tablified Market, and the feature that sets it apart from Android Market, is that the list is curated. This means that the staff at Tablified Market actually install and check all the apps on their list to confirm that they were designed with tablets in mind.

This simple (though time consuming) action cuts out most of the fluff in the market and saves tablet owners a heap of time manually trawling the market looking for something that is both compatible and suitable for their pride and joy.

I’ll admit that I’m a little biased because I’ve just purchased advertising space for Solar Explorer on Tablified Market’s Android app. I looked at each of the indexing services on offer, and I came to the conclusion that this one is the only one with the right idea. By offering a vetted list of Android tablet apps, they are fulfilling a need that’s long been ignored by Google, and one that I believe is in part responsible for the slow uptake of Android tablets.

Tablified Market also does reviews.

I don’t expect Google will bring out a competing list any time soon, and even if they did, it wouldn’t be anywhere near the quality of Tablified Market’s index. Automated search algorithms just aren’t good enough to find apps that have been designed for tablets, which is something completely different to finding apps that are compatible with them.

Tag Archives: apps

Unity3D vs Shiva3D