Team Blog

The Movie Awards season has drawn to a close for another year. It's all about favorites; favorite actor, favourite movie, and for the movie fans here at Astraware, our favorite Movie Awards - The Razzies! The Golden Rasperry Awards are always lots of fun and highlight the worst films and performances of the past year.

Another favorite of ours is Landware's excellent application, Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide 2007, which is an absolute must for every movie fan. It features details of over 21,000 films (good and bad!), more than 9,100 DVD, 7,100 laserdisc and 15,400 videocassette entries, filmographies for over 39,000 actors, actresses and directors, and you even get free updates during the year that encapsulate new film releases. It's perfect for finding out about all this year's award winners, including director Martin Scorcese, who finally won an Oscar® after many years of nominations! What I really want to know is when does Johnny Depp get a gong?

Sitting by my desk in overcast England, it is hard to believe that only a week ago I was walking around sunny Barcelona. On Saturday 10th February, John and I started our journey to one of the largest mobile shows in the world: 3GSM. Being my first time at 3GSM, I was very excited about looking at the greatest and latest products and phones but, most importantly, about meeting people from the companies that make it all happen. We spent some time around booths of some of the companies we work with and it was especially rewarding seeing Bejeweled showcased in the Access stand.

I must admit, I was impressed with the size of the show, the great variety of products you could find and the amount of people it moved. After covering the eight halls of the exhibition, I had seen mobile phones for all tastes - from the extra-small and light to complete all-in-one office-solution ones. And it is also worth noting that all were accompanied by a myriad of accessories and software, so users of all kinds are clearly going to be spoilt for choice.

I was extremely tired after spending a week walking around the halls and meeting people from different companies. But the experience was very interesting and gratifying and it also gave me a more tangible demonstration of how big the mobile market really is.

It has been 4 months since I first posted about Mobile Linux while we were at Orange Partner Camp and hinted about our interest in the new technology. It's something that we've been seriously looking into for about a year now, and things have progressed from early demonstrations to our demonstration of Astraware developed games running on the ACCESS Linux Platform at this week's 3GSM Conference in Barcelona.

It's always exciting to be working with so-called 'bleeding edge' technology, to be in there right at the start trying things out and seeing what works. I was on-site with the ACCESS engineers in Sunnyvale, California at the end of January, talking to the engineers whose job it is to make sure that ALP supports third-party developers and allows us to do great things (be they games or applications) on ALP-based phones. They're working hard to get a mobile OS that has the power and flexibility of Linux, the user-friendliness that Palm OS still is famed for, and the efficient battery usage that customers want.

I know some fans were hoping that ACCESS would be showing off some high frame rate action demos, but in reality developers such as ourselves don't tend to get much time between getting access to a device to work on and when the show starts! It certainly gets the adrenaline going! We tend to take a step-by-step approach, trying simpler things before jumping into the complex in order to make sure that we understand the system and maintain the reliability that you've come to expect from us.

What we now have is our games platform running on ALP, which makes it much easier to bring our more recent releases to the system as well. But our target isn't really just ALP. It's to make our games platform run on a much wider range of devices in general including both Symbian and various guises of Linux. It's all part of our vision to let people 'play anywhere'!

There's been quite some discussion recently about how Palm OS doesn't seem to be the same anymore, and to an extent how this shows through in the games that are being created. I thought I would explain how I've seen the OS, the types of users, and the demand for games change over time, particularly from the Astraware perspective.

Astraware ran its first big survey of customers back around the start of 2001, when there were just four of us working full time. At the time, the majority of Palm owners (we weren't dabbling with Pocket PC too much back then) were what get termed "early adopters" - who I might stereotype by saying that they were predominantly 20-35 year old males with a high level of education, a well paid job, and plenty of disposable income.

These were people who loved their gadgets, fondly remembered playing games in arcades, and were willing to part with cash for games like Zap!2000.

That's how it was back in 2000 and 2001, but Things Changed...

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It's been snowing here at Astraware, but thanks once again to my keen eye for the weather, we were well prepared for the wintery onslaught. Having known about the oncoming snow for weeks, staff were advised of the best possible course of action, in order to ensure their safety.

Having ignored this advice, we were forced to mount a last gasp defence against the cold. With steely determination, the entire staff armed themselves with coats and hats, and headed out into the blizzard.

This makeshift army downed their usual tools in favour of a snowball battle royal, the aftermath of which can be seen on the left. The fighting was fierce, but as you can see, fairly good natured.