Author Archives: aaron

What Do You Do?

From time to time, we’re all asked that standard question: “What do you do?” And as I start to explain what Square Lines does, it often gets summarized thusly – “Oh, you do tech design and development and stuff.”

Well, yes and no.

Yes, we do those things. In fact, we bill ourselves as “Design & Development,” specifically so that people get a quick sense about what part of the world we occupy. But that’s not really the best description of the scope of what we do.

We are, in the truest sense, solution providers. Over the last decade or two, that phrase has become so pervasive as to be meaningless in the tech world (which is why we don’t really plaster it all over our website). But for us, it really is the case.

So what’s the difference? Well, if all you want is a quickie web design, you can get that for free. Just find one of the tons of templates out there and call it good. Of course, your site will be from a cookie cutter, may not work the way you want, and certainly won’t represent your brand as well as it should, but hey — it’s free. You get what you pay for.

What we do starts with listening and thinking – two skills that the cookie-cutter chop shops don’t have. What is the problem that you’re trying to solve? Who are the audiences? What do you want them to do and to feel? How will this work be changing over time?

By getting a sense of the big picture, we can look at a whole array of options — some might even call them solutions! — whether it’s web design, app building, or something entirely different. The goal is to meet the client’s needs and solve the problem, not just to churn out another bland product that looks and works vaguely like everything else out there.

So what do we do? Design and development, yes. But really? We provide solutions.

Retro Tech: Early Software Creator Culture

Today, I write in appreciation of Bill Budge. Budge got his start writing games for the (then-new) Apple ][. But almost right away, that wasn't enough for him. And that's where things got interesting.

After some initial forays into writing games, he got more interested in one of the key underlying parts of the games themselves -- namely, the graphics routines. The Apple ][ was a pretty revolutionary computer of its time, after all, but the limitations of its graphics processing were huge. So how could you get around them and make things that looked good – and, important for games, rendered quickly?

After working on that for a while, Budge developed another game, and this one (unlike his earlier products) would be a classic: Raster Blaster. This was not just a pinball game – it was a pinball simulation. Budge had found a way to take the amazing work he had done on getting fast, high-resolution graphics out of the Apple ][ and give it the best proof-of-concept ever.

It was no wonder that Raster Blaster became among the best-selling games of 1981. But Budge didn’t even stop there. And even though I loved Raster Blaster when it came out, and played it a LOT, it’s this next step that put him in the innovator’s pantheon.

The next year, he released a Pinball Construction Set. For the masses of Apple ][ users who didn’t know how to program (or couldn’t program advanced high-res games, at least), it was a revelation.

You fired up this program, and you could make your own game! You just dragged and dropped (a new construct at the time) components onto a pinball board, adjust physics parameters if you wanted, and go. You could tweak all kinds of things along the way, and when you got a game put together that you liked, you could save it independently to a disk and share it with friends.

Pinball Construction Set was the first (as far as I can tell) “builder” kind of game/app. All of the Sim games and other simulations that came later — they have Bill Budge to thank. (In fact, Will Wright, creator of many of those great simulations, has cited Pinball Construction Set as an inspiration!)

So it seems only right on this Retro Friday to offer our thanks to Mr. Budge as well. Not only for helping us misspend much time in our youth, but for sparking a bit of the creator culture and vibe that has become a cornerstone of development today. It all started with some bumpers and flippers.

Speeds ‘n Feeds

In technology, we’ve always gotten excited about so-called “speeds ‘n feeds.” The stats, the specs, the numbers that indicate performance. There’s a whole benchmarking industry for computers, for instance, that allow you to run the same test suite on your computer and check it against other models. In theory, that will give you an objective sense about how much faster/better one is than the other.

Except that when things are generally fast enough, or sharp enough, or have enough capacity, the speeds ‘n feeds don’t matter so much anymore. For the majority of the population that uses their computer to access the web and do office productivity stuff, the difference between a 2.7GhZ and a 3.0GhZ processor isn’t going to matter. Neither is 6GB of RAM vs. 8GB.

(A quick side trip – part of my mind still reels when typing those numbers; I remember when it was $100+ per MB of hard disk storage, and if you had 64K of RAM, you were rockin’ the best machine around. 8GB of RAM? 4TB of HD space? Amazing.)

So when the numbers stop mattering so much, what’s left? Experience and, to a lesser degree, features.

I was thinking about this yesterday, when the new iPhones were announced. As has been pointed out elsewhere, the new iPhone 5C is essentially a buffed-up plastic version of the iPhone 5. The iPhone 5S is a faster version (and 64-bit, which is actually a pretty big deal), with enhancements made to the camera and a new fingerprint sensor.

Now I’m an iPhone user, and we develop apps for the iPhone and other devices all the time. But I found myself stifling a bit of a yawn at times. Other than the 32-to-64-bit move, the hardware was an incremental step forward, but other than for fanboys and those at the end of their contract who need a new phone, it’s not going to move the needle much.

No, the ‘killer app’ of the presentation was the first part, where a slideshow-based demo of iOS 7 was done. Now this just might sell more phones. Parallax views, new sharing technologies, redesigned interface, easier access to more frequently-used things, intuitive use of calendar and mapping — this spells the foundation of a new experience altogether.

I think, at least in the phone world, we’ve entered the zone that PCs entered about a decade ago: speeds ‘n feeds aren’t so important anymore. How will the new thing (phone/PC/whatever) make me feel differently? Work differently? Live differently?

Should make for an interesting run for device makers everywhere.

The Power of Breaking Down Barriers

We all work in silos to one degree or another. Even with the integration of technology, very few of us are working with different people every day, solving problems with new coworkers each time. In fact, technology — while it helps to break down some of those barriers of time and space — also plays a key role in erecting new ones.

Think about a little thing like formats, for example. One canonical instance was the old videotape format of Beta vs VHS, where people who standardized on one type couldn’t meaningfully exchange video information with people standardized on the other. It still happens today with software and file formats, although the differences are lessening.

Or think about corporate competitors – if you’re standardized on Oracle financials, for example, it’s in Oracle’s best interest to make it difficult for you to migrate to a different manufacturer. One easy way to throw up roadblocks on that process is to establish proprietary formats that are difficult to match. (This happens in the CMS world all the time — Concrete5 is a perfectly-adequate CMS, but exporting all of its contents to migrate to someplace else is a royal pain!)

So it’s notable to me whenever an industry agrees on enough of a standard to be able to exchange meaningful data back and forth. And one industry that has done it — multiple times! — is the eLearning field.

Now they have been pushed along by large customers like the US military, but they still keep advancing the standards. Recently, a new API and standard called, alternatively, the Experience API or the Tin Can API, took the standards to a whole new level. Now, under this model, any bit of software can keep track of whether a user is learning or practicing a skill.

The implications are pretty big, if this gets ubiquitous. Right now, tracking your ability to learn a new Word skill, for instance, is limited to training programs that cover Word. What if Microsoft Word itself could track your progress? You’re doing an online course about how to mail merge, for example, and then you switch over to Word to practice — and the program feeds that information back to the online course, where you can get customized tips. Suddenly, everything can be about learning and professional development.

Pretty neat stuff – and it only happens when the barriers start breaking down. There are examples from other fields, too (especially through the power of XML), but those are for another day. If you’re so inclined, you should check out the Tin Can API. It’s got real potential!