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This is the difficulty for the company I work for. We make a range of desktop applications including launchers, productivity apps, media apps, games, etc. Beca

This is the difficulty for the company I work for. We make a range of desktop applications including launchers, productivity apps, media apps, games, etc. Because all of these apps are based on a game engine, we get the complex and hard to test bugs that games get (texture cache corruption, null pointers in the scene tree, etc.). There's much more serialization and pressure than with pure games (but still not as much as with enterprise applications) because we're dealing with transactions with 3rd party services, or because a screw up could corrupt a user's whole music collection, or because users don't expect their music player to crash every 4 hours. The game engine adds a huge amount of extra variability to our applications; we have to not only watch out for obscure bugs in our custom script code (which the engine silently tries/fails to execute anyway), but also in the (C/C++ based) game engine it is driving. The upside to using an engine with a simple scripting language is the shorter development times to get things off the ground and the high-performance/shiny visuals, but I feel it costs us much more down the line in terms of stability and extensibility.

palish 15y ago
Wait, wait... "texture cache corruption", and "null pointers in the scene tree"? Edit: It's both scary and awesome that you rigged a game engine to manage a music library a-la iTunes. Are you profitable?
- genbattle 15y ago
  I'm not sure I would be allowed/qualified to say much about our financials. From what I can gather we are profitable, with ongoing contracts for clients such as Dell. http://www.unlimitedrealities.com/blog/video-the-dell-stage-touch-ui-and-music-stage-apps/ http://www.unlimitedrealities.com/blog/video-the-dell-stage-... Those issues I mentioned are examples of things that we have actually run into. edit: Our specialization in touchscreen development is really what drives the company, but hardware accelerated graphics are also a huge draw.
  - spoondan 15y ago
    At the risk of going too far off topic and without intending to be too harsh: at least in the video, that interface looks nice, but there is too much lag between when a tap/gesture is made and when the interface reflects it. This breaks the direct manipulation metaphor and is, I think, a showstopper. The pinch to zoom example was particularly off-putting: how can I know how much I'm zooming when the interface doesn't track my gesture? I cannot imagine being happy with pinching, waiting a second to see what's happened, then pinching and waiting to adjust (repeat until I get it right or am too frustrated).
    - genbattle 15y ago
      I don't think there's too much danger in going off-topic if the conversation is interesting and has some substance. Yea I think lag in touchscreen interaction is a huge problem. I think this is largely a result of hardware. We've had to ship on atom-based hardware with 2003-era DX9 graphics. Even the latest Intel chips with DX10 are horridly slow when it comes to graphics. The other side is actual touchscreen hardware. The machine used in the video is an HP Touchsmart, which uses an optical touchscreen panel. These panels have a latency of around 100-200ms, and that's before we even start processing the touch event information. Capacitive touch sensors are much better, but the're expensive to manufacture above about 10 inches. In the end lag/accuracy is a reality of the low-cost hardware OEMs use, and there will always be some trade-off between hardware cost and performance.
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palish 15y ago

Wait, wait... "texture cache corruption", and "null pointers in the scene tree"? Edit: It's both scary and awesome that you rigged a game engine to manage a music library a-la iTunes. Are you profitable?

genbattle 15y ago
I'm not sure I would be allowed/qualified to say much about our financials. From what I can gather we are profitable, with ongoing contracts for clients such as Dell. http://www.unlimitedrealities.com/blog/video-the-dell-stage-touch-ui-and-music-stage-apps/ http://www.unlimitedrealities.com/blog/video-the-dell-stage-... Those issues I mentioned are examples of things that we have actually run into. edit: Our specialization in touchscreen development is really what drives the company, but hardware accelerated graphics are also a huge draw.
- spoondan 15y ago
  At the risk of going too far off topic and without intending to be too harsh: at least in the video, that interface looks nice, but there is too much lag between when a tap/gesture is made and when the interface reflects it. This breaks the direct manipulation metaphor and is, I think, a showstopper. The pinch to zoom example was particularly off-putting: how can I know how much I'm zooming when the interface doesn't track my gesture? I cannot imagine being happy with pinching, waiting a second to see what's happened, then pinching and waiting to adjust (repeat until I get it right or am too frustrated).
  - genbattle 15y ago
    I don't think there's too much danger in going off-topic if the conversation is interesting and has some substance. Yea I think lag in touchscreen interaction is a huge problem. I think this is largely a result of hardware. We've had to ship on atom-based hardware with 2003-era DX9 graphics. Even the latest Intel chips with DX10 are horridly slow when it comes to graphics. The other side is actual touchscreen hardware. The machine used in the video is an HP Touchsmart, which uses an optical touchscreen panel. These panels have a latency of around 100-200ms, and that's before we even start processing the touch event information. Capacitive touch sensors are much better, but the're expensive to manufacture above about 10 inches. In the end lag/accuracy is a reality of the low-cost hardware OEMs use, and there will always be some trade-off between hardware cost and performance.

deleted 15y ago

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