I own it and played it. It's good, very pretty, but highly repetitive. It's one 40km track, two trains, and most of the scenery is the same. It is one step above a Unreal Engine tech demo (e.g. the matrix demo from a few years back).
For one person it's impressive, but it won't knock the major players down any time soon.
I've actually embraced the asynchronous element of AI programming in my personal projects.
Playing Star Citizen? There's pockets of 5 minutes all over the place traveling from A to B. I keep my laptop nearby and have a prepared todo list of items to work through. Those moments wasted on Reddit are now moments wasted on feature experiments!
Waiting for a cup of tea? Run an experiment. Waiting on wife? Run an experiment.
Piece by piece an app is coming together built from 5 minute increments of reclaimed time.
You'd be shocked at how easy Supabase makes these things. You can describe your data needs and it'll use AI to generate the table and RLS policies. You can even go a step further and have Replit do both front and backend. I had chats with multiple PMs who have entire functioning products without understanding a lick of code. Powerful, and although scary from a security perspective, not so scary if it's a personal app.
Getting strong original iMac vibes as well, with a similar market opportunity. The chromebook / education space is awful, and a well built (and stylish) competitor can do serious business.
> It's unclear why January's security update for Windows 11 has been so disastrous. Whatever the reason, Microsoft needs to step back and reevaluate how it developers Windows, as the current quality bar might be at the lowest it's ever been.
After owning a product, I've developed a lot of sympathy for the people outside of engineering who have to put up with us. Engineers love to push back on estimates, believing that "when it's done" is somehow acceptable for the rest of the business to function. In a functioning org, there are lot of professionals depending on correct estimation to do their job.
For us, an accurate delivery date on a 6 month project was mandatory. CX needed it so they could start onboarding high priority customers. Marketing needed it so they could plan advertising collateral and make promises at conventions. Product needed it to understand what the Q3 roadmap should contain. Sales needed it to close deals. I was fortunate to work in a business where I respected the heads of these departments, which believe it or not, should be the norm.
The challenge wasn't estimation - it's quite doable to break a large project down into a series of sprints (basically a sprint / waterfall hybrid). Delays usually came from unexpected sources, like reacting to a must have interruption or critical bugs. Those you cannot estimate for, but you can collaborate on a solution. Trim features, push date, bring in extra help, or crunch. Whatever the decision, making sure to work with the other departments as colaborators was always beneficial.
At $500 for a large screen and CPU/GPU, my first concern would be power. This is a small company, so it's not realistic to expect iPad performance. I'm curious what the underlying hardware is, and if it's an existing mediaboard.
Mediaboard hardware is notoriously underpowered, especially with 3D. The touch response times are also questionable, usually designed for tap instead of swipe.
There's plenty of games where either the setup is tedious, or some of the rules create confusion. Game of the year "Wingspan" confused everyone in my group the first time we played, and only made sense after watching a YouTube explanation. A confident system would have been great.
Setting up a game can be tedious as well; Axis and Allies is notorious for taking longer to set up than to play, but it's a lot of fun once you get going.
This is a really long article to say "Content dispersion is bad".
Yeah, obviously. More so if you use a generic image like Waze. It's not a usability problem, it's a quality problem. Apple does just fine with full width desktop heroes because they include relevant images.
The single greatest benefit to my career as a developer has been learning to draw.
I draw on whiteboards, in moleskins, on printer paper, on the back of resumes... anywhere and everywhere. I do this because I need to convey complex ideas to important teams who are NOT programmers: Product, Marketing, People Ops, and the C-suite.
Helping people understand my ideas through illustration creates buy-in from them and trust in me. You can be a great programmer, but if people don't know and don't trust in what you're doing you'll never be given the space to execute.
For one person it's impressive, but it won't knock the major players down any time soon.