How often do you get to 404 pages? Usually, they are not styled and stay default. Recently I’ve found test.do.am which interactive character attracts attention and livens up the error page.

Probably, there was just a cat picture, then they thought up eyes movement and developer implemented the idea.Now user visits the page and checks out the effect. It’s cool and pleasant small feature, it catches, then user discusses it with colleagues or friends and even repeats the feature. It could be this easy, if not:

If not to take into account releases for Android and a dozen of abandoned projects just before they were ready, then yes, it is our first game appropriate for more than one platform. How did it all start? Very simply. We worked on another project, let’s call it “project A”, and we’d been working on it for a long time when we decided to make a game during a couple of months and use it to train our marketing skills, and then immediately release our “project A” when we would be more experienced in the promotion of games. But the plan failed and “project A” was kept untouched for the whole year. But this story isn’t about “project A”, it’s about a logical game called «Cubicity: Slide puzzle».

RUVDS together with Habr.com continues the series of interviews with interesting people in computer field. Previously we met Boris Yangel, who heads AI development of Yandex’s Alice voice assistant.

Today we bring you an interview with Richard (Levelord) Gray — level designer of such legendary games as Duke Nukem, American McGee Alice, Heavy Metal F.A.K.K.2, SiN, and Serious Sam. And he is the one who coined the famous phrase «You are not supposed to be here». Richard was born and spent most of his life in USA, but several years ago he moved to Moscow to his russian wife and daughter.

These who speak to Richard are Nick Zemlyanskiy, editor of Habr.com, and Nikita Tsaplin, co-founder and managing partner of RUVDS company.


→ Text and video in Russian

If you ever created a game, you probably ran into the same problem as a lot of game developers before you: nobody knows about your game. In the article, I will tell you how to promote an incremental** game for free, fast and somehow effective.

TL;DR

Using a custom build script in Node JS, it is possible to manipulate a series of Sketch files, and then, using an internal Sketch tool, automatically export their assets, to generate multiple icon libraries, for multiple platforms and different brands, that support dynamic colourisation of the assets via design tokens, and also AB testing of the assets via naming convention. Easy peasy :)

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Well, actually it’s not that easy, but it can certainly be done. This post is a detailed explanation of how we did it, and what we discovered along the way.

The problem we were trying to solve

At Badoo we build a dating app. Actually, multiple dating apps. For multiple platforms (iOS, Android, Mobile Web, Desktop Web), across multiple teams.

We use hundreds of icons in our apps. Some of them are the same across different apps, some are very specific to the brands the apps reflect. The icons are continuously evolving, in sync with the evolution of the design. Sometimes completely new icons are added, while others get updated, and still others get dropped (although, they often remain in the codebase).

You’ve probably heard about Yandex’s DeepHD technology they once used to improve the quality of old Soviet cartoons. Unfortunately, it’s not public yet, and we, regular programmers, don’t have the dedication to write our own solution. But I personally really wanted to watch Rick and Morty on my 2880x1880 Retina display. And I was deeply disappointed, as even 1080p video (the highest available for this series) looks really blurry on a Retina display! Don’t get me wrong, 1080p is often good enough, but Retina is designed in such a way that an animation with its pronounced outlines in 1080p looks awfully blurry, like 480p on a FullHD monitor.

I decided I want to see Rick and Morty in 4K, even though I can’t write neural networks. And, amazingly, I found a solution. You don’t even need to write any code: all you need is around 100GB of free space and a bit of patience. The result is a sharp 4K image that looks better than any interpolation.

The mobile app developers are exceptionally intrigued by conveying 100% fulfillment outcome for the entrepreneurs. By having top 10 mobile app development companies, it is crucial for working with an effective outcome and does the worldwide system. In this way, get assistance from the professional mobile app developers and grow the business in like manner.

Why do so many programmers hate UI work? Because it is tedious. Especially, for the Web, but other types of UI are only slightly easier. Layouts, margins, paddings — neverending stream of little tweaks to make it look OK on all sane environments, and somehow this freaking button sometimes overlaps that input field. Rrrr! And yes, it should not hang on button clicks, which means a lot of asynchronous programming, which is a nightmare.

And don’t even speak about aesthetics and usability! Choose right colours, element sizes and locations, find/draw images and put them where they fit, think about user workflows — isn’t it a designers’ or Ux specialists’ job?! Leave me alone, I’m a programmer. I work with backend layers, where everything is straightforward and linear, there are no buttloads of different environments to adjust to, and design is guided by mere logic without pesky fussing with ‘user friendliness’ and ’beauty’!

The 7.0 release marked a new milestone in the history of the PVS-Studio analyzer — the analysis is now available not only for the code, written in C, C++, C#, but also in Java. In addition to this global improvement, some existing mechanisms for the analysis are refined and improved, diagnostic rules are added. There was another significant change that you could hardly missed. We changed the icon.

Note. In the article, you will not find cunning tricks or tips on designing icons. The purpose of the article is a bit different this time — it is to tell a story, and, if possible, make it interesting.

A few months ago I came across a very interesting documentary series on Netflix called Abstract, they basically explore the output of professional designers from different sectors like architecture, graphic design, fashion, … in their workplaces.

It was easy to spot some similarities in the work of designers from other fields with that of an iOS developer who implements user interfaces. For example, when a designer is creating something that is big enough to be broken down into smaller parts, using a strategy like ‘Divide and Conquer’ is key to being able to focus on smaller parts that will be assembled at later stages in the process.

Breaking down a whole design into smaller subunits allows us to think about each problem in isolation, removing any dependencies between the components. But the full picture also needs to be present throughout the whole process, otherwise there can be problems when the time comes to fit everything back together.

On the other hand, while watching Abstract I noticed that in the design process for objects like a shoes, banners or buildings the final design remains fixed for the lifetime of the product. The design of a Nike shoe isn’t going to change after it is released and there aren’t going to be any updates once it’s on the shelf in the shop. Sometimes a design remains unchanged even 20 years later, and the product is still sound.

Hi everyone! About six months ago we launched one of Badoo’s most exciting features: Live Streaming. One of its main functionalities is that viewers can send gifts to their favourite streamers to express their appreciation. We wanted to make the gifts as fancy and as engaging as possible, so it was decided to make some of them really lively, and by this I mean animated. And to engage people even more, we, the Badoo team, planned to update those gifts and animations every few weeks.

As an iOS engineer, you might have already guessed the challenge we faced here: the need to add new animations and remove the old ones was going to require a fair amount of work from the client side. We’d need both the Android and the iOS development teams for every release — which, when combined with the amount of time App Store reviews and approval often take, would mean it might be days before each update could go live. But we solved the problem, and I’m going to explain to you how.

Solution overview

By this stage, we already knew how to export Adobe After Effects (AAE) animations into the format readable by our iOS app using the Lottie library. This time though, we went a bit further: we decided to create a kind of animation storage service, available via the internet. In other words, we would store all the actual animations on the server and deliver them to the client apps on demand:

Today I’d like to speak about Smart homes and IoT devices. But it is no ordinary article. You won’t find description of hardware, links to manufacturers, batches of code or repositories. Today we’ll discuss something of a higher level — principles that are used to organize “smart” systems.

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Smart home is a system that can do some everyday routines instead of a person. It leads us to the first and the main principle:

I am a system administrator, and I need a small, lightweight notebook for every day carrying. Of course, not just to carry it, but for use it to work.

I already have a ThinkPad x200, but it’s heavier than I would like. And among the lightweight notebooks, I did not find anything suitable. All of them imitate the MacBook Air: thin, shiny, glamorous, and they all critically lack ports. Such notebook is suitable for posting photos on Instagram, but not for work. At least not for mine.

After not finding anything suitable, I thought about how a notebook would turn out if it were developed not with design, but the needs of real users in mind. System administrators, for example. Or people serving telecommunications equipment in hard-to-reach places — on roofs, masts, in the woods, literally in the middle of nowhere.

The results of my thoughts are presented in this article.

In the end of January Global Game Jam 2019 will be hosted. 26 and 27 of January will be hottest days of the month! GGJ is annual event about creating games (for those who don't know what Game Jame is). This is onsite event lasting 48h.

A few years ago I had a feeling that Oleg Chumakov (then working at the game studio Nival) was the most famous programmer in the game development industry. He was giving speeches, hosted Gamesjams and frequently showed up on the podcast How games are made.

When VR hit the market, Oleg was chosen to lead the company’s new department — NivalVR. But, as you probably know, VR didn’t quite take off as much as people expected.

I kind of moved to other to other things in life and stopped keeping up with game development for a while, but after getting into it again I noticed that things were looking up for Oleg’s team. Now it’s called Luden.io, and their machine learning expert simulator, while True: learn() became a huge hit in its admittedly small niche. Lots of cool stories are happening around the game and the team.

We decided to do an interview with Oleg, but I couldn’t stick to one topic — his life up to this moment has been, for the lack of a better word, “interesting”. He’s seen it all. And, to ensure that a programmer could talk about programming without fear of looking too “nerdy”, the interview was conducted by my friend, colleague and an experienced developer of its own fillpackart.