I’m a fan of Spb software and am so grateful for some applications that completely revolutionised the way I access and use my device (Spb Mobile Shell) but… I can’t help thinking that games aren’t really Spb’s strength.

Spb Time, an outdated but still immensely popular app is gathering dust. Spb Wallet is only just out of beta and could really use some help to be able to compete in its market. Spb Finance hasn’t had an update in almost a year (isn’t that abandonment in the IT world?). The Spb forums are loaded with great feature requests for Spb Mobile Shell. With all of those “high priority” concerns in place, Spb turn their attention to making games?

Am I the only one thinking “Foleo”? Seriously folks, concentrate on your strengths, dominate your key markets and answer your customers’ needs before expanding the product offering in the “fringe” areas. Mobile gaming is a big (in dollars) market but not on the PPC platform and Spb aren’t a leader in the area (regardless of what their “about us” page might claim).

Another boring, useless rant…

Melvynadam, how about you just don’t buy the games if you don’t feel like… or, at least keeping your comments relevant to the software being announced. Have you even tried to install and play these games?

I’m sure Spb REALLY cares that you think they should stick to PPC, should not release games, should satisfy all feature requests etc.

Wow – that was an unnecessarily harsh response.

I posted an opinion. My comments were completely relevant to the announcement and related to the company rather than the software.

Whether Spb cares is immaterial. However, I think I could easily make the case that they ought to care about the opinion of a customer who has bought Spb Diary, Spb Backup, Spb Mobile Shell, and Spb Phone Suite. Incidentally, I’m also in two of their beta testing programs.

I don’t appreciate your tone and nor do I like it when words are put in my mouth. I didn’t say they should “stick to PPC” (they have offerings for Smartphone which have been well received). Neither did I say that they should “satisfy all feature requests”. I said they should “answer customers’ needs”. A “need” (like WM6 support for some apps) and a “request” are very different.

The point is, mouthing off about Time, Finance etc is completely irrelevant to the release of the 6 games this topic is about.

And I’m sure there are more appropriate places to give your advice on how Spb should spend their development time or what to prioritize.

Fact is you said nothing of relevance regarding the games (did you even install them?), I just don’t see what your rant has anything to do with these 6 games.

Melvynadam – I agree that a lot of their apps could use a refresh, and that they should definitely think about the focus… BUT…

The way I understand Spb to work is that they each focus on their own individual apps. For example Fedor may only work on Spb Wallet and not touch any other app, or maybe just a core set of apps and the other developers again only focus on their stuff. So the folks working on the apps that need refresh may not even be involved in these new releases.

Also (in my admittedly VERY slim concept of programming) optimizing a pre-built program to run on smartphone isn’t a huge undertaking. It’s an undertaking to be sure, but not anywhere near the extend of writing from scratch. I’d be willing to bet a clean set of underwear that they didn’t re-write these from scratch but grabbed the source, tweaked it a bit and ran it back through VB.NET.

I’d guess total time a couple days to get things tweaked and a few more testing in house. Very little work for adding a lot of extra income.

Again this is all IMHO …

Yeah, Brandon is right, my understanding of Spb is that they have sub groups or teams. So, the fact that the games group is optimizing their games for Smartphone has no bearing on whether Finance will get updated (and yes, it is due for a major overhaul.).

That being said, these games were initially developed for SPB Brain Evolution, which is an incredibly popular game. They just broke them up into individual offerings and released them because so many users requested it.

Porting them to Smartphone from there, as Brandon said, should not be a huge undertaking. Plus, there is a relatively large demand for Spb to offer more Smartphone programs.

OK, kids. Let’s all play nice.

Doug

Brandon and Doug,
Thanks for the clarification. From the forums and beta groups I’ve been involved with various developers of the Spb apps and what you say is mostly right. I remember a recent post when one of the staff said something about “now that such-and-such is released I’ll have time to come back to this project” but on the whole you’re right that each individual is works in one team only.
You both helped me with two things that weren’t obvious to me from the original announcement: that these games were ports, and that they are from an existing application. With that knowledge, it’s obviously negligible development time and my entire point is moot.
Move on. Nothing more to see.