Geek Gestalt

Editor's note: This is part of a series of stories about the recession's effect on the tech industry.

Not long ago, during an evening of hanging out with friends, five of us sat in my living room, staring at and holding tight to our iPhones or iPod Touches.

This wasn't the anti-social behavior you might think, though. Actually, we were having a great time, banging our fingers furiously on the touch screens of the five devices, trying to kill each other (and not be killed ourselves) in the utterly addictive multiplayer shooting game Maze Wars Revisited.

'Maze Wars Revisited,' by Dennis Hescox, is a new iPhone game. Hescox is hoping that the game--and other apps he hopes to create--will allow him to make a living without needing a full-time job.

(Credit: Dennis Hescox)

The game, which tasks multiple players on a single Wi-Fi network with hunting each other down in a dense maze, was newly available that week on Apple's App Store for the iPhone and iPod Touch. It is the brainchild of Dennis Hescox, one of the friends in the room, and this was the first time more than three people had used it at once. And much to Hescox's satisfaction, those of us who had never played before, after some initial skepticism, were now feverishly navigating the game's winding alleys, hunting our prey, shouting out suggestions for the next version, and screaming out obscenities when someone ambushed us for the kill.

For Hescox, this scene could well turn out to be the genesis of something big. Or, it could be a cautionary tale in undelivered potential and promise.

With the economic skies getting darker by the day, and the prospects for jobs in the games industry worsening with each new set of layoffs, Hescox finds himself in a place that is at once immensely exciting and fraught with danger. It's also very familiar.

Like many in technology, he's suffered through the professional consequences of a recession before. Unlike many, he's been through it twice.

Hescox isn't twentysomething or thirtysomething like many game designers. At 54, game design is, and has long been, in his DNA. After graduating from UCLA in 1981, his first jobs were some of the earliest the then-young industry had to offer.

After a stint at Mattel, he took a programming gig at Sega USA, where he worked on coin-op games like Shooting Gallery 2 and Duck Hunt 2.

"Unfortunately, the...machines I worked on never saw the light of day," Hescox remembers, "This was the Reagan recession (of the early 1980s and) Sega withdrew from the U.S."

Dennis Hescox created 'Maze Wars Revisited.' A veteran of companies like Sega USA and Apple, and institutions like the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Hescox is facing a tough time selling his iPhone game. This is the third major recession he's had to navigate as a professional.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

Laid off, he returned home to Los Angeles, and began teaching Macintosh programming. Many of his students worked at Jet Propulsion Laboratory and after inquiring about teaching some classes there, he instead was invited to be JPL's Mac consultant.

That was the joke, Hescox said. "I moved (from Sega) to JPL, the ultimate video game."

In 1988, leveraging his Mac experience, Hescox got a job at Apple, in developer technical support. And after five years there, his stock was worth enough to leave for more personal pursuits. He bought a new Subaru with cash, and spent years mainly traveling, investigating America's back roads, its hot springs, and many of the things most never have time to see.

As happens without steady employment, however, his resources dwindled, and right around the end of the dot-com boom, Hescox began hunting for work.

He landed at an Internet company in San Francisco, but with awful timing: that downturn was kicking in and he was once again laid off.

Unable to find anything else and needing money to live, he settled at a ranch near Sacramento, Calif., working as an in-residence engineer/carpenter/handyman, hunkering down for several years, while still looking for a way back into technology.

He applied for job after job, but the responses were uniform: His skills were outdated. He was overqualified. He didn't know enough about Web technology, and so on.

Enter the iPhone
Then along came the iPhone. For Hescox, the veteran game designer and Apple alumnus, this seemed like a solution sent from above: he saw a way, finally, to use the skills he'd built over the years to make money, ideally without needing to get an actual job.

In 'Maze Wars Revisited,' a group of players on a single Wi-Fi network prowl a maze, trying to find and shoot each other. The game is addictive, but faces challenges on Apple's App Store.

(Credit: Dennis Hescox)

"It was really exciting to see this much power in a phone," he said. "Looking at the development tools was just a dream. So I spent the first six months of this year educating myself on the current technologies."

He pondered a number of different ideas, and settled finally on Maze Wars Revisited, an homage to a famous public domain game, Maze War.

But once again, the economic tides were turning. Even as he got going on programming Maze Wars Revisited, thinking that at last, he might have found his way to financial stability, the financial world around him was collapsing.

"As I started the project, it wasn't clear that we were going to be in a recession," Hescox said. "I'm a programmer, not an economist."

Since it came out, Hescox has struggled to find traction with Maze Wars Revisited. He launched the game at a price of $2.99, thinking that it was better than some of the games available for 99 cents or $1.99.

His goal was to find critical mass at universities or large companies, where large numbers of people might buy the game and play together. Evidence of the fun groups could have playing Maze Wars Revisited was right there in my living room.

Those were good ideas, we told him that night, but we urged him to drop the price to 99 cents, and fast. There were countless iPhone games that cost that much, or were free, and given the fact that the game only works when there's a group of players on one Wi-Fi network, $2.99 seemed too costly to attract individual buyers in advance of buzz about the game.

One measure of an application's sales is the number of reviews it has on the App Store. The more reviews, the more sales. For Maze Wars Revisited, there are just three, one of which I wrote that night at my house, full of enthusiasm. But another, clearly written by someone who tried to play by him or herself, gets right to the core of Hescox's challenge: "This game is not fun at all," Dandy3333 wrote.

Last Friday, however, Hescox dropped the price to 99 cents, and he says he will most likely put out a free version that will allow people to play for 5 or 10 minutes, hopefully to get them hooked, and get people playing it together.

I asked how important the game is to his path back to solvency.

"It's very important," Hescox said, adding, "but it has not generated the kind of income I had hoped right away."

A one in 10,000 chance?
Certainly, he hasn't put all his eggs in this one basket, and he's already beginning work on his next iPhone app project.

But the truth is that it's very hard to get noticed in the app ecosystem, what with more than 10,000 currently available, and the odds of success for apps that don't get featured by Apple are long.

Click for complete special report

So Hescox is aware that even if Maze Wars Revisited doesn't sell well, he can still point to it as a portfolio piece.

Having been around the tech world for more than a few years, he recognizes that while the early days of the iPhone app era may reward individuals and small teams, that might not remain the case.

"Whenever there's a new computer platform, there's lots of little" development, he said. "Then you start seeing the big innovation. (That) requires bigger teams and investments, and the recession could have a big effect on that."

And that's why for Hescox, the pressure is on to make a go of it right now. Because if the backup plan is to end up getting hired by someone putting together a team of highly-skilled developers, the economy may well not cooperate.

In truth, Hescox, having been through this twice before, is probably better suited to weathering an economic storm than most. At the same time, though, at 54, it's getting harder and harder for him to start over.

So for now, he's hoping for many more scenes like the one in my living room. But if not?

"I'm continuing to move forward with the next project and the next project after that," Hescox said. "Plan B is a continuation of Plan A."

Next in the series: A successful Web 2.0 entrepreneur counts his lucky stars

At DemoFall, Mapflow demonstrated its iPhone application, designed to automate carpooling. The product was just one of many shown built around the iPhone at the event.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

SAN DIEGO--At Demo and DemoFall, there are always easily identifiable trends among the dozens of companies chosen to present their products.

In previous iterations of the events that I've attended, those trends have been photo-sharing services, online video hosting, Web 2.0, and the like.

This week, the trend--at least as I've seen it--has been the number of companies here with iPhone applications. Not every one of them is talking prominently about the applications they have, but Demo lead organizer Chris Shipley told me informally that she thinks that there must be at least a couple dozen companies with iPhone applications here out of the 72 total presenters.

I'll be the first to admit that I was slow to understand the value of iPhone apps, and I suppose that's because it took me awhile to buy one of the devices, and even longer after I did before I started trolling the Apple App Store looking for the best and brightest of what was out there.

My major introduction to the applications was a day I spent last month in Seattle, basically letting a series of them control my life for a day. And more recently, I have found myself blown away by some of the most simple applications imaginable. For example, Showtimes determines where you are and then comes up with a list of movie theaters--sorted by proximity to you--and shows the films showing at each and the times for each film.

As I said, it's totally simple, and pure genius.

Ultimately, while other mobile phones have many of the features of the iPhone, I don't think that there will be any others in the near future that combine GPS, a great interface, the power of an operating system like OS X, and a network of developers eager to reach out to an audience of users as devoted to their devices as iPhone owners.

Back here at DemoFall, there is definitely no shortage of companies that have developed applications for the device, and some of them seem very promising to me, even though most have yet to appear in the App Store.

I have my own ideas, as I stated above, why I think iPhone apps are the future of software, but I thought these developers would have opinions even more valuable than mine, since they're building businesses around the platform.

WebDiet built an iPhone application designed to help people find restaurants that serve the kind of healthy food they want to eat.

(Credit: WebDiet)

Among the companies incorporating the iPhone into their Demo products are WebDiet, Telnic, SkyData, The Echo Nest, and Rudder.

"Right now, (the iPhone is) the platform with the most immediacy," said Richard Bryce, CEO of Mapflow, a company here with a product centered around an iPhone app. "Especially for the consumer market."

It's easy to see why Bryce would think so.

Mapflow is a very interesting product designed around the idea of helping drivers offset the high costs of gas by finding people who need rides to pay to fill empty seats in their cars.

"Most of our lives are ad hoc," Bryce said. "We're trying to apply the iPhone's smart technology to give that ad hoc, on-demand capability to carpooling."

The Mapflow system works by letting drivers define routes--either one-time, or repeat--they're following and the number of seats they have available to fill. The iPhone makes it simple to do this through lists that can be easily displayed and because the phone's GPS chip quickly determines where the driver is in proximity to anyone looking for a ride.

It might sound weird to pick up strangers in this manner, but Mapflow requires that all users register with their name, a photo, and a credit card, and that means that drivers can feel confident that whomever they pick up is probably going to be safe. And when they arrive to pick up the rider, the iPhone displays the rider's picture so the driver can be sure the person is who he or she is supposed to be.

In addition, drivers and riders alike can choose preferences for the type of person with whom they want to travel. This means, for example, that women can choose to ride only with other women.

Further, the service has a quick and easy rating system--again, enabled by the iPhone's elegant interface--that allows everyone to weigh in on the people with whom they've traveled.

Riders pay about 30 cents a mile to use the system, and Mapflow makes its money from a 15 percent commission on the transactions. Drivers pocket the rest.

Clearly, there are many questions the company must answer before the product becomes profitable--and of course, it must first release the application, which it plans to do in about four weeks. But this seems to me to be a very good use of the device, especially given the growing emphasis on getting people to stop driving one to a car.

A week ago, I wrote a story about a morning and afternoon I spent in Seattle letting iPhone applications control my day.

A screenshot from the iPhone application Twitterific. Last week, I hadn't been able to figure out how to get Twitterific to work properly, nor did I know there was a way to take screenshots. Now I know how to do both.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

And while I vouched for the concept of turning my life over to the various apps--a couple for finding restaurants, one for finding music, one for playing Internet radio, one for AOL Instant Messenger, and so on--I also said that I'd had some problems with several of them.

I also got a lot of feedback from readers who pointed out that I hadn't needed to take photographs of the apps because there is a way to take screenshots directly off the iPhone. Simply clicking on the phone's home button and its power button simultaneously takes a perfect screenshot.

So, in the interest of being fair to the apps that I couldn't figure out, I decided to try them again once I was back home to see if I could figure them out or whether they were beyond that.

It turns out, of course, that it was basically user error. After spending a little more time with each of the apps I got them all working, though, in my defense, I think there were definitely some things about the apps' interfaces in each case that were extremely unintuitive.

First off is Urbanspoon, an app designed to help you find restaurants wherever you are that meet several criteria: neighborhood, type of cuisine, and pricing. It's designed with sort of a slot machine interface where you can "shake" it and each column spins and spins, finally resolving to a single suggestion.

What I'd not understood was how to get the app to give me a suggestion based on my specific criteria. Every time I chose to "shake" it, it spun all three of the wheels and gave me a totally random suggestion. If I wanted Japanese food, for example, it might give me Chinese instead.

Frustrated, I had finally given up and used another restaurant suggestion app instead.

To use the Urbanspoon app as I had wanted to originally, it is necessary to click on the lock icons below the columns for neighborhood, cuisine, and price.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

But now, I discovered that there is, in fact, a way to get it to do what I wanted, something I admit I should have been able to figure out before.

Below each column there's a small lock icon. It turns out that clicking on a lock sets that column in stone. So, by setting my criteria for each category, then clicking on each of the locks, and finally "shaking" it, it does indeed present suggestions based on my needs.

Next up on my list of apps I couldn't get working properly was Twitterific, an iPhone Twitter app.

I had had problems getting Twitterific to let me enter my Twitter account information after I'd inadvertently entered it incorrectly the first time. It asked me to enter it again, but I was stumped trying to figure out how to do so.

And, again, it turns out there was an easy solution, and one I missed most likely because I was in a hurry and wasn't thinking analytically. The answer was to click on the little wrench icon at the bottom of the Twitterific screen, which brings up the account information screen. I re-entered it there and sure enough, the app started working right away.

While I was in Seattle, I had abandoned Twitterific in favor of another app, called Twitterlator. But now I've started using one called Twinkle, and it seems even better because it offers more features, including the ability to view tweets from people in your immediate vicinity.

I'd also written that the tip calculation app I'd downloaded--CheckPlease--didn't look in any way like the screenshot presented on Apple's App Store. In fact, it had a very unattractive interface though it was simple to use.

The updated CheckPlease iPhone app is much more elegant than the version I downloaded originally.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

But a couple of days ago, my iPhone alerted me to the fact that there was an update available for CheckPlease. When I downloaded it, there was the interface that the App Store had originally promised. And indeed, it is now much better, more elegant, and more useful. Instead of unattractive sliders and results that give you a total restaurant check but not the specific tip amount, it now has a nice system with punch keys for entering the amount of the bill, a click wheel for the tip amount, and it presents the subtotal for the tip and the total amount for each person.

Much better, for sure.

In the end, then, I have to give props to the designers of each of the apps I'd said I had problems with. I suppose I would encourage them to make their interfaces a tad more intuitive or to include helpful directions. But then again, I have to also take some responsibility for not employing analytical skills to solve the issues I was having when I was having them.

Either way, it's nice to see them working properly now. Which, ultimately, reinforces my notion that spending a day letting iPhone apps run my life was a worthwhile and fun experiment.

SEATTLE--If you've ever wanted to hand control of your life off for a day, let me recommend putting it in the safe care of iPhone applications.

That's what I did Thursday, a day for which the plan I had originally made fell through.

During a day in Seattle, CNET News reporter Daniel Terdiman used a series of iPhone applications to direct what he did. Click on the above image to see the photo gallery.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

So, late on Wednesday night, as I was pondering what to with myself here Thursday--I'm in town for the Gnomedex conference, which begins Friday--I started thinking about my brand-new iPhone 3G and all the applications I've heard you can get.

And it occurred to me that it could be quite an experiment to turn my day over to the direction exclusively of some of those apps. I already had downloaded a couple, but as I looked around on Apple's App Store, I found that there were countless others that could help get me through my day.

I began the morning by booting up LocalEats, a free app from WhereTheLocalsEat.com that offers up lists of the top 100 places to chow down in 50 American cities. It makes its suggestions based on where you are and then sorts them, nearest first.

LocalEats had a few suggestions that sounded good, but before I set off in search of food, I thought I'd give another app, UrbanSpoon, a chance as well.