Written by On app stores and ecosystem – Does Zynga have plans for an app store?
I can’t disclose any plans that we have at this point for the future. But, I definitely think it is the right time build really cool solutions to serve apps on the Web. Like the Chrome Web store. Mozilla has its own Web store now. I am excited about those services. At the same time there are ways to bundle apps for the native app source. You can have solutions like PhoneGap or appMobi to really put your HTML5 game, the same code that runs on the browser, and put it into native platform and serve it in the App Store and such.
I think that there is ways that you can serve both at the same time so that is super helpful. As you’re aware probably, Facebook itself is kind of like an app platform and has been a really awesome ecosystem for us. I don’t see it as critical as many HTML5 engineers out there.
Facebook said at f8 last that it has no plans on an “app repository.”
It depends on what you call an app repository, I guess. Right now, Facebook has launched an HTML5 version of mobile and you can actually launch apps on their HTML5 versions nowadays which is pretty cool. While there may not be an overview page that gives you access to apps it [Facebook] is still kind of an app store.
How does Zynga view the opportunities around HTML5 vis-a-vis its reliance on the Facebook platform? Is it a way to distance itself or diversify itself?
I don’t think it is a matter of that actually. That really is not a reason we jumped on HTML5. Whether you are doing Flash or HTML5 or native code you could still use Facebook or not use Facebook. Other than that I cannot really describe our plans with Facebook. You know, we have a very healthy relationship with them and I am sure it will continue to be like that in the future.
What is the next step for Zynga in terms of HTML5 games and what does the roadmap for 2012 look like?
Well, we have a lot of tricks up our sleeves, that is for sure. And a lot of prototyping to do and a lot of great stuff. Unfortunately, I cannot disclose any future products that we are releasing. But one of the things that you should definitely take a look at is our open source repositories. So, from a technology perspective, we started open sourcing tech that is in our games at github.com/zynga that will drive our current or future games. We will be allowing to continue more future code there that can help game devs but can also show you a vision of what we can do. So, there will be a lot of interesting stuff in 2012 and beyond from out games perspective.
One of the prototypes that we have released is the Zynga Jukebox that is one piece of a shared tech that we built on HTML5. That has been a pretty good success story since the Jukebox is being used on Words With Friends already. If you check out Words With Friends on Facebook, which is built on HTML5, this one is actually using that open source product. I know of other situations where some of our plugins are used. This is the essence of what we are doing here, essentially, built into small components.
There are two others there. One is called Zynga Jukebox which is meant to bring HTML5 audio to game developers across devices. The next one is the Zynga Viewporter which makes resolution and view port handling on smartphones much easier which is another pain point for many engineers. Finally we released the Zynga Scroller which is an implementation of a scrolling element like the fact many people highlighted the fact that smooth scrolling in Path is awesome. And I agree. But, I am positive we can have the same smooth scrolling affect in HTML5 with the Zynga Scroller. It really brings us the capabilities that people would only know from native apps before.
What are the best tools that Zynga uses or you could point developers to when developing HTML5 games?
Tooling is still actually a pain point. I agree. So, I don’t have a perfect answer right now. We are not running IDEs but are working with text editors. We are also writing our own tools. I think we are at a point right now where every HTML5 game developer still codes in there. The tool vendors out there simply don’t know what people need. So, eventually, game developers have to write their own tools before putting them in indigenous libraries. I think that is really what is needed. At this point I have seen a lot of great experiments like Mobi Edge or Sencha’s tools. I am reading them all on a monthly basis to see where the direction is going. There is a lot of passion and engineers working on this right now trying to solve these issues. We are not there yet. I don’t know the definite solution for game engineers for tooling. Let’s see what happens.
How long down the road before HTML5 Web apps for the browser and for mobile really hit an inflection point for popularity like the native ecosystem has?
You know what? Officially the spec says something like a couple of years. That is the usual way to do things because final spec is taking a very long time at the W3C level to major but that doesn’t keep anyone from doing stuff and I don’t think it should. So, HTML5 and what people think about HTML5, they don’t really think about HTML but also CSS3 and JavaScript extensions. So, it is a whole mindset, a whole buzzword that people will raise. I don’t think there will be a time where you point to a certain time in history where you can say “this is the first time HTML5 was done.” I think the time is now to create those things. The Web is not something that comes in release cycles. The Web is growing always and we have seen that with the current browsers and the new iterations at the browser level, the vendor level. So, if you look at Google Chrome or Firefox, you see those weekly release cycles nowadays where you see those crazy revisions of versions. I think we are now at Firefox 10 and Chrome is at 16 or 17 and that is great because when you talk to engineers that work on new game specs or features on Google Chrome, for instance, they tell you they can have something prototyped in weeks and out there for everyone to use in a matter of months which wouldn’t be possible a few years ago.
So, that shows me that there isn’t any reason to wait. If you want to start using something now, you should because you have an overlap of 75% of HTML5 capable browsers that update almost monthly. So, there is no point in waiting for a certain spec to finish. You can just start using it right now.
Article From:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/mobile/2012/02/interview-how-zynga-is-transfop2.php
