John August

Hive Mind

Help Stuart with AdWords

Hive Mind, Software

beeOn Sunday, we submitted our first app to the Mac App Store for approval. It’s a utility screenwriters will hopefully find useful, but it actually has a much wider potential user base.

The Mac App Store queue apparently varies wildly, so I don’t have an ETA for when our app will be available. Hopefully by Christmas.

Because our app is a good answer to something users might type into a search box (“something something mac”), Stuart will be overseeing a Google AdWords campaign to promote it. He’s reading up on all the official documentation and tips, but I have a hunch that some readers may have a lot of experience with AdWords. You might have good advice for him, both in terms of maximizing exposure and minimizing frustration.

So this is an open call for suggestions and links. (And hopefully not too much spam.) Thanks in advance.

Spring cleaning

Hive Mind, Meta

spring cleaningThis site has 1,440 posts, stretching back to 2003. Unlike many blogs, most of these articles are still relevant. The basics of screenwriting haven’t changed much in a decade.

Yet some problems inevitably creep in with age. Links break as external sites vanish. Formatting glitches arise. Graphics get misplaced.

To help fix these issues, we’re doing a few days of Spring Cleaning on the site. And if you have some free time, we’d love your help.

At the bottom of this post is a list of articles that need checking. (It generates a fresh list each time.) Click on an article, read it, and look for mistakes or issues. Repeat as often as you choose.

If you notice any problems (typos, missing graphics, broken links or other mistakes) click on either the “Flag for Spring Cleaning” button at the end of each post or the Send To button. This will send a report to Ryan, who will verify and correct.

Use the "Spring Cleaning" links at the bottom of each post, or in the "Send to" menu.

Once a post is marked “Flagged for Spring Cleaning,” you can’t send additional reports on it until Ryan checks it out.

Yes, private, this is a bug hunt. Twice daily, we’ll be posting results showing who has caught the most mistakes.

Ryan is the final arbiter of who gets credit for what.

UPDATE: You can see the leaderboard here.

We originally had a checkbox marked “Outdated,” but too much was getting flagged. Some posts are old and not exactly actionable (e.g. anything related to the 2008 WGA strike). That’s okay. History counts too. The publication dates are there for a reason.

As with the Scene Challenges, the winner gets public acclaim and bragging rights. But I’ll also happily send the victor his or her choice of movie swag, such as a signed script, DVD or poster.

I’m sure there will be issues we haven’t yet considered. Feel free to ask questions in the comments. Thanks, and happy hunting.

Math advice for paranoid aliens

Geek Alert, Hive Mind

Story problems in math rarely overlap with story problems in screenwriting, but today I have one that I could use some help figuring out.

Far away on a distant planet, an intelligent but very paranoid species is constructing a series of terrestrial watchtowers to scan the heavens, making sure no space-traveling enemies sneak up on them.

You can think of these watchtowers as observatories, each one watching a 180-degree (half-sphere) swath of the sky. For this simplest version, you can ignore complications like atmospheric distortion or possible moons.

Question #1: For complete coverage, what is the minimum number of watchtowers they need to build?

Question #2: What would be a prudent number to build? If you want to introduce features like atmosphere or redundancy, go for it.

This planet’s new Grand Ga’loo was elected on a promise of putting the watchtowers into orbit. After his inauguration, he’s assembled a team of leading scientists to figure out a plan for doing so. The current thinking is to have the satellites be geo-stationary (staying fixed over one spot on the planet), but the Ga’loo can be persuaded otherwise.

Question #3: What is the minimum number of satellites needed?

Question #4: How does the number change if the orbit radius is increased? If the field of view is increased?

Your answers could help some paranoid aliens sleep better at night.

Mapping The Variant

Geek Alert, Hive Mind, Projects, The Variant

I’ll release sales info for The Variant on Monday, but I wanted to offer up one bit this afternoon in case data-miners were inspired to do something with it over the weekend.

Sales of the Kindle version are pretty opaque; I only know totals. But the downloadable versions (pdf and ePub) give me names and shipping addresses. I was curious how many readers were international, particularly since Amazon’s Kindle is U.S.-only. (The answer: 37%.)

There may be other interesting things to explore and/or mash up, so I’ve stripped out identifying information and uploaded it in Excel and .csv formats. The file shows only transaction date/time, initials, city, state, postal code and country.1

If you do something interesting with the data, leave a link.

  1. Originally, I was going to include first name, which adds a nice degree of personality. But in a couple of cases, I worried that it was too individualizing, particularly with unusual names in smaller towns. ↩