I had an interesting encounter a little while ago. A 10 year old asked me how much does Distant Suns cost in the App Store. I said “10 bucks.” “Why so much?” he responded…. One of the many paradigms that shifted when the App Store first opened up was the pricing model. It was obvious that the apps would cost less then their CD-ROM/store shelf variants. But how much was underestimated. Apple expected games that might retail for $30 to drop down...

Whenever someone sees Chez Mike (AKA: Distant Sun’s World HQ for Global Domination) I invariably have to give a tour and explain lot’s of the weird crap I have scattered about. This is the first virtual “weird crap” tour that I’ll post to make it look like I really am paying attention to my website and Distant Suns. 150 years ago this past week was the bloodiest battle of the Civil War, the Battle of Gettysburg....

I’ve been back from Norway for a couple of weeks, but for the first week was too wacked out from jet lag to do much of anything. I was thinking that were I to do a coding marathon of 30+ hours, skip one night’s sleep then get to bed at a “normal” time, I could do a hard reset of my internal clock. Nope. Didn’t work. Screwed me up (well, more than normal). The trip was terrific, but too short. While I don’t...

25 years ago, while working at the NASA Ames Research Center, I got the idea to create an astronomy program for computer users. It started out as a 17 line BASIC program and I’ve been polishing it up ever since. Thanks to you, Distant Suns has become one of the longest-lived, continually published, consumer software titles still on the market, bested only by products like Windows, Microsoft Word, and Broderbund’s Print Shop. I want...

We here at DSWHQforGD (Distant Suns World HQ for Global Domination) get a lot of interesting things in the mail. No astronomy app developer should be without at least one “space helmet” to dress up the dump. Can anyone guess what movie or TV show this is from? If so, you’ll receive a handsome “prize” (meaning I’ll find some piece-of.some worthy item around here I want to get rid of). Give up? Okay. The helmet...

In what surely must be ranked as one of Apple’s most closely held secrets to date, word has leaked out that the rumored September 12 event has absolutely nothing to do with the iPhone 5, but instead will witness the introduction of the Cupertino company’s latest foray into a previously untapped market…