Today we checked in for our “Sorcerer Day” at the D23 Expo and picked up our “swag bag”, the goodies provided by various divisions of the Disney company for the Sorcerer attendees. I know this was one of the things I was very curious about coming in, and I imagine others may also be wondering what the contents were going to be in this year’s bag.
First of all, the bag itself is very interesting. During the Expo (and I’m sure for some time leading up to it), the lamp posts all around the Disneyland Resort are decorated with banners promoting the Expo, as seen in this photo:
Banners outside the convention center
The banner design changes every year, so once this year’s expo is done, the banners are not usable. So the Sorcerer bags from this year were made from the recycled banners from 2011 — a very clever idea, making each bag unique and collectible. Here are the bags we got, but each one is different.
Bags made from recycled D23 Expo 2011 Banners
Now, as to what was in the bag … quite a bit of stuff! Let’s just get to the pictures.
A lithograph of artwork used in promoting the 2013 ExpoA pin .. the Halloween party flyer was apparently just used as something to stick the pin to. Two of the possible designs shown.Keychains with different Vinylmation designs; two of the possibilities are shown.Spa goodies (body scrub and lotion)Another vinylmation, available in several colors — we both got gold.Another pin, this one quite large and features D23 Expo promotional art againThe Disney Legends bookA hardbound book of the program guide for the Disney Legends induction (to be held Saturday)A journal — embossed D23 design on cover is hard to make out in this photo. I’ll be taking notes in this all weekend.A collectible figurine; we both got Scuttle so I’m not sure if everyone got the same or if there were other possibilities here.A set of Disney Collector Cards. Not sure if these are unique to the Expo or are copies of already released cards.A $15 gift card for the Disney Music storeVery nice – a decanter and tumbler with the Disney Legends logo etched on the decanter.A personalized Sorcerer Guest name badge.
So, that’s how our day started. Then most of the rest of the day’s activities were about providing us with a way to add to the haul … a preview opportunity in the Dream Store, a chance to shop at the pop-up Disney Store, and a chance to preview and bid on items in the Silent Auction. I picked up a few additional items … I think the folks at the UPS store are going to get to know me very well before this trip ends.
Oh, and a few other items I didn’t get pictures of — a coupon for a massage at the Sorcerer Lounge. I think that may be very welcome after hauling bags all of the place for several days. And a couple of coupons for Mickey’s of Glendale, the Imagineering store .. one for a Sorcerer member exclusive pin, and the other 40% off on any item. If they have the same jackets on sale that were available in 2011 I know what I’ll be using my 40% on.
Much more Expo news to come … it was a long day (and not a sedentary one, either, FitBit shows 24060 steps taken today). Tomorrow the Expo proper kicks off with the Animation presentation in the morning; I’ll be cracking open that new D23 journal (as no cameras or recording devices of any type are permitted in the arena for this presentation).
Keep checking back … I’m not sure when I’ll transcribe and post notes made over the weekend so new posts can pop up any time.
Really tough choices in picking what to see and do at the D23 Expo.
To some degree, I’m being guided this year by what things blew me away in 2011. So the Legends ceremony in 2011 was incredible, and as a result I’m planning to do Legends this year even though it’s got some tough competition in the timeslot.
This might change between now and show time, but as it stands now here are the things I plan to attend.
Saturday:
Art and Imagination: A preview of upcoming Disney and Pixar animated features.
Undiscovered Disneyland: stories, film, and photos from the construction and early years in the park.
Marty Sklar: Dream It, Do It. Walt’s right-hand man for theme parks, one of several presentations Marty will be involved in this week
The Art and Artistry of Aulani – Disney Vacation Club’s Hawaiian resort
Broadway and Beyond – live performances from cast members of Disney’s various Broadway productions
Saturday
Let the Adventures Begin: A preview of upcoming Disney, Marvel, and LucasFilm live action features.
Once Upon a Time panel – a look at the ABC TV series
Disney Legends Ceremony – inducting this year’s newly named Legends
Crash Course in the Force: Star Wars 101. Curious to see if we’ll learn anything new about the upcoming features.
Richard Sherman and Alan Menken in concert — the Disney Songbook.
Sunday
Working With Walt — an incredible panel of Disney Legends featuring Marty Sklar, X Atencio, Alice Davis, and Bob Gurr
To Infinity and Beyond: Disney Interactive. Need to finally figure out what this Disney Infinity thing really is.
Leading a Legacy – Disney Imagineering panel
Leave ’em Laughing – Disney Imagineering panel
I’m happy with those choices — but so many great-sounding presentations didn’t make it onto my final list, including
Behind the Scenes of Mary Poppins, with Dave Smith
Mayhem, Mischief, and Monkeys – the Mystic Manor attraction at Hong Kong Disneyland
Inside the Ice — a look at the upcoming Frozen animated feature
Voices of the Parks — the voices you hear throughout Disney theme parks share stories
The Art of the Good Dinosaur – a look at the upcoming Pixar feature
The DNA of Innovation – another Disney Imagineering presentation
Women of Pixar – the write-up on this doesn’t list the panelists, so not sure if they are primarily animators, executives, or a mix.
Craft of Creativity – another Disney Imagineering presentation
I hope to hear from others who are attending these sessions so I can get a recap of what I missed.
Panels and presentations are only a portion of what goes on at the Expo — there are also meet-and-greets, lots of shopping opportunities, artists, podcasters, and of course just meeting and hanging out with fellow fans. More on all those things as the Expo gets underway, starting with the Sorcerer Preview day on Thursday August 8th.
The D23 Expo runs from Friday August 9th through Sunday August 11th, but for the guests that signed up for the Sorcerer package, the activities begin on Thursday August 8th.
D23 has now announced the activities for Sorcerer Guests during the 4-day Expo event. Here’s a look at the Sorcerer activities (look for an upcoming post on the main Expo schedule activities I’m planning to attend).
Thursday gives us a chance to shop at some of the Expo stores before the show officially opens. Since some of the merchandise is in limited quantities and will sell out, this is a real advantage for collectors of some of the scarcer items. Since I think my souvenir shopping is going to be mostly of the T-Shirt variety, I may not be taking maximum advantage of this. (Then again, once I get there and see the merchandise I may find myself unable to resist).
Shopping opportunities:
D23 Expo Dream Store (10 am to 6:30 pm)
Dream Store Silent Auction Preview (10 am to 6:30 pm)
Disney Store (2pm to 5:30 pm)
Other Thursday activities:
Access to exclusive Sorcerer Lounge (9 am to 6 pm)
Exclusive Treasures of the Walt Disney Archives Tours (10 am to 6:00 pm)
Private Show Floor Tours (10 am to 6:30 pm)
Dessert Reception and Fireworks viewing (8:45 pm to 10 pm)
During the main expo days, there are also a few Sorcerer events
Access to exclusive Sorcerer Lounge each day during Expo hours
Exclusive Walt Disney Imagineering reception, Friday 5pm – 6pm
Farewell reception, Sunday 6:30 pm – 7:30 pm
The special Sorcerer exclusives are a nice bonus, but the real benefit to the Sorcerer package is reserved seating for any of the panels and presentations … I’ve been making the tough schedule choices over the past couple of days and will share the choices I’ve made for my Expo experience in my next post.
This year I’ll be attending my second D23 Expo … for the first expo in 2009, there wasn’t a whole lot of information released ahead of time, and I decided to take a pass. When I saw updates from the Expo as it was happening, I realized I’d made a bad call … there was some amazing stuff going on, and I was missing out!
So for the 2011 Expo I was there for all 3 days. I absolutely loved what I saw — but what I saw was only a small fraction of what I wanted to see. Unlike most of the other D23 events, where a ticket guarantees you a seat at every presentation, an Expo ticket only grants you the right to stand in line to get into the presentations. Many of the most popular presentations filled up well ahead of their starting time, so anyone showing up a few minutes before a presentation was not going to find a seat. So, if you wanted to see a 2 pm presentation, you pretty much had to forgo any presentations at 1 pm and start lining up between noon and 1 pm for the 2 o’clock. For the main arena presentations, typically held first thing in the morning, lining up outside the convention center 2 hours ahead of doors opening was pretty much the minimum … for a while on Saturday we actually believed we were going to be the very last people admitted to the Studios presentation (they cut off the line behind us, but later let through about 100 more people).
So, this year I wanted to maximize my chances to see as much as I could … which means Sorcerer. A very limited number of Sorcerer tickets are sold, and each ticket guarantees a seat at any presentation (it appears we will be asked to register for the presentations we plan to attend just before the expo, so that they’ll have an exact count of how many seats to set aside in each presentation). It’s a pricey indulgence, but for a once-every-two-years event, with a lot of content that will never be repeated anywhere at any price, I thought it would be worth it. I hope they prove me right.
So I’m watching the schedule as it fills in on the web site (D23 doesn’t announce everything at once, but trickles out the content in the weeks leading up to the Expo). Already I see some tough choices … Friday morning at 10 am is the Animation presentation, with John Lassiter, covering all the upcoming Disney and Pixar animated features. I have to be there for that … but that means I’ll miss Dave Smith (Disney Archivist Emeritus) discussing the making of Mary Poppins, and the Imagineers discussing the Mystic Manor attraction at Hong Kong Disneyland. If only I had a few clones to send to those other presentations!
Things got a little more real this week when the Expo credentials arrived … it’s very exciting to have my tickets in hand, but seriously … couldn’t they have run this through a spell checker and found the correct spelling of Sorcerer?
I think the things I’m looking forward to most at this point are the evening concerts .. Friday night we get “Broadway and Beyond”, featuring current and previous cast members of Disney Theatrical Group’s Broadway productions. Then on Saturday, Alan Menken and Richard Sherman take the stage together for the first time … I saw Menken perform at the Destination D: 75 Years of Disney Feature Animation event and it was a highlight. I’m sure this will be an equally memorable evening.
If you’re at the Expo this year, look for me and say hi … and comment below with what you’re most looking forward to at this year’s Expo.
The D23 Expo apps for iPhone and Android are available for download today from the respective app stores.
Check the schedule and presenters, adding interesting presentations to your calendar. Check out the vendors in the Collector’s Forum and other shopping opportunities (Dream Store, Mickey’s of Glendale, and more). Maps of the facilities, FAQ, trivia, even a scavenger hunt.
Sometimes the stars align just so, and something magical happens. This may just be one of those times in my life.
Almost a year ago, tickets went on sale for the 2013 D23 Expo. Since I’m planning on writing a lot more about the Expo over the next 3 weeks, I won’t go into anything about it here, other than to say buying the tickets put a stake in the ground as far as my schedule … I knew exactly where I was going to be on August 9-11 of 2013.
I bought those Expo tickets while I was training for my first ever runDisney race, and my first run over 5K – the Tower of Terror 10 miler, in late September of 2012. That race led me to try another — the WDW Half Marathon in January 2013 — and that in turn led me to sign up for back-to-back races over the upcoming Labor Day weekend — the inaugural Disneyland 10K on August 31st, followed by the Disneyland Half Marathon on September 1st. (The two races together comprise the Dumbo Double Dare challenge, and doing the Disneyland Half during the same calendar year as the WDW Half earns me the Coast-to-Coast Challenge medal, so I’ll be sporting some serious bling come Labor Day. I hope I can stand up!
That’s another topic for future posts, but once again, I’ve got a firm schedule commitment, again in Anaheim, this time for Labor Day weekend.
Now, at the same time I’m making all these plans for Anaheim, I’m also thinking about a cross-country move — to get closer to family and friends, primarily. It’s an idea I’ve been kicking around for several years, but with real estate in the tank recently it wasn’t feasible to sell my house for enough to make it worthwhile. But recent recoveries in the market changed the equation … I talked to my Realtor and we decided to give it a shot. The house went on the market, and 8 days later it was under contract. The market was stronger than I realized.
I followed this up with a trip to Atlanta, I called it a house hunting trip but honestly I would have been satisfied just to eliminate a few areas from consideration and narrow the focus somewhat. Finding neighborhoods, and not necessarily “the” house, was my goal. But again, things went better than expected, and by the end of last week I was under contract on a house there.
Now is when the timing falls into place beautifully. I need to be out of my house here in early August, but the house I just purchased is under construction and will not be ready until mid-September. So I’m homeless for most of the month of August. But, I do have a few prior commitments in Anaheim … so you can probably see where this is going.
Early in August, the movers will come in, pack up my house, and roll away. I’ll board a flight for Anaheim and enjoy the D23 Expo. And then …. I’ll stay. My job affords me the luxury of working from anywhere I can get an internet connection, so it’s not (exactly) an extended vacation. I’m hoping to find a nice coffee shop or similar location to use as my office for nearly four weeks, while every evening is a chance to enjoy the Disneyland Resort at a leisurely pace I’ve never experienced. I’ll need to keep up my training … a lap around the resort perimeter is just about the length of my daily runs, anyway, so that shouldn’t present much of a problem. After the Dumbo Double Dare on Labor Day weekend, I’ll fly to Atlanta, where I’ll stay with family for the last couple of weeks before moving in to my new home.
I’m really looking forward to living — however briefly — in Anaheim. The Expo should be amazing, I’m hoping just to finish the races upright, and the time in between should be a great chance to get to know every little nook and cranny of the Disneyland resort.
So, Disneyland friends — any suggestions? Where’s a great place to set up with a laptop and get work done while still being part of the magic? What are the places to see and things to do when you’ve got more than just a couple of days to run through the parks? Anything else you’d recommend for a short-term Anaheim area resident to make sure not to miss?
In previous posts I’ve described my desire to do an iPhone app, and finally finding what seemed to be a worthwhile project. All that was left was to take the idea and see how well I could translate it into an app.
I started writing code in mid-January. Sometime in late February the name came to me — The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. It’s Mickey Mouse’s most famous role. The ‘Sorcerer’ obviously also ties to the game’s name, Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom. And it can be shortened to The Sorcerer’s App — “app” works as a shortened form of Apprentice or of Application, and I liked the duality of that. Even though I was a ways off from having an app ready, I went into iTunes Connect (the software that developers use to publish to the App Store) to see if I could reserve the name. It was not yet in use by any other app, so I grabbed it, as well as reserving thesorcerersapp.wordpress.com as a blog name where I would start writing about the app.
Work on the app progressed, and functionality seemed to be falling into some well-defined “buckets”. There is obviously the collecting of the cards used to play the game, and early on it was decided that this would be the focus of the first version of the app. So I put together screens that would track cards the user had and the cards still needed. I designed the database to hold all the card information. Trading was originally going to wait until Version 2, but ultimately I decided there needed to be something in Version 1 — not a full-blown trading system where users can electronically trade with other app users, but at least something where a user standing in line at a game portal can show a list of cards needed and cards to trade to someone and check off the cards to make a trade.
Being able to break down the app into smaller chunks felt crucial to me. For one thing, remembering the experience of seeing other apps beat me to the app store before, I didn’t want to be working on an app for many months, only to have something else appear before I finished. I felt it was important to get a release out there, and then build on it, rather than wait until I had an app with every feature I could think of.
As I read more and more of the blogs online, the crowd-sourcing aspect became less important, and eventually disappeared. It may reappear in a later release (or it may not), but it seems like basic game strategy is understood well enough to encapsulate it in a relatively small set of rules that will be built into the app. (These game play features will be introduced in Version 2 of the app).
Version 1 of the app, the digital checklist for card collectors and the trading manager for casual trading face-to-face, was completed early in March. I recruited some beta testers to try things out, and went through a series of minor revisions. I submitted the app to the app store. The first submittal was rejected — not entirely unexpectedly — because it included pictures of all the cards, which are images copyrighted by Disney. (I rationalized that the card images can be easily found on the web, so Disney appears not to have ordered them taken down — perhaps they wouldn’t object to their use in the app. I never got to find out as Apple red-flagged that and made me pull the images out of the app.)
Original “Card Detail” screen, when card images were included
After pulling the images, I resubmitted the app and then on April 1st, I got notice that the app had been approved for sale. I decided that April Fool’s day was not the day I was going to announce the release — too easy to either be taken as a joke, or simply lost in the flood of bogus announcements coming from various sources. So I waited until April 2nd to start posting updates on Facebook, Twitter, and other sources announcing the app.
An interesting thing about this whole experience, to me, is that I kind of feel I almost missed it. Since I abandoned my first app effort in 2009, it’s always been a goal to find another project and build an app. It’s not something I obsessed over or thought about daily — but it is something that I came back to again and again, considering and rejecting a number of ideas that I either couldn’t come up with a good approach for, or thought were over-done, or required skills I didn’t have. Yet for some reason it took several exposures to the SotMK game for me to make the connection — it seems very obvious in retrospect, but it did not come to me when I played the game in September, or even in January. Only after the trip, reflecting back on it, did I make the connection.
If you have a project you’ve wanted to kick off and are just waiting to find the right inspiration — make sure you haven’t missed it! Do a mental review of things that have recently caught your interest for more than just a passing moment. Is there a connection that needs to be made?
In my last post, I talked about the Baseball Scorecard app that never made it to launch. That was in 2009, and ever since then, I’ve had it in the back of my mind that doing an iPhone app was going to happen — I just needed to find the right project.
Maybe “in the back of my mind” isn’t quite right. It was really a bucket list item for me … not something I thought about daily, but something that was more than just an idle thought. I really did plan to act on it, but the ideas just weren’t coming.
As a long-time Disney fan, doing something Disney related certainly had an appeal, so more than once I tried to think of a Disney-related app idea. But there are already various tour guides, line estimating guides, etc. for all the parks — I didn’t really want to do a “me, too” app, I wanted to do something new — or at least something I felt like I could do better than anyone else was doing it. Nothing came to me, but I continued to believe it would eventually.
During a WDW trip in September 2012 for the Tower of Terror race, I first played the game Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom (which had launched in February 2012). It’s a neat little game and one which I was sure I’d play again on future visits to the park — but somehow the synapses didn’t fire, nothing connected telling me there was an app there waiting to be written.
When I went back in January 2013 for the half marathon, I played again, and this time I did more than just play — I talked to other players, traded cards, and started to hear that there was more complexity to the game than first meets the eye. The reason this is not readily apparent is because if you play on the “Easy” difficulty (as I was doing), there is really no strategy required to win — it’s just a pleasant diversion and a chance to walk around the park and watch some entertaining videos, and follow along with the story line. But if you play on medium and hard levels — then what you do matters. You can’t just randomly play any cards and hope to defeat the villains trying to take over the Magic Kingdom.
The game strategy has to be discovered, and it’s really something that one person is not likely to figure out on their own. So online communities have developed, both for trading the SotMK (as the game is abbreviated) cards and for sharing strategy tips — what’s the best card combination to beat Cruella de Vil? What cards should you absolutely avoid playing against Maleficient when she appears in dragon form? How can you handle multiple cards at the portal without dropping your Dole Whip?
After playing in the parks during each day of my trip, I was checking on the online forums at night for better strategies to use the next day. Yep, they had hooked me and reeled me in — I needed to beat the game.
It wasn’t until I was home from the trip that the light bulb went on. There were too many card combinations for anyone to ever find the completely optimal strategy working alone. What was needed was a crowdsourced solution. And while this was happening online via blog postings and Facebook groups, the way to really kick that into high gear would be with an iPhone app. I’d discovered the app that needed to be written.
From this idea, I was quickly beginning to mock up what such an app might look like — drawing out the various screens on index cards and pinning them to a cork board to get the flow. It really seemed to hit the sweet spot I was looking for — here was an app with enough to it that it wasn’t trivial or worthless, but not so large and complex that it was more than a one-person job. The app could be compartmentalized nicely, meaning that it didn’t have to be done all at once — I could easily visual several versions of the app, each adding in a few new features. (That was a big downside to the baseball app — you couldn’t do it in pieces. You can’t release a version 1 that only does balls and strikes, and then a version 2 that handles other batter actions, and then a version 3 that handles baserunning — until you can do it all, you don’t have anything usable).
Inspiration had finally come along; the idea was there. Now it was just a mere matter of programming to take the idea and make it a reality.
Index cards being used to mock up application screens
In my previous post I mentioned that I wanted to give a bit of the story of developing The Sorcerer’s Apprentice iPhone application. But The Sorcerer’s App was not my first crack at writing an iPhone app. Before we get to the new app, let’s turn the wayback machine to 2009. The App Store was only about a year old (it’s easy to forget that at the initial release, third party developers could not write applications for the iPhone). And I had an idea for what I felt would be a great iPhone application.
The idea of the app was a baseball scoring application. This wasn’t a new idea for me — I had originally thought of it as an application I thought would do well for the Apple Newton. I had even drawn up some screen mock-ups of the Newton app (I still have them in a file around here somewhere). But the Newton wasn’t a long-lived platform and was gone before I ever got a chance to make any serious attempt at developing an application for it.
But the idea didn’t die, so when the iPhone opened up for third party developers, I started thinking about it again, and then working on it. I bought a couple of developer’s guides, and even attended an iOS developers conference in San Jose. Soon pieces of the app were beginning to take shape … a display across the top of the screen for the line score (inning-by-inning runs scored), a lineup on the left, an area for scoring the current play on the right.
Background image for the play scoring area
As it turns out, this was an incredibly complex application, and in hindsight was really too ambitious for a first project — especially for a single developer, working part time. Things that were uninteresting, but vitally necessary — like handling the roster, lineup, substitutions, etc. — were very time consuming to get right. The interesting part — scoring the plays — really required skills with graphics that I didn’t possess if I was to give the app the polished look I was looking for.
I worked on the app pretty steadily for a number of months. At some point while I was doing this, another baseball scoring app showed up in the app store — but I wasn’t too discouraged, because I looked at it and decided I could do better. Not too long after that, a second scoring app showed up — much more complete, better thought out. Well, I thought, I may have lost the first mover advantage, but I could catch up. Then the newer, better app was re-branded –it became the ESPN scorecard app. At that point it really seemed like Game Over. If I was confident that I was going to turn out an app that was everything I envisioned, perhaps I would have continued at that point — but I was daunted by how long I’d worked on this and how much was still left to do. I knew it would be several more months before I could possibly have anything to market, and then it might very well be second-best.
So, my first iPhone development project was shelved. But I’d learned a lot, and I felt I would return to iPhone development when the right project came along. I really thought that would be in a matter of months, rather than years — but in the intervening time, there has been nothing that struck me as something I wanted to do badly enough that I’d invest the hours required. So time marched on, while millions of new apps were developed and shipped. There had to be an idea that was still out there somewhere, waiting for me to find it.
That’s where the story will pick up in the next post.
Yesterday my first-ever iPhone app launched in the App Store for Apple’s iOS devices (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch). The link to download the app is at right and also below.
I have also created a new blog specifically for the app — I didn’t want to post a bunch of stuff here that would only be of interest to users of the app, so if you’re interested in the app, please follow The Sorcerer’s App blog to get the latest news about the app.
But I thought it would be appropriate to post more of a personal story here of how the idea for the app came to me, and some of the fun and challenges along the way. So stay tuned over the coming days and I’ll share some of the backstory of creating the app. In the meantime, if you’re a player of Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom, please check out the app. If you aren’t yet a player but are planning a visit to the Magic Kingdom in the future, take a look and see if it’s something you want to include as part of your next trip to Walt Disney World.
Nodes and Edges 