Plus, I'm very slowly working on something to improve my ability to support my apps, and I kind of need to lock down on which apps I really want to be supporting.
Cubes come flying towards you, and you tilt the iPhone side to side in order to dodge them. Very simple, but well done. It's free, so what more could you ask for?
This game has become sort of the poster child of games on the iPhone. And why shouldn't it? It looks quite good, and its fit and finish is almost unmatched by anything else available right now. I've easily invested more time in this game than anything else I've gotten thus far.
That said, I do have one complaint: it's hard. Really hard. The controls take awhile to get used to, and the developers very quickly throw levels at you composed of narrow pathways with no rails. You get better at the game as time goes on, so you'll find that going back to past levels will be easier than when you played them before, but the developers keep the difficulty a few notches above where you often wish it were. If you like a challenge, this will deliver.
Now this one's interesting. It allows you to use the iPhone's iPod interface to remotely control iTunes on your computer or Apple TV. A remote control whose interface is cognizant of the content it's controlling: surprisingly novel.
There are, right now, about 17 different Sudoku games available on the store. I picked this one mostly out of an attempt to strike a balance between the reviews and the price. This one is probably not the best of the 17 available. The difference between pencil marking and actually filling in the box is ostensibly a single-tap versus a double-tap, but it doesn't seem to always quite work that way. More important, the game generates puzzles with more than one solution, which is strangely annoying.
It's not a bad kart racing game, except for one major issue: its framerate. When there's no other racers near you, it's great. When there's one, it's still pretty good. When there's two or more (like, say, when the race first begins), the game really starts to chug, and it becomes really hard to control. If they can improve the performance, I can see myself keeping it around for awhile. If not, it probably won't be on my phone much longer.
For the Dance Dance Revolution and Guitar Hero fans out there, this is not a bad download at all. It would nice, though, if it had a visual indicator showing progress along the multiplier ranks and streak length.
This game is free? It's up there with Super Monkey Ball in terms of polish. It's also rather unique. It's a basic block-matching matching puzzle game, but with the added twist of being able to level up and gain new abilities like an RPG. Scrolling through menus can be pretty choppy, though, and there are a few bugs that make it appear that the game was rushed out in order to be in the store on the first day. The developers appear to be moving quickly, though, and many of the issues are fixed in the first update that should be arriving in the next few days.
Here's a fun one: a virtual keyboard. It comes with basic recording and playback functionality. It's great just to mess around in, and it'll really help me for times when I get a little melody in my head and want to jot it down without going through all the overhead of launching GarageBand.
So, that's just a bit of what I've been playing with over the past few days. Kind of hard to believe that in addition to all that I've been making significant progress with my own iPhone projects.
In retrospect, I'm still impressed that Apple was able to choreograph so many projects to launch all at once. I'm not impressed with the apparent QA deficiencies in the .Mac/MobileMe team, and Apple most likely could have done more to scale capacity for the iPhone OS 2.0 launch.
Oh well, was fun to watch.
Apple is in the process of multiple large deployments, the two main ones being the iPhone 3G and Mobile Me. What's interesting is the number of dependencies that exist in this deployment. Both projects have a dependency on iPhone OS 2.0: the iPhone 3G needs it just to run, and Mobile Me needs it to deliver push messages to mobile devices. The iPhone OS 2.0, in turn, needs Mobile Me for its consumer push data system. The iPhone OS 2.0 also has a dependency on iTunes 7.7 for downloaded application management. Mobile Me has a dependency on an OS X update for any push functionality that they may be adding to Mail, Address Book, and iCal, as well as to change all references to .Mac to Mobile Me. Mobile Me also has a dependency on an Apple TV update to change its .Mac gallery reference under photos to a Mobile Me gallery reference. Finally, iPhone OS 2.0 has an application that can remotely control the Apple TV, and it requires an Apple TV update to expose that functionality.
Overall, this is one of the more complicated and all-encompasing deployments I've ever seen, and it's remarkable that most of those components (the Apple TV update, the iTunes update, and the OS X update) have gone over without a hitch. Now, Mobile Me's individual deployment has fallen to a state that could nearly be described as apocalyptically catastrophic, but I nonetheless marvel at the higher level orchestrating talent at Apple necessary to accomplish such a feat.
I'm not sure what caused the problem to occur, though I feel pretty safe calling it a Firefox 3 bug. Essentially, one of the first images in the preloaded image list would fail to load. It wasn't always the same image, but the loader would always fail to load exactly one image.
The loader works by creating a large number of HTML image elements and attempting to load them all at once. When asked to load n elements, browsers usually won't attempt to actually load all n at once, but rather more like 2 or 3 to avoid swamping both the user's and the internet server's connections. The browser will simply queue up the elements it needs to load, start loading a few, and then load more as items finish loading. The loader allows the browser to decide how many elements to load simultaneously.
The fix I implemented causes Firefox 3 (and only Firefox 3; not Firefox 2, Safari 3, or Mobile Safari) to operate under a different loading philosophy: it'll only attempt to load a single image at a time, and won't start loading the next image until the current one has finished loading. This causes loading to be much slower under Firefox 3, but I felt a slower load was preferable to no load at all.
Google changed its favicon a few days ago, and it got quite a bit of coverage. I just wanted to add one observation: the old icon was 1,406 bytes, the new one is 1,150 bytes. That's 256 bytes smaller. Just going out on a whim and guessing that if Google gets somewhere in the range of one million requests for that icon a day, the new icon will save them roughly 90 gigs a year ... which honestly doesn't seem like that much for Google.
Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not that important.
John Carmack
What do Doom 3, BioShock, and Lost Odyssey have in common? Aside from being powered by major FPS engines, it's that they all have a two-tier storytelling system. All three of the games have a story that the player is forced to view during the course of the game, and all three allow the player to optionally see much more of the story through written text or spoken word. Doom 3 accomplishes this through PDAs, BioShock through audio diaries, and Lost Odyssey through dream sequences.
This is an interesting setup in that it allows people who simply want to shoot things or grind levels to do so without terribly long interruptions to the action, while individuals who enjoy a deep and nuanced story still has it available to them.
While this is a good thing, there's one aspect of it that I don't particularly like: the additional storytelling segments are a modal thing separate from the game itself. While the sequences may be quite well written (Lost Odyssey, in particular, has some very strong writing), the transition to and from can be somewhat jarring. You transition from active participant to passive listener/reader, and then go back to active participant again. This makes the first few seconds after each transition kind of weird.
So, I don't think that these modal sequences are a silver bullet. It accomplishes the goal of allowing people who want extra story to get it, but I feel that it is probably a suboptimal way of achieving that goal.
Anyway, just wanted to toss this out there.
