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Last time I talked about Tic-Tac-Bacon, an odd variant of a classic children's game. Today's piece is on a game called GardenGrow. According to the developer's blog, this game was inspired by his girlfriend. Makes sense, I suppose, because I couldn't see too many guys designing a simple gardening game on their own accord. After all, we like to kill things with big guns, right? Anyway, I do have to give this game credit for one thing: it's better than Tic-Tac-Bacon. Sadly, not by much. The game starts off with a similar loading time to TTB, though I think it's a bit faster. Once the game's ready you get a splash screen explaining that you are to use music to make the plants grow, and there's a nice big Begin button in the middle of the screen. Press start and you're off... to a screen with grass and some colored buttons at the bottom. It turns out that if you press those buttons, they make music!
With the Push support in the iPhone OS 3, the iPhone has become an excellent platform for instant messaging.
Before the Push support, you could only keep them listening using hacks like Backgrounder on jailbroken devices or using clients that forced the entire phone remain “alive”. Neither is an optimal solution. Now, the Push support provides the platform with something that, in some respects, is even better than the current instant messaging support on competing smartphone operating systems (at least Symbian S60, Blackberry and Windows Mobile).
In my increasingly sickening quest to assimilate all games iPhone, I ran across an interesting web site: the App-A-Day Project. The original directive of this project was that the developer was literally going to release a project each day (by 11:59 pm) to the App Store for 30 days. As happens with most projects like this, the developer has simmered down a bit. The new goal is to take the equivalent of a day's worth of work (4-5 hours) to complete each project, though an individual project might not necessarily be coded all in one day. The concept intrigued me, and the developer offered promo codes to anyone wanting to cover the games, so I figured "why not?" I will do my best to cover the games in the proper order, but given his new philosophy of spanning certain games over more than one day, there may not be a proper order to everything. At any rate, the first game that I'm going to cover in this series is Tic-Tac-Bacon.
After using Bento for a few more weeks, I am really sold on it! It’s the best database I’ve found that works with an iPhone app and I’ve tried them all. The Bento app is simple, but it serves its purpose. The real workhorse is the desktop application.
In this blog I’m getting back to my roots, literally. The people at Antenna Theater have something very special to show you in their blend of the iPhone, natural world and the arts, and it’s called ECOcal.
This weekend I stumbled across the ESPN ScoreCenter app. And let me tell you this app is a must have for any sports nut or even a non-sports nut like myself.
Now you can volunteer without ever leaving your chair by simply turning on your iPhone! An organzation called The Extraordinaries is encouraging a new kind of social networking, Microvolunteering, to do good. (NPR's article on Microvolunteering) The premise is that you can volunteer your time anytime, anywhere, for just a few minutes as you available. (no more excuses!)
I reviewed the 1.0 version of this great free web service on the WinMo side of our site here. Now version 2.0 brings full syncing of your tasks between the web and your gadgets (including iPhone). The service is free, but iPhone client is $2.99.
PCMag.com is reporting the results of some speed tests of the iPod touch after upgrading to 3.0 — with the result that it actually slows some things down. The testing found that even though JavaScript speed is greatly enhanced, operations such as startup and web page loading are slower. Of course if features such as copy and paste are more important to you than speed, then you'll want to spend the $10 and upgrade anyway.
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