Let’s have some fun.
The box, hat added for scale
Here we go...
Woot.
Packing about the same as my 2006 iMac
Includes a teeny tiny wireless keyboard, magic mouse, OSX disc & apple style manuals
The screen is gorgeous and enormous. (the cellophane is wrapping i haven't removed yet)
Have you seen Mint.com? If you haven’t you should check it out, because it is awesome. Not so fast though, Mint along with a number of other web based financial analytics apps are not supported by Canadian banks – yet. This seems like a no brainer to me. If one of the big Canadian banks offered online functionality like this to their customers i would seriously consider switching.
I think there is an opportunity here to really innovate the online banking experience in Canada, it’ll be interesting to see who’s going to make it happen.
You can probably relate to this if you 1) are a twitter user and 2) follow Kevin Rose, Daniel Burka or Leah Culver.
Here’s my issue with Pownce: Over the course of a day i might see a tweet like this from one of the Pownce people:
Ok great, sounds interesting lets click on the link. Takes me here:
Hmmm, this doesn’t seem to be the article as advertised. Looks like i have to click on yet another link.
Finally. My gripe with this is you just made me click through 2 links to get to the content. That’s not a good experience. Having Pownce in the way of me getting to that content added no benefit to me, so it’s clear that the whole “Pownced” tweet thing is just a way to drive traffic to Pownce. Granted, this is not so much a technical issue with Pownce i’m sure it works fine – but an attempt at starting some sort of snowball marketing effect by it’s founders, like the Paris Hilton sidekick story that kickstarted Digg’s success. Pownce is not Digg!
The Good
The Bad
How it works
Your goal is to stop waves of enemies from making it from the left side of the screen to the right. With each wave, you’ll face different & stronger enemies. Once 20 make it to the right, it’s game over. So how do you stop them? You’re able to create 4 different types of ‘towers’, each having it’s own strengths/weaknesses. You have 
your “Gatling Tower”, which has a weak but continuous short range attack. The “Goo Tower” which does no damage, but slows enemies down from a medium range. The “Missile Tower” which causes fairly significant splash damage & from a long range and finally the “Tesla Tower” which does massive damage but only within medium range.
As you kill bad guys with your towers, you get cash. Cash is required to buy towers. The other interesting dimension to the game is you can also spend cash on upgrades for existing towers to make them more powerful. The positioning of towers and the types of towers you use make for a really interesting strategy game.
So here’s what i think about it.
Graphics 9/10
Really solid for an iPhone. Only seems to be one level right now (albeit a long one), but the textures are really nice and suit the game. Kind of reminds me of Legend of Zelda for SNES if you recall that game.
Audio 0/10
Unless i am missing something, which i don’t think i am there is none! No sound effects, no music – nothing.*
Gameplay 8.5/10
Tapping & positioning towers feels just right. If i was going to complain about anything it might be that i wish you could zoom in a bit more and add more variety of maps.
* On the App Store page the developer mentions a big update is coming that adds music, sound & new content, which will take this game from great to awesome most likely.
Fieldrunners is available on the App Store for $4.99. Here’s the link.
Since web apps are executed only after an HTTP request, you may have situations where scripts need to run in the background on a scheduled basis. On Linux, to do this you’ll need to get to know the crontab. The way it works is kind of like an airport. The service is always running, however planes only depart at their scheduled times. The crontab is kinda like that, a daemon that runs constantly in the background and checks once a minute to see if any jobs need to be executed.
Let’s say you have a script located at http://www.acme.com/myscript.php that needs to run the first of every month at 9am. Here’s how you’d set it up:
1. Look for a file in your /etc folder called crontab.
2. You need to install a new crontab job, to do this type crontab -e.
3. Now the tricky part, the syntax:
and here’s how that translates in our example:
0 9 1 * * curl http://www.acme.com/myscript.php
Lets break it down. 0 is for the minute, 9 is the hour – so 9 hours & 0 minutes which is 9am. Day of the month, 1 – easy. We want to do this for every month & week, which is accomplished using the wildcard or * character. Next comes what we want to execute. It’s not enough to just type the URL of the script, you’ll need to use the CURL system function to make the HTTP request for you.
Here is some more information on CURL & Cron jobs for your reading pleasure, hope this tutorial helps!
I’ve had a few weeks to try out many of the apps on the iTunes store, and although it’s not even a month into the release of the 3G iPhone there is already some outstanding products available, many of which are free:
Google Maps (built in)
The best feature in maps is that you can search for anything. If i search for “Sushi” gmaps will search and drop pushpins on the map for any results matching your search criteria. You can drill down to results, get phone numbers, addresses and using the built in GPS get directions from your current location. This has already saved my ass on a couple of occasions!
Airme (free)
If you are a Flickr user, and love your meta data – this is the app for you. I actually bought mobileflickr for $2.99 before i found this one, but i’m going to use this instead. Airme will allow you to take photos, and then automatically upload them to your flickr site for you. Again, the magic comes from the GPS integration. Airme automatically tags your photo with your local weather (temp / sky conditions) and plots your photo on your flickr map.
Link
Google Reader / Google Talk (free)
These are actually web apps, but with all their ajaxy goodness they feel more like native apps. I spend about an hour each day commuting on a train to/from work and being able to access all my feeds in Google Reader is like having my own custom newspaper. I also like that alot of the features have been carried over from the desktop web app (i.e sharing / share with notes / stars). The implementation of Google Talk is really solid too, only problem i find with gTalk is that alot of people sign into their gmail and walk away from the computer but still show as ‘available’ – so it can be frustrating trying to connect with your contacts occasionally. Also, due to the limitations with the iPhone SDK & the fact these are web apps if you leave safari you will be logged out.
Link
Texas Hold’em (not free)
Really REALLY well done game. All the touch gestures feel right (double tap to check, tap drag & throw your cards to fold etc…). The graphic quality is probably one of the best i’ve seen so far. One cool little feature is if you tap your dealt cards, you will see a colored ‘hand strength’ meter. I’ve actually found this a handy tool for a beginner like myself…for example pocket 2’s a beginner would likely make the mistake to bet hard when in fact it’s a really weak hand. Other cool things: LAN multiplayer support, stats (keeps track of your best hands / win % etc) & it will save your games making it great for even burning 3 mins waiting in line at the grocery store. The only negative i have is that you can’t listen to your tunes while you’re playing, which you could do with the old ipod version.
Link
Remote (free)
There has been alot of buzz around this one. Right now i live in a 700 sq/ft condo, so i don’t have much use for it however this would be amazing for a house party or backyard BBQ. With Remote you can control iTunes or AppleTV over wifi from your iPhone. This way you don’t have to leave the party action to skip a track / pause etc…awesome.
Link
Facebook (Free)
The thing that is most impressive about the Facebook app is the attention to detail. There is alot of functionality crammed into this app but the beauty of the UI is they don’t expose it to you all at once & overwhelm you, it’s like peeling the layers off an onion. I continue to find cool things i didn’t realize it could do. It actually even supports Facebook chat, although i’m not sure if anybody really uses that, and it has the same limitations as Google Talk when you leave the app. Just a really solid translation of a web app -> iPhone.
Link
Truphone (free)
Apple does not allow apps which support VoIP over cellular data (edge/3G) however if you are on wifi you can using Truphone. I used this when i was in New York state for a friends wedding a few weeks ago to dodge roaming charges and it worked great. Just hop on free hotel wifi and you’re good to go. When you sign up they give you $4.00 to get you started. Rates are pretty decent @ about $0.06/min for landlines/mobiles in Canada/US. One nice thing is that for the person at the other end the call display still shows your iPhone #.
Link
Urbanspoon (free)
Merlin Mann called this app “almost useful” last week on Macbreak Weekly and i see where he’s coming from, but it’s probably one of the first apps i show people when i’m demo’ing the phones features cuz it’s just so damn cool. I am going to Hawaii for 2 weeks and am going to try it out while we’re there. Urbanspoon finds your location using the built in GPS, and then builds a slot machine style list of neighbourhoods, types of cuisine & cost level ($/$$/$$$/$$$$). You can lock certain dials on the slot machine, for example maybe you are certain you want Italian food, but don’t care what neighbourhood or cost. Then you simply shake the iphone (so silly, but so cool) and it will return a restaurant matching that criteria. You can then drill down and see ratings, address & phone number with links to Google Maps if you want to get yourself a table.
Link
Twinkle (free)
I used Twitteriffic when i first got my iphone as that is what i use on the desktop, but i found it started crashing alot so i tried Twinkle (which i used on my old jailbroken ipod touch). The selling feature of Twinkle is that it uses GPS to show you Tweeters who are nearby, which is surprisingly interesting even though they are complete strangers. Also supports picture tweets.
Link
If you’re like me, you’ve imported your contact list from Gmail which means thousands of names & email addresses you don’t really care about – ugh what a mess! What i am now doing is trying to maintain proper groups for family, friends & business contacts. So how do you get rid of all the clutter? First get the contacts you care about into an address book group – doesn’t matter what you call it. In my case i called it “Friends & Family”. Then create a smart group that looks for your contacts that are NOT in your groups. Go into that smart group, select everything (CMD+A) and delete. You now how have a nice clean address book which will sync between your iphone / mac / pc.
Rogers voice/data plans are horrible. With no competition in Canada, Rogers is quite frankly gouging consumers but it doesn’t really matter… people are still going to be lined up on Friday morning, myself included. Here’s why:
No sign of the iPhone, even a site search came up empty.
