Shin
Nov
24

Ikea for iPhone app

Ikea finally made an app for the iPhone. And it’s free.
That concludes the good news. The bad news is that it sucks in every way possible.
First of all, after you download the app and start it for the first time it says you first need to download a catalogue, which for the Netherlands is almost 60MB. I knew we were off on the wrong foot here. And it went downhill further. What you get is basically a glorified pdf viewer dressed up as an app. But with added functionality, you can click on the + next to products to se product information… yay… except that rarely works and most often you get an error page as demonstrated in the screenshots telling you the product information is not available.
So yeah, epic fail for Ikea, hopefully they’ll learn and eventually make a better version than this heap of crap.

Nov
21

Kingdom Conquest

Well hello stranger, where have you been so long. Out of nowhere Sega jumps on the iPhone bandwagon with a fresh new game, not a Sonic rehash, not Mega Drive classic port like Phantasy Star or Golden Axe, but a new game. And free too. Well freemium technically, but they’ve done it right. Unlike others Sega doesn’t actually let you cheat with their in game purchases or block you from unlocking any content unless you spend cold hard cash. So for all intents and purposes this really is free.

And it’s wonderful. It’s an MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game) where you have to build your kingdom, expand your territory, group with others in real time dungeons to defeat baddies and build up your monster army to fight in tactical combat. And there’s quests too.


Build your city, gather resources, research & train monsters.


Expand your territory, forge alliances and attack other players.


Unlock new monsters, train them and level them by attacking neighbouring lands.

No screenshot of the realtime battle, I already blew out my 5 daily tries before realizing I wanted to post about this. :D
It’s free, what are you waiting for? Get it!

And thank you Sega! Now make a new console please.

Nov
17

Another day you’ll never forget?

Really Steve? The Beatles catalogue on iTunes is a day I’ll never forget?
Maybe I’ll never forget it as the lamest most overhyped Apple announcement that left me totally unimpressed and disappointed.
How about going back to making spectacular announcements when you actually have something spectacular to present. Because this shit is getting old.
Maybe it’s a day YOU’ll never forget because it took you a bloody decade to get them to sign up, but for the rest of us… either we already have their music in mp3 or cd format, or we simply don’t care.

Nov
14

Ego

Nice little app that does exactly what it says on the proverbial box, it shows your webstats, be it from Google Analytics, Mint, FeedBurner, Squarespace, Tumblr, Twitter, Ember or Vimeo.
I’m not sure Ego is the most fitting name for the app though, ouch, I have a long way to go to get traffic back to what it once was. But it’s great eyecandy nonetheless, so if you like to track your online stats on your iPhone, this is the app to get.

Nov
10

Friends for iPhone

If I had more friends I’d be jumping for this app, very nicely done. If this works as advertised it’s going to get the top spot in sold apps in a day and stay there for quite some time. Yay for integration apps.

Sep
26

PHP5 on Snow Leopard

Using PHP5 under Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) was a bit of a pain thusfar, because you’re limited to either using the built in PHP5 or building it from scratch. The latter being not for the faint of heart and the first not being ideal either. Although the built in PHP5 is a big improvement over the one supplied with 10.5, it still is lacking some rather standard and useful libraries. With 10.5 this was easily remedied by installing Entropy’s PHP5 package, but that hasn’t been updated for 10.6 and it doesn’t look like it will any time soon.
Luckily someone stepped in to fill the void and built his own using Entropy’s build scripts. So you sort of get the Entropy build, except it works.
So thank you very much Taracque, and for the rest of you; go download it here:
http://taracque.hu/php5/

Aug
13

EpicWin

An iPhone app that’s a todo manager that works with rpg elements to motivate you to do your chores.
Sadly, I’m interested.

Aug
13

Unjailbroken

I have invented a new word. Maybe not. But yeah, this week I finally decided to jailbreak my iPhone using the new jailbreakme.com, which works as advertised. Simply go to the site using Safari on your iPhone and slide the slider to jailbreak. It’ll start working it’s magic and after a minute or so you’re done and you’ll have Cydia added as an app which you can use to tweak the crap out of your phone and add lots of apps.
This is however where I started getting an icky vibe as I added a few apps like LockInfo which is supposed to give you a nice screen with all your mail, calendar, phone and what not info, Android style. Except it didn’t work. Added a few more with varying results as well, but then when I wanted to check my mail the app was behaving oddly, not marking mails as read, not even opening some others. That was the final straw for me and I rolled back using iTunes restore to a nice pristine fully functional iOS 4.0.1. Maybe the jailbreak apps aren’t fully iOS 4 compatible yet, maybe I just had bad luck, but for me the biggest joy of the iPhone, or anything Apple really, is that it just works. This little side adventure reminded me a bit too much of olden linux and windows days where you have to tweak everything to get it working the way it’s supposed to.
And those days are, for me anyway, over.

Jul
30

Flipboard

Dammit. I’m sort of keeping a mental list of reasons I do and I don’t want an iPad. The reasons I don’t are mostly lack of money as well as preferring an iPhone4 to be honest, but other than that I really haven’t seen any killer apps yet. But this is just, for lack of better words, amazing. It can basically slurp your entire network and reading preferences and create an on the fly magazine custom tailored for you. I like. A lot. I also like the interaction options it presents. This redefines lounging. I just hope they’ll add rss later on as well.

Work in progress... not home!
Trying to get all/most of the new code working before I start on the eyecandy.