we rule from plus+

first i want to say that it’s radian’s fault that i’m hooked on this now. I wasn’t sure if this post should be an iPhone app review or if it should be a ‘favorite (or just new) time suck’ (see last one here). it’s a little of both.

we rule is a pretty cool little game created by plus+, that is basically a virtual kingdom that you build and manage. think of it as simpler sims for the iPhone. it’s pretty easy; you have land, a castle and some gold to begin with and you just start building. you add farms to grow and sell veggies for gold coins. you build houses so you can tax the residents that move in. you add shops, schools, mining camps  - that all make you money in the end - and decorate your land with trees, fences, banners and other medieval accoutrements.

my kingdom on we rule. don't let my handle fool you.

the funny thing about this game - and the one that draws you back - is that it takes time for things to happen. if you plant carrots it takes 24 hours for them to grow in order for you to sell them. strawberries take 12 hours. it takes 12 hours to mine gems and a few hours to produce clothes at the tailor’s. i find myself logging in just to collect taxes from my lowly peasants (work harder you bums, i need a bigger castle!) and to make sure that my crops don’t wither and die before i can sell them.

as all games on the iphone, i showed this to my daughter and she loves to play it although the time factor doesn’t give her quite the instant gratification. plus, she doesn’t actually have the phone in her hands when she needs to maintain the land. she was, by the way, the one who chose the user name when we registered for the game together.

radian's kingdom. all nice and orderly

we rule has a nice little interface and there’s also a social networking aspect that allows you to ‘hire’ your friends (or soon to be new virtual friends). new friends show up on the map and you can visit their kingdoms and see how they have them set up. radian has a wizard in his and i want one too, dammit. overall i’d give this game 3.5 stars out of 5. so come on, you know you want to join and be my medieval friend in our virtual serfdoms.

chromacircuit

we’re finally developing our first iphone app at visual mercenary group and that’s what led to the current favorite time suck. we’ve been talking about apps for a couple of years and have been part of the iphone developers group, but we just never really got around to it until now, when our friends at 4corners (see shca post) asked us to help them develop an app for one of their clients.

to make a long story short, i finally opened up xcode and started playing with the developers kit. apple really makes it easy, but still…not being an objective c developer has it’s drawbacks (and i don’t want to hear stories on 11 year olds programming iapps). so with my head exploding with code and model/view/controller logic i was bitching to my social network and vincent higgins pointed me to adobe.com, and the demos of CS5 which is slated for release next year. one of they key components of cs5 is that developers will be able to program in flash using actionscript3 and compile their work into an iphone app. well sign me up!

one of the lower chromacircuit levels

so while checking out the demo, i was led to the game chromacircuit by bowler hat games. bowler hat coded the game using flash cs5 and as3 from a pre-release of the software. so while that’s pretty cool in itself, the game is also great. and although us iphoners get to take it along with us, everyone else can still play on the web.

the object of the game is to rotate the elements in order to match the colors on all the sides. very simple yet very addicting. as the levels progress in difficulty, the elements also gain sides. it’s a really cool experiment in pattern recognition and gets addicting in trying to best the amount of moves required to finish. remembering which way to swipe on the iphone is a bit tricky and adds extra moves but it’s still great nonetheless. chromacircuit gets 4 out 5 stars for time suckiness. oh…and even cooler, you can download the source code and embed it on your own site for free!

photoshop mobile on iphone

photoshop mobile came out a few days ago at the iphone app store and although there was anticipation for a mobile app from adobe, this one doesn’t really satisfy. the paltry set of effects is actually quite disappointing, considering the amazing breadth of photoshop. my own personal bummer was that there were no layers - imagine something as cool as a single type layer where you can type a name (or phrase) and position it on a photo wherever you want.

the app allows you to open or take a photo via the camera. then gives you the choice of the crop/flip/rotate tool or 3 main sets of effects you can run. the choices are a little more than canned color overlays and a couple of blur effects - the blurs which I actually like a bit. I just wish that I could layer something over the blurry images. and c’mon adobe, do we really need the ’sketch’ effect? it doesn’t even look good. just for that alone i can’t really give it more than 2 out of 5 stars.

for now though, i think i’ll still use some of the other graphics apps - like doodle buddy - that i like (and my kid loves!) and then bring those images into ps mobile. but really, i’m already ready for the update. of course this is probably just adobe signaling the beginning of their cloud apps along with their online service at photoshop.com, but more on that later…