See, the basic principles of games like (Desktop) Tower Defense are what make them so addicting. As such, tower defense’s rules are simple to understand: build a maze of different weapons which the enemy - in case of Fieldrunners a varying number of ground and air units - has to walk through or fly over. (more…)

I recently looked for a way to get to my iDisk (part of MobileMe) from my iPhone and found a free app on Apple’s App Store, called MobileFiles which does exactly that.

MobileFiles can access your local files on the iPhone and multiple MobileMe iDisks, including your friends public folders. When you drill down to an actual file in the folder structure you can view many of the documents. (more…)

When Steve Jobs entered the stage today one of the first things to appear on the screen was “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated”. Anyone saying he’s got no sense of humor: shut up, now!

But he didn’t wait long until he got to the meat of the show. The first announcement was that NBC is returning to iTunes. This means all the Heroes, BSG and 30 Rock loving people can get their fix now online at Apple again. And another good thing about the TV shows: they’ll be available in HD for 2.99 a pop (SD still at 1.99) and watchable on your Mac, thus not limited to the Apple TV like the HD movies. (more…)

Last tuesday I spent a rather long day in Berlin. Actually it wasn’t exactly Berlin which made the day long, it was - again - Cologne and its black hole called public transportation or short KVB. Coming out of the plane at Cologne airport - by the way: that pilot must have been mental - I went directly to the trainstation. Of course I didn’t really think about the train timing here, as they are just always late, but that’s the Deutsche Bahn and we’re kind of used to it. In the end the train came 10 minutes too late. The signs at the stations didn’t show this, even two Bahn workers who waited for the train looked suspicious at the dark tunnel. A quick look at the iPhone app that has (allegedly) every station in Germany showed the 10 minute late-ness.

If you ever come to Germany and own an iPhone get the Fahrplan app from the App Store. If you’re going to Berlin also get the Berlin Trip Planner. This one even searches for nearby stations. (more…)

After the first days of using the iPhone 2.0 software - which I use in combination with the MobileMe service - there obviously still are problems with the “push” service. At some point my iPhone doesn’t sync with the service anymore. The only solution is to reboot the phone. (more…)

I read and heard various opinions in the past few days since the “iPhone dev-team” released the updated tools for doing the things above. (Granted, unlocking the 3G iPhone isn’t yet possible.) Most of the people obviously think these things don’t matter anymore.

But they still do, maybe even more than before. It’s not about the new phone, but the old. Apple sold millions of these and they won’t go away soon. Especially the people exchanging their old for the new will want to sell their phones, for example on eBay. Are the buyers of these old phones going to use a new official plan by AT&T, T-Mobile, etc? They’ll probably want to stick to their current provider.

If they want to do this, there needs to be at least the activation and unlock, which now exists. Jailbreaking? Not so much. The App Store still has its problems, but once everything is working smoothly the jailbreak apps will only be a small niche market for apps that Apple doesn’t allow. But how long do you think Apple will keep the route of, for example, not allowing a video recording app? My guess is as good as yours, but with a growing user base the pressure for obvious applications like that will increase. The same goes for true navigation solutions like TomTom.

Unlocking will also stay important because of the growing number of business users who stay in various countries and have different SIM cards to avoid the crazy roaming charges. Or think about how many people you know who already have two phones. Why not use the 3G phone for surfing while you can save battery life on the old phone you use just for calls?

So, activation hacks and unlocks are here to stay. The phones will change owners who might want to change providers.

This post was written entirely on the phone using the WordPress app. It works but it’s not a great experience.

Testing the new WordPress for iPhone app on my - guess what - iPhone. Looks good so far!

Update:
After the initial impressions you quickly realise the shortcomings and things that need to be done to the app until it does all the important things. For example moderating comments or being able to change things in your blog such as de-/activating plugins without the need of Safari.

Also I’d to be able to arrange my photos in posts how I want them to appear. Just like in the normal web interface. Oh, btw, anyone got a good gallery replacement? The stock 2.6 gallery which you can see below isn’t really nice.

But for a 1.0 release WordPress for the iPhone does the basic stuff right, which is posting an entry and inserting photos. The latter isn’t beautiful but it gets the job done. One more thing: using the Twitter tools plugin always creates the “New blog post”-tweet even though you haven’t yet published the post. So if you see random posts/tweets around the web containing “!$title$!” you know where they might be coming from.