Tag Archives: iPhone

SimCity for iPhone: ASOD (Advisor Screen of Death)

I was ecstatic when I discovered SimCity for iPhone. It is, without a doubt, the best “deep” game for the iPhone that I’ve encountered. (Stuff like Bejeweled is great too, but they’re in a completely different league.)

I have long been a fan of the SimCity series. I haven’t really played SimCity 4 much, mainly because it seems that with each new version, Maxis EA gives the Mac version less and less attention. Or, more accurately, they give MacKiev even less time and a stingier budget to do the port from the PC version. So, it’s bloated and sluggish and slow. But for me, SimCity 3000 was great, and that is the edition that was the basis for the iPhone version.

I love it. It is unbelievable that they could pull off something like this on the iPhone, but they did it. Mostly. It’s great, but it’s buggy.

The worst bug I’ve encountered, twice now, happens occasionally when clicking one of the advisor links in the news ticker at the bottom of the screen. What you get is… ugh… this:

Sim City Advisor Screen of Death (ASOD)

In the spirit of the classic Windows 95 BSOD, I’m calling this bug the ASOD: Advisor Screen of Death. I have no experience with iPhone programming, but I suspect that the text you see is the variable names or some kind of parsed placeholder text where the actual advisor message is supposed to appear. Unfortunately, not only is the text not being properly loaded, the actions for the buttons aren’t, either, meaning that once this appears, there’s no way to make it go away… at least, no way other than clicking the iPhone’s Home button, which does a fine job of returning you to the home screen… but it quits SimCity in the process, and if you hadn’t saved in, say, the entire amount of time you had just been playing the game, it can be incredibly frustrating.

So… if you like SimCity and you own an iPhone or iPod Touch, by all means, buy this game. You will enjoy it immensely. Just remember two things:

1. Save. Often.
2. Think twice. Skip advice. (Or at least approach your advisors through the “…” menu instead of the ticker.)

Update: A few other bugs, or at least flaws, I’ve noticed: the city’s population seems to fluctuate wildly from month to month, with no logical explanation; demand for the different zones seems to bear no relation whatsoever to the tax rates for those zones, but almost seems to just follow an arbitrary pattern of ebb and flow; and the budget numbers do not adjust month-to-month, making it really hard to track current revenue levels. Maybe this last one is the same in the computer version too, but the budget seems to require a lot more close attention on the iPhone.

Real cupcakes that I would like less than the “Cupcake in Bloom”

I didn’t think it was possible, but I’ve discovered something even worse than the “Cupcake in Bloom” from 1-800-Flowers. I ranted about this a few weeks back, but in case you missed it and somehow haven’t seen ads for it plastered in every public space in your city, this is what it looks like:

img_0652

Pretty bad. And for everyone I’ve talked to about it, the consensus is that we’d all prefer a $1 real cupcake to a $25 bouquet made to look like flowers.

That’s how I felt, for sure. Until tonight at Target, when I saw this:

They're cupcakes! They only LOOK like dogs! Isn't that cute and/or clever?

I stand corrected. And this is now the second time I’ve surreptitiously taken a photo with my iPhone inside the same Target store for use on this website. I wonder how long it’ll be before they have their stoner security guard start tailing me when I come in. Maybe I can buy him off with dog-shaped cupcakes.

The iPhone version of Amazon.com is better than the regular version of Amazon.com

Amazon.com (as if you don’t have it bookmarked) is (probably, still) the undisputed king of the mountain of e-commerce. Even though many of Amazon’s former brick-and-mortar partners, like Target, have since gone off and launched their own (usually better) individual e-commerce sites, Amazon is still at the heart of it all and is the go-to choice for buying… well… just about anything online. These days, as I’ve noted before, I use it mostly to buy MP3 downloads, which despite my usual criticism of Amazon in general (wait for it!), offers a great selection, better prices, and higher quality than iTunes… and no DRM.

But that’s not my point today. My point today is to address that one usual criticism I have of Amazon: their design sucks. And I am talking about both the surface-level graphic design and layout of their pages, and also much of their application flow as well. There are two main ways in which I think their design fails: there’s too much of everything, everywhere, all the time on their site, and (consequently, perhaps) many options that I think should be prominent and visible are instead hidden in microscopic type at the bottom of the page.

Case in point, from the Amazon MP3 realm: as a web developer, I’m constantly tinkering with web pages in ways ordinary users do not, and as a result I am frequently clearing my cache and my cookies. Now I could be careful and just delete the cookies from the sites I’m working on, but I’m usually in the middle of something and therefore in too much of a hurry, so I just delete them all. (And, yes, waste a lot more time in the long run retyping all of my usernames and passwords for the sites I visit… but at least that helps me remember my passwords!) As a result, I lose the cookie that tells Amazon that yes, dammit, I did already download and install your MP3 Downloader app so I don’t need to download it again! The first couple of times this happened, I was dumbfounded, and frustrated, and I re-downloaded and reinstalled the application, even though I knew I already had it. Finally I scrolled down and discovered a sentence in 8-point type telling me that if I already have the downloader app, I should “click here” to activate it in this browser.

Yeah, thanks.

Which brings me finally to my point. Today I finally took the plunge (what with it being Black Friday and all), and bought myself an XBOX 360. Later in the day I was sitting inside a Caribou Coffee (which itself was inside a Lunds grocery store), enjoying a Cinnamon Wild (though not as much as I would have enjoyed a Gingerbread Latte), and I decided to check the IGN Reviews app on my iPhone to see what good games were coming out for the 360, the better to fill up my Amazon wish list (one of the primary reasons Amazon is still so central to the e-commerce universe).

Once I had picked a couple of games I felt that, yes, I wish for, I decided to go right to Amazon on my iPhone and add them to my wish list.

Many websites have decided to leverage the popularity of the iPhone and also to adapt themselves to its cramped 480×320 screen real estate, by developing iPhone-aware versions of their sites. They detect the browser is an iPhone, and so direct the user to a streamlined, stripped-down version of their site that will be more manageable on the iPhone’s screen.

And you know what? A lot of times, but perhaps none more so than is the case with Amazon, this streamlined, stripped-down version is in fact better than the usual bloated, overstuffed standard version of the site. If they want you to actually be able to go about your business with their sites on the iPhone, they have to stay focused and not waste a single pixel with distractions and clutter.

Sometimes the sites have predictable, distinct URLs for their iPhone versions. It’s common these days to preface the URL for a mobile (read: regular cell phone) version of a site with “m.” and occasionally then the iPhone version with “iphone.” But sadly Amazon’s URLs are as cluttered and inscrutable as many of their pages are, so an iPhone-specific Amazon URL was not immediately apparent to me, and beyond that it seems that their site is handling the iPhone version as a more integrated feature rather than a separate standalone version of their site.

Too bad, really, because if I could I think I would use the iPhone version of Amazon.com all the time.

(For what it’s worth, I am aware that Amazon’s iPhone version has existed for over a year; it’s just that I had never bothered to use it before today, and besides, most of the attention it received upon its debut focused negatively on the fact that it was un-iPhone-like, without also recognizing, positively, that it was un-Amazon-like.)

OK, this is how John Gruber makes $1750 a week on Daring Fireball

I’ve been reading Daring Fireball for a while now (long enough to have noticed and be relieved at the eventual removal of the questionable tagline, “Gay for Macs”), and I’ve enjoyed John Gruber’s pithy insights and diligent distillation of the daily deluge of Mac (and other stuff he’s, apparently, “gay for”) related news into a single useful stream of relevant information.

I’ve also been reading it long enough to know that its primary source of revenue is via a single weekly sponsorship, which culminates in a post touting the greatness of whatever it is you’re promoting via the sponsorship, and a link in his sponsorship archive. And for this he charges $1750 a week. That works out to $91,000 a year. Just for hawking someone else’s wares once a week. Not bad work if you can get it. But how can you get it? Well certainly not by describing your own writing as “blather” and then justifying that description by indiscriminately posting whatever prose crawled out of the dank, cobwebbed recesses of your brain. Trust me, I know.

I get it though. His insights are often brilliant. Case in point, today’s dismantling of my dreams of Flash for the iPhone. OK, I haven’t really dreamed of it. It would be nice, I suppose, but it’s been clear for a while that Apple had reasons beyond their spurious claims of poor performance for keeping Flash off the iPhone.

If you doubt that assessment, please do yourself a favor. Read Daring Fireball and then shut the hell up. I will now heed my own advice.

Presenting the most perverse (and brilliant) use of modern technology…

…in that it perfectly simulates ridiculously outdated technology.

Granted, if you weren’t a kid in the late ’70s or early ’80s, you probably aren’t interested in LED Football for the iPhone. But I had one of those old Mattel LED football games and, for some reason, I loved it. And I also love the developer’s sense of humor in the game description*:

Reach the end zone and you will hear the sweet sound of victory beeps. TOUCHDOWN! This is electronic sports at its best…. See the LED display, so bright and hi-tech.

*But I do not love the fact that iTunes doesn’t let you copy and paste description text. Boo!