Tag: iPhone - Page 11 - UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

iPokédex updated

I’ve just added some updates to the iPokédex today, inspired (as was the iPokédex) itself by questions my son asked that I couldn’t answer.

The search page now offers a “special evolution conditions” dropdown menu, allowing you to see at a glance all of the various special evolution conditions that exist and, with a click, get a list of the Pokémon affected. (So now he knows which Pokémon evolve with Thunderstone.)

I also added a link to a handy battle chart on the “sources” page, although I would like to add a direct capability to select a type (or click the type on the Pokémon’s detail page) and instantly see all of the details about that type’s strengths and weaknesses. That’ll be version 1.3.

The iPokédex is here!

Yes, I am into Pokémon. Way more than any 34-year-old could possibly justify. At least I have a kid I can use as my excuse. But it’s getting pretty serious. First the DS video games, now the trading card game, and of course I will sometimes watch the TV show and DVDs with him.

If you know anything about Pokémon (or, for those of you over the age of 10, who don’t), you know there are a lot of them. In fact, the sheer, staggering proliferation of them seems to be the main point, or at least a shrewd marketing tactic. As a result, there’s a lot of information to know about them, and thus arose the idea of the “Pokédex,” or Pokémon Index. The Pokédex is both an element in the games and the TV show, and a tool for fans, to store and retrieve information about all of the various Pokémon.

That’s all well and good, but what I really wanted was a version that was always at my fingertips, i.e. a version that works on my iPhone. Strangely there seemed to be no iPhone-friendly Pokédex out there. I can understand why an official one wouldn’t exist, what with Nintendo’s reluctance to license their brands to other hardware manufacturers (a smart move when you consider the disaster that resulted the one and only time they tried it), and especially when you consider that the iPhone is now essentially a competitor to the Nintendo DS.

Anyway… the point of all of this is that I’ve built my own iPhone-friendly Pokédex, which I am oh-so-creatively calling the iPokédex. Don’t bother going to ipokedex.com though. (Yeah, I have no idea either.) I may eventually register a unique domain name for it (assuming I don’t get sued in the meantime), but for now you can find it here at this relatively pithy URL:

room34.com/pokemon

Enjoy!

Technology Large and Small

Here I sit in the living room, tentatively tapping out a blog entry on a tiny on-screen keyboard in the new iPhone version of WordPress. (So far, so good.) Meanwhile, the kids are watching a “Lazy Town” DVD on our new, gigantic 42-inch LCD HDTV, purchased last weekend. It’s an interesting study in technological contrasts. These days, everything’s profoundly huge or tiny, depending on the need for mobility. Nothing too deep, I know, but it’s cast in bold relief for me at the moment. Plus, it was a good excuse to test the iPhone app… and to post a photo of the giant television.

No, iPhone, my house is not located in the middle of the Arctic Ocean

It goes without saying that I love my iPhone. I can geek out on just about any Apple device but the iPhone trumps them all. Yes, when I first heard the rumors circulating early last year that an Apple cell phone was in the works, I dismissed and denied them. “Impossible. That sounds totally stupid and Apple would never do something that totally stupid.” Of course, not only was I staggeringly wrong in my assumptions about the device, but by the end of the keynote I was already coveting one.

Fast forward to March of this year. Although no official word had yet come out that a 3G iPhone was on the way, it was fairly obvious. Nonetheless, the time was right, and I had to move on it, so I bought an iPhone while my window of opportunity was open. I certainly haven’t regretted it, and I admit I’m pleased that the 3G isn’t a revolutionary leap forward. That its most interesting feature — the new software — is fully compatible with the old iPhone means that not only did I not regret not getting a new iPhone this past weekend, it meant that in some sense I did get a new iPhone this past weekend. And it’s what I was waiting for since March.

But, sadly, the most peculiar flaw in the iPhone’s software, for me anyway, endures.

The Google Maps app has a cool little button that, when tapped, triangulates your current location from cell tower and public Wi-Fi hot spot data. Awesome. And it almost always works. But the one place I’ve discovered so far that it absolutely does not work is in my own house! For some reason, whenever I’m at home and I tap that button, I am dropped deep in the frigid depths of the Arctic Ocean beyond the northern coast of Alaska.

Now, given the fact that the map uses (*gack!*) Mercator projection, it’s darn near impossible to tell where exactly that’s supposed to be when you get that far up there. My guess is it’s simply dropping me into the default location it returns when both latitude and longitude come up null… probably 90 degrees north 180 degrees east (i.e. the “upper left” corner of the map, at least in terms of the coordinates they actually plot).

I am decidedly unhappy about this, far beyond any rational justification. That’s because it taps into my absurd and long-standing fear of blank spots on maps.

Room 34 on iPhone

I finally got myself an iPhone on Thursday. In fact tomorrow I will have two, which is one more than I need (and is also a story for another post), but the point right now is that I finally have an iPhone.

Naturally one of the first things I did with the iPhone was take a look at how room34.com looks on the iPhone. And since the iPhone’s Safari browser works pretty well, it looked fine. But since it’s optimized for a 1024×768 display, it also was a tad small.

By now I am all set to create an iPhone-friendly version of the site, but since it’s built on WordPress, I was pretty sure someone would already have created an iPhone-friendly theme, and sure enough, someone did. But they actually went one step further and built it as a plug-in, so you can keep your regular theme for computer-based visitors and mobile users will automatically see the mobile version. Nice!

It’s a bit plain for my tastes, and it doesn’t account for the fact that I’ve built my own navigation bar and menu system for browsing the non-blog pages of my site, but it’s a start. I plan to customize it over the next week or so to look more Room 34-ish, and to include all of the necessary navigation.