Zephyrus of the Anemoi

The iPhone has been for some time the perfect device for a number of different applications, though not all of them seem as readily obvious up front. However, once the first board games began appearing on the device, it became quite clear that asynchronous multiplayer turn-based games would be a perfect fit. UniWar, Monopoly, Lux. All have been fairly successful implementations of turn-based gaming on the iPhone.

However, the iPhone truly excels when multiple versions of the same product exist and can compete for your hard-earned money. This recently became the case when NewToy Inc. challenged the reigning heavyweight in the board games on iPhone arena, EA. The board game at stake? Scrabble.

Here’s a breakdown of the two versions:

Scrabble – The heavyweight champ — EA brought this game to Facebook as an app and then put it on the iPhone and tied the two together. This was kind of a big deal, as that meant that the number of potential opponents grew much larger thanks to the larger userbase of Facebook. Another nice feature of this version of the game is that the app can actually show you what your highest-scoring move is at any time. The down-side? You might be tempted to let the game play itself, and may account for the reason that the only game I was able to find currently available said “no smartphones allowed”. All-in-all, this is a rather impressive application visually and its feature-set has piqued my interest for sometime. If you love Scrabble, and you want to play with friends that don’t have iPhones, then this is the app for you.

Words With Friends – The challenger — When I saw this app announced today, I did a double-take. First of all, it came from the team that brought you the highly-acclaimed Chess With Friends. Secondly, it was gorgeous in its simplicity. With the same basic interface as Chess With Friends, and very basic interface for the game itself, it managed to completely recreate the game of Scrabble without actually looking like a Scrabble board (an important piece of the puzzle, as EA has the rights to the Scrabble artwork and would very likely defend them vigorously). Notifies you when it is your turn via e-mail, just like Chess With Friends (a feature that I can find no notice of for EA’s Scrabble, though surely it’s an oversight and is on its way).

Ideally, I’d like to see push notification for both apps, but in its current state, I’ll accept what they give me. So long as I can play Scrabble without having to pick up all those tiles I knock on the floor when I “accidentally” throw the board across the room in frustration, I’ll be happy.

Yesterday, I talked about one of the more “hidden” features of iPhone OS 3.0, HTTP Live Streaming. While I posted a link to a site that breaks down the tech behind the feature, I hadn’t actually had an opportunity to see it in action. So today, I decided to do a quick Google search and discovered two separate sites that allow you to play with this awesome, awesome new feature.

The first is from Inlet Technologies, who partnered with Akamai to create this. Now, if you’re on your iPhone, you’ll see the site proper. If, however, you’re using your desktop computer, you will see a different format of the site and you cannot watch any of the live streaming video, only video on demand. However, from the iPhone, it is easy to fire up a stream from NASA TV and just watch an endless stream of video.

The other site is not yet publicly available, but it seems that getting into the beta merely requires submitting your info and waiting for a response. You can do that here.

If you don’t have an iPhone, or if Akamai’s site doesn’t seem to be working properly for you (which might happen if you’re not using Safari 4 and the latest version of QuickTime), then you can visit this site to see an embedded video of the tech in action.

Welcome to the future. I’ll take my flying car, now.

I know, I know. I promised I’d get these to you yesterday. But I was busy. Honest. I was definitely not playing Boom Blox and watching Torchwood.

Anyway, if you’re like me, you’re always looking for a way to reduce the number of things you have to carry around. Likewise, if you’re like me, you’re constantly trying to make your iPhone be the only thing you have to grab when you walk out of the house. If the DMV ever lets you get a digital driver’s license app for the iPhone, my wallet is history.

I picked up the latest in wallet- and keychain-reducing apps yesterday, and believe me when I tell you that this is bound to be one of my most used apps.

Currently, I’m a Blockbuster Total Access subscriber. All my friends use NetFlix, but I use Blockbuster for a couple of reasons. One, I can take movies I’ve received in the mail and exchange them at the store for an instant free rental. I used to be able to get the next movie in my online queue immediately, but they’ve since changed that behavior so that you can keep the movie rented from the store for as long as you want. Second, I get two free video game rentals every month. The rentals can actually be used on anything in the store, but I prefer to rent video games, as I already get plenty of movies. Before I go to the store, I download the coupon to my iPhone (as it’s just a bar code generated as a JPG). Some days, if the iPhone feels I am worthy, the clerk can even scan the barcode right off my screen instead of typing in the number. Of course, I still need to get my Blockbuster card out of my wallet so it can be scanned, otherwise I can’t actually rent anything.

Enter CardStar. This application lets you pick any of those pesky little keychain shopper discount cards, membership cards that have a barcode on them to scan, and really any other series of letters and numbers you’d like, and store them on your iPhone, where they can be scanned right off the screen. Sounds cool, right?

So far, the only drawback is that the app doesn’t always succeed at automatically deciding which barcode language it should display it in. But, as long as you’ve got the original card, it’s super-easy to just test the different options and examine the card to see which one matches. I haven’t tested it in the real world, yet, but I have scanned the images with the barcode reader on my computer to determine that it works perfectly.

The catch? Some cards don’t say what the number on your card is, requiring you to either know how to read barcodes yourself, or have a barcode scanner on a computer that you can use to determine the correct numbers to enter into your iPhone. Still, though, if it just gets those pesky member discount cards off your keychain, I’d say it’s worth it.

Also, it’s free.

Today has been an almost non-stop day of awesome on the Interwebs. So before I begin my bombardment of all things iPhone, I thought I’d give the rest of you some entertaining and/or informative links (some of which may still pertain to the iPhone).

With that out of the way, let’s get started, shall we?

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Google has been hard at work on the development of some awesome new technologies in preparation for the ratification of the final HTML 5 standard. In the interest of viewing 3D graphics directly inside of a web browser, a proposed open standard for doing so is currently being developed. Called O3D, it allows you to view gorgeous 3D graphics from inside your web browser, without ever having to fire up another application. While it currently requires you to install a plug-in, I believe the ultimate goal is to have it become a part of HTML 5 before ratification so that all HTML 5 compatible web browsers will be able to pull it off out of the box. Check out the demo site here.

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Speaking of HTML 5 and the reason that I discovered O3D, Google has also posted a demo page of what YouTube will look like once HTML 5 is complete and Flash will no longer be required to quickly & easily embed video. If your browser supports the HTML 5 draft (Safari 4, Firefox 3.5, Google Chrome), then check this out. While the site looks much the same, you’ll notice that right-clicking on the video no longer brings up the Flash Player contextual menu, indicating that that video is playing entirely through the browser’s built-in capabilities (no plug-in required). This will greatly reduce the memory footprint of your browser and should speed up your computer considerably when visiting sites that were formerly very Flash heavy and can move to HTML 5 methods, instead.

Also, if you were interested in seeing what O3D could do, but don’t feel like installing the plug-in, the YouTube demo I’m talking about is a walkthrough of the O3D demo page.

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This particular clip is more entertaining due to the fact that Steve Wozniak is in a low-budget, body shop commercial. Since he’s hilarious, I recommend taking a gander.

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Also, Rule 34 has no exceptions. Moving on.

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Now, I love me some giant robots. I always have, and I always will. I even liked that movie Robot Jox, and it was frakkin’ terrible. No, really. Just awful. But, it had giant robots. So I loved every minute of it. The exception to that rule is when giant robots are combined with Michael Bay. Cause then you get “Michael Bay Blows Up Egypt in Slow Motion” (commonly known as Transformers 2), which is utter crap and painful to watch. That being said, one of my favorite uses of giant robots is to put gamers in control of them so they can destroy anything and everything they see. MechAssault on the Xbox was one of my favorite games. Chromehounds was pretty cool, as well, though a lot less frenetic. However, all current-gen mech games have a grand-daddy. And that game is MechWarrior. Well good news to all of you that have played it, and to those of you that just plain love giant robots. MechWarrior is getting a reboot.

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And lastly, in this long line of crazy, ridiculous, nerdery: iPhone 3.0 has a feature that has been kept quiet until today. That feature is HTTP Live Streaming. Now some of you are going to say, “What?” Others will say, “Who cares?” Still more of you will say, “My iPhone already does streaming.” To all of you I say, “Shut up and let me finish!”

HTTP Live Streaming is a technology that should finally allow for a standards-based streaming method for video content (this goes back to HTML 5 and Google’s YouTube demo of said feature). Essentially, what it means is that video content can be downloaded in 10 second chunks and then played back, meanwhile grabbing the next chunk or two or three before the current chunk is finished being viewed. On top of that, instead of sending the video using technology that is consistently blocked by most firewalls, or requires a plug-in and therefore eats up system resources, HTTP Live Streaming will be sent to your computer using the same packets that web sites are downloaded to your browser with and will (hopefully) be a part of the HTML 5 standard when ratified. The best part is that if you switch from EDGE, to 3G, and then to Wi-Fi while watching a video, rather than having to re-buffer the clip because you changed network types, your iPhone will be able to automatically grab the chunk that befits the quality that will give you the best image without stuttering for your current connection. And since the sections are only 10 seconds a piece, you don’t have to wait long for the quality to improve if you suddenly find yourself in range of a Wi-Fi network while watching your favorite web series.

The best part? If this tech takes off, there’s a chance that a television network could use it to stream their channels directly to your Apple TV, allowing you to subscribe to only the channels (or shows) that you want without having to pay for an expensive cable TV or Dish subscription to get 10 channels you want and 100 you don’t.

To read more about this, go here.

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That’s all for now, folks. If I have time today, I hope to hit you up with some reviews and recommendations of the iPhone apps I’ve been spending the most time with as of late (or at least that I think are awesome and feel you should, too). See ya starside!

First, let me apologize for my hiatus. The reason for it is the very announcement I will be making during this post. Before that though, I bring you a warning.

It’s been said in the past that I talk far too much about the iPhone on my blog. Unfortunately, that’s because I’m very passionate about the device and the apps that are available for it. Those of you that don’t yet own one, I’m hoping my words will push you over the EDGE (see what I did there?).

I’m telling you this, because you’re about to be bombarded with a lot of technical info, some about the iPhone, some about various other geek-related things. But before I do that, I wanted to make an announcement.

Liam Dean Cash
was born on June 16th, 2009
at 9:01 pm
He weighed 8 lbs 3.6 oz and was 20.5 inches long

This is what he looks like now:

Isn’t he adorable?

End of line.