i d/loaded the freebie version of words with friends on oisín’s recommendation and we had a few games of scrabble over the intarwebs.

it’s actually quite a good wee game. if you’ve ever played scrabble before, the interface is pretty self-explanatory. drag your tiles onto the board, to make your word and then it’s the next player’s go. you can pinch to zoom in or out of the board - although this only seems to have two settings; close-up or full board. it’s not a controllable zoom:

words with friends offers you the ability to play with people over the internet; either challenge a friend, or let the game find you a random opponent. i’ve not tried the ‘random opponent’ setting yet, so cannae vouch for whether it works. you need to register on the developer’s website to play over the internet but, if i rem correctly it only asks you for a username and email address, so no biggy. there’s also a ‘pass and play’ option [shouldn’t that be ‘play and pass’ ?], where you can play with a ‘real’ person sitting next to you, by passing the ipod/iphone back and forth between you.

i’ve been playing quite a few of these pass and play games with the missus and, while still good fun, the pass and play games show up what, for me, is the major problem with words with friends - the game needs a wifi connection to work at all - even if you’re not playing over the internet. i think it stores the dictionary used to check words against back at HQ and, after every move you make, there is a brief pause while it checks the word and awards your score. if your wifi goes down [as happened to me once, mid-game] or you dinnae have an internet connection in the first place, the game will just time out either before even starting, or while checking a word you’ve played.

this is a shame really, as it limits the usefulness of the game as a ‘travel scrabble’ substitute. the other night, while waiting in the pizza shop, for our luvverly pizzas to be made, i sez to the missus ‘let’s have a quick game of scrabble, while we wait, then..’ before remembering that we wouldnae be able to play, without an intarwebs connection. :doh:

two other, less important, niggles with pass and play are:

* you cannae give your opponent a name. so it’s always yourself vs ‘player 2’. t’would be nice if you could personalise that a bit more.

* as soon as you submit your word and get your score, the opponent’s tiles appear, ready for you to pass the ipod back to them for their turn. if you were a scrabble master-strategist, knowing which letters your opponent has could help you plan where to play your own. i’d like to see some kind of intermediate screen come up after your go, which the opponent would have to dismiss to play their go. that way you wouldnae see each others letters.

* t’would also be nice if pass and play allowed you to play against more than one opponent at a time, so you could have a proper family game of scrabble.

in use, i’ve found the interface does tend to get ‘stuck’ fairly often. but this is usually fixed by clicking onto one of the other screens and then back to the board again. one of those aforementioned other screens is a chat one, wherein you get a mini ichat like interface, where you can taunt your opponent. all good fun!

after playing a couple of games with the freebie version, i got pissed off with the annoying adverts popping up every time i reopened the app to make my move, so i splashed out my £1,79 for the full version. apart from the ads, they seem identical. so if you can tolerate adverts [i cannae - i bloody hate the things!], then you can stick with the free version.

one other point: i’m still not sure about the dictionary the app uses to check against. it seems to have a pretty big vocabulary and will get most words you play. i have however had one or two words disallowed, which i thought were kosher and conversely have had one or two words allowed which i thought were a bit dubious. but on the whole, it seems pretty comprehensive. i’ve yet to get a combination of letters which will allow me to play a word like ‘colour’, ‘harbour’, ‘centre’… etc. so i dinnae know if the game will favour american over english, or vice versa… or allow both. but if i get a ‘proper english’ spelling of a word disallowed, you can guarantee i’ll be back here, madra-ranting! :grin:

i think this is a really good wee game, but i’m going to knock off two points for the fact that it’s unplayable without an internet connection - even in pass and play mode, which severly limits its usability.

COST: free [ad supported], £1,79 [no ads version]
RATING:

draw a flag - flag recognition app.

i downloaded this, just out of idle curiosity, when it was reduced to free one day [usual price 59p]. the premise is pretty simple; you use the [very primitive] painting tools to paint a flag on screen and the app identifies it for you - or so the theory goes.

as an actual ‘flag identifying’ app, the premise is pretty idiotic to start with. it’d be far quicker and more accurate to use some kind logic to identify a flag in response to answering some questions, than to rely on people drawing it with the clunky painting tools and limited colour palette provided. but i thought i’d give the app a whirl, as it might be a bit of fun.

i found that the app is pretty rubbish. it can identify flags with bold colours in horizontal or vertical bands [ie. tricolour flags] fairly well, but draw in anything more complex and the app hasnae a clue. the algorithm that it uses seems to take little notice of the combination of both colours and shapes you draw, seeming to prefer instead to pick at random something vaguely the same shape, or something using vaguely the same colours as what you drew.

didn’t it do well?! :loon:

it’s good for a quick laugh - i could see the potential in creating a gallery of its most way-off-the-mark guesses - but gets boring very quickly. i deleted it after about 20mins. even for a freebie it’s not much use. i cannae see why anyone would actually pay for something this pointless.

COST: free [usually 59p]
RATING:

OK - here’s one i havenae had a chance to try yet, for obvious reasons. but it sounds interesting.

12 days of christmas - apple giveaway app

it’s a promo apple are running from 26th dec - 6th jan, whereby they’re giving away a free *something* in the itunes store every day. no doubt the freebies will turn out to be pants, as they usually are with this kind of thing. but it’s still a nice idea and will have you checking back with the app every day to see what you’re getting.

at the moment the app is just showing a countdown to when the giveaway starts:

XE currency - mobile version of the XE website.

not much to say about this one, really. anyone who’s ever needed to do currency conversions [ie. anyone who’s ever tried to make sense of us appletalkers whingeing about the cost of things in our respective countries] will be aware of xe.com - *the* currency conversion website.

XE currency is a mobile app which draws on the conversion rates from the site to do currency conversions. it’s a freebie. it’s great looking. it’s a lot less hassle tapping a quick currency conversion into your ipod than either trawling the web, or firing up OSX calculator and its clunky currency conversion.

it’s also free

what are you waiting for? - download it now.

COST: FREE
RATING:

knot guide - a knot tying guide

once a boy scout, always a boy scout!

being an outdoorsy, camping type of guy, this is the kind of ‘useless’ info i love collecting. i couldnae resist this app, when i accidentally tripped over it [like a discarded piece of rope! :grin: ] in the app store. a measley £1,19 for a fount of information that would keep any ray mears happy for a month.

the app contains an ever-growing database [all the reviews say it’s regularly updated with new knots] of knots for various purposes. each knot has an info screen, telling you what it’s used for and a series of photgraphs [sometimes using overlaid arrows] showing you how to tie the knot.

completely and utterly about as ‘non-essential’ as you can get, but i love it and feel strangely comforted by the fact that, if i ever get washed up on a desert island with my ipod somehow still working, i’ll know just what techniques to use when lashing my life-raft together.

willlll-ssssssooonnnnnnnn! :grin:

1: select knots by name or category

2: choose a knot and view info about it. click on ‘tie the knot’ for instructions

3: the good ol’ clove hitch. step by step photos [the hi-tech approach to what i learnt in the scouts as a kid; “the rabbit comes up out of his hole, runs round the tree twice and…” :grin: ]

4: clove hitch - step 2

5: clove hitch - step 3

5: clove hitch - step 4

6: there’s also a ‘glossary’ which explains the terms relating to knot tying. screenshot included here purely for the reason it includes the word ‘frapping’ :grin: :thumbsup:

no reason not to give this a five really, but i’m holding back the extra star until i see whether the ‘regular updates with new knots added’ claims are true.

COST: £1,19
RATING:

tab toolkit - guitar tab app

another consequence of my previously mentioned [and yet another] midlife crisis induced re-awakening of interest in learning to play the guitar.

this is a mobile app from the people who make the guitar pro software. that, in itself, was not much of a recommendation, as i’ve tried a few versions of guitar pro in my time and always found it one of the most unstable apps i’ve ever owned [albeit quite nice when it actually manages to run for more than five mins, without falling on its arse!]

the mobile version disnae offer all the features of the desktop app. it is primarily a guitar tab viewer. you can view guitar tabs in a variety of formats, but the most useful are tabs in guitar pro’s own format. viewing a tab saved in this format, allows you to ‘play’ it [at user controllable speeds] and the tab will scroll in the app window, whilst playing a midi-sounding rendition of that tune. you can also bring up a fretboard which shows the fingering for the tab, as it plays.

so far, i’ve not done too much with this app, apart from downloading a few tabs and loading them in [like a lot of ipod apps, you can connect your ipod via USB cable and then ‘browse’ to the app in a web browser and upload/download files in a web interface]. therefore, i dinnae feel overly qualified to judge on whether it manages to be more stable than its desktop counterpart. but i like what i see so far. i’ll give it a four for now and revise up or down as needed, once i’ve spun it round the block a few times.

another quite expensive app, this one - weighing in at £5,99, but the reviews were almost universally positive and it does seem to be the most feature-laden guitar tab app out there. most of the rest are just glorified text file readers.

COST: £5,99
RATING: [based on *very* minimal usage]