Rolando 2 out now on the App Store

Just in case you haven't yet heard, ngmoco has released Rolando 2 out into the App Store for the premium price of $9.99. The game's subtitled Quest for the Golden Orchid (in this one, you're rescuing a relic rather than a prince), and though it's not cheap by App Store standards, but on the other hand, it's as quality a game as you'll find on the iPhone. We were big fans of the first one, and the second one ups the ante with a brand new 3D look (though still the same great 2D gameplay), and lots more types of Rolandos to roll and jump and fly and drive around the more than 45 new levels. It's fair to say that if you liked the first one, you'll love this one, and if you've never tried rolling a Rolando around, this is a perfect opportunity to start.

There, unfortunately, no lite version of the second game yet, but there is a version of the first one to try, and there are lots of movies to watch over on ngmoco's site, so you can probably get the idea from there. If you're interested in gaming on the iPhone at all, Rolando's on the short list no matter what your tastes are.

Kaloki Adventure and Peggle on sale, plus free music

If you didn't jump to pick up Kaloki Adventure [App Store link] after our first look last week, now's your chance: the game is on sale today (not tomorrow, apparently -- you've got under 24 hours) for just $1.99, a buck cheaper than the usual $2.99 price. The game offers some fun but casual real-time strategy business simulation, so if your dream has ever been to own a burgeoning spaceport, they don't come cheaper than that.

And as an added bonus, NinjaBee is also offering a catchy tune from the game's soundtrack on their website for the low, low price of completely free. It's the jumpy, swingin' background music to the main gameplay, composed by Eric Nunamaker, who's apparently been working on video game music for quite a while.

Oh, and finally, while we're talking about awesome iPhone games on sale, Peggle is only a buck. 'Nuff said.

Special Ops [ iPhone ]

Digital Chocolate has nabbed the 24 license (along with a few sounds and music bits) from Fox, and they've released an iPhone game based on my favorite TV show ever. Unfortunately, things don't get quite as good as they probably should, but the run-and-gun gameplay mixes it up with a nice variety of minigames, so if you're a 24 completist (and have an iPhone -- apparently this doesn't work for iPod touch at the moment), it might be worth spending the $5.

If not, there's a "lite" version on the App Store which will take you through the game's first few "hours" (in reality, just a few minutes per segment) of stages. The game itself features Jack Bauer backed up by Chloe doing what else but saving Los Angeles from various terrorist threats. The grid-based action gameplay is simple but fun, and the shooter stages are broken up with encryption and driving minigames. None of it is brilliant, but just like the show, watching Jack Bauer kill bad guys is usually good enough.

It's too bad they didn't do more -- 24's strengths have always been in its breakneck story pace and twists and turns, and just from playing the first few hours in the lite version, this seems like a Jack-and-Chloe story only (Bill appears in a suit on the menu screen, so apparently he shows up later, in some role at old CTU). If there are any cool story twists or turns, they take place more than four hours in -- it would be great to see Michelle or even Nina (if this is before Day 3) again, but I doubt we get that. Still, it's got Jack killing and blowing stuff up, and that's never a bad thing.

iCombat's stats on app pirates

Miguel Sanchez-Grice, creator of the iCombat app (a remake of the old Atari game), sent us these stats on piracy of his app after writing a blog post about the same thing, and I find them fascinating. Instead of building DRM into his app, he just detected if the player was using a copy that wasn't from the App Store, and then forwarded them onto a web page that he could track. It seems like he equates unique visitors to his Pinch Media site as users (though he doesn't go into detail about exactly where those "Pinch Media New Uniques" numbers come from), and then subtracts legit app sales from those numbers to get the number of pirates. And while he says the numbers are lower than he expected, they seem pretty high to me: there is a substantial number of people out there using cracked apps.

Maybe this is strange to my point of view because I used to use hacked and cracked apps -- when I was in college and didn't have $50 to my name, much less to spend on the latest and greatest games (not to mention a line in to a fat campus Internet connection), warez was where I went. But nowadays I've got the money to do right by developers, and especially as cheap as things are in the App Store, piracy doesn't really seem like a viable route. But apparently for quite a few people, it is.

Miguel isn't that angry -- he believes that hackers are a bigger help (people tweeted a lot about playing the cracked app) than a hurt (he definitely doesn't equate all of those hacker numbers to lost sales). And he says that hackers are often early adopters -- look how many hackers jumped on the app right away, and then those numbers tailed off later on. But he does say is that the best solution is to create a lite version for apps detected as hacked, and then push for the upsell. In fact, he even tells us that one of his hackers has become a big evangelist for the app, creating demo videos and contests. Hackers and crackers are the folks who are most interested in getting to your app early and fast, and If you can convince them that it's worth it to pay the buck, or even just spread the word, they could serve you pretty well as a developer.

Starmap up for Arthur Clarke award

We've posted about Starmap before -- it's a full-featured map of the sky on your iPhone that will let you find stars, constellations, and "deep sky" objects in the blanket overhead. Despite a few glitches and slowdowns, the app is pretty popular, and now it could be the only iPhone app nominated for a Sir Arthur Clarke Award. The yearly awards ceremony recognizes notable contributions to space exploration, and this year's list of nominees includes Frederic Descamps, creator of Starmap, for Best Individual Achievement. He's got some rough competition: Richard Garriott, creator of videogames like Ultima Online and Tabula Rasa, is also in that category, presumably for his recent trip into space. But Garriott's in quite a few other categories, so the iPhone developer has at least a fighting chance.

But we're sure that, as the creator of an iPhone app, it's an honor just to be nominated. It's doubtful this is the last non-software award something released for the iPhone will be winning.

submission process

Jonathan Zdziarski, who has appeared on this pages before for other iPhone-related hijinx, has written an open letter to Apple about the AMBER Alert iPhone app he's written. Apparently he's worked in conjunction with government agencies to set up an iPhone app that can easily and quickly send sighting reports of children gone missing in the United States. And he's unhappy with Apple, because they haven't yet approved it.

His letter, which you can read in full over here, complains that we've got tons of fart apps already approved on the store, but his app still sits in approval purgatory. He actually sounds kind of selfish in the letter to me -- he says he doesn't care about how the App Store works, and that he just wants someone to "pick up the phone" and push his app, which could save children's lives, through.

We've got nothing against the AMBER Alert system, of course, and if it's true that this app can get more reports in and possibly help kids who are in danger, then great. But do we really want Apple picking and choosing which apps get kicked to the front of the line?

Update: looks like the app has been approved. The question remains: what was the holdup?

There are thousands of apps already on the iPhone store, and probably many, many more waiting to go through. In this case, sure, you could definitely make the argument that this app could help a lot more than a random piece of software that makes farting noises. But do we really want Apple making that decision? In this instance, clearly, you'd want the AMBER Alert app to go through. But what about the next time, when Apple pushes the wrong app forward, just because the developer of that app raises a stink? Shouldn't Apple stick to apps in the order they're presented, rather than actually monitoring the 'usefulness" of every app that shows up to see which gets to go first or not?

Not to mention that it's a simple matter right now to send a report on any AMBER Alert child that may have gone missing, from your iPhone or any other wireless device. Considering that the functionality is already easily there, you could even question whether there is a pressing need for the app itself. Maybe Apple has already made its decision, and determined that because the functionality exists there already, it doesn't need to be in the store. Though if that is the case, it would have been nice for them to actually tell the developer.

There are definitely issues in the App Store that need fixing, and the approval process clearly isn't perfect. But asking Apple to kick certain apps to the front of the line just because they're perceived as more important than others isn't a solution.

Radar.net wants to be your iPhone's photo sharer

We're at a new juncture in the course of iPhone development, I believe. Twitter has basically monopolized the "text exporting" function of your iPhone -- if you want to broadcast text from a mobile device, most of us do it through Twitter. But now, we're seeing a whole host of sites and services aiming to be the distributors for your richer media: photos, audio, even video (as well as the iPhone can handle it, anyway).

Radar is one such service, and they'd really like to handle any photos you want to send out into the world. But unlike a site such as Twitpic, they're not content with being just the repository. They want to host, share, and deliver. Whenever you want to mess around with pictures on your iPhone, whether that be taking them and sharing them, browsing your friends' pictures from Flickr, or looking at funny shots from CollegeHumor, Radar wants to be there.

They gave TUAW an early look at their new software, just released to the App Store, and we were duly impressed -- they've got hooks into a surprising number of places, and it's clear they've worked hard to make themselves fit somewhere into your photosharing flow. But is it worth it to have yet another site acting as a go-between for you and your photo content? Read on to find out.

 

The process starts simply: you need to make an account at Radar.net, and of course install the app on your iPhone and sign in to it there. At its core, Radar is simply a picture sharing program -- you take a picture on the iPhone, and then can upload it to the site with a short title, where others can see it and even comment on it. In that sense, it's not much different than Twitpic or Flickr or Snap My Life or any of the other photo sharing apps out there.

But where Radar starts to set itself apart is how it connects to all of the other services you're using. If you put in your Twitter credentials, it'll tweet as you upload a pic. If you sign up for their app on Facebook, it'll send your pictures there automatically. And the app doesn't just send pictures out, it can bring them in as well -- you can browse pictures from your Flickr friends by signing in to that service, and even browse a "Gallery" of Radar accounts, some of them from official sites or bands (you can see some pics from one of my favorite bands, Bloc Party, in the gallery above).

In short, Radar wants to be your one-stop shop for picture sharing: take a picture and share it with Radar, and they'll make sure it goes everywhere else you want it to go. But is it worth it? In return, they get to host your content -- every time someone clicks on a link to your picture, they'll see Radar's site and likely get sold something there (even if there are no ads on picture pages right now, as appears to be the case, there's at least a pitch to join Radar). And Radar has even put Admob ads on lots of the app's UI screens: even while browsing my own "posts," I was dodging ads that floated above the UI as I scrolled down the screen.

The app itself is free, and of course they've got to make money somehow. But then again, if I really wanted to make sure my Facebook and Twitter friends knew I'd shared a picture, there are already ways to hook up those two services and make sure my pictures get broadcasted to the right places.

So it's up to you -- as a one-stop shop for picture sharing, Radar can be helpful in tying all of your different services together. If you're sharing lots of pictures from your iPhone and need some help in organizing and sending them out, it could be very helpful. And we also have to mention that the app itself is very solid -- even while flicking through pictures, there was never any lag or big loading waits, and the "fullscreen" viewer is so good and responsive to the multitouch screen that it even beats Apple's official Camera viewer -- you can spin and rotate and zoom in and out with ease.

But the Radar service replicates a lot of what's already available, and though it won't cost you anything, you can expect to spend a lot of attention on the various ads you'll see in the app and service. It's worth checking out if you do a significant amount of photo sharing (and if you have a lot of Flickr -- or even Radar, though the network is fairly new -- friends whose pictures you browse often). But for people who only occasionally twitter about a pic they've taken and already have Facebook hooked up to a Twitter or Flickr feed, it'll probably ask too much for too little.

Payback brings a GTA clone to the iPhone

Grand Theft Auto isn't out for the iPhone, but Payback is --it's basically a 3D version of the old top-down GTA gameplay, improved with better rendering and lighting. You control the game by pressing "buttons" on the screen, and tilting the iPhone around, and Touch Arcade says it works well. Some missions are apparently tough, but in terms of what GTA is really about -- driving around and generally causing mayhem -- Payback will deliver.

Unfortunately, textures (both visual and audio) are rough, as are the actual physics, so it seems Payback is more of a "GTA could work on the iPhone" demo rather than an actual game (though of course you can play it, it probably just won't be as fun). Still, we're in favor of any game reaching high on the iPhone, and this one definitely does.