On Monday I was browsing through the App Store on my lunch break and was a bit surprised when I stumbled across a game called Harbor Master. The surprising part hit me when I was looking at the details page in the store. The game play seemed very familiar and very much like that of Flight Control HD. The concept is the same as with Flight Control, you have to direct the boats to the proper docks based on the color of the cargo the boat is carrying. I must admit that both games are very addictive, I mean to the point where I find myself playing them whenever I get a chance because you know “I just have to beat my high score!”.

Though the game play is very similar at first (and I was surprised they are made by different companies) you will quickly see that Harbor Master while following the same concept takes it’s own direction with the game play. When you first start a game you will see an empty harbor which will quickly fill with boats (if you play on high speed like myself). Some of the boats are small speedboats carrying a small amount of cargo and some are rather large cargo ships. You will notice that the larger the ship and the more cargo it has aboard the slower it will go. When you have a large ship with a lot of cargo headed into port you will notice that it moves at a slower rate than after it unloads. The attention to small details like this is what makes Harbor Master a truly great game.

Another twist is that you will see tornado’s (I think that’s what they are) appear from time to time. Any ships that are set on course for a harbor that hits the tornado get spun around and loses all sense of direction. You will have to direct this ship back to a port trying to avoid the path of the tornado. This tends to make the game a bit more challenging especially when you have a lot of boats on the screen and more than one or two are hit by the tornado. Another great twist is that a ship can be carrying several different types of cargo. You will notice in the screen shots below that there are some ships carrying multiple types of cargo. First you have to dock the ship at one dock to unload that type of cargo and then head over to the other dock to finish the unloading process.

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Early last week a co-worker noticed I had the iPad and had asked if I had tried out the Flight Control game. At first I thought it was some flight simulator and was not that interested however he told me that it is nothing like a simulator so I just had to try it out. I came back to my desk and bought the application which is priced at $4.99. Seeing a price like that for a game I did not think twice on whether or not I should buy it. It seemed cheap enough and it was a highly recommended game. Once it was downloaded I played one game and was instantly hooked on it. I have been playing it as much as possible in my down time and just love the game. The game play is very smooth and very engaging for the user, once you try it I am sure you will be hooked as well.

The game play seems very basic and at first look you wonder why people are raving over a game that seems so easy. After playing a few rounds I quickly noticed that it is not that easy of a game to play. Once you have several aircraft on the screen with some directed towards a runway and others not it becomes seemingly difficult to keep your attention on all of the planes to make sure there are no collisions at the runways or in transit. I did not notice until today that the game actually takes advantage of the multi-touch feature that the iPad offers. You can use multiple fingers to tap different planes and hold them all in the holding pattern while using other fingers to direct planes where you wish for them to go. This is a very nice feature but after trying it for the first time I have come to the conclusion that it will take some getting used to before you can master that trick.

I have heard people gripe about the price difference between the iPad and iPhone versions of this game when the only difference is a larger screen and higher resolution images. Personally I cannot complain at all because I do not have an iPhone and did not have to pay twice for the application. I also do not think that $4.99 is that much to pay for a game anyway. What are your thoughts on the pricing of this game?

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If you have not seen lately I have been posting reviews if iPad applications on my site. So far I have reviewed Early Edition and Hangman RSS HD but I have many more on my list. If you are a developer and would like me to review your application get in touch with me. I will gladly add it to my list of applications to review.

The other day I was reading TUAW and they had made a post about Hangman RSS HD for the iPad. Generally I would not be too intrigued by a hangman game as it is an old game that I played as a child with friends and we generally would play on paper. Hangman RSS HD however is currently a single player game so I hope you will not want to compete with others on-line or via Bluetooth.

I bought the game last night and I have found that it can be very addictive. From the time I bought the game last night until now I have played for 37 minutes and won 62 out of 83 played games. The unique twist that Hangman RSS HD implements is the fact that every hangman level is created from current news which is pulled from RSS feeds on-line. You might be asking yourself right now since it pulls the questions from the internet does this game require you to always be connected to wifi? The answer is no. The game pulls down the stories and stores them locally so if you want to make sure you are always playing with current news you should connect it to wifi from time to time so that it can update it’s internal list of articles.

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One of the first things I did when I got my new iPad was to look for a good RSS reader, i stumbled across Early Edition. When I first opened the application and started playing around with it I just loved it. I was able to start it up and add a few of my feeds that I read on a daily basis. I had originally added only 14 feeds thinking this was going to be a good set of feeds for my daily news. However today when I opened up the application I was confronted with only 4 articles to read, no matter how many times I told Early Edition to refresh the feeds nothing seemed to happen. My first thought was this is a bug and I added a review to the apple store flaming the application for not working. I jumped the gun because I saw reviews from a lot of other people about the same issue and though how could Apple let an application that does not work like this get into the application catalog. After looking at it for a few minutes I determined that I just did not have enough source feeds added to Early Edition because there were only 4 new articles for today at that point. I quickly edited my review to give it a 5 star rating after adding more feeds and seeing this issue go away.

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I know that most people probably just go to the website but i have become accustomed to reading Engadget on my Palm Pre. I know that they have an iPhone app so I am hoping that an iPad version is coming down soon. Currently i have the iPhone version installed but i hate how the graphics all look when it comes to iPhone apps on the iPad.

Yesterday while at work my fiancé called me and told me that she was buying me an iPad for my birthday. I must say that I am quite impressed how fast the device is. I must also state that i love how fast you can actually type on the device without any lag or delay in the typing speed. As i am writing this i am trying to type as fast as i can and to my amazement it is almost as fast as on a regular keyboard and there have been very minimal mistakes.

My only real disappointments with the device Is the lack of a front facing camera for use with video conferencing. The other slight drawback is the fact that iBook does not support PDF documents. For that I have found GoodReader which fills the gap. It would be very nice however if iBook actually supported PDF since there are really no converters that I have found which actually work. I am not Trying to convert the typical book with only text. I am trying to convert books like “Head First Php& MySQL” which contains a lot of images. When i convert a pdf book which has 300 pages it is converted into a malformed ePub as file with about 3000 pages.

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As some of you may know we rented one of those big moon walk / bounce houses that you see at carnivals for Dylan’s Birthday party. We had about 12 kids over yesterday for the party and they were loving the bounce house. There were some Spanish kids next door as they were having a party as well and as expected they had been caught many time peering over the fence at the bounce house. I had told them 3 times that if they asked their parents that they could come bounce with the kids. About an hour later a little Spanish girl walked into the back yard near our trash barrels that were about 10 feet away from where we were sitting. I instantly asked her “Would you like to go bounce sweetie?” She responded with a quick no and I said “It’s ok you can bounce as long as your parents say it’s ok. What she did next made me feel so sad. You see I thought she was one of the kids from the neighbors house but as it turns out her mother was waiting on the sidewalk. She quickly grabbed a soda can out of the trash and ran back to her mother. I could not believe that a parent would have their kids do something like that. I mean I understand there are families out there that have to do what they have to do in order to make it through life. I just do not understand why they would bring their kids with them and have them be the ones to go into someones back yard which is being used for a party to collect cans. I half expect to go downstairs this morning to find all the cans removed from the barrels.

I just could not believe what had just happened.

I will get some pictures up of the bounce house soon!

Over the last week I have been trying to get rid of a rat that has made a home in our back yard. The landlords had this wood platform that they had built with 2×4 and plywood for the garbage barrels in the back yard. Last week Dylan came in and told me that he thought he saw one peering out from under the wood. I went down and lifted the wood to find a big fat rat was sleeping under there during the day. While I like animals I find these rats to be very nasty and who knows what diseases they carry. The landlord said he was going to put broken glass under the platform to get rid of the rat. I will not go into details on how I got it but take a look how big it was. It’s measuring up next to a 10.5 US shoe. In Lynn MA there is surely no shortage on these things. When I sit on the porch at night you will see them scurry across the street and on trash night you will see them jumping from barrel to barrel savaging for food.

Take a look at this picture:
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