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.

Today while I was at work I had to request a particular day off through our online tool. When the request was approved I received an email from the system which wanted a return read receipt. I allowed it to send the return recipt and then Thunderbird showed a message stating that it was not a valid address and again I clicked ok. Once I clicked that I got a very funny message which seems to be a debugging step for the developers on Thunderbird 3. Look below for a screen shot.

Note: If you are from Mozilla and would like more information on how to re-create this please get in touch with me through the comments below.

Once the AppStore opened on the Palm Pre I put my card in place so that I could order apps that I may want. In the past I have had no problems while purchasing apps. I have bought Tweed, Spot the missing pieces, JogStats, Air Hockey, Spot the Difference, and Conmigo. However while on the train this morning I decided to buy an app and as an end user it seemed like everything went smooth. It asked for my palm password, asked if I wanted to purchase the app and then it downloaded the app. Nothing out of the ordinary happened during the transaction, however when I got to the office this morning this is what I found in my in-box.

Transaction Failure Notice

Your previous transaction could not be processed. Please contact your financial institution should you have any questions.

You will still be able to purchase more applications in the Palm App Catalogue in the future. To do so, update the payment information in your account before placing a new order.

We appreciate your patience and hope you continue to enjoy using the Palm App Catalogue.

Best regards,
Palm App Catalogue Team

It seems like Palm is allowing all transactions failed or not to actually download the app as if it were paid for… Let’s hope they fix this problem real soon, I have already reported this to the palm app catalogue support team.

** UPDATE **
On a side note Palm, I suggest that you look into other live chat applications for your website. Using something that is Windows only is not very smart since there are a lot of Linux / Mac desktops out there now. I had to load up Vista in a Virtual Machine just to contact your support reps. At the very least provide an email address where your support staff can be contacted. I searched for support and all I came up with was the Live Chat with your reps.

Over the last few days I have been digging deep into the concepts of REST. I have been reading through my copy of RESTful Web Services. Out of curiosity I searched Google for a "php REST library" and it turned up the Official MySpace PHP REST Library.

I started to look through the code and noticed something really weird about how the code is structured. It looks like they are trying to use an Object Oriented approach however I think they are going about things improperly. The code looks a lot like the following.

Now the structure of these classes is fine, but it does bring out the question as to why they are using classes for this type of stuff. The classes have no methods, they have only provided public static properties. I am not sure why they took this approach. I am not sure if they are trying to remain backwards compatible with PHP 4 or not. If they are however I think they would be better off using constants for these values in the Common.php file, also I am pretty sure they are not trying to support PHP 4 because they are using the static keyword in the classes and I believe PHP 4 would FAIL with that being there. I am unsure why they are not using class constants. I would suggest a better way of doing things.

Even if they were to choose to go the PHP 5 way I would highly suggest that they do not use classes as containers for constants, there is no need to do this. It is not using proper OOP methodologies. Why create an object that just holds 2 - 4 constant variables, these would be better suited for define() calls in my opinion.

I am not trying to flame the work of others, I would just like an idea of why they are using these methods. Anyone reading this that knows the developers on the team feel free to have them explain what they were thinking when creating this code base.

One thing I have never understood is the fact that there is a huge lack of games out there for OS X. Even the small games like Tetris, Trism, Fastlane, are great games but where is the OS X version? I know that you will lose all of the accelerometer features but you could still have nice keyboard commands. I wonder just how hard it would be to port these games over to OS X. I wonder if this will ever happen? I know there are a handful of games and even less gamers on the mac but some of these nice small games would be good for me to put on the laptop for the kids to play.

I remember back in the day (4th – 5th grade) I would play “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego” and “The Oregon Trail” and used to love these games. Trying to find something like that for kids today on OS X seems to be almost impossible. I did find one game that I know the kids will like and that is Wall-E. What happened to all the small games for kids though?