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.

While the game play for both games follows the same concept I feel they are rather different once you play them both for a short period of time. The one fact that I loved about Harbor Master is that it was “free” for the iPad. I am not sure why it is free for the iPad since the iPhone version is priced at $1.99. The only thing I can think of is that it is a promotional price so if you want the game on the iPad I would suggest you go grab it immediately. I am not sure what the Harbor Master price will be once they remove it from being free but I would expect that it would remain closely priced to Flight Control HD which comes in at a mere $4.99.

Overall I would give this game a 4 out of 5 rating. While the game play is nice I would like to see more to this game. I have not been playing for long and my high score is only 51 but I have only seen the single harbor map. It would be great if these games would provide more levels initially with the games and maybe down the road offer more levels for sale maybe 4 for $0.99.

I know I would not mind paying a bit more for added levels if the game were to come with 4 or 5 from the start. I am just a bit disappointed in some of the iPad games because they are shipping with a single level.

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?

The screen shots above really depict the quality of the graphics in the game. You can see that on the main screen it details information such as average planes landed, total planes landed, high score, etc. This is a very nice page with very useful information. As well as keeping a local record of your high score you can also opt to submit your scores to CloudCell so that you can see just how well you are doing against other players. I have noticed when you look at the leader board it seems to only show people which are “close” to your current location. I have not yet found a way to see your placement on a global level.

As well as being a very addictive single player game you can also play multi-player with a friend in either co-op or vs mode. In the vs mode you are playing on a split screen so it can become a bit tedious to work with when you are used to playing on a full screen iPad. The developers did not stop there either, they have added another twist which could make the game even more addictive. You can play multi-player mode with a friend who also has an iPad. I could see that being a lot of fun and need to find someone local to try it out with but I do not know anyone in my area yet that has an iPad (though I am sure there are many that do).

The last feature that I will talk about is the bonus 3D map that came with the iPad version. Supposedly you can put on a pair of those red and blue 3D glasses and play the game in 3D mode which I have not yet tried. I will be giving this a shot this evening though because I just remembered Dylan has 4 pairs of those that came with his Polar Express 3D movie. I will update this once I have played the game a few times in 3D mode.

Overall I would give this game a 4 out of 5 due to it only having a couple of different maps. for $4.99 I would have thought that it would have come with about 8-10 HD maps but it only comes with 3HD maps, 1 3D map and 5 iPhone quality maps. With the bump in price from the iPhone version all you are really getting is 3 HD maps and a bonus 3D map. Here’s to hoping they offer more maps for free in a future update.

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.

Now that I have covered the basics of the game lets start talking about the actual game play. I will first cover all of good and then the bad points for this application. Pulling articles from the current news and using those for the levels is quite a good idea. As you play you are also keeping up with the news going on around you and even on easy I find that some of the levels are rather difficult if you are already not keeping up with the events taking place currently. I have had levels that talk about the earthquake in china to levels about the national enquirer. The game seems to mix the news rather well so that you are not getting levels that are very similar which is nice since repetitive levels would get annoying. The graphics for the game are pretty good and the UI is very appealing to the eyes. I could see myself playing this game for hours at a time without having to worry about an ugly UI getting in the way and becoming painful on your eyes. In the images below you can see some of the features that I have been talking about. One of the best features I think is the ability to actually read the news stories in the application. They seem to be using a Web View when you click on an article because it loads the original website allowing you to read the full article.

There are a few features that I would like to see implemented in a future release however. Currently you can only play the game in portrait mode it does not use the accelerometer to rotate the screen when you flip the iPad. This may seem like a small annoyance for most people however if you use your iPad outside the sun may become too bright for you to see the screen. I get this every day when I am on my way to work and generally I will put on my sunglasses. The issue I have found is that the iPad has problems with polarized glasses when being used in portrait mode. You cannot see the screen because of something to do with the polarization, however if you turn it to landscape mode even with sunglasses on you can see the screen. You might now understand why I find this to be a minor annoyance.

Another feature that I would suggest is to allow the list of RSS feeds that the device uses to be customizable. I would love it for instance if I could add a bunch of Java Development related feeds to the game and actually try to learn something about Java from the game rather than using world news or feeds that are non-customizable.

All in all I think this is a great game that will consume quite a bit of my time however with the few drawbacks that I have mentioned I give it a 3 out of 5 and I think it is well worth the price of $2.99.

Now lets actually get meat of what this application is all about. Early Edition gives you a newspaper friendly way of reading your rss feeds. All of the articles are nicely laid out in a newspaper fashion as a lot of people are used to reading traditional newspapers. This gives the application a nice feel. You can skim the headlines and if something peaks your interest you can easily tap the header title to see the article in Story Mode. One thing that I have noticed is that when you are reading an article in the Store Mode it does not always contain the entire article. The developers have added a button at the top of the Story Mode view which allows you to view the article in View Original mode. This is very nice as it loads the article in the same window even though it contains all of the mark-up that the website uses. I am assuming they are using a Web View to gain this functionality but it really does beat opening the original in Safari. I have to add that I like how the developers made it so that you can swipe from either side of the screen to the other to change pages. It is a very nice visual touch to actually see the pages curl and fold over.

Above I have posted a few screen shots of some of the views that you can get in Early Edition. Up until this point everything has been excellent and I wish that I did not have anything negative to say about this application. However there are a few drawbacks to using this application. First of all when you open the application it starts to reload the feeds, if you have a lot of them this will take a few minutes. While this is expected behavior because it needs to check for new content what is not expected is that your UI will lock up until it has completed refreshing the feeds. I also think it is a bit on the slow side while refreshing the feeds. My old feed reader refreshed quite a bit faster so it seems.

The final drawback that I have found is how it displays the feeds. It seems to me like it does not do any randomization of the feeds before displaying them so you will see several articles from the same feed source near each other and might have to go a few pages to get to a different source. This happened to me this morning with TUAW. I hope that they do something to rectify this in a future version, or at-least provide an option for it.

Even with these few drawbacks I have not regretted paying the $4.99 for the application. I use it every day and have been loving it, it just makes keeping up with my news easy and rather enjoyable. Have you tried Early Edition? What are your thoughts on the application and what was your experience like? Please let me know in the comments below.

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.

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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.

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.

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?