Jason Lancaster

One of the more useful iPhone applications I’ve found and used goes beyond Apple’s SDK by installing a quick-glance menu on the iPhone’s “locked” screen. In it, you can add calendar items, mail, sms, or a variety of other things. It’s a great idea and something the iPhone is desperately missing.

So you can imagine my dismay when, after installing on my pwned (hacked) phone and thinking to myself, “this is a good product, perhaps I should buy it” I ran into a brick wall:

No. Not happening. You just can’t do this, no matter how cool your software is! This screen says two things to me:

1. Developer is overly confident that their software is the bomb, will never fail, never break, never act differently than a user might expect.
2. Developer wants distance from the users of his/her product because users like me are dumb and will contact them about stuff they just don’t want to be bothered with, like their bomb-less application crashing.

It’s great developers are finding an outlet outside of Apple’s App Store to sell applications but this one is not for me.

As Adam wrote on his blog, Wordabble is now in review on Apple’s App Store.

Once the application is available, I’ll be contacting lots of people in attempts to get reviews and (hopefully) positive talk about the application going around. If you have an iPhone or an iPod touch, I hope you’re excited to play!

Adam and Lindsey came up with a cool concept that Adam executed really well. It has everything an icon needs (in my opinion). It’s unique, it indicates what the application is about, and is quite aesthetically pleasing.

There are some cool things in the works like submitting scores to the servers, which means soon this thing will actually be playable in puzzle of the day mode. Since I have early access to it, I have a leg up on everyone else by having a week or so extra time!

iPhone application icons are insanely hard to make look good on a black background. Seriously. All I want is the game’s tiles on a black background and all the iPhone wants to do is layer the little transparent highlight on top of it making my tiles look like crap!

I know why I wasn’t a graphic artist in another life. I know what I want but I can’t make what I want. I just want something representative of the actual gameplay. Argh, the pain!