Toppled
I was going to write a little thing about how fun the ngmoco game Topple was, maybe even with an accompanying screen shot, but the App Store is still ridiculously slow here.
Instead, I’m going to write just a little bit about monocultures and why they suck. When everything works, you can almost believe that owning an iPhone and using iTunes is the bees’ knees. “It just works” is a popular phrase bandied-about among Apple fans. Apple just posted a huge $1.6bn profit for their last quarter. Apple is on more desktops and in more go-bags than ever before.
But it doesn’t always work. Systems are bound to fail sometimes, and when a central one like the App Store is inaccessible, it can feel like your device is broken. Sometimes, that little badge on the App Store icon can remind you that you’ve got outdated apps that you can’t get to. There are a couple of apps I wanted to try out and even pay money for (mobile Colloquy for one, Rolando is another) but I can’t get at them. “Try again later” is the antithesis of the impulse purchase and that is largely what the whole iTunes Music/App Store is based on.
Fortunately, the internet came to the rescue and can at least provide some iPhone app shopping happiness even when the mothership is leaving orbit. App Shopper, which I believe I’ve mentioned before is a great web-based app-search system. It even lets you sort by price and view price changes. Right now, I conducted a little experiment, clicking on an App in the (finally loaded) App Store and then typing in and searching for the same name on App Shopper. App Shopper won hands down but clicking “Buy” still takes you to the iTunes store.
is listening to ‘Future In Computer Hell’ by Junkie XL from the album, ‘Saturday Teenage Kick’
PS, get well, Steve.
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