Most popular iPhone web app
A while ago, a friend of mine (from HelipadHouse.com), showed me this cool little things called web apps, that are actually small web pages designed to run on Apple’s iPhone. The idea looked pretty nice and last week I decided to give it a go and play around with them. I made 3 webapps:
- WiFi Speed Meter (http://www.wifispeed.info) - measures the speed of your iPhone’s internet connection.
- Pocket Market (http://www.pocketmarket.info) - displays the latest prices for the commodities traded on NYMEX
- CeRetea (http://www.ceretea.com) - it’s a web app for the local romanian market, to help people find out to which fixed/mobile operator a phone number belongs.
And what turned out to be great after the next Apple site update … WiFi Speed Monitor became the no. 1 most popular web app of all categories.
See the screenshot:
Link: http://www.apple.com/webapps/index_top.html
Feel free to browse our collection on web apps, directly on your iPhone at: http://www.exowebapps.com
6th anniversary of our hacker games
Exactly 6 years ago, on November the 5th 2002, in a cold autumn morning, after a sleepless night, our first PC game, Blue Sky::Acceptable Casualties was released. It was our first game, and exosyphen studios was officially born.
We came a long way since then and continued coming out with better and better games, and other products.
I would like to thank to all our supporters throughout these years.
We will be here for many years to come, and promise to deliver the same great games.
I would like to thank Jeremy Stride from Terminal Zero, for all his help and support in helping us with our first game, and making it into the independent games industry.
A different kind of "game demo"
Recently, I have made a small game for the BlackBerry, called : Daughter In The Box. It’s an ancient chinese puzzle.
As many people know this (both developers and gamers), there are 2 versions of each game. A demo, that allows you to evaluate the game up to a certain point, and the full version, which if you decide to purchase, gives you access to all the features and content of the game.
It’s been like these since the first day computer games appeared.
I wanted to innovate and create a slightly different model of distributing commercial games. The scope of the game is to move the pieces of the puzzle, until the biggest piece of puzzle reaches the exit. The “demo” version will allow you to play the game for a maximum of 100 moves.
Here comes the catch. The game can be solved in less than 100 moves, if you are real good, meaning that you get to play the game completely free, if you are real good … as a nice reward for you.
iPhone software development
Some time ago, I have decided to go into iPhone development.
After some hassles, I finally received my Mac Mini. I also bought an aluminum keyboard to go with it.
Overall, I like the hardware design, and getting used to MacOS is fun. It’s different from Windows, but it’s not something difficult to learn.
I didn’t have much time to play with it, but I installed the iPhone SDK and decided to make a simple “Hello World” application for the iPhone. It went nice and easy. The development IDE and the language (Objective C) are something different from what I have done until now.
And yes, this means there will be Hacker Evolution for the iPhone 
How to reduce your roaming data costs on your BlackBerry
Hello everyone,
Someone asked this a few days ago, and I know a lot of people have this issue.
And it’s a “thing” not mentioned often, but here we go:
Some definitions:
While roaming, the granularity at which your data traffic is charged, is larger than usual. (I get rounded to 1Kb in my home network, and to 25 to 100 Kb while roaming).
Basically, every data “session” is rounded to the granularity amount.
What happens when you are roaming, is that your phone switches networks and bands (from 2G to 3G and backwards) a lot more often since it can connect to virtually any network available in that country. Now, if you have been on a network for an hour and your BB session transferred 5 Kb of data, and the phone switches over, you get billed for the entire 25 to 100 Kb granularity chunk.
You can easily figure out how this will drive up your costs. You end up paying 5-10 times more data traffic that you use, at a price which is 5-10 time more … basically, you can pay up to 100 times more!
What you can do?
Simple. Set your phone to manually select a network. Select the network manually and voila, things are better (also, don’t allow your phone to change from 2G to 3G automatically). Stick to non-3G and you will be fine, as it has wider coverage than 3G, anywhere in the world.
Proof:
To prove my theory, when I went in my vacation (abroad), I left the phone to automatically switch networks for 3 days. Then I put it to manual and when I got home, I requested a detailed invoice.
And boy … was I right. In the first 3 days, I had about 5-6 data sessions closed and rounded up, daily. In the last 4 days … I had 5 sessions in TOTAL. The cost difference was HUGE.
Keep in mind that I have spent most of my time in the vicinity of my hotel, and the swimming pool. The 5-6 sessions were when I went out for walks and the phone switched networks or switched to 3G and back to 2G.
Give it a try and feel the difference for yourself.