By Mona Nomura of Pixel Bits (FriendFeed/Twitter)


I can't believe it's barely been a month since we were crammed in stores filled with irate last-minute shoppers. If you've forgotten, close your eyes, think back to the few days before Christmas and how brutal the holiday shopping crowd and all the stores are - even the grocery stores.

Now imagine, combining the tiring experience with raining glass. What a nightmare. I would not wish that on my biggest enemy but that is what happened to a couple from Kansas.

Last December, an Apple retail store's glass doors shattered shut from strong Midwestern winds and showered glass all over two shoppers. Luckily, the couple only sustained minor cuts with no major injuries, but the fact remains: Glass. Exploded. On them. In our country where everyone and their pets are quick to yell LAWSUIT, Apple got lucky, as the couple chose not to sue.

Instead, the couple's son wrote to Steve Jobs and Ron Johnson (VP of Apple Retail) about the incident, and the only response they got was a call from Apple Claims in Seattle, to verify that Andrew's parents decided to pass on taking the company to court.

There was nothing from Ron Johnson VP of Apple retail, or his office.
There was no press release from Katie Cotton VP of PR, or her office.
Of course, there was nothing from Steve Jobs (obviously it won't be from the man himself, since he is in no condition to do so) but not even an Out of Office reply?

Unacceptable.
Below is the letter, taken from Gizmodo:

"On Sunday December 21st, my parents were shopping in the Leawood, KS Apple Retail Store. After making their purchases they found a design flaw in the elegant stores of Apple. Glass does not hold up well in Midwest winters As they were leaving the store, a gust of wind caught the front glass door, the door slammed all the way around into the front of the building and shattered all over them. After many apologetic conversations with the employees of the store, they left and my father noticed he had sustained a cut on his hand. To make it home, they had to stop at the local grocery store to get bandages. Upon coming home, my mother discovered she had also sustained cuts.

This all seemed like a lot of trouble and trauma for just adding to the number of Apple products in our family (We have the new Macbook, Macbook Air, 2 iPhones, time capsule, Apple TV, airport extreme, countless iPods, etc.).

THE END RESULT: I emailed this information to Steve Jobs himself, as well as Ron Johnson VP of Apple Retail. My family has not heard from either of them. We did however get a call from an Apple Claims representative in Seattle to make sure my parents didn't keel over on the car ride home and probably trying to find out if we were planning any litigation. My parents took the high road on this one out of respect for the company of Apple which they know I greatly admire. I am an Apple shareholder as well as the Vice-President of the Mac Users Society at my University.

THE BOTTOM LINE: Our family LOVES Apple. We have all been to Cupertino and have seen Steve in person. It's just funny that all Apple did to rectify a retail door shattering on my parents was to make sure we weren't suing. It's ironic that people who get horrible service and whine about it walk out of stores with brand new macbook pros and whatever they cry for. Yet people like my family have taken the high road because we respect companies that give 1st class service to customers and deliver innovative products.

I've Attached a Photo of the Damage to the Store. My heart goes out to all the Apple Employees who braved the cold and stayed until the store closed."

I love Apple, I do. But Apple's course of action - or lack thereof, makes me sick to my stomach. Who does Apple think they are? Have they forgotten why a company succeeds? It is the paying customers. And from the letter, it sounds like Andrew and his parents are loyal Apple customers. To not even extend a written apology from the corporate offices is completely unacceptable - especially since Andrew and his parents handled the incident with class. The least Apple could've done was offered the nice couple a free year of MobileMe, since no one wants to pay for it anyway. Completely unacceptable.

Am I overreacting? What do you think Apple should've done? Do you have any nightmare Apple customer service experiences?

Read more by Mona Nomura at Pixel Bits

While there's a trend to make video games more complex, taking on special effects and twists more commonly seen in feature films on the big screen, other game developers are taking a simplified route, focusing on fun gameplay and entertaining animation that means even the video game novice can enjoy an app. Crazy Frog by Lima Sky is one of those straight-forward games that is silly, and fun, and yet hard enough that you'll be playing over and over, not just to get a high score, but because you can't believe you lost so fast.


The Crazy Frog Jumps to Get His Meal
The goal of Crazy Frog, which debuted on the iTunes store on January 29th, is simple: You're a frog, and your goal is to jump and eat the flying bugs the buzz around your head above you. But don't accidentally eat a bee - that hurts!


The Crazy Frog Dodges Bees, Eyes His Food
To control your Crazy Frog, you can use the accelerometer of the iPhone, tilting left and right to slide him along the lily pads, and when you're ready to strike, just tap the screen, at which point the frog will jump into the air. Should the frog come in contact with the bug - well, yum! You can even tilt the phone while in the air to change your trajectory and get a better angle at one of the flying vermin.


The Crazy Frog Expresses His Pleasure and Pain
The game has fifteen levels, starting with a mere two bugs to get you acquainted with the frog's antics, and then piling on a seeming unfair share of malicious bees. Try as you might to avoid the bees, but you will get stung. And sometimes, just to make things difficult, your one target might be flying just above the bee, meaning you have to catch it on your way down, tilting to and fro in the air with your frog.

If that doesn't confirm to you that the game is silly and fun enough, you should see the frog's antics and facial expressions, and hear him cry out in pain after getting stung. It's tame enough that yes, we would add it to our list of great games for kids, but there's no doubt I'll be playing it as well. You can grab it from the iTunes store for only $.99 for a limited time, before it goes to its regular price of $1.99.

Despite Twitter's having practically owned the microblogging market for the better part of the last two years, the lesser-known Pownce had its share of loyal users, who liked the product's broader feature set, including the sharing of images and events and embedded replies. But when Pownce shut down last month, having been absorbed into Six Apart, refugees were faced with a choice - join the popular Twitter and lose functionality, or try and find Pownce clone. Though the name is silly, Schmownce, as in "Pownce Schmownce" offers the functionality of the now deceased service, and if you were a Pownce user, you can import your Pownce data by synching up your user name, or uploading a file with your history, assuming you got it downloaded in time.

I never got into Pownce, so its loss was no skin off my back, but I can see how its users could grow accustomed to doing more than Twitter's razor-thin feature set. Much like services including FriendFeed have grown their user base with a diversity of options, Schmownce shows some potential, especially when it comes to sharing messages with a small subset of your friends, with "groups", and seeing a reply stream in one place.


After being introduced to the service by Ajit D'Sa, who works for TRNSFR, the company behind Schmownce and other products, including TweetShrink, I checked out Schmownce, and found it to look like a quieter version of Twitter, but the major thing you'll note is instead of a simple "What are you doing?" prompt, you see a box with four options: "Message", "Link", "File" and "Event".

A message works like it does in Twitter. You write a note, without a 140 character limit, and send it, either to the general public, to an individual friend, or, in a new twist, to a group you may have created. Like in TweetDeck, you can select a subset of your followers and place them in a group, but unlike TweetDeck, you can actually message some of your followers, rather than the "blast all" option Twitter prefers.


A link adds a hyperlink to an external site. Adding a file, such as an image, either displays the graphic, or posts the file for follower's access. With a limit of 100 megabytes, that's fairly robust, though I didn't test it. You can also post an event, with a location and a date, though you can't pick an hour during the day, or a duration, so it's no replacement for Outlook - just a good way to let your followers know something's upcoming.


Unlike Twitter, Schmownce lets you have threaded replies, so I can reply to specific messages on any of my friends' accounts, see the total number of replies, and get e-mail notifications from said replies. Nothing tremendously Earth-shattering, but still... a potential future direction for Twitter, should it be interested.

Given the best benefits of Twitter are the vast community and its interlocking with developers on third-party services, Schmownce doesn't exactly have the Fail Whale provider shaking in its boots, but if you find these functions interesting and miss your Pownce, go check it out. As always, you can find me at: http://schmownce.com/louisgray.

By Phil Glockner of Scribkin (FriendFeed/Twitter)

It seems like genuinely new video game concepts happen infrequently at best. Usually, the industry is perfectly content to watch how a certain gameplay mechanic does in the marketplace, and if it works, diligently copy and iterate on the concept until it doesn't sell any more.

It has traditionally been the domain of the independent (or Indie) game developers, usually 1 to 3 people working intensively together, to really push the 'state of the art' in the industry. They have always been willing to try something new without the expectation of having to sell a minimum number of units in order to pay their salaries and materials costs.

Crayon Physics Deluxe

Petri Purho (Twitter) is one of those indie developers. The game play mechanic he developed is deceptively simple: Take the equivalent of a child's crayon masterpiece, figure out what sort of things might actually have mass, like a boulder, add pivot points and strings, and then apply gravity and force!

He entered his idea into the 2008 Independent Games Festival and ended up winning the grand price and $20,000 for his idea. He quickly refined his prototype into a game he could sell via his Web site and licensed the rights for the game to be ported to the iPhone.

The Game


For comparison purposes, I am going to hold up the PC version of Crayon Physics Deluxe to be the 'gold standard.' That said, let's see how it holds up.

First, it's not surprising that the unique but fairly elaborate "Mario World"-style level navigation from the PC version is absent on the iPhone. The game starts off with a pretty straightforward-looking intro screen (drawn in Crayon, of course) lets you drive right in to the game.


There are 50 levels, and you can either play them in order, stopping and resuming at any time (it remembers where you left off) or you can go directly to any of the 50 levels you want to practice on from the main menu.

When playing the first level, the first thing I noticed is that the animation did not feel as smooth and effortless as on the PC version. This game definitely gives the iPhone a workout. Once the level is completely drawn in and the game can focus on only animating the puzzle parts of the level, it seems to run a bit more smoothly.

The gameplay mechanics are almost identical to the PC version, if you play in 'tablet PC mode' (with a stylus instead of a mouse), with one big difference: in order to remove something, you double-tap on it instead of right-clicking. This actually proves to be quite a bit more frustrating as the interface seems to fight your efforts to recognize what you are double-tapping on.

Another frustration comes from the relative size of the iPhone screen and a finger. On the PC version, a stylus obscures very little of the screen, and a mouse pointer even less. However, especially with me, I have relatively large fingers and the screen is tiny. This means drawing in a relatively small detail such as a pivot point that requires precise placement is harder than it should be.

Perhaps in recognition of this fact, the iPhone version lets you zoom in on portions of the play field with the familiar gesture of placing two fingers on the screen and dragging them apart (or pinching to zoom out). You can also drag the viewable area around by using two fingers instead of one. Finally, 'resetting' a level to its original position is as easy as giving your iPhone a shake.


The game comes with a level editor, where you can create your own puzzle to play later. Unfortunately, the level editor doesn't seem to have any documentation, and has a lot of shortcomings. For example, drawing a section of 'ground level' is extremely difficult.. there are some little drag-able Xs that are there to identify different geographic features, but they don't seem to work reliably. Usually, any lines that are created just fall off the level immediately once the play buttin is hit. Plus, if a level is somehow miraculously playable and you save it, you can only play it on that iPhone. There isn't any way to export or share the level with someone else.

The translation of the experience over to the small screen is surprisingly complete; I still get the same rush and feeling of satisfaction when I manage to get the ball to touch the strategically-placed star (the winning condition for each level). However, a host of problems plague the release as well. Perhaps in recognition of that fact, the game is currently listed for $4.99 on the iTunes Store.

Even at that price, I would have difficulty recommending the game until the developer manages to address some of the issues I've covered here, such as the generally laggy feeling and the useless level editor. On the other hand, the PC version at $19.95 is definitely worth it.

Read more by Phil Glockner at Scribkin.com.