I’m getting ready to go on vacation, so of course I checked out new games I can load onto my Pocket PC and bring with me. I’ve been addicted to Spider on my PC for a few years now, but never found a good implementation of it on a handheld until now. But Astraware has finally done it – made a version of Spider that’s actually playable on a handheld.
It’s hard to do – the screen is small, and you can’t use handy keyboard shortcuts for hint or undo like you can on a desktop. But they’ve solved the problem with a mode that shows all available moves, so you don’t have to go to the menu to see each one (why didn’t Microsoft do this in their version? It’s so obvious once you think of it), and an Undo button right on the screen. The cards are as big as they can be, and the stacks resize as they fill up.
This is a lesson in usability for handheld developers. (No, I’m not playing games. I’m learning about usability. Really.) There are 12 different solitaire games in the package, and it looks like the others are just as well implemented. Brilliant job, Astraware. And thank you – the flights and airport are going to be a lot more bearable for me now.
*(I wrote this Monday. I’m publishing it Tuesday because we 
No matter how badly some folks hate them, the terms “Web 2.0″ and “Web OS” just won’t go away. For many, these are the holy grail of software development…a multi-platform single language environment that allows instant upgrades with no downloads, making software available to the customer from any connected device. For others, the terms are empty promises or overused marketing phrases that never seem to live up to expectations.
One of the toughest things to do as a (relatively) small software developer is to get the word out about your product. We don’t have a multi-million dollar ad budget or a marketing department filled with people thinking up clever new ways to let people know how badly they need our software. At the same time we have some great products that people get really hooked on once they start using them.
One of the top requests we get for NewsBreak is that we download and cache the web pages that the “Read More” links go to. The reason people want this is that many news feeds don’t provide the full story. They just give you a teaser. If you’re off line this means you can’t read the entire story without going back online. Annoying, I know, especially for those feeds that only give you like one line of the story.
I recently installed IE7, and for a lot of reasons, didn’t like it much. I’ve never managed to get along well with Firefox, but after spending some time with Opera, found that it worked pretty well for me. There’s a lot it doesn’t do – I do keep IE7 and Firefox both available as well, but I decided to use Opera as my primary browser. Given that Opera imported my IE bookmarks and that I only ever let IE save the passwords I didn’t care much about (things that I don’t really consider very secret, like my logins to sites where I have to register just to read an article), I figured the hardest part about converting would be retraining my fingers.
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