iTouch Hacks

In Boggle, you shuffle 16 six-sided dice, each imprinted with letters, in a tray that holds the dice in a 4-by-4 grid. You must find words in sequences of letters on adjacent dice. You can go up, down, left, right, or diagonally. In the desktop game, you’re timed using a sand-filled hourglass; each turn is three minutes.

Boggle for iPhone features three game modes: Classic, which adheres to the three-minute rule; Advanced, which lets you set your own time limit, features “Portal Cubes” that swap first and last positions when a word is formed, and has a “Panic Flip” that lets you find words using a new roll of the dice in the last 20 seconds of the game; and Self Score mode, a sandbox mode in which you play by your own rules and score yourself however you want.

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Ramp Champ’s gameplay couldn’t be more simple: you flick your finger to toss a ball up a ramp and up onto a game board, all in an attempt to hit objects labeled with various point values. Clear the right objects and more objects appear, leading to even bigger point totals. You have nine balls to toss; when you’re done, you receive tickets (yes, the old tear-off red kind) based on your performance. You can use tickets to buy virtual prizes at the carnival gift shop, and stock your virtual trophy wall. Denizens of 1980s arcades may remember these fellows.

The game comes with four built-in levels, each with an array of sound effects and lovingly depicted objects. Each level comes with a series of challenges of escalating difficulty, and you receive a trophy for each challenge you complete. For example, I got a trophy once I cleared all four seahorses out of Breakwater Bay and then hit the opened clamshell twice, dislodging a black pearl.

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Although Software update 3.1 is really nice and sparkly, I would advise against the update (but don’t freak out if you have because who knows how long it will take for the dev team to release more comprehensive news concerning the iPod Touch Hack in specific). Here are a few words from the Dev Team:

If you update to Apple’s new software using the normal iTunes process, you will lose your ultrasn0w unlock.  In fact you may lose it permanently, because for most people the baseband firmware cannot be reverted to a previous version (unlike the main application CPU firmware).

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So, the new iPods are in. At first glance, I was kind of disappointed; the second time I looked, I wasn’t quite as disappointed.  Apple has been very frugal in their latest batch of new hardware. My greatest displeasure comes from the new iPod Touch. . . IT HAS NO CAMERA (not to mention the exclusion of a compass and FM radio). Although they did add a mic, voice control, a faster processor, better graphics, and better wi-fi, a camera would have been appropriate as well.

Apple did do a good job with the new iPod Nano – its got a video camera and radio.

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Although Apple’s latest release of the iPod Touch 3G was not quite as good as it should have been, this little bit of news cheered me up. Apple was rumored to have had manufacturing problems with iPod Touch and was therefore unable to release it with a video camera. PCW reports that a update BY CHRISTMAS may include a this highly coveted Video Camera

I’ve also heard that Apple wants to have these things in full production by Christmas and that they’ve made only a few months of camera-less models to tide the market over until the new ones are ready.
PCW also offers some more information by hypothesizing that:
The conventional wisdom is that Apple will put the camera into the higher end iPods ($299/$399 – 32GB/64GB) only and leave the $199 model to be a 2nd-gen model. The higher end iPods have the processor speed and the Open GL 2.0 capabilities to do video, the 2nd Gen does not. This is exactly the same pricing/feature structure as exists on the iPhone.
Based on this, my advice is to wait for just a few more months and see what happens.

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