Monthly Archives: December 2010

There are a whole heap of decent RSS readers for the iPhone and boy, I should know, having tried about 99% of them over the past 2 and a bit years. If you read around the web you’d believe that very few were contenders aside from Reeder which is good, no doubt about it, and which I have been using on and off for over a year now yet I always seem to be looking for something else as although it ticks most of the boxes, I don’t know, there’s just something about it that doesn’t quite do it for me.

Anyway, my seemingly never-ending quest for the worlds greatest RSS reader continues and shows no signs of ever being sated.

The other week I stumbled across yReader. This is a pretty new application and its arrival has been somewhat less than heralded. When I’m looking at RSS readers I am looking for quite a few essential features.

Numero uno – it must have an offline mode so that I can download my feeds in the morning at home via wifi and then read them when out and about later without having a wifi connection.

Numero dos – when reading the feeds without a wifi connection the feeds, and in particular the images, must appear in the posts straight away. I find that when using Reeder, there is always an irritating second or two delay before in-line images re-appear.

Numero tres – the option to increase the font size is always appreciated because I’m nearly 50 and the old peepers ain’t quite as good as they were when I was 21

Numero quattro  – I like the ability to move through posts by swiping left and right on the screen

Numero cinco – Google Reader syncing is an essential

You’ll be shocked to learn, no doubt, that yReader delivers on all of the above. It downloads for offline reading very quickly, quicker than Reeder, images appear immediately when reading without a wifi connection, the font size is customisable, you can swipe to read through posts and last but not least, it syncs very well with Google Reader. Another nice bonus is the full screen reading mode achieved by a simple double tap on the screen. In addition, tapping and holding on an image pops up a menu offering the ability to save the picture to your camera roll….why can I never seem to be able to do this in Reeder? You’ve also got the useful facility of being able to save posts to the usual suspects, Instapaper, Facebook, Twitter, Evernote…

Downsides are few but there are too many taps required to get you back to the home page once you start delving into your Google Reader folders and the icon is a bit iffy, it reminds me of something a bit too redolent of GMTV for some reason…this is just a surprisingly nice little RSS reader application with a clean UI and feature set that should satisfy most power users yet at the same time is easy enough for the casual user to get their head and fingers around.

Murray

Short Takes are brief reviews of iPhone and iPad Apps that have caught my fancy. I’ll give a brief description and tell you why I like them. I’m not going to give ratings. I would rate all of the Apps a 4 or 5 out of 5. They are stable, are well made, at least in my opinion, provide good value, again, in my opinion, and get good developer support.

Puzzle Games

I confess, I’m addicted to puzzle games. And if I can get through a puzzle in 5 to 10 minutes and still feel challenged, so much the better. I’ll get hung up on one particular game for a week or so and then switch. The ones I like best are those that don’t have a time limit and force you to use your brain rather than reflexes. So while Angry Birds is a lot of fun, there are lots of games I’d rather play instead. So first up for Short Takes are a couple of puzzlers.

Trainyard

Being a patriotic Canadian I’ll look at Trainyard for the iPhone first, created by fellow Canadian, Matt Rix. In Trainyard, you have one or more stations where trains leave from, and one or more stations where trains must arrive at. Your job is to lay track between the stations using your finger. Simple you say. But of course there’s more. There are colours involved. Only trains of a particular colour leave a station and only trains of a particular colour may arrive at a station. Anything else and CRASH!

Sometimes you have obstacles. Sometimes you have to make tracks cross each other, without crashing trains. Sometimes, there are more trains leaving than arriving, so you have to merge trains. And sometimes the trains leaving are a different colour than those arriving, so not only do you have to merge trains, but in the right combination.

There are in-game tutorials showing you all the game mechanics. And the first few levels of each group are really training sessions to make sure you’ve got it before making you rack your brain on the real puzzles. The basic game structure is to lay down your track and then start the trains to see what happens. You can adjust the speed of the trains. Slow them down if you need to see exactly where they’re going, or speed them up if the puzzle is very simple.

One thing that I really like about Trainyard is that very often there’s an “aha!” moment. While the tutorials give you all the mechanics, you still have to figure out how they work in the context of the puzzles.

Trainyard is an iPhone game but plays perfectly well on an iPad. The graphics are basic but clean. Trainyard is currently $2.99Cdn in the App Store and includes 150 puzzles.

The puzzles are grouped by city, Canadian of course, and once you unlock a city, you can try any puzzle within that city.

But there’s more. To ensure that you don’t waste you money on something you don’t like, there’s the free Trainyard Express with 60 puzzles. Unlike most “lite” versions, the puzzles in Express are unique. So between the two, there are over 200 puzzles.

Blue Block

Within my puzzle addiction is another addiction – to parking lot or sliding block games. You know the ones where your car or block is in the middle of a parking lot and you have to move the cars or blocks around in order to get yours out. I’ve tried almost a dozen but the one I like best is Blue Block for the iPhone by Martin Demers.

As the name implies, you have to rescue a blue block from a 6×6 grid. Blue Block keeps track of the number of moves you make and also shows the minimum number of moves possible, so there’s something to shoot for. Blue Block also has a number of themes, including wood and stone.

Some parking lot games give you a few hundred or even a few thousand puzzles. Blue Block gives you all of the possible puzzles for a 6 by 6 grid that can be solved. That’s 39,963 puzzles grouped into Kids, Easy, Medium, Hard, Expert, and Crazy packs. Within a pack, when you solve a puzzle, the next one is unlocked.

What I really like about Blue Block is that the game mechanics and layout are very clean and easy to use so you can concentrate on solving the puzzle.

Blue Block is $0.99Cdn in the App Store. There’s also a free version with over 2500 puzzles, so you can try it out. And if you’re really masochistic, there’s Blue Block Double for $0.99Cdn with 4465 puzzles with, you guessed it, 2 blue blocks. There’s also a free version of that. While all of these play well on the iPad, there is an iPad-only version that contains all of the single and double block puzzles for the usual price of between $2.99 and $4.99 depending on when you catch it. But it’s marked down to $0.99Cdn for the holidays. There’s a free iPad version as well. The iPad version has the same puzzles as the iPhone version, but the graphics are crisper.

Bob