Interview: Ngmoco's We Rule after a year on the App Store
19/03/2011 |
Ngmoco's We Rule has arguably changed the App Store since its release. Before We Rule, the App Store was generally based on a rather traditional gaming model -- developers released games for a price, and customers paid or didn't pay based on that price. But with We Rule, Ngmoco (as outlined by CEO Neil Young at last year's GDC) showed that freemium could really work on the App Store, and the ensuing shift led us away from more traditional games, and further into the idea of games as a service,...
TUAW preview: NimbleBit's Pocket Frogs
Since I got my new iPhone 4 a few weeks back, I've been playing more games than ever on Apple's little handheld. I just recently got back into Ngmoco's We Rule. It's probably the pinnacle of the "freemium" genre on the iPhone so far. It's free to play, very social, and very much based on timed "c...
GDC Online 2010: Interview with Newtoy's David Bettner
Last week, during GDC Online in Austin, Texas, I saw a panel run by Newtoy's David Bettner. Later in the week, Bettner himself met up with me to talk about the company and its popular Games With Friends titles for the iPhone. Though the company is doing great with its own App Store games (Words W...
Interview: Firemint's Rob Murry and Steve Faulkner of Infinite Interactive
Firemint and Infinite Interactive surprised us all the other day with the news that the one company was buying the other, but Firemint's Rob Murray and Infinite's Steve Fawkner weren't surprised themselves. "We've actually been talking about this for years, going back to 2006," Murray told TUAW t...
GDC Online 2010: Mark Rein on iOS and Epic Citadel
If you are an iPhone gamer and haven't tried Epic Citadel yet, you're doing yourself a disservice. Epic Games wowed the crowd at the recent Apple event with the free demo, showing an astoundingly beautiful virtual town running in full 3D graphics on the iPhone and the iPad. Epic's Mark Rein is he...
Want FaceTime on 3G? Try Tango
Tango is a video and audio chatting app that does what FaceTime should have done. It works on a 3G (or a 4G) network. This free app was released last week and I have been testing it over the weekend.It performs pretty much as advertised using it on my iPhone 4. You can make and receive calls over...
A quick roundup of iOS text editors with Dropbox support
This morning we received word from Jesse Grosjean at Hog Bay Software that his new app, PlainText (free, in-app purchase to remove ads), is now available on the App Store. It's one of several iOS text editors that feature support for Dropbox, so we thought a quick roundup of these apps was in ord...
GDC Online 2010: Hands-on and preview of WINtA
WINtA is probably the best brand new game that I've seen so far at GDC Online 2010 (this week in Austin, Texas). It's a title published by a group called OneBigGame, which is a nonprofit video game publisher. They commission and publish games, which are created for free by luminaries in the video...
What's new (and gorgeous) in iOS 4.2 beta
If you're as excited as I am about the iOS 4.2 beta being released, you probably spent the majority of Wednesday paging through all of the tech blogs and/or neglecting your responsibilities as an adult. For those of you who aren't able to experience Apple's latest firmware until November, I've ro...
New York Times website, iPhone and iPad subscriptions start soon
We knew it was coming, and now there is a date: the Gray Lady is charging admission this month. The New York Times digital products (the website, TimesReader app, phone apps and iPad edition) will be subject to a subscription fee for US customers starting March 28, with Canadian customers active ...
