Since then I had an opportunity to get a Nexus One which I couldn’t ignore. And I generally dislike the onscreen keyboard as much as I expected.

That has just changed however.

I just downloaded the beta of Swype for my Nexus One and the improvement is tremendous. Instead of tapping letters, you press and hold the first letter and then drag over the other letters. With a combination of seeing when you pause and a dictionary lookup, it picks up the word you wanted to type (it works a lot better than you’d expect). There are a few issues, specifically it has difficulty with very short words (mainly because there are generally more possibilities) and there is the pathological case of pit/pot/put being difficult to differentiate. But on the whole, it’s definitely an improvement.

By the way, I typed most of this on my Nexus One (using the official Wordpress App). I added the links afterwards.

Here are some videos.

For a page to be eligible all you need to do is add a few meta tags to it specifying it’s  name and type (film, book, actor, product, game etc.). To actually do anything useful, you then add a Facebook “like” button. Once some people have liked it, it appears in their Facebook news feed like any other item (with the data you added in the meta tags). One of the optional meta tags you can add specifies user IDs of Facebook users who can administrate the page. If you do, you can get access to the same sort of admin page you get with any traditional Facebook page.

Conveniently I just developed a use for this sort of thing so I added support to my blog. A few edits to the theme and cunning use of Wordpress’s custom fields and now any page or post on my site can support Open Graph. Currently the only support is on the Gravitas page.

Full tutorial on Electric Pig.

It’s almost identical to the iPhone version. There are fewer sounds and no clouds, but the highscores work (and are shared across both versions). Also, Android 1.6 or better isrequired since we make use the native OpenGL ES bindings.

To quote the Android Market:

If you’ve been looking for a ‘Flight Control’ style game then this is it!

Join the elite team of Search & Rescue helicopter commanders and save lives. Take control of up to 4 helicopters and direct them to people in need of rescue by drawing a path with your finger. You’ll need to manage the flight paths and fuel load.

This also means I have invites available…

That number will grow slowly however as they also revealed that existing users will be able to invite others (similar to when GMail launched).

So if anyone has an invite… :P

Now you can play Pool against your Facebook friends anytime you like. Anytime Pool is the first social game to allow you to play no matter whether you are sat at your PC or out and about on your iPhone, iPod Touch or mobile phone.

Not only does Anytime Pool have an incredible and robust multiplayer game, but you can also take part in a single player game against 14 cool characters in 5 exotic locations, from the UK and USA to the Philippines to China.

International Version. US Version.

On the surface DUST looks a lot like a slightly grittier Halo 3. Basically a futuristic first person shooter with a strong focus on vehicles. The big point comes from it’s interaction with the EVE Online universe. The combat in DUST will take place on the surface of planets in EVE. As a consequence the result of battles will effect EVE. How big this effect will be (and in exact nature is not yet known). What we do know is that it will tie in with the upcoming changes to sovereignty in the Dominion expansion to EVE.

A few people have responded with horror to this,  worried that control of their systems will now be at the mercy of some crazy twelve year old console dude. Although it’s probably wise to have a little concern, DUST has been in development for two years and EVE Online is CCPs flagship product – I don’t think they began this endeavour without some serious thought.

Personally I think it’s an amazing idea, creating a universe that can entertain two rather disparate audiences (PC MMO players and console FPS players) at the same time and hopefully make them both more fun because of it.

More info should be forthcoming at EVE Fest, on October 1st.

It’s opt-in per site. You have to add a specific meta tag to your pages to make it take advantage of the plugin if it’s installed. There is also a Javascript way of detecting if the plugin is installed and inviting users to install it if isn’t.

They aren’t just doing this to help IE users out however. Google Wave makes use of HTML 5 stuff that doesn’t work in IE and the beta will go public on September 30th. And however good Google Wave may be, if IE users can’t use it, it won’t be a success…

• Chat mode is back. People asked for it’s return almost from the moment it was taken out. Can be disabled and can also be limited to ‘friends only’.
• Practise mode. Perfect those tricky shots or just hit the ball around.
• Power remembered between shots. A time saver everywhere, but mainly for shaving those last couple of seconds off your weekly challenge times.
• Improved ‘ball in hand’. Moving the white around the table no longer feels like a wrestling match.

One of the best things about the previous Maemo devices is the lack of restrictions on what you could do. Enabling root access to the underlying Linux system was possible (and easy) allowing a lot of access. Even updating it with unsigned firmware images was allowed. In theory this will all be possible with the N900, but in practice, things might not be so open. I remember a quote from someone at Nokia some time ago along the lines of “As soon as you put a sim in it, the operators want a piece of it”. Although you can get a sim-free unlocked N900 (the UK price is advertised as £499.99) I’d guess any operator subsidised N900 will have restrictions.

As part of the relaunch I’ve finally upgraded Wordpress to a more respectable (and secure) version, found a new theme and added some cool stuff, including OpenID support for comment posting.

All the posts and comments should be intact and everything should be working properly, but random behaviour for the next few days shouldn’t be unexpected…

It’s a line drawing game similar to Flight Control and Harbour Master that has you drawing paths for helicopters to pick up people and return them to safety. There are three types of helicopters, three different maps and online highscore table (featuring highscores which are frankly higher than we could manage during testing).

Simple, fun and only 99¢/59p.

It’s a flash based pool game that lets you play against your Facebook friends. There is a also a mobile version (to be released soon) that includes a full single player game as well as the social play through Facebook.

Have fun