The latest update to Anytime Pool on Facebook is here. Anytime Pool is a cool Flash game I was involved in making on Facebook that lets you play pool against your friends. Changes and new features in the latest version include:

• 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’.
• Practice 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.

Our new Heli Rescue fan page on Facebook includes an early look at two new levels in an upcoming update.

Despite becoming the sole owners of Symbian, Nokia have gone ahead and announced the N900. The N900 is the next in the 770/N800/N810 line of devices based on the Debian-derived Maemo platform. Unlike it’s predecessors however, the N900 is in fact a phone.

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.

I finally decided to start posting to my blog with some regularity again. Whether it will last, I can’t say.

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…

A game that I was involved with making called Heli Rescue has just been released on the App Store for iPhones and iPod Touches.

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.

I just thought I’d announce a game that I’m involved with at Distinctive Developments called Anytime Pool has just relaunched.

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.

Slightly off topic compared to most of what I’ve written about, but I thought I’d quickly mention Fight Klub (wiki).

Fight Klub is a new collectible card game shortly to be released by Decipher. Decipher previously produced card games based on Star Trek, Star Wars and Lord of the Rings (and others). Fight Klub aims to be significantly different from previous games in a number of respects. It will be multi-licence, meaning interesting combinations are possible (although it means many game mechanics are a little more abstract). It will also only be available online direct through through the Decipher website (which they intend to make it cheaper).

The concept of the game is very simple; heroes vs. villains, with each game consisting of a player controlling a single hero or villain and playing through a series of confrontations. And the multi-licence nature means some cool match-ups. From the very first release you’ll finally be able to answer that difficult question, who would win in a fight between Rambo and Saw’s Jigsaw killer

The move for something so different might be risky, but if it pays off, it could be cool.

I found a new website through the MythTV mailing list a few days called The Movie DB. It’s essentially aiming to be an open version of IMDB.

Many projects (such as MythTV and XBMC) have depended IMDB for a long time to provide metadata. Unfortunately this has usually been against the rules and was often difficult any since it relies on rather fragile screen scraping.

So in steps the Movie DB. From what I can tell from reading around the forums and stuff (and apologies if any of this isn’t accurate) it was started by the guy who wrote Meligrove, a database of fan made movie posters to replace a similar effort called Movie XML. The content is a little limited right now (about 8000 movies apparently) but the database from Movie XML is soon to be imported adding another 150,000.

Of course the important point is that the Movie DB is an open database - all the entries are editable wiki style. It also has high level support for TV series (with seasons and episodes etc) as well and a not-quite-ready public API.

I’ve keeping my eye on a project called Elisa a lot recently. It’s basically another attempt to produce a cross platform* media centre solution. At the moment its features are fairly limited, it’s essentially just some nice media playing software. It does have plugins to handle Youtube and Flickr though with lots of other stuff planned.

The main reason I’m interested in it though is that it feels likes it’s constantly making progress (and they make the progress very visible). They have weekly releases and every one actually has some cool new feature. It’s also written in Python which I think lowers the bar a little for community contributions (as opposed to C++/Qt required for MythTV).

For it to replace MythTV for me the obvious missing feature is, well, TV. Reading the forum suggests it’s quite low on the priority list for the moment (since it obviously requires a lot of work and other features are less likely to be released in the meantime just because the developers are busy). But, as I said at the beginning, it’s worth keeping an eye on.

* Not so long ago it only worked on Linux, now it supports Windows. It technically supports MacOS with some messing around but they’re aiming for proper support soon.

Well this came way out of left field for me, but after reading their thoughts and plans on the matter makes a lot of sense: Google have released a browser, called Chrome. Main highlights: based on Webkit and using a spanking new Javascript engine called V8.

I’m using it right now to type this and everything seems in order. It feels faster than Firefox 3, the interface is nice and clean and I’m generally revelling in the nice newness of it all. Interestingly it seems to have a spellchecker built-in that doesn’t recognise the word “Google”…

Anyway, anything I might say about the browser this early will end up repeating most of their hype, and that is done much better by this comic strip they released.

PS. Currently the beta version is Windows only with Linux and Mac versions to follow..