QuadPong has been released!

Quick and easy to pick up, QuadPong is a twist on an old classic!

Keep the balls on the screen in this fast paced action game. Collect items that will help you, or make the game more difficult. As time goes on the balls will move faster....how many balls can you keep on the screen at once? 5? 10? 20?

Features:

✔ Beautiful Retina graphics!
✔ Great music to keep you on your toes!
✔ 2 Game mode, the normal QuadPong mode as well as a classic Pong mode
✔ Items you can pick up
✔ Easy to learn swipe or tilt control systems
✔ Online Score with Ranking system

Tangled 2 has hit the Apple AppStore!

Tangled 2 has just been released on the Apple AppStore and for a limited time will be sold for $0.99 (the regular price will be $1.99). This update brings many new features including amazing graphics from Joel Espaillat Rodriguez, and the most exciting new feature: our brand new Action game mode! In this mode you try to achieve the highest possible score by untangling the dots as fast as possible before the screen gets filled with more dots. Watch a demo of the Action mode! This mode is unique to Tangled 2 and unseen in any implementation of the classic Planarity puzzle game!

Here's the release notes:

The sequel to your favorite puzzle game is back with a new Action mode!

Tangled has been completely redesigned with new graphics, music, puzzles and new social
networking features (Open Feint Achievements and Leaderboards support). Fans of the original
will love the new redesigned interface, familiar game play and brand new puzzles to grind your
way through.

I highly recommend that everyone tries the new highly addictive Action mode. In this mode
you have to untangle the dots as fast as you can to make them disappear before there's
too many on the screen. Each dot you untangle will give you points, can you make it to
the top of the leaderboard?

Tangled 2 has taken the Planarity type puzzle to a whole new level that no other similar
game on the AppStore can match! The new Action mode is 100% original and there's nothing
like it in the AppStore.

Features:
    - Action mode (100% original)
    - Normal mode which includes 30 carefully designed puzzles
    - Random mode (for unlimited fun with 10 difficulty levels)
    - New Graphics by Joel Espaillat Rodriguez
    - New Music by Kevin MacLeod
    - Social Integration (Open Feint Achievements and Leaderboards support)

Multitasking on the iPhone (a developer's view)

A common complain I hear about the iPhone is the lack of multitasking, all the other smart phones can do ti so why not the iPhone? Well it CAN do it (there are some hacks to enable it) but Apple doesn't want it enabled. Now it has some basic multitasking, you can listen to music while doing something else or even be on a call and do something else but for most applications pressing the home button means quitting. What are the pros and cons of this method?

Pros:
- Your application always has full access to the hardware (you know there's no other app in memory or using the CPU except the iPhone OS)
- The user doesn't have to worry about "closing" apps (closing vs leaving it running in the background). I remember on Windows Mobile some people would have trouble running some apps because they had to much stuff running in the background that they didn't even know about
- Applications have evolved around this "limitation" and are a lot more flexible, most apps on the iPhone will remember their last state when quitting and will bring you back exactly where you were

Cons:
- Some apps would be good candidates for multitasking, instant messaging, audio streaming apps etc. But unfortunately it would be too hard for Apple to start deciding who is allowed to multitask and who isn't
- Some apps are not as graceful in restoring the previous state and some might just start from the beginning (can be very frustrating for the end user)

Now with the iPad coming soon people are again complaining about the lack of multitasking. It would be a big deal if the iPad ran regular desktop apps (like OSX apps) but it doesn't. It will run iPhoneOS apps which have already been designed with that in mind (and the new iPad specific apps will be designed that way too).

The only problem I can see is when programmers don't work around this limitation properly. Now I'll have to admit I'm far from perfect, my own game Tangled doesn't do it properly, it will allow you to go back to the last puzzle you were on but the state is gone and you have to start over :(   . Why was it done this way? Well when I was working on Tangled I had an iPod touch and I didn't really see why people would just go out of my game and want the same state when they would come back (I figured they could just put it to sleep and come back later). Now earlier this year I finally got around getting an iPhone 3Gs and I was playing Tangled and I got a text message, so I went to reply to it and when I got back in Tangled I had to start my puzzle over! It was actually the first time I realised how frustrating it was. The first thing I did after that event was improve the way Tangled quit and resumes. The new version coming out soon will remember the exact state the game was left when it quit and will resume it properly! (plus there will be a lot more features added...see my previous post about what's coming)

Now I'm sure I'll come up with more pros and cons so I might update this post soon but in the mean time, developers and users what do you think about the lack of multitasking on the iPhone/iPad?