JordanH.net

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas from JordanH.net!

Have a great Christmas and a happy new year! Thanks for reading my blog this year and I hope I’ll keep it up (and maybe post a little more frequently) throughout the years to come.

How are you spending Christmas this year? Personally, I’ll be playing Guitar Hero: World Tour for most of tomorrow, and some CoD: WaW later on. Considering we seem to have bought FOUR turkeys this year (don’t ask me why!), we may be eating turkey all the way through 2009 too!

Have a great time,

Jordan

Mobile Fotos

After having a great experience with Twittelator Pro for my iPhone, I decided to buy another paid app from the App Store. In particular, I was looking for a good Flickr application, and it didn’t take me long to find Mobile Fotos.

The application is quick and easy to use. You can view almost everything – sets/tags/groups/favourites/contacts – and it caches photos when you view them, which is a useful feature. You can save pictures to your iPhone, and assign them as a contact’s picture really simply.

Uploading is a snap, and despite some users’ complaints about images being uploaded upside-down, my test upload (a picture of @ruby_gem’s ferret) uploaded fine. There’s a wealth of options you can fill in when you upload too, such as privacy and picture type (photo, illustration, etc).

There’s also the option to view nearby photos and “explore” interesting and recent photos. Finally, there’s the ability to search for photos too. Something I would like to see added would be the ability to view collections, currently it’s not possible to do this via the app.

Mobile Fotos is a feature-plenty Flickr app for iPhone, and I definately recommend it for any Flickr enthusiast. The price tag is rather cheap (I think it was about £3), and it is really helpful. Well done!

I’ve uploaded a few pics of my usage of the app:

Need for Speed: Sellout

The games industry is now as important as movies when it comes to money made from releases. Grand Theft Auto IV, for instance, made $310 million on its first day in sales alone. However, there are some companies (*cough* EA *cough*) who are monetizing games far beyond new items and mission packs.

I’m in particular pointing the finger at the latest Need For Speed game – Need for Speed: Undercover. Browsing through the Xbox LIve Marketplace today I saw that you could purchase “the ability to buy upgrades without having to unlock them”. So that means that I can purchase something for 200 Microsoft Points which I could unlock quite easily with a few hours of playing time in the game.

In my opinion, that is a step too far. I can understand why they want to release new cars and race packs, but letting you pay EA to skip ahead in part of the game? Now that’s just exploitation of the gamer.

Well that’s done it for me EA. I’m no longer going to buy your new NfS game or the rip-off DLC that you’re selling with it. Done.