Nothing funny about feldspar

A couple of months ago, I posted about what I put on my iPod Touch. I thought it might be informative, if not particularly interesting to give an update as to what’s on my iPod now.

One thing I’d like to point out: I am not particularly frugal (geez, I own lots of Apple gear — frugal it ain’t), but I am cheap and I really don’t like the iTunes store. This stems from the early days, when I bought a few albums and then had a drive crash and oooops! no more music and no way to get it back from Apple. I suppose it’s a little better now with the “DRM-free” tracks, but frankly I have enough music (over 10k songs) that I seldom buy any. And since I never was big on movie rentals or TV… Anyway, this cheaposity has transferred over to the App Store. The $25 iTunes credit I got with my iPod Touch case tends to be used for software updates, but I have bought a couple of games.

All that long-winded paragraph to say that not everything in this list is free, but it is all pretty cheap.

And, like before, there are mostly games. I’m not a “productivity” kind of person, so most of the business &c. apps are wasted on me. When I was poking about the App Store yesterday, it was interesting to note that games are often free or low-cost, but “lifestyle” apps are nearly always spendy. Finance apps fall slightly more expensive than games, and business apps are all over the place, but are often quite pricey.

Looking at my “Applications” library in iTunes, I see I’ve downloaded 43 items. Not all of these have remained on my iPod Touch, but I don’t bother deleting them. In fact, I have fewer on than off.

What causes me to keep something? A game that passes the time and that isn’t too easy or too hard; or an application that does some occasional (and usually simple) task well that I can’t do by other means.

Because of the length of the lists (17 on, 26 off), I’ve moved them below the fold.

On my iPod Touch:

• Air Sharing. This free app gives you access to files over your wifi. I have not actually set it up yet, since I just downloaded it a few hours ago. It is currently free, but shortly it will cost $6.99. I imagine (but no one has mentioned it) that future upgrades will cost.
• Aurora Feint The Beginning. I loved this game when it first came out. However, numerous scoring and visual bugs left me cold and I took it off my device. It’s been updated a couple of times since, and so I reloaded it, but it just doesn’t seem to have the same charm as in those early days. Part of the problem is that I have a gazillion credits (see scoring bugs above) to use where necessary, but I can’t get past certain points and so I’m left with just matching three cubes for forever. I have to decide whether to abandon this “character” or abandon this game.
• Bloomberg. The only news app I have. A recent update included ads, which are only slightly annoying. It has an terrible habit of loading the stock indexes, and then not showing the ones I’m interested in. Switching off the index page and going back to it helps. The nice part now is that you can select which headline groups you wish to see, and their order.
• Cowabunga. You’re using a raft to help bouncing cows get across a fast river. The graphics are cute (though I’d like to be able to see the cows close up!), but I’m terrible at it. I play it every so often when I want to smile at cuddly cows. I’m sad when they die, though.
• Crossword Light and 2 Across, Lite Edition. I got both of these apps to see which I prefer, and frankly, it’s neither. Crossword Light’s puzzles are too easy (and since the paid version uses similar sources…) and 2 Across’s interface bugs me (why do I have to make extra effort to bring up the keyboard — it should be there from the beginning). I’ve had these for about a month now, and still haven’t finished the free puzzles (for lack of interest), so nothing’s compelling me to buy the full versions.
• FiatLux. The only problem with this “flashlight” is the brightness is limited by whatever setting you have on your iPod Touch. If you’ve got automatic brightness turned on, it will be quite dim in a darkish room.
• Mach Dice. (99 cents) I don’t play RPGs, but I know people who do. This is a nice implementation of odd-sided dice. The 3D rendering is pretty effective.
• Moonlight Mahjong Lite. I don’t play this as much as I used to, but I will pick it up every so often. I like the interface for looking at the board in 3D.
• Puzzloop Free. Kind of a “match 3″ and gun-pointer game. I’ve only had this a few hours, but I don’t think it will last long. In case you haven’t guessed, I’m not much for action games.
• Radius. (99 cents) I got this on the recommendation of a friend, but I should have determined that my friend and I have different tastes. It uses the touch-screen effectively, but it’s a bit too frenetic for me.
• Remote. My favorite application. I keep my music on a different computer — I can use Remote to make it play through the speakers anywhere I’ve got AirTunes running. Awesome.
• reMovem (free). A balloon-popping game. I play this without regard to whether or not I’m going to win. Call it BubbleWrap for the middle-aged.
• Rolo. ($1.99) I’m a little disappointed to find out that a free version was released after I bought this one, because even though it’s only 2 bucks, I probably wouldn’t have bought it after trying the free version. Another puzzle game. I’m currently stuck on a level; I’m not sure how much more I’ll play it.
• Sol Free Solitaire. I probably play this game 5 times more than any other game. 10 times, even. What can I say? I like solitaire, and this free version gives me four versions that I play pretty frequently (there are actually 5, but 1-card Klondike is just so wrong). There are bugs (cheating is possible because some of the counting algorithms are inadequate, and there are a few visual errors), but overall it beats carrying around a deck of cards.
• Stanza. This is an ebook reader. I seldom read ebooks even on a regular sized screen — having them on a tiny device is painful. This (free) reader has access to many different formats (some reformatted from Project Gutenberg, for instance), and has a reasonable interface, but some things just drive me crazy. For instance, instead of using the “pinch” mechanism to just zoom in, it causes the page to reformat with a larger font. This is disconcerting the first few times you do it. Plus, scrolling doesn’t really work. I’ll wait for something like this for reading electronically.
• WeatherBug. I tried to set up a bookmark to Weather Underground, but I kept coming back to this. Simple and easy, and gives me just as much info as I want.

Removed from my iPod Touch:

• Audi A4 Driving Challenge. This is an ad for Audi. The game isn’t bad, but I have issues with where the “gas” and “brake” are positioned on the screen. It would be better if they were alongside, so you can steer, gas and brake like you had steering-wheel-mounted controls. Plus, if all you do is push the gas down as long as possible, you will still finish the course — much like those Old-Timey cars at Cedar Point. This one didn’t stay long.
• Bubbles and BubbleWrap. Interesting only in concept. I don’t have a 3-year-old to keep occupied, and my inner 3-year-old prefers solitaire.
• Labyrinth Lite Edition. This is like those old wooden games. I sucked at those, too.
• Blip Solitaire. Very simple game. Gameplay improved with an update, but it is still one-person Pong.
• Cannon Challenge. This ballistics simulator comes from The Discovery Channel. The graphics are kind of nice, but once you get the hang of positioning the barrel, it’s pretty straightforward.
• Cube Runner. It was interesting the first few times, but my twitches don’t match the game’s requirements.
• DizzyBeeFree. A maze game. The graphics are cute, but in the end it’s not my kind of game.
• Hanoi. Towers of Hanoi game. Once you’ve done it…
• KuGon Lite. This is a math/puzzle game. It’s ok, but once you mess up, it’s really hard to recover (or even start over).
• Lumen Lite. This is a puzzle game that uses a beam. You use mirrors and “gems” to manipulate the beam. It’s ok, but like most puzzle games, once I’ve seen how to “do” it, it’s more or less over.
• Match. A game I played without regard to score. Since replaced by reMovem for the “playing without thinking waiting for something” times of my life.
• MotionX Dice. I’m not a poker player so I wasn’t interested in their other offerings. Even though this is free, and Mach Dice cost a buck, I prefer Mach Dice for the D&D rolling.
• Pangea VR. This is an ultimately limited exploration of other people’s photographs. I found it difficult to find pictures I was interested in exploring.
• PapiJump and PapiRiver. Very simple-looking games that require good coordination with the accelerometer. Fun for a few minutes, but not my cup of tea.
• Subway Shuffle Lite. Another puzzle game (get the theme here?). I did all of the puzzles in the free version, and wasn’t inspired to go get more of the same.
• Sudoku (free). Basic Sudoku. For as much as I used to play it, I don’t find it so compelling anymore. Mostly I get tired of counting one through nine.
• Tap Tap Revenge. I might like this better if I actually used headphones when I play games.
• Tetravex Lite. A color-matching tile puzzle game. Meh.
• Tris. A Tetris clone that has since been pulled from the App Store. I played lots of Tetris back in the day… Having touch controls doesn’t improve the experience.
• Google Mobile App. I hated that it opened up a new window for everything. Since I only looked at the news, I just made a bookmark on my Home screen for it.
• NYTimes. I took this off pretty early on. It’s way too slow.
• Check Word. I don’t play Scrabble™ enough to bother keeping this on. Maybe once the weather turns cold…
• Pocketpedia. I haven’t ever used this. There’s just too much work to get my info into it.
• WordPress. Yeah. I don’t blog much, and when I do I type a lot.