Month: July 2012

Review: Tiny Tower

Rarely do I play games on my iPhone. Over the past four years I can think of only a handful that I’ve played for longer than a few minutes: Orbital, Frenzic, Horror Vacui, and Mage Gauntlet.1 Last week while vacationing in Colorado I decided to give Tiny Tower a try.

Tiny Tower came out over a year ago. It was picked by Apple as the 2011 iPhone Game of the Year, and it has a 4.5-star average rating based on 285,000 ratings. Needless to say, it’s incredibly popular. Chances are you’ve played it.

Anyone who has played Tiny Tower knows it requires no skill or strategy. So long as you check in on the game (or let its push notifications alert you) then you can’t help but progress. There is no goal other than to keep building. And there is very little strategy other than to give your Bitizens a place to work (preferably based on their skill sets).

More or less, Tiny Tower is a digital ant farm.

Anyone can build a gloriously tall tiny tower, it’s just a matter of how long it will take — because the only thing working against you in the game is time. The game requires you to wait a certain period of time between building a new level and opening it for business. You also have to wait for the inventory in your stores to be re-stocked. Even the elevator moves painfully slow if you’re delivering someone beyond the first few floors.

Time, however, can be “traded” for Tower Bux. Or, as we say in the real world, time is money. And the more time you spend in the game the more likely you are to earn a Tower Bux here or there.

  • Spend time manning the elevator and you’ll occasionally get tipped a Tower Bux.
  • Spend time helping a visitor find someone in the tower and they’ll give you a Tower Bux for your time.
  • After you’ve earned enough coins to build a new level you get a Tower Bux as a bonus.
  • If a store is completely stocked you sometimes get a Tower Bux bonus.

Tower Bux can be spent to speed along the game play. You can use your Tower Bux to:

  • speed up the re-stocking process;
  • buy a faster elevator;
  • advertise open apartments and get renters in sooner;
  • speed up construction of a new level; and/or
  • upgrade the amount of inventory a store can hold, allowing it to go longer before needing to be restocked.

The taller your tiny tower gets the longer new levels take to build. And though you’re earning coins faster due to a higher number of shops being open for business, Tower Bux are accumulated very slowly no matter how far you progress in the game. Thus, the longer you play, the more you feel the pain of time with no way of beating it… 2

Or you can cheat. You can use real-life money to load up on Tower Bux via an In App Purchase. $0.99 gets you 10 Tower Bux; $4.99 gets you 100; and $29.99 gets 1,000.

Early on I resolved not to buy any Tower Bux (it seemed like buying cheat codes). It took me two and a half days to organically earn 25 Tower Bux so I could buy a faster elevator. The next elevator upgrade cost 75 Tower Bux. At my current rate that’s at least a week away.

I can’t help but feel that the whole point of Tiny Tower is to bore me or frustrate me to the point of spending real dollars to buy Tower Bux in order to speed up the game play. As cute and clever as Tiny Tower may be, I prefer games with a strategy and a goal.

  1. Which one of these is not like the other? ↵
  2. There are 40 different missions you can complete in order to earn Tower Bux as a reward. However, after a week of play I’ve built a 17-level tower and yet I still only have the proper stores to complete 1 of the 40 missions. Since you cannot chose the actual stores that get built (only the category) the missions are at the mercy of the game itself. ↵
Review: Tiny Tower

Instagram’s Permalinks Got a Sweet Update  →

I just noticed today that Instagram’s permalink pages have received a very nice update. It used to be that all you could do was view the image and its related info. Now you can log in and then “like” an image or post a comment just as if you were in the app itself.

My friends on Twitter tell me that the update rolled out last week while I was vacationing in Colorado (as you may have deduced from my linked-to ‘gram).

Instagram’s Permalinks Got a Sweet Update

Understanding Twitter  →

Dan Frommer:

The worry, as usual, seems to be that Twitter — a thing we love deeply — is going to destroy itself as it tries to become more of a business. Or at least ruin the Twitter that we grew up with or the Twitter that could have been. Anyway, I get it. No one likes it when The Man takes things away, even if it’s as bizarre as wanting to use LinkedIn to read Twitter. But it’s also important to understand Twitter’s situation.

Understanding Twitter

Growing Pains  →

Chuck Skoda on the difficulties that Mac users and developers encounter at times due to Apple’s aggressive attitude of simplification, change, and/or the adoption of new technologies.

(An aside to Chuck’s article, I can’t help but wonder how long until the only port on a Mac is a Thunderbolt port. Will it ever happen, or will Thunderbolt and USB be as simple as Apple goes? And that begs another question: will Thunderbolt replace the 30-pin adapter on our iPhones and iPads? And if so, how soon?)

Growing Pains

Sponsor: Igloo Software  →

My thanks to Igloo Software for sponsoring the RSS feed this week.

“That’s no moon. It’s a corporate intranet!”

… 6 months later …

“I felt a great disturbance in our company — as if hundreds of employees cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.”

Your intranet doesn’t have to suck. At Igloo, we built a new intranet platform that combines social technologies with document management in a beautiful, usable digital workplace.

In your day, you might give updates, have discussions and share files with your team. With Igloo, that all happens in one place. The tools you want to use, like blogs, comments, ratings, status updates, and more, are already there. Right beside your documents.

No more searching email threads. No more bolt-ons to legacy platforms.

It just works.

Plans start at just $99 a month for up to 25 users and scale to intergalactic sizes. Get started with a demo and you could win a Field Notes Brand National Crop set.

(Sponsorship via The Syndicate)

Sponsor: Igloo Software

The Camera You Have With You  →

Marco Arment:

Like many of the people likely to be reading this, I bought a digital SLR a few years ago and developed a photography hobby. Then, also like many of you, my iPhone’s camera slowly took over my casual photography needs, and I stopped bringing the big SLR with me most of the time. The iPhone camera was good enough for most uses.

I have never owned a nice camera. One day I may spring for something like a GX1, but right now my iPhone is not only “the camera I have with me,” it’s also the best camera I own.

The iPhone’s abilities as a camera have significantly improved over the years. If your budget or your interest in photography don’t warrant a high-quality camera, fortunately it’s safe to say that Apple will continue to make the iPhone into a great camera.

The Camera You Have With You

The Hemingway Papers  →

Several of the columns written by young Ernest Hemingway during his time writing for The Toronto Star have been put online:

[The Hemingway Papers] showcases the columns Ernest Hemingway wrote while reporting for The Toronto Star in the early 1920s. He joined the paper at the age of 20, sending dispatches from Toronto, Chicago, and across Europe. His relationship with the city, the newspaper, and the stories he told would have an enormous impact on his literary style.

Hemingway wrote 191 articles for the Toronto Star, and 19 of them are currently showcased in the archives. A bigger selection of the collection (70 articles) is available in newsprint for $20.

The Hemingway Papers