A couple weeks ago, the Good Morning Silicon Valley newsletter posted a link to a story on Slate (with a devastatingly effective demo on YouTube) of Crayon Physics Deluxe:
Petri Puro, the developer, put it together by himself (it bears similarities to some other gravity-based physics demos/games) and won the “Seamus McNally Grand Prize — the indie-game equivalent of the Academy Award for best picture”* — at the recent Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.
I downloaded the prototype game Puro wrote, Crayon Physics**, and was blown away by it. So was my son, and we ended up fighting over the mouse to solve the last two levels.
Wow! Crayon Physics is just too much fun to describe (stop now and watch that YouTube demo). OK, Slate comes close: “an ingenious game that looks like it was designed by a third-grader.” I immediately wrote Petri Puro and begged him to consider porting Crayon Physics Deluxe to the Nokia internet tablet.
My real thought was “Too bad that Tim Samoff already gave that gift N810 away!” I know that once Petri got an internet tablet in his hands he would realize that the tablet and his game are meant for each other.
Then a thread was started here in the ITT forums about the game — I want this game on my N800!. I’m not the only one who sees the need.
Maybe somebody in the Nokia food chain will realize the same thing when they see Crayon Physics Deluxe demoed and send Petri a tablet.
in the meantime, I’m going to suggest that everyone who thinks likewise write to Petri and to anyone they know at Nokia and tell them the same thing: Crayon Physics and internet tablets belong together.
Let’s send Petri a tablet!
_______________
* To quote Chris Baker’s original Slate piece.
** Following the precepts of the Experimental Gameplay Project, namely that the game encompass a single theme (i.e., “gravity,” “vegetation,” “swarms,” etc), be written by a single person, and be completed within one week.
Added later:
Visitors to Petri Puho’s blog at Kloonigames can see his other games — he writes one a month and posts them there — and learn a little about this 24-year-old: “At the moment I’m a student at Helsinki Polytechnic, studying computer science. Game development has been a hobby of mine for at least ten years now. My gaming interests don’t just limit to video games, but also include pen & paper roleplaying games, strategy games, board games, card games, etc.”
Chris Baker, in his Slate piece, notes that “despite his obvious talent, Purho isn’t sure he wants to go into the industry after he gets his computer-science degree. ‘It’s more about writing documents than it is about designing games,’ he says. ‘And I really hate writing documents.’” And Baker adds that “Purho will probably have a better chance of moving the industry forward if he keeps flying solo.”
I think that’s probably true. Now why does that seem so obvious? You see, I’m not the only one who agrees. To further Petri’s opportunities, an anonymous benefactor has indicated his intention to donate a now-idle N800 (yes, made superfluous by his recently acquiring an N810) to Petri. Shipping to Finland to occur posthaste. Games, inspiration and possible port to NIT to follow.
We know now that the 2006 OS will come with at least one new application pre-installed — Google Talk, with its instant messaging and VoIP phone capabilities.
Since Nokia has been promising IM and VoIP by mid-2006 for 51 weeks (hey! one more week till the announcement anniversary!), we knew this was coming.
I wonder if there will be any other pre-installed applications? Maybe FBReader, the world-class e-reader, for instance. We know that the 770 is an ideal e-book reader and that e-books are becoming more significant.
Or maybe there will be some additional games — Nako, Battlegweled and IceBreaker seem obvious candidates. Maybe a sturdy text editor to supplement Notes. Or built-in XTerm and CPU/MEM load graph. I would add PIM apps to this list, if there were any such available. I’m not envisioning the Nokia developers creating new apps with so much already on their plate.
I’ve definitely made my opinion known that FBReader is a natural application for the Nokia 770. But maybe not everyone agrees. RemoteUser (aka Gene Mosher) believes in the 770 as a remote control device. A whole crowd is making it a mapping/GPS displaying device. Not to mention others developing its audio and video playing side.
If Nokia isn’t going to pre-install all of these apps, and is wary of picking only one or another of them, I hope Ari Jaaksi and his crew provide a good clean automatic way to install and update them that even a rank beginner will be able to follow, as they’ve hinted will happen. If there are “click to install” links to add some of these apps, that will be the next thing to “pre-installed.”
You know what I’d like to do? Be upstairs monitoring the buggy old HP desktop I’m trying to clean from an unidentifiable infection, and play Battleship with my son as he half-watches a TV show with his sister that he’s seen before. Both of us using 770’s of course (we’re inching ever closer towards that second unit).
Sure, there are lots more interactive two-player games, but we’re partial to Battleship. And playing over a networkagainst each other instead of the computer would be a lot more fun.
I’ve played chess this way, as an add-on in an IM program. That was a little too interactive, too intense, to mix in with work and I dropped it. But Battleship ought to be about perfect. I wonder: Will Gaim take add-ons like this?
Nako is a version of the memory game Concentration that runs on the Nokia 770 which Jakub Pavelek coded. Jayne, our six-year-old daughter, loves playing Nako but some of the landscape photo pairs in the default tile set are too similar for her level of observation.
Jakub has worked up a version of Nako which permits you to supply your own images and to switch between different sets. The illustration here shows some of our five-year-old photos of Jayne as well as scenes from her native Cambodia (and the director of the AOA orphanage outside Phnom Penh).
Now the images mean something to her, and even similarly composed pictures of family and friends will be easier for her to distinguish (oh, I’ve got several more tile sets to create before her birthday on Sunday, at least one for each of the last five years — there’ll be lots of images of faces).
Construction of a tile set involves creating a single bitmap 2100 pixels wide by 70 pixels tall, picking and sizing 21 images each 100 pixels wide, and placing them side by side, as you can see below. The BMP image needs to be given a “.tileset” extension and placed in your Images folder for Nako to see it.
Clicking the arrows in Nako’s sidebar switches you between different tile sets. It’s hard to tell from this illustration, but the graphic shown there is the upper left quadrant of the dancer in yellow — the leftmost image in my .tileset file. I’ll probably change the photo in first position with one that has a clearly identiable feature in the upper left.
You can download the new 0.2.0 version of Nako 0.1.11 experimental version of Nako (this version closes if you try to switch to another application) from this page: koti.welho.com/jpavelek/tmp/770/
So maybe there’ll be new software in future Nokia 770 images. Are there sufficient justifications to include the FBReader in the base 770?
There are legitimate issues that need to be considered. Is it ready and open-source, and the best reader around? Yes, IMO (some might want to wait for bookmarks and highlighting).
Are there other apps that should come first? Well, that’s a big question. We should definitely get the most useful, wonderful, and necessary apps first. And VoIP and Instant Messaging obviously take precedence over FBReader.
As for the rest . . . various people have suggested other apps. I can see an alarm clock/calendar as being useful — except I use my phone to set alarms and, well, it keeps better time But is one really ready? And should we pick one PIM app to put on the 770 and ignore all the others?
A second browser? Please . . . one (Opera) or another (GPE-mini-browser or MANaOS), but not two (or three). Same for Evince and XPDF.
Business apps? I guess by that I mean AbiWord and Gnumeric. Me, I say leave those to individuals who need them. I don’t, yet. They’re not something my wife is going to use (when she gets the 770 as her Christmas/birthday present).
More games? Well, a few. Crazy Parking, BattleGweled. A great solitaire, if there is one. These fit the kids, who’ve demanded their own 770 screen time, and a tiny bit more variety might be good. Some people swear by MineSweeper. Me, I’m waiting for a two-person version of Battleship. Playing that with my son on two 770 — now that will be cool. (Operative word: waiting. Not in line for consideration here.)
But you know what? This list is straying fairly far from Nokia’s vision of this device and their vision of themselves as a “communications” company. As I noted before, Nokia wants to provide access to the “other” type of communication — voice being first. if you want to take the data that’s on the web and access it, you have a pretty good picture of the 770’s defining role — websites, blogs, rss feeds, email, VoIP and IM coming, internet radio, music and video, images. Even PDFs.
About the only thing missing from this list that you might encounter on a webpage or in a Google search is a slideshow viewer that accepts Powerpoint presentations. That I think is more mainstream than Word compatability for someone consuming information. Not in line yet (is it on the horizon even?).
And, then, of course, there are e-books.
We have huge repositories of essential data we need so much that we aggregate the different pieces into warehouses and let anyone access the whole thing for free — it’s so critical we started doing this even before the web. Libraries we call these data repositories. They house books and people are trained to use them, from their first day in school.
And, really, people like to access information in book form. The depth of information, the amount in a single package, these are levels that have been set over hundreds of years. They’re the depth and length people feel comfortable with. Websites, blogs and such, are pretty confusing because you never know how much is there. Start reading a labyrinth like Paul Ford’s Ftrain, and you may never know how much of it you’ve seen. And how far back do you read in a blog? There’s no beginning in a blog.
And, of course, people like entertainment in book form. Sure we go to the movies, but when how many books do you give as Christmas/Hanukkah presents and how many movie tickets? If books didn’t do the job, people would be giving lots more ties and board games to adults, don’t you think?
Oh, you say, they’re not giving e-books as presents, are they. Rhetorical question, since we all know the answer to that. No, they’re not.
I think I’ll go into all the reasons for that in a succeeding post. There’s a whole set of issues that have stalled the e-book market — publishers’ concerns, DRM (digital restrictions management), multiple formats, expensive or awful e-book reading devices — that deserves exploration at length (hey, my specialty).
For now, let’s say it’s not for want of demand or desire. That’s what I think, and I’ll provide the justifications for my opinion then. But a critical aspect to consider is how we will use the 770 when we are forced offline. And an e-book reader is made for that.
Look for Part II later in the week.
If you like the idea of FBReader being included with other software on the Nokia 770, please add a comment to this blog post. If you have really well-grounded ideas for competing software, do add your comment as well.
Marcelo Oliveira at Handful of Nothing posted application-installer versions of multiplayer Doom, Battlegweled, Crazy Parking, and five additional games on his website today.
The software section here at Internet Tablet Talk will be among the sites that mirror the games.
Other games include IceBreaker, MaemoBlocks (Tetris), Maemoswap (Minesweeper), MaemoDrac (Solitaire-like), and Tux Pux.
On the Maemo users list — questions that aren’t about the development of new apps or using the developer tools Nokia has made available — Marcelo Oliveira wrote about the version of Doom we’ve seen running on the 770:
We are just finishing the multiplayer support for it ( wi-fi) and we will
publish the game and full source code (GPL as the original doom). This week for sure the packages will linked on the wiki, and at our site: www.indt.org.br/maemo
We are also just waiting for the final sdk, to place versions for it online.
New useful applet showed up in the Application Catalog. It’s is a status bar plugin showing CPU load and memory usage. It also has — all right! — a menu for taking screenshots. Future versions will list the most CPU intensive apps, for killing as needed. It notes that the applet, which loads on startup, is “Application Installer friendly” but you will need to reboot after installing.
New game showed up this morning in the Application Catalog at the Maemo wiki: Crimson Fields, “a strategy game in the style of Battle Isle.” It should still be regarded as beta, Uwe Koch, its developer reports, because a couple features aren’t working quite right, but the port is going well, he says.
Don’t know how this works, or if it’s a port of gnome-sudoku or gnudoku or some other version, or as it’s a new app entirely. We await more information eagerly, being Sudoku enthusiasts. Anyone with further information, please advise.If any of our readers installs the game and can send us photos or screen captures and a description of how it works, please let us know.
Update: Nacho Barrientos wrote that the “Software is usable and works ok.” He adds that he isn’t the developer, but is only writing some patches to improve the features. The author, Luca De Cicco, in response to our queries, said that the game was developed from scratch to run on GPE and easily ported to Maemo (and, btw, it runs on PC’s).
But is one really ready? And should we pick one PIM app to put on the 770 and ignore all the others?
