Wow! This is pretty mental. I know a while back someone had managed to get a Linux kernel running on the iPhone, but there wasnt much to see and I soon forgot about it. It appears now however that PlanetBeing from the Dev-Team has managed to take an Android build and get it to run on the iPhone! Check out the video of it below:

Very cool stuff. I cant wait to see some Flash 10.1 running on that!

Well after a little deliberation I decided to go for it and take a leap and pre-order a “WakeMate“. Mainly as an experiment but partially to fuel the geeky gadget lover inside of me, but I do think this sort of thing is a natural extension to our techno-obsessed lifestyle.

Im a big fan of Science-Fiction, and my favourite author is Peter F. Hamilton. In the vast majority of his books he portrays a future where humans and technology merge, generally just an extension of the shrinking of personal gadget devices (think iPhone) down to microscopic scales which can then be embedded in the body (nano-robotics). These personal devices then allow the user to interface with the internet directly, without screens or input devices. This I think is a logical direction of our shrinking hardware and smarter software.

Glimpses of this future have already been seen with basic data-visual augmentation apps such as Layar for the iPhone. In addition to the ‘net-interface’ capability of the technologies described by Peter F. the micro-devices are capable of reading biometric data from the body directly and also capable of modifying and augmenting the bodies own capabilities.

So back to the point of this post. I think that Wake Mate is a tentative step in the direction towards the “personal doctor” and “human augmentation”. What it does is monitor your sleeping pattern through a wrist-band you put on when you go to bed. As you sleep it records your cycles and if you set it to, it can wake you when it considers is the best time, so you always wake up feeling refreshed.

Thats the concept anyways. I have no idea if it will work, but as a techno-gadget-geek im willing to give it a shot for $50

P.S. I would like to point out that Wake Mate isnt the first to make such an app. Zeo Sleep Coach has been around for a while selling a product, it however, is 5 times more expensive than Wake Mate and doesnt interface with the iPhone.

FoodScanner is an iPhone app that lets you scan a barcode and it then tells you about its nutritional info. Whats frustrating is that I had this idea over a year ago, the idea was that you scan an item, enter how much of it you ate, then the app keeps a running daily total of the amount of GDA of calories, fats, salts and more.

I didn’t chase it up as although I knew it possible to read a barcode from an image, it would of been difficult to tally the code to a specific item as each store has its own identification numbers.

Ah well, im sure now the idea has been proven we will be seeing Tesco, Sainsburys etc bringing out their own “measure your nutritional input” iPhone app!

First up is one of my favorite flash games of all time MotherLoad.

I loved the simplicity and addictiveness of this game. Basically you play a miner who digs down through the earth for minerals and then has to return to the surface to sell the minerals. With the cash you earn you can buy upgrades for you mining machine which allows you to go deeper and stay down for longer.

The graphics are simplistic but functional, giving you an easy to understand indicator of where the resources are and where you are to mine.

You can quite easily play this game for hours, getting deeper and deeper.

The iPhone version of this game is called iDigIt and is by the developer inmotion software.

The first thing you notice is that the graphics have been given a significant upgrade. I must admit I like the graphical additions, I think they give a needed boost of professionalism to the game especially if you are going to pay 59p to download it.

Once the pleasure of the new graphics wears off you start to notice a few issues.

Firstly the whole radar thing. In the original game you could mine down as far as you wanted and still see the minerals around you, in the iPhone version they have introduced a “fog of war” that shrouds your digger as you start to go deeper. You can buy radar upgrades that increase the distance you can see but I found this to have little effect as you get deeper (see screenshot to the right).The effect of this is that you cant see where the minerals are so you end up digging blindly into the dark.

Another issue is the control system. The game uses an on-screen joystick, im not a particularly massive fan of this method in the first place but its compounded by the fact that you have 360 degrees of freedom when underground. This is an issue as when digging you can only dig right, left, and down at 90 degree angles so having 360 degrees of freedom results in you often digging in the direction you werent intending. I would of liked to have seen the digging directions limited to 90 degree angles when the digger is on the ground.

As for replayability of the game, i dont think this game will have the same appeal as other games due to the fact that the only change the deeper you go is that you get higher quality minerals. There doesnt appear to be any other variation (i may be wrong here). In the flash version there were events like earthquakes to keep you interested, I would of liked to have seen this developed some more and improved on, perhaps some interesting creatures that you encounter. This would of also prevented the most efficient yet most boring tactic of just mining every single block in a strip fashion from left to right.

Overall the game is probably worth the 59p (cheap!) download but I think some of the game play features could of been extended and improved giving a richer more replayable experience.

Just acquired a shiny new 15″ MacBook Pro, so I can do some iPhone stuff, yey