She compiled a list of 2700 words in the following categories: Basics, Slang, Professions, Languages, Countries & continents, Numbers, Question words, Words for time, Weather, Family, Emotions, Clothing, Colors, Describing people, Town & outside, Traveling, Body Parts, Eating, Foods, Parts of a house, Furniture, Animals, German 201 words, German 250 words, German 301 words and Advanced words.

Try it for yourself for only $5!

• In October 2010, they will have all of their books also available in ePub format which will coincide with the new APress website.
• Their books will soon be available for purchase in the iBooks Store. They’re currently in the process of adding their entire catalog there which should be done by Fall 2010.
• If you really want to read APress books on your iPad, you can already buy them from Amazon and read them on the Kindle iPad app.

Also, someone asked about buying dead tree copies from an actual bookstore in Germany. You can get them at Lehmanns Fachbuchhandlung. They also have several branches in Berlin which you can find by clicking on Filiale on that website. If you’re interested in bookstores in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, then here is their complete list of distributors.

Now, if you’d like to take advantage of an excellent deal, use the code MOREIPHONECOOLWJOU to get my eBook for 50% off! Which can be entered after clicking the “buy eBook” button here:
http://www.apress.com/book/view/1430229225 Note this offer expires on Nov 1, 2010, so take advantage of this incredible offer before it’s too late!

1. Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.
2. Go to your podcast list and find the podcast to which you just subscribed.
3. Right-click on this and select Copy Podcast URL as shown below.

4. Open Miro and press Cmd+N (Ctrl+N on Windows).
5. You will see the following dialog box appear with the feed already pasted in as shown below.

6. For some strange reason, iTunes adds an automatic line break at the end of this URL, so you need to press down and then backspace to remove that.
7. Press Enter and it will now import your feed.
8. Now you can unsubscribe to this feed in iTunes and enjoy it in Miro!

Dvorak attempt

About two years ago, I was suffering from pain in my hand and also realized that finally, for the first time in my life, I do almost all my work on my own computer, so thus I can feel free to experiment with other keyboard layouts. For the uninitiated, Qwerty was originally designed for typewriters as the most efficient layout possible to keep the bars from hitting each other and jamming. So, they scientifically analyzed a large word list and made a keyboard with this knowledge. Remington got his design and noticed if they moved just two letters, they could have the word typewriter on the top row, so it would be easy for salesmen to type. In any case, due to market momentum, most people still use this keyboard layout to this day.

Enter Dvorak. August Dvorak saw this issue in 1936 and designed his own layout, so that all the vowels would be on one hand and the most common consonants on home row on the other hand. This was optimized for typewriters, because he obviously wouldn’t know about important shortcuts like Ctrl+X, C, V for cut and paste as well as Ctrl+Z for undo and Ctrl+Q, W to quit apps and close windows on a Mac.

However, despite these limitations, I spent a month learning Dvorak and even reached a speed of 35 wpm. Unfortunately though, I experienced intense pains in my right pinkie finger from reaching up to pretty the L. I still can’t fathom how anyone would consider designing a keyboard layout so that a pinkie would have to hit such a common key so often. So, time to throw out Dvorak and keep looking.

Next! Colemak…

So, I remembered my friend Zak Greant suggesting that I look into Colemak, since it keeps the cut and paste keys in place and has the added advantage of changing as few letters on the Qwerty keyboard as possible. It also keeps the punctuation of the US keyboard, so it’s also ideal for programmers. Another feature is that it strives to make each hand do its share of the work… oh yeah, and it also remaps your useless Caps Lock key to Backspace. This last feature alone will speed up your typing speed quite a lot with very little finger training, I highly recommend it!

Colemak keyboard install

So, first I have to install the Colemak keyboard. I went to Colemak.com’s Mac page and downloaded the keyboard. Then I took it into a free keyboard editor, Ukelele and added a dead key (a key which lets you enter another key to get special characters) next to the left shift so that I could easily type Esperanto and German characters. I should preface this by saying that I type around 80% English, 15% Esperanto and 5% German, but it’s annoying to always switch to the German keyboard just to type the umlauted letters like ä, ö and ü.

Caps lock config

Next comes the caps lock to backspace configuration. I already had a program called DoubleCommand installed, because I remapped the right option key on my Macbook to a forward delete key, which I find missing on a Mac laptop keyboard. So, I just had to remap the caps lock key to backspace and I was done. Well, not quite. Every time I pushed the caps lock key, the light would toggle. So, I installed another app called PCKeyboardHack and that fixed the issue. Ah, the perfect keyboard.

Hooked on Ergonomics Worked For Me!

For the sake of curiosity, I did a search on amazon for Colemak and discovered a gem called The Computer Athlete’s Handbook: Your Guide To A Healthier, Happier Techy Lifestyle. It’s not available in Germany, so I bought it for Kindle and read it on my iPhone. It goes over how to change your working environment to keep yourself from developing carpal tunnel syndrome. After reading this book and remembering a lifehacker article about how bad it is on your body to type on a laptop keyboard, I decided I needed something new. Unfortunately all the ergonomic keyboards are very Windows centric, and I’ve tried using one before and had no success with it.

Apple Wireless Keyboard

For a long time I’ve had an unused keyboard tray in my desk. I also had very poor posture, because my Macbook sits on top of a cooler, because after I upgraded its hard drive and RAM, it has always run very hot. I’ve always had to reach quite high just to type… not good. So, I read some reviews and decided to splurge for the Apple Wireless Keyboard and I have to admit that I absolutely adore it… with one caveat: the caps lock is horrible as a backspace key. They designed it so that it can’t repeat to prevent people from toggling caps lock twice by accident.

Eventually I discovered that KeyRemap4MacBook (after uninstalling DoubleCommand) has a Caps Lock LED hack which allows the caps lock on certain Apple keyboards to act normally, even though it keeps the light on. So, now I have the perfect keyboard setup. I made a site called LearnColemak.com to help me learn the setup, but found that I needed more training, so last night I bought Master Key, a typing tutor which turns mastering Colemak into a challenging game… I guess you could call it Colemak Hero without the cool graphics.

So, I should go practice my Colemak a bit more, so hopefully my next blog post will be typed in it!

Well, on the way back, we stayed overnight in Kraków and I wanted to visit the main market which is Rynek Główny. I was a bit surprised to realize that I already knew the word Rynek, because of the Polish localization of Dominion Minion which has Czarny Rynek, the Polish translation for an interesting Dominion card called Black Market. Black Market is an interesting card which changes the nature of a Dominion game a bit and lets you buy cards which are not active in the current game (for more details, see: boardgamegeek).

So, how is this dangerous? Well, I got into a cab and wanted to ask to be taken to the main market:

- Czarny Rynek, proszę!

Of course, this got a rather strange expression from the driver, since I had just asked to be taken to the black market! Fortunately this wasn’t a location known in Kraków, so I quickly corrected myself and we were on our merry way. I just can’t imagine what interesting adventure we could’ve gotten into had the driver actually taken us to some black market!

Fortunately I also had the iPhone app, OffMaps on hand, where I had the exact location we wanted marked as a pin which I just showed to the driver. This app shows a map where you can pre-download maps of places you plan to be abroad, so when you arrive you won’t have to pay exorbitant data roaming fees to see a map of your current location… it will just rely on your iPhone’s GPS.

If you need to localize your iPhone apps, check out the services we provide at iPhone-i18n.com, providing app translations exclusively for the iPhone.

iTunes links:

• German Course
• German Sex

See more information about the app

I know that when I first saw Orbital, I thought of it as a knock-off of Puzzle Bobble (a.k.a. Bust-A-Move), but once I got it, I discovered that it’s much more than that. Each shot will create a ball that expands until it reaches either the edge of the screen or another ball and if you hit a ball 3 times, it explodes giving you a point. What were your inspirations for Orbital?

First of all, congrats on your score in Gravity Mode, i have yet to break the 100 points barrier. Did you know that Dane Cook is 8th with 171 Points? People are really addicted, the average playing time of all players is somewhere around 5 hours, with some people maxing out at 100 hours. That’s the amount of time people usually spend with role-playing games…

Anyway, to get to your question:
Adrian, the guy who programmed Orbital, and Andreas, who acted as Producer,
were addicted to a flash game called Gimme Friction Baby. Very simple, very basic. They just couldn’t stop playing, i gave it a shot and was addicted as well. The game felt like a raw gem. But man, was it tough. We wanted to provide something that everyone would play – so we experimented a lot, we tried many different things but in the end what really worked well were gravity and multiplayer. So we stuck to them and left out the experimental stuff.

Initially, we also wanted to have a pinball feeling… a lot of action going on. We knew we wanted to have voice-overs, but no one here speaks English without an accent – so we had to go with a text-to-speech engine. And we wanted the robot to be a bit sarcastic, like we are.

And we included online high scores and facebook so people start to challenge each other. Some experiments also went into the direction of Bust-a-Move, now that you mention it.

Graphically, we wanted to do something impressive, that really wowed people. We knew it will be something space themed, and we needed to show the gravity. That’s how the grid came into being.

Many players notice its very simple scoring mechanism. On the first game of Gravity Mode, a player’s first score is usually 5… while somewhat disheartening, it also gives the player a challenge … “I can do better than that!” and they have to play again. Were there other considerations for a more complex scoring mechanism or why did you choose this?

During the experiments we had other scoring systems – but they just didn’t add to the fun. As soon as you are in the 10,000s or millions, your score becomes a fuzzy number in your head. We like it the way it currently is – you can really compare your scores and you know how good (or bad) you are at the game. We saw tweets from people who were happy about a high score of 2. It really motivates people – they think they can do better than that. And if they take their time, they will.

Orbital is in the category of the “one button” games for the iPhone. No matter where you tap, it simply fires the ball in the direction of the turret. Was your idea that the game should be a game of timing or did you just think that would be the simplest way to interact with the game? Also, did you experiment earlier with other ways to control the play?

We were developing mobile games and there was this wave of timing based one thumb games. They really work well on classic mobile phones (as they usually have crappy input for games). The game should be playable with just one hand free so you could play it almost anytime, anywhere. Accelerometer based games for example just don’t work when you’re in a bus or train.

Also we wanted to keep game-play sessions in short bursts of about 3 minutes so you could take out the game, play a round and put it back. The simple controls also help the game feel so deceptively innocent and simple.

There was a mode where the shot would fly where you tap but it broke the game as you could play it almost infinitely. Many people were asking us for such a mode though so we are currently working on it and i think we’ve found a way to make it work so the game stays challenging and short.

What are your future plans for Orbital?

As mentioned there will be a new game mode coming, it will address most of the requests we had from the community. You will be able to control your shot and you will have progressive scoring – but even though in theory it should be easier, we’re going to mess with your mind so you will get greedy and lose.

OpenFeint is something we’re currently investigating. Achievements were in our initial list of features and maybe we’re going to add them. Anti-chievements for extra-bad gaming was also something we considered, but i don’t think people are ready for this yet Online multiplayer is also something we’re currently thinking about, but we need to think about how we want to do it.

Do you have ideas for other similarly minimalistic, yet addictive games for the iPhone?

We are currently working on an unannounced title that will not be self-published, and we’re working on publishing high-quality games from other developers. We are currently evaluating new concepts, but for now we keep on improving Orbital.

I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but I learned about your game during a presentation at 360|iDev, an independent iPhone developer conference. David Whatley, developer of GeoDefense, presented Orbital as an example of bad PR from a very fun and polished title… and recommended that we all buy it. Going on that, how did you try to spread the word about your game and what worked well and what didn’t go so well? What are your future plans to get the word out?

We knew that just putting the game on the appstore just won’t cut it (anymore). We knew we had to spread the word, so we created two videos, a gameplay preview and a launch trailer, a launch press release and wrote to all the blogs we knew. We had a person dedicated to doing this as we knew this is vital. We managed to get glowing pre- and reviews from most blogs, but we weren’t able to sink into the awareness of the masses. We were featured on the front page of the App Store, in the 3rd position. That’s some of the best advertising you can get. But as soon as the featuring was gone, sales ditched. Except for Japan. There it was always staying not on the top, but in the awareness of people. As soon as we did our recent sale, Orbital skyrocketed back to #2 in Puzzle games.

One big mistake we made though is that we didn’t have a free version available at launch. We should have done that. The free version should be out this week (it was rejected due to the use of an iPhone icon for the buy button), and there will also be an update to the game as mentioned before. In order to really spread the word on it we are working with TriplePoint, the PR Agency which David Whatley recommended. We will be able to tell in two or three weeks if this works out – we hope it does of course.

I just noticed today that you also have a flash demo of Orbital on your website. I see it’s not perfectly the same as the iPhone version, but very close. Are you using the same codebase for both versions or is the Flash version a complete port?

When we started working on the flash version we weren’t sure if it will be possible to recreate the iPhone game visually. What you see now, the gameplay and physics are the same, visuals are almost the same but there are some things missing or slighly different in the flash version.

The code is a port of the iPhone code – it’s the same code (or parts of it), just written in ActionScript instead of C++. Of course, there’s no OpenGL or OpenAL in Flash, so Sound an Graphics had to be completely rewritten. It was actually pretty easy for us to do the port, as the iPhone code is already highly portable. Since this month we’re licensed PSP and DSi developers, so stay tuned

Well, I wish you the best of luck! Thank you very much for your time and I think I’ll have to go back to trying to beat the top score now… If you want to try to beat my high score, you can get Orbital on the App Store.

See Full press release

Why did you decide to make Uniwar and what other games were your inspiration?

We decided to make UniWar originally to promote our online mobile portal called Xpressed. The game turned out to be so good that we decided to make it its own product.

How large is your team and how long did it take to develop?

It took about 1.5 years to develop. About 8 people have worked on it.

That’s a lot of time! Are you also considering porting it to other platforms?

Yes. In the next two to three months, it should get released for most other phones on the major operator decks.

What were your biggest challenges creating such a game and how did you overcome then?

The biggest challenge is the sheer complexity of this game. Having the best suite of tools in the industry (the Xpress Suite) and some very talented programmers was key to succeeding.

How does the online multiplayer game work? Do you need to keep the app running while you wait for your opponents to make their moves? Also, is it possible to invite a friend to play against you, so that you don’t get worried about being the n00b to get pounced by the wizards on the server?

You can invite your friends to play online with (team matches) or against you. Each game is setup with a certain duration per turn that varies between 10 minutes and 3 days. You do not need to keep the app running but simply log in and check out whether it is your turn in any of the matches.

What are your plans for future projects?

Make UniWar even better and add a lot of really cool new features.

To my readers, I’ll give a tip that If you get this game, be sure to start with the campaign mode, so that you can have an easy introduction to the play mechanism. Thank you very much for the interview and I wish you success with your game!