Family Learning Center

Posts Tagged ‘Gist’

Review: Set card game on the iPhone is oh so close to the perfect puzzle app

Filed under: iPhone, iPod touch, App Review

The idea behind Set, the now-classic card/puzzle game, can be mind-numbingly difficult to explain. Some people just can’t wrap their heads around the “all the same or all different concept.” Of course, some people get it right away. For both types, the new Set app [$2.99] for the iPhone and iPod touch is a fine challenge, even if it’s not perfect in all aspects.

Here’s the gist of the game: each card in the 81-card deck has between one and three images on it. These images come in three shapes (diamond, oval, and squiggly), three colors (red, green, and purple), and three levels of shading (solid, lined, and empty). Every possible combination is available on one single card.

The goal is to find sets from a collection of cards laid face-up on the table. A set is any three cards where each of these four features are, independently, either all the same or all different? So, a single red solid diamond, a single green solid diamond, and a single purple solid diamond make a set (in that example, the number, shading, and shape features are all the same while the colors are all different). Also, a single empty purple squiggle, two lined green diamonds, and three solid red ovals make a set. Got that? Good. If not, click through the gallery of images from the app starting here to see how the game’s designers explain things.

If you want to give Set a try for free, you can try an online daily puzzle here, or download the very limited lite version of the iPhone app here. For learning the game, the app’s tutorial is tremendously helpful. Keep reading to find out more about how the game works, or doesn’t, on the iPhone.

The Game

First released in 1988, Set is a perfect light card came. Part puzzle, part race, watching players who enjoy the game stare intently at a table with the 12 cards played out in front of them and shout “Set!” is an absolute joy. The first person to see a set calls it out, takes the tree cards into their score pile and three new cards are laid out. If there is ever a situation where the 12 cards do not contain a set – something that is geekily fun to prove – you simply deal three more cards and go from there. If someone misidentifies a set, they lose three cards from their score pile back into the deck. The game ends when all the cards have been dealt and all the possible sets have been found. Whoever snagged the most cards wins. Reshuffle, deal ‘em out again and play it again and again until everyone’s sick of staring at squiggly lines and stripes.

The App

What’s most frustrating about this app, the first offering from Pockent (also available for Android, apparently), is that it’s so close yet maddeningly far from perfect. With just a little more effort, the app could completely replace the deck of cards. We’d need a way to enter the number of players, name them, and a method of play that goes through the deck. When someone sees a set, they’d hit a “found” button, identify which player they are, and then touch the cards they think are a set. Sounds great, right? Well, that style of play is not available in the app.

Instead, the app is built for single-player use only. Sure, you can kind of shoehorn in ways to play with friends, but none of the app’s game modes truly recreate the intense thrill of going head-to-head with friends.

The app comes with four modes, with basic or advanced play available in each mode. Basic just means that one of the features (shading) doesn’t make an appearance and only nine cards a dealt. In advanced mode, all four features matter and 12 cards are dealt. The four game modes include:

• Arcade: You have just one minute to find sets but, if you find enough to reach the next level (which changes as the game goes on), you’re given more time. Cards are replaced as you find sets.
• Classic: Find ten sets as quickly as possible. Cards are replaced.
• Puzzle: Nine (or 12) cards are laid out and you need to find all four (or six) sets hidden in them. No time limit and the cards dealt stay on the table.
• Timed: You have two minutes to find as many sets as you can. Cards are replaced.

So, with the Arcade, Classic or Timed mode, it is kind of possible to play two (or more) player Set, but it’s not quite the same deal. Here’s hoping any possible iPad version of this app respects its roots and allows real multiplayer games with the full deck of cards.

The app’s clear graphics and simple look work great. The only problem, carried over from the card game, is that people who are red-green colorblind might have difficulty identifying colors correctly. The app really should include an option to set the three colors on the cards to whatever a player wants, making it possible for anyone to enjoy. Well, anyone who can get what a set is, anyway.

Something about Set just screams higher level math. And yet, when you’re playing, it’s simply fun. But, speaking of getting geeky with Set, check out this paper (PDF) about the ACTSet program for Mac OS X called “How to Construct a Believable Opponent using Cognitive Modeling in the Game of Set.” Whew.

TUAWReview: Set card game on the iPhone is oh so close to the perfect puzzle app originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 18 Mar 2010 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Read the whole story…

Gist Acquires Startup Weekend App ‘Learn That Name’

Every few weeks (and sometimes even more often than that), dozens of techies gather together for regional Startup Weekends —  fast-paced code writing frenzies where entrepreneurs and developers conceive of and build a new application in less than 60 hours (and lose quite a bit of sleep in the process). Many of the apps die off soon thereafter, but some of them live on. And now they’re becoming acquisition targets: Learn That Name, a game that uses your LinkedIn contacts to help you remember the names of your business acquaintances, has been acquired by Gist. Terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed, but the LTN guys say they’re “very, very happy” with the result.

Learn That Name was built last August at a Microsoft-sponsored Startup Weekend and won top prize (which was amusing, because it was built for the decidedly non-Microsoft iPhone). The app’s idea came from lawyer Eric Koester, who was inspired to create it after he failed to remember someone’s name earlier during the event. A team of 14 people came together to build the app that weekend, and since then, a subset of the original LTN team has continued working on it, releasing an updated iPhone version, Palm WebOS app, and Flash app.

The deal is for LTN’s tech assets, and the proceeds are being split among the 14 original team members. Going forward, the standalone iPhone and Palm applications will still be available, and the game is also integrated into Gist’s own iPhone application, which you can find here.  The Gist version will tap into Gist’s database of contacts (the original uses LinkedIn).

For those that haven’t used it, Gist offers services that help you keep tabs on the people in your professional network. The service’s web interface allows you to see past messages and attachments from each contact, news about their company, and their recent messages on services like Twitter. Gist also offers an Outlook plugin that shares similarities with Xobni. Given the business oriented nature of Learn That Name, this seems like a good (and fun) fit.

Given the success of the Learn That Name team, it will be interesting to see if more Startup Weekend teams continue working together following the conclusion of their events.

Read the whole story…

Latest Version of Google Chrome Adds Auto-Translation and New Privacy Features

Google just launched a new stable version of Google Chrome, the company’s increasingly popular browser, which introduces a number of new features and more advanced privacy controls. Chrome will now automatically detect the language of any site you surf to and offer you to translate the text for you. In addition, Google also added granular privacy controls to Chrome that allow you to turn off cookies and JavaScript on a site-by-site basis. For now, these new features are only available in the Windows version of Chrome.

Sponsor

Read 52 Languages

Starting today, anybody who uses the stable release of Chrome on Windows will see a little bar appear at the top of the window whenever the browser loads a page that features a language that is not the default language of your browser install. Google Chrome uses the technology behind Google Translate to automatically detect and translate 52 languages. Chrome also gives you the ability to selectively turn this feature off for those languages you don’t need it for.

One interesting aspect of this technology is that the language detection happens in the browser, while the translation itself happens on Google’s servers. As with all automatic translation algorithms, Google Translate is prone to errors, but it more than good enough to easily get the basic gist of a new article or blog post.

Better Privacy Controls

In addition to the new translation feature, the new stable release of Chrome also includes a number of new privacy controls. Through the new “Content Settings” option, Chrome users on Windows can manage how they want Google to handle pop-ups, plug-ins, cookies, images and JavaScript code. These new settings, for example, allow you to easily block cookies from some sites. It remains to be seen, however, if mainstream users will be able to understand these relatively complicated controls.

What About the Mac and Linux?

With multiple release channels and different schedules for every platform, keeping track of Chrome isn’t easy. While these new features aren’t available for Mac and Linux users yet, it’s likely only a matter of time before we will see them on non-Windows platforms. For the time being, Mac users on the dev channel should make sure that they have updated to the latest version of Chrome, which finally brings a usable bookmarks manager to the OSX version of Google Chrome.

Discuss

Read the whole story…

PhoneTag Voice-To-Text Is Only 86 Percent Accurate, But That’s Better Than Google Voice

Computer voice-to-text technology has come a long way, and every time it gets better, new applications open up. It is still not 100 percent accurate. Hell, it’s not even 90 percent accurate. But it is accurate enough for automated voicemail transcription services to become increasingly available and good enough not to have to listen through 15 voicemails to get the gist of what they are about.  Of course, voicemails are often translated incorrectly, sometimes to comic effect.

In a study comparing the accuracy of four different voice-to-text technologies (Google Voice, Preview in Microsoft Exchange, Ditech’s PhoneTag, and Yap) the one which came out on top was PhoneTag, which is now part of Ditech Networks. PhoneTag showed an 86 percent accuracy rate in translating 500 spoken messages into text. Google Voice was only able to achieve an 82 percent accuracy in its voice-to-text translations.  The study only evaluated purely automated voice-to-text systems.  Here’s how all four fared:

Automated Voice-to-Text Accuracy:

• PhoneTag: 86%
• Microsoft: 84%
• Google: 82%>
• Yap: 78%

The study was commissioned by Ditech and carried out by William Meisel of TMA Associates. You can read his methodology in the document embedded below. Of course, a study commissioned by Google might show Google Voice coming out on top  But what I find more interesting is that 86 percent accuracy is considered something to boast about.  Ditech’s Chief Strategy Officer, Jamie Siminoff (who founded the company behind PhoneTag, Simulscribe) points out that each percentage point gain in accuracy is a big deal and that his goal is to get to 90 percent accuracy.  To get beyond that, it si still necessary to use humans to clean up the automated translations.

PhoneTag offers both fully-automated and human-assisted transcription.  One service which uses PhoneTag is Ribbit Mobile, which I’ve been using with the human-assisted transcription option turned on.  I also use Google Voice on another phone.  I’ve certainly noticed that the human-assisted transcriptions are incredibly accurate.  It can even make sense of my three-year-old son’s messages:

Hi, daddy. Hello. We’re calling you from the kitchen. We just made, what we had just made, a banana (??). Bye. Bye.’

I turned off the human-assisted option and tested some purely automated transcriptions today, so I could compare it more fairly to Google Voice.  Some messages were pretty much the same, for others the accuracy went way down, but I really couldn’t say that PhoneTag was noticeably better than Gogle Voice.  But I do notice the difference when I have the human-assisted option turned on. So while 86 percent accuracy might be something to crow about, adding human translators to the mix is still by far the best way to go.

Accuracy of Voicemail-To-text Services

Read the whole story…

Commodore 64 1.2 released in the App Store with three new free games

Filed under: Gaming, Software, Retro Mac, Developer, iPhone, App Store, iPod touch

The creators of Commodore 64, that emulator app that eventually gained Apple’s blessing, emailed to say that they have released a brand new version [iTunes link] with some brand new (old) C64 games to revisit. The gist of this one is that you can buy C64 ROMs to play through in-app purchases, but right out of the gate with version 1.2, three different games are free: Bruce Lee, Laser Squad, and Samurai Warrior. So if any of those ring your nostalgic bell, you can go jump in on the app now — it’s $1.99.

If you want to add in some extra games, it’ll cost you 99 cents each, but they’ve now made Alleykat, Uridium, Paradroid, Stormlord and Nebulus all available that way. Unfortunately, not all emulator developers have been able to secure such a deal with Apple, but C64 enthusiasts have to be excited about what’s available with this one.

TUAWCommodore 64 1.2 released in the App Store with three new free games originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 24 Dec 2009 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Read the whole story…

For Google, The Meaning Of Open Is When It’s Convenient For Them

Yesterday, Google published a long manifesto on the “meaning of open” in the form of an email to all employees republished as a blog post. In it, senior VP of product management Jonathan Rosenberg, makes an eloquent argument for why open systems always win and urges Google’s employees to always strive to be open when designing products. An open Internet spurs innovation and brings more consumers on board, which ultimately means more searches and increased use of Web applications.

The gist of his argument is that a bigger, better Internet is good for Google. He writes that Google employees should resist the impulse to create closed products and systems, and even makes a swipe at Apple for doing so (bold added for emphasis):

. . . open systems win. This is counter-intuitive to the traditionally trained MBA who is taught to generate a sustainable competitive advantage by creating a closed system, making it popular, then milking it through the product life cycle. The conventional wisdom goes that companies should lock in customers to lock out competitors. . . . a well-managed closed system can deliver plenty of profits. They can also deliver well-designed products in the short run — the iPod and iPhone being the obvious examples — but eventually innovation in a closed system tends towards being incremental at best (is a four blade razor really that much better than a three blade one?) because the whole point is to preserve the status quo. Complacency is the hallmark of any closed system. If you don’t have to work that hard to keep your customers, you won’t.

It all sounds great and Google certainly is a champion of open systems with Android and Chrome and countless other projects. Google is making a very public effort to claim the mantle of openness. But the battle for this mantle has been going on for a long time. Two years ago, I wrote a post titled “Who Is The Opennest Of Them All?”. What I noted then bears repeating:

But don’t be fooled. Companies are very selective about the areas where they choose to be open, and they very rarely open up their core source of profits voluntarily. . . . So the next time a company touts how open it is, ask yourself how that will help it make more money. Don’t confuse openness with altruism.

Google is only open when it is convenient for them. Google will never open up the source code to its search algorithms or its advertising system, or share the core data which gives it a competitive advantage in those areas because that is where it makes all of its money. Again, I pointed this out in that post two years ago:

Just because industry pressures and increased interconnectedness are forcing companies to embrace open technologies, don’t confuse openness with profitability. Open standards tend to be good for spurring the adoption of new technologies, but not so good for generating profits directly. That is why companies choose to be open along axes where they don’t compete. Google, for instance, is a big proponent of open standards in social networking, mobile networks, Web applications, and practically everywhere —except the one place it makes money. Its advertising system is a black box. You also never hear any talk coming out of Google about opening up the search algorithms that drive all of those advertising revenues. In contrast, Google has no problem championing open standards in industries that it is hoping to disrupt (by commoditizing existing business models with open standards, and making money with advertising instead).

Rosenberg realizes there is an incongruity between what he is saying and what Google is doing. He takes a stab at rationalizing this huge exception to Google’s embrace of everything open:

While we are committed to opening the code for our developer tools, not all Google products are open source. Our goal is to keep the Internet open, which promotes choice and competition and keeps users and developers from getting locked in. In many cases, most notably our search and ads products, opening up the code would not contribute to these goals and would actually hurt users.

Maybe, but it is more likely it would hurt Google. The company has good reasons for keeping those things closed tight. Opening up those black boxes would make it easier to spam search and game AdWords and give competitors valuable data to make their own search engines and advertising systems better. If it opened all of that stuff up, it would have to work harder to keep its customers.

And really nobody should begrudge them the right to keep products they’ve spent a lot of time, energy, and money building to themselves. But don’t give us this song and dance about how everything should be open and how Google is the opennest company in the world. Google has nothing to lose if operating systems, mobile phones, browsers, books, news, and every other industry becomes open and free, as long it can make money from search and advertising. That is exactly why Google is so disruptive. It can offer products for free that other industries charge for, as long as those products result in more searches or other advertising opportunities.

There is nothing wrong with this strategy. The fact that Google is pushing openness in so many industries is generally a good thing for startups and consumers alike. But Google should just be honest and say that they think everything should be open—except for search and advertising.

(Image via j/f/photos).

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Read the whole story…

Time Inc. shows off magazine tablet demo, plans future anger about 70/30 profit split

You know that Condé Nast tablet / digital magazine demo we saw recently (non-ironically paging through a copy of Wired)? Well now Time Inc. has gotten in on the same game, showing off its version of a digimag running a touch-friendly issue of Sports Illustrated. The company not only buzzed everyone with the charming walkthough video — a floating hand paging through SI on a sleek, black tablet (embedded after the break) — but also had a live, functioning variation of the product up and running on a touchscreen HP laptop. The gist of the project seems to be that the publisher will be able to offer this digitized version of its magazines in some sort of agnostic format, one that would be accessible to PCs and phantom Apple tablets alike. Peter Kafka over at All Things D says that he had a chance to play with the demo and it was, “quite a bit of fun.” While it’s clear that both Time and Condé Nast are taking parallel routes to online publishing (the former is purely in concept mode, the latter is working with Adobe on digital versions of its titles as we speak), one thing is painfully clear: both companies have shockingly similar ideas about what the future of magazine publishing looks like. We hope Apple has been informed.

Continue reading Time Inc. shows off magazine tablet demo, plans future anger about 70/30 profit split

Time Inc. shows off magazine tablet demo, plans future anger about 70/30 profit split originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Dec 2009 18:09:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  AllThingsD, The Wonder Factory (YouTube)  | Email this | Comments
Read the whole story…

Pew Study Reports That Internet Users Are Becoming More Status Update-Friendly

A new Pew Internet And American Life Project study is being released today which reports that internet users on a whole are becoming more likely to update their statuses online (on social media networks). The report says that 19% of internet users say they use Twitter or another service to share updates
about themselves, or to see updates about others. When Pew surveyed the group in April of this year and in December 2008, 11% of internet users said they use a status-update service.

Updating status online is a learned behavior for most internet users. It’s not something users tend to do naturally but these statistics shows that people are increasingly looking to Twitter, Facebook and other sites to update their status, which is definitely noteworthy. The full report is embedded below.

While the survey seems to revolve around Twitter, it’s unclear if respondents were referring to Twitter or Facebook because of the way the question was framed. The exact survey question was “Do you ever use Twitter or another service to share updates about yourself or to see updates about others?” Facebook has an incredibly large user base that posts status updates and a larger userbase than Twitter. In fact, Facebook was one of the first networks to coin the “status update.” I’m really curious what percentage of the “another service” category Facebook makes up. A representative for Pew said the question was open ended because they wanted capture the the general gist of “status updates” vs. seeing what the breakdown was of the origin of the updates. Twitter was chosen as the lead in the question because the currently, the “moment is ripe for Twitter as the exemplar of status updates.” This discounts of course that Facebook has more users and traffic than Twitter, but ok.

The study also reveals some not-so-surprising stats. For example, the report claims that wireless access is an key factor in predicting whether someone uses Twitter or another status update service, with users who own and use a wireless internet device makes an internet more likely to Tweet or update their status. Or, that users with more internet-connected devices (computers, phones) are more likely to update their status or Tweet. Well, duh.

Under the heading, “younger internet users,” Pew’s document inconclusively addresses the whole age issue over Twitter users by reporting that users between the ages of 18 to 44 report rapid uptake of Twitter over the last nine months, whereas internet users ages 45 and older report slower adoption rates. For example, 37% of internet users age 18-24 use Twitter or “another service,” up from 19% in December 2008. Let’s be real here, the 18-44 demographic doesn’t adequately define “younger internet users.”

The report also indicated that Facebook users may be graying a bit. The median age of a Twitter user is 31, whereas the media age for Facebook, now 33, up from 26 in May 2008.

What the study did not highlight is that increase in status updates (across all social networks, not just Twitter) is also attributed to the fact that these networks are steadily making it easier for users to post updates to multiple networks at once. MySpace recently launched a publish to Twitter feature, and Facebook launched a limited version and may be launching the full monty soon. And of course, web and mobile-based Twitter and Facebook clients like Tweetdeck, Tweetie and Seesmic also make it simpler for users to post status updates.

PIP_Twitter_Fall_2009 –

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Read the whole story…