Nine Men’s Morris has been updated to version 1.1 in BlackBerry AppWorld. 9 Men’s Morris is a two player strategy game that you can play with your friends on BBM. The game itself is turn based and plays like a cross between checkers and tic-tac-toe.
New in Version 1.1
This updated includes more detailed in-game messages, as well as a system notification when it is your turn in the game.
How to Play
To start the game each player places 9 tokens onto the gameboard, with a random selection determining which player goes first. After all tokens are placed, the players take turns moving their own tokens to try and get three in a row to form a Mill. Forming a mill allows you to remove one of your opponents tokens from play. As with checkers you win after removing all of your opponents pieces, or by placing them in a position where they are unable to make a legal move. Your own pieces are always red, while your opponent is blue. For more details on the game see Wikipedia.
Device support
9 Men’s Morris supports all touchscreen BlackBerrys with a minimum OS of 5.0, and a minimum BBM version of 6.0
For the first time since the introduction of carrier billing in AppWorld, the percentage of users making use of carrier billing was down from the previous month. For the month of October, carrier billing accounted for 38.6% of all purchases.
In the United States 72.7% of all AT&T and T-Mobile customers choose to purchase their apps via carrier billing. This number is larger then the 38.6% of all purchases due to the many carrier that still do not support this option.
This data is generated from the dollar amount of purchases of all Ebscer applications over the given months.
Xploding Boxes has been updated to version 2.2 in BlackBerry AppWorld. This update adds 10 new levels to the game.
About Xploding Boxes
Xploding Boxes is a strategy game for BlackBerry where the goal of the game is to start a chain reaction that will explode all of the boxes on the screen. Each level gives you a different number of touches, and requires a different strategy to solve. The first 25 levels are free, while the full 240 levels can be accessed by making an in-application payment and requiring no further downloads. This game is available for both the PlayBook, and for most smartphones running OS 5.0 or higher.
Carrier billing is rapidly increasing in popularity, with September seeing 41.3% of all sales made through carrier billing. However this number includes sales to customers in carriers that do not support carrier billing, as well as sales to PlayBook owners who don’t even have a carrier.
In the United States, carrier billing is supported by AT&T and T-Mobile. In the month of October, when customers on these two carriers purchased an application, they opted to pay via carrier billing 72.7% of the time. It’s not only that it is nice to have the option, but that it is preferred over credit cards and PayPal combined.
This data is generated from the dollar amount of purchases of all Ebscer applications over the given months.
This weekend Pixelated was updated to version 3.0 adding BBM integration and support for 5 languages. The languages supported by Pixelated now include English, Spanish, Dutch, French, and Portuguese. This update also improves the stability and efficiency of the application. Pixelated is free to download and supports every BlackBerry device released in the last three years including the PlayBook.
BBM Integration
Pixelated now integrates with BlackBerry Messenger, allowing you to publish your best scores to your BBM personal message, and posting your achievements earned to a Pixelated profile box. You also have the option of inviting your friends to download Pixelated by using the “Share via BBM” button on the About page.
About Pixelated
Pixelated is an addicting puzzle based strategy game that requires a mixture of skill and luck in order to complete. Starting with the square in the upper left corner, the object of the game is to change the colour of the squares until the entire screen is a single solid colour. This is done by repeatedly by changing the colour of the blocks in order to match that of the surrounding squares until the entire screen is a single colour. The object of the game is to clear the screen in as few moves as possible.
Why are there posts on this site? It is because I truly believe that there is value to communicating and sharing knowledge.
This was reinforced after reading a recent post on Gamasutra, about League of Legends developer Riot Games:
Interestingly, says Merrill, all company employee can participate on the forums directly — which is definitely not policy for many developers or publishers.
“We don’t know if anyone else does that,” says Merrill. “It’s because we think it’s valuable to humanize the developers, and have a direct relationship, and personalize some things, and have this dialogue.”
I touched on this when talking about the power of Alec Saunders publicly posting his email address, but I have no idea why more developers don’t take this approach. Posting here has only resulted in positive things for me.
I have made a few estimates of the sales of the BlackBerry PlayBook before. Assuming that 255,000 had been sold by June 14th, and that 504,000 had been sold as of September 16th. After looking at the most recent data I calculate that RIM has sold around 700,000 tablets as of November 15th.
This shows BlackBerry tablets selling at a rate of about 100k a month recently. Sales rebounded unexpectedly in October despite the lack of a timely OS update. Numbers for November, however, are on track to be down once again.
As before this estimation is based off of the number of downloads of the free game Pixelated. While this calculation does rely on a number of assumptions, given that Pixelated has remained one of the most downloaded apps for the PlayBook, I feel that I have better numbers then most to base this estimate upon.
Nine Men’s Morris is a two player strategy game that you can play with your friends on BBM. The game itself is turn based and plays like a cross between checkers and tic-tac-toe.
How to Play
To start the game each player places 9 tokens onto the gameboard, with a random selection determining which player goes first. After all tokens are placed, the players take turns moving their own tokens to try and get three in a row to form a Mill. Forming a mill allows you to remove one of your opponents tokens from play. As with checkers you win after removing all of your opponents pieces, or by placing them in a position where they are unable to make a legal move. Your own pieces are always red, while your opponent is blue. For more details on the game see Wikipedia.
Game Development
Development of this game started at the BBM Hackathon in New York City. The introduction of the BBM API solved many of the problems that multiplayer games traditionally have. By allowing you to challenge friends already listed in BBM you can avoid the hassle usually associated with finding your friends in game.
Device support
9 Men’s Morris supports all touchscreen BlackBerrys and requires a minimum OS of 5.0, as well as BBM 6.0
Pixelated Plus has been updated to version 3.0 in BlackBerry AppWorld. This update adds BBM integration, and expands language support to English, Spanish, Dutch, French, and Portuguese. This update also improves the stability and efficiency of the application.
BBM Integration
Pixelated Plus now integrates with BlackBerry Messenger, allowing you to publish your best scores to your BBM personal message, and posting your achievements earned to a Pixelated Plus profile box. You also have the option of inviting your friends to download Pixelated Plus by using the “Share via BBM” button on the About page.
About Pixelated Plus
Pixelated Plus is an addicting puzzle based strategy game that requires a mixture of skill and luck in order to accomplish. The object of the game is to change the colour of the squares until the entire screen is a single solid colour. Starting with the square in the upper left corner you can change the colour of the blocks in order to match that of the surrounding squares. This is done repeatedly until the entire screen is a single colour. The object of the game is to clear the screen in as few moves as possible. Under the default settings you must do so in under 22 moves in order to win.
On Wednesday, Verizon sent out an email to the ‘Verizon Developer Community’ once again trying to push their V CAST Apps Store. This store isn’t actually used or wanted by developers or consumers, but that doesn’t keep Verizon from trying. So allow me to take a minute to use this email to show everything that they are doing wrong. I will start by pointing out that nobody seems to know what V CAST is actually an acronym for. A quick search brings up nothing. So Verizon is not off to a good start. Here is the image that heads their email to developers.
The thing is the developers generally have an engineering background. Which means for the most part we have a solid understanding of simple mechanical systems. Things like gears. For those at Verizon who clearly do not understand this, gears need to actually touch each other in order to work. The teeth of the gears need to interlock, so that rotating one gear will result in movement of the other gear. This is how machines operate. As such if you are going to add out apps to your machine most developers don’t really want them to be placed between the teeth of the gears. That is where things get crushed. Getting to the text of the email doesn’t make things any better for Verizon.
“Want to increase your app sales?”
Of course. All developers want to increase app sales. But after talking to one of the few developers that is actually in the VCAST apps store, there is really no evidence that being in the VCAST apps store is actually going to do anything in order to increase app sales.
“Submit your app to V CAST Apps”
The thing is, I tried. I honestly did. The submission process asked for lots of paperwork, lots of legal documents, lots of fluff about my company. I tried the best I could to generate a lot of this nonsense that no company outside of the Fortune 500 actually has or cares about. You wanted screenshots formatted as .gif files. I still don’t know why. You wanted a single build to support all screen resolutions, OS versions, and input mechanisms. I complied by using a low OS build and limiting the list of supported devices. I honestly forget at which point I gave up and figured that it just wasn’t worth my time, but the fact is that I should have quit much, much sooner.
“it’s the only way to enable carrier and subscription billing on Verizon.”
That is disappointing. Carrier billing is rising in popularity. It results in more people buying apps. But only if it is tied to a store that actually has content to sell. Verizon would make far more money taking just a 1% cut on all the transactions from their customers through BlackBerry AppWorld, then they will taking 30% through the VCAST store. There is money to be made, but Verizon is too interested in pushing a redundant service to actually benefit.
“Submitting your app to V CAST Apps is the only way to get access to the power of our Efficiency Machine.”
This mostly scares me due to the capitalizing of “Efficiency Machine”. Is that honestly the proper name of what you want me to sign up for? To me it doesn’t look any different then what devs have been ignoring from you for years.
“TURN ON THE MACHINE Put the Machine to work for your app today. It’s quick, free and it’s never been easier.”
You know what would actually be easy (and efficient)? Integrating your existing carrier billing with the existing BlackBerry AppWorld. Every BlackBerry Developer already sells through AppWorld. It is already preinstalled on every phone sold. If Verizon added carrier billing to that it would be awesome. Developers would sell more apps, and Verizon would actually be part of the ecosystem, instead of an outsider looking in. Vodafone which owns 50% of Verizon Wireless is already on board in Europe. If they could take the same approach in the United States it would be great for everyone.
A few quick calculations based on the overall size of the market, Verizon’s market share of that, and the popularity of carrier billing shows a lot of money on the table. I don’t know what cut RIM offers the carriers, but at 10% Verizon is passing up $3.2 Million in revenue. If the cut to the carriers is closer to 15% then Verizon is missing out on $4.8 Million in revenue per year.
Two years ago in the fall of 2009, Verizon ran a competition for developers. Only myself and 20 other devs signed up. I have since talked to about a quarter of these developers, and despite actually being involved from the beginning, the majority of us still do not have any apps in the Verizon store. It is time for Verizon to just do what is best for everyone, and work with AppWorld.
The BlackBerry OS distribution is largely unchanged from last month. Use of OS 6.0+ increased 2.1% to 42.3% of the market, while use of OS7 increased slightly to 8.3% of all users.
This data was taken from downloads of the popular BlackBerry strategy game Pixelated. Data shown on the chart is from the beginning of October 2010 through the end of October 2011.
Use of carrier billing has increased for the 14th straight month. September saw the use of carrier billing increase to 41.3% of all sales. September also saw a significant number of app sales on the PlayBook which does not support carrier billing, so if you were to look at just smartphone app sales the percentage would be even higher.
This data is generated from the dollar amount of purchases of all Ebscer applications over the given months.
The Hockey Scores app has been updated to version 2.9 in BlackBerry AppWorld. This update fixes an issue with showing the goal scorers, and also adds gray as a background colour.
About Hockey Scores
This application provides the day’s hockey scores is an intuitive and easy to use format. It also includes additional game statistics such as start times, goal scorers, shots on net, hits, faceoff percentage, team Corsi numbers, and the goal scorers. Additionally the app supports keyboard shortcuts for easy navigation, and a number of display options. All BlackBerry devices with OS 4.6.0 and higher are supported.
Last week we lost power for a few hours. Instead of lighting candles, I made a light out of a BlackBerry. I grabbed a spare 9900 and plastic cup, and made the contraption seen to the right. The camera LED is forced on by playing with the settings on the video camera, and then setting it to record so that it doesn’t timeout to save battery. The semi-transparent frosted glass is used to dissipate the light some, so you can place the LED on the table without blinding someone.
