App Store: gpsAssassin For The iPhone Gets Approval

June 4, 2009

2009-0605-gpsassasin2Although you guys probably heard it from Jackson Miller earlier tonight via Twitter, Apple has approved Side Hobby’s first iPhone application gpsAssassin, a location-based role playing game that lets you kill your neighbors with weapons made of words.

First let me clarify the official spelling of the app so that people can (hopefully) follow suit when (hopefully) spreading the word in the future. Previously I had incorrectly listed it as GPS assassins, which again is completely wrong. You won’t find it in the app store unless you spell it gpsAssassin. I’m also going to go a step further and provide a link to the iTunes download.

As for cost, the app is currently priced at $4.99, however Jackson said “we are still exploring the pricing and it will likely change.”

Sadly I’m going to refrain from speaking about the specifics of the game. This time I’m holding back because Jackson and Nicholas Holland (the other half of Side Hobby) asked me if I’d be interested in helping run a media blitz, which I of course said yes to.

Now that the app is published, what I will say is there are lots of things to do over the next week. I’m so excited my head feels like it may explode [or implode... which ever is more mighty and/or awesome]. They still haven’t nailed down most of the official communication, but I’m pretty sure there will be a beta tester appreciation launch party about a week from now. Also, there are other head exploding ideas I’ve suggested and I hope end up happening. Either way check back for new developments, as I’ll be gathering the discussion on this site as it comes along.

In the meantime, go to the iTunes Store’s gpsAssassin page and inflict some murderous review love if you’ve enjoyed playing the game. If you aren’t the reviewing type, then just marvel at the fishwreck screen shot (or else).

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Posted by Tom Cheredar

URLzen: Archive of Short URLs Sent Via Twitter

March 30, 2009

tchedzen

Months ago Jackson Miller, creator of URLzen, sent me a link that allowed me to view a collection of all the links I had shortened through URLzen and then transmitted over micro blogging platform Twitter. I asked him if it was public knowledge, but I was toiling away at something and can’t remember his exact response.

But since he’s about to roll out a slew of new features for the URL shortening service, this trick will soon be small potatoes.

All ur shortyz r belong 2 TChedzen

Anyone can access an archive of past short URLs and sent via twitter by manually typing in the URL path as follows:

http://urlzen.com/twitter/USER_Name [Your Twitter ID]

I’ve run into a few instances where my Twitter ID was case sensitive, so make sure you type your own ID exactly how it’s listed on your profile. For instance, urlzen.com/twitter/tched did not work, but urlzen.com/twitter/TChed was fine.

The URL archive isn’t organized by the date it was shortened, but it’s fairly current. Also, the statistical information is all preserved. I imagine the archive will get some large tweaks in the future, but it’s very functional in its current state.

[EDITORS NOTE: Just to be clear, the archive contains only short URLs that passed through URLzen.com. This redundancy brought to by smart men and women who will ask me about this anyways.]

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Posted by Tom Cheredar

TinyWTF – Why aren’t you using URLzen?

January 11, 2009

urlzen-logoURLzen is a URL shorten-er in the same vein as the default TinyURL and increasingly popular is.gd (is good) and ow.ly. These shortening sites just recently became useful due to Twitter, which only allows 140 characters to be sent per message.

But unlike the similar competitors, URLzen is unique in two distinct ways: A) It was created as a side project to help track the statistics of the original URL and B) it was produced locally here in the Nashville area.

statzen_logo_100Local developer and genius mind of the best iPhone game that hasn’t been released, Jackson Miller created the shorten-er while working on Statzen –  a site that promises to offer up blogger specific web statistics with a beautiful user interface. (I’ve seen screen shots. The Statzen team is going to deliver).

From the Statzen blog:

“A few months ago we decided to experiment with Google App Engine. We also wanted to scratch an itch that we had. So, in the course of about six hours we created Urlzen.com.”

Now many people will still probably say, “well URLzen is too many characters” and that is true compared to is.gd. But, consider this fellow Nashvillians:  We often talk about the city’s potential as the technology capital of the south, but what are each of us doing to help it along?

Jackson is one of the people that will help us achieve that future. TinyURL will not. So do us all a favor and switch to URLzen.

Thanks to Chuck Bryant for alerting me to URLzen months ago and also to Erin Cubert who indirectly gave me the idea to post something about it on this site. You guys rock!

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Posted by Tom Cheredar