Sammy, the brilliant man behind Palm Addicts, asked me if I would like to have a fun contest on his site. I jumped at the chance. Palm Addicts is one of my favorites sites covering every day use of smartphones. I also follow Sammy on Twitter as his twits are often humorous, informative, and a great entertainment.  And without further ado, the contest.

 Todd Sherman form SmartboxDesign would like to offer PalmAddict readers a chance to win a title of their choice from his suite of great games. Whatever platform you use whether it’s Palm OS or an iPhone you have the opportunity to win a SmartboxDesign game. All you have to do is as per usual send me a userthought or mobile thought and let me know what game and platform you would like from the Smartboxdesign website. Email your thoughts please, with SMARTBOX in the subject line, remembering to tell me your game choice and platform – sammymcloughlin@gmail.com

wordpop_contest_march_2009.jpgTo the left is a screen shot of WordPop!, our best selling word game. Two ways to win. Try to find the longest word you can, and then submit it to our forum. Just like the rules when you play WordPop! on your device, each letter in the word must be adjacent to the next, for example, RIPE.

– The player who submits the longest word wins a copy of a Smart Box Design Game (if a tie then the first one to submit wins)
– Two random winners will be picked from additional submitted words
– Contest ends March 31, 2009
– Winners will be announced in the next newsletter and / or e-mail (you must register at the forum to qualify and so we have your e-mail on record)
– We’re looking forward to seeing your words

Click Here to Submit Your Words at the Forum

wordpop_screen_1.jpgWordPop! for Windows Mobile 5.0 or Greater Have you moved to Windows Mobile from Palm or bought a new Windows Mobile device and want to upgrade to the latest version of WordPop? If yes, simply download the latest file to your PC, unzip, and run the installer.

– Now supports Palm Treos running Windows Mobile
– Added Undo Last Move
– Players can now clear the best words screen
– Players can now clear the high scores screen
– The Bonus Tiles can now be dragged and dropped
– Added “Use System Sound” to Preferences
– Updated menu to Windows Mobile standard layout
– Entire game code was rewritten to be faster and more efficient
– Click below to read more
– Requires WM 5.0 or greater

Click Here to Download WordPop! – No Charge

wordpop_globalhighscores75.jpgFor the last month, the team has been working on Global High scores for WordPop for the iPhone and iPod Touch.  A real challenge was how to lay out the screen. Wyatt was driving the effort and through several iterations with Jim and I, a series of screens were created and tested. The driving goal of the High Score screen was to allow players to easily and quickly compare their scores to other players. It was complicated because we have three different scores, Easy, Medium, and Hard. It was a lot of information to squeeze into one page. It was tempting to split this to separate screens. The feedback from our testers to Wyatt was very helpful and I am very pleased with the final vesion. 

 A feature we added that is not new, but not seen too often, is Today scores. Typically, All Time high scores are posted and compared. However, I wanted new and occasional player to see how they are doing in comparison to others. The Today High Score posts scores from the last 24 hours, Pacific Time. It has been great fun watching the Easy, Medium, and Hard lists fill up through out the day.

 An interesting side note in releasing a Global High score feature.  Our first version was rejected by Apple as violating their privacy policy. We assumed the term Global High scores was enough to alert players that their scores are being posted to the net. Scores are considered private data by Apple, so we needed to add some language alerting the player is a more transparent way. Although Apple was more strict than I liked it did push us to be more creative in our presentation.

I highly recommend all owners of WordPop for iPhone to upgrade to the latest version. It is free and the new feature is a real incentive to get those high scores. I know during testing that I really wanted to beat some of the other scores I saw.

Click here to download the latest version from the Apple Store.