Time traces

Mix Yahtzee and Poker on the iPhone and what do you get? MotionX Poker, a clever and beguilingly addicting dice game for the iPhone and iPod touch that will only set you back US$5.

In MotionX Poker, you play against the house (a computer-controlled opponent) as you try to “roll” the best poker hand you can using five specially painted dice. The six-sided dice each have a nine, ten, jack, queen, king and ace engraved on them, and you have three shakes of the dice to figure out your hand. You can hold any or all of the dice in between each roll–so if you come up with three aces on your first roll, you can hold them and then try to get five of a kind with your last two throws.
Poker rules have been modified, obviously, as you’re only dealing with six possible “card” combinations. But it’s challenging, regardless, and you have to keep some of the realities of “dice poker” in mind. In classic card poker, for example, a full house (a hand that contains three of a kind, plus a pair) beats a straight (five cards in sequence). But because the probability of getting a straight is lower in dice poker, a straight beats a full house. A tutorial mode at the beginning of game play will show you the ropes.

The accelerometer of the iPhone (or the iPod touch, if that’s your mobile device of choice) is taken into account here, too. A flick of the wrist is all you need to get your dice rolling. And if you’re using an iPhone, specifically, you’ll feel the device buzz and vibrate as if the dice were rattling around inside. (You can turn this option off, if you don’t want to waste your battery, but where’s the fun in that?)

As you get better and better you’ll get rewards, including new sets of dice and gems. As your winnings increase you’ll also get to unlock high rollers’ tables, where the stakes are much higher–as are the rewards.

MotionX Poker is compatible with any iPhone or iPod touch running the iPhone 2.0 software update.

[Peter Cohen is Macworld's Game Room columnist.]

Best Buy will become the first retail chain outside of Apple and AT&T to sell the iPhone in the U.S., an Apple spokesperson confirmed for Macworld on Tuesday.

First reported by AP, Best Buy will begin selling the iPhone on September 7 in 970 full-size stores and 16 smaller Best Buy Mobile stores. Apple began selling Macs and iPods in about 170 Best Buy stores during the fiscal third quarter, for a total of 570; it hopes to be up to about 600 stores by end of summer.

When purchasing an iPhone through Best Buy, your AT&T account will be setup in-store, making the process very similar to what you would experience at an Apple or AT&T retail store.

Apple retail stores have been a boon for the company, allowing more people around the U.S. and the world to experience the Mac, iPod and the iPhone. Apple’s retail stores saw $1.44 billion in revenue in the last quarter alone.

On July 11 Apple updated the iPhone, releasing the iPhone 3G, iPhone software 2.0 and the App Store. iPhone 3G sold more than one million units in the first three days it was available. The App Store saw similar success. Launching with over 500 applications available for download, Apple had more than 10 million application downloads in the first three days.

For more Mac news, visit Macworld. Story copyright Mac Publishing, LLC.

Twitter is a fun service that lets you keep in touch with your friends and other people you only wish you knew. Like many people, I’ve come to rely on it as a backchannel that keeps me in touch with my colleagues and friends in ways that e-mail and instant messaging simply can’t. And since the iPhone was first released, I’ve used Web interfaces to Twitter to read and post Twitter items, known as “tweets,” when I’m on the go.

With the release of the App Store, there are now several native Twitter clients for the iPhone. All of these programs show immense promise as well as numerous warts.

The Iconfactory’s Twitterrific is my favorite Mac client for the Twitter social-messaging service, and the new iPhone edition of Twitterrific is my favorite of the first generation of iPhone apps.

Twitterrific displays tweets from your contacts and lets you send tweets. The program includes integration with twitpic.com, so you can take a photo (or pick one from your photo library) and the program will automatically upload it and embed its URL in your tweet. An embedded Web browser lets you tap on user names or hyperlinks and view the contents without having to switch out of the program and into Safari.

The program’s interface is excellent, combining simplicity with solid functionality. A series of slide-out “hint” screens appear for new users, cleverly helping to teach you how the program works. But I found the program’s large single-tweet view to be mostly a waste of time.

Although Twitterrific provides me with 95 percent of what I use Twitter for, there’s still plenty of room for the iPhone version to grow, especially given the tough competition of several excellent iPhone-optimized Twitter web interfaces, most notably Hahlo. Twitterrific can’t display all the messages from a given friend; also, it doesn’t let you filter tweets to only see your direct messages, messages replying to your tweets, or a list of your own recent tweets. The program’s scrolling also feels sluggish. (A forthcoming update will improve the program’s scrolling speed.)

Tapulous’ Twinkle is a strong competitor to Twiterrific, but its colorful interface (bright yellow, blue, and gray word balloons on a dark starscape background) is distracting and harder to read than Twitterrific’s.

Twinkle’s best trait is its location awareness. When you post to Twinkle, other Twinkle users can see what city you’re tweeting from. And a tap on the Nearby button lets you see tweets from Twinkle users near you, which is pretty cool. However, I wish I could opt to view tweets only from nearby users I follow, and there’s no way to block nearby users whose tweets you might find distasteful. (Tapulous says such a method will be available in a forthcoming update.) Because Twinkle’s location-savvy functionality works via a proxy server run by Tapulous, only Twinkle users can appear in the Nearby list, and only other Twinkle users can see what city you’re tweeting from.

I’m not thrilled about Twinkle’s reliance on a Tapulous server as a mediator between your iPhone and Twitter. Yes, that approach lets Twinkle include some clever non-Twitter features such as location-based services, but only for other Twinkle users. When Twitter is down, you’ll still be able to send Tweets–but they won’t go to Twitter until it comes back up. Likewise, if Twitter is up and the Twinkle server goes down, you could be cut off from the rest of the Twitterverse. And I found it a little disconcerting that Tapulous’s TwinkleKing account, who I don’t follow on Twitter, was able to send me spam about Twinkle-related contests and the like. You can’t block those TwinkleKing messages.

Stone Design’s Twittelator is in many ways the polar opposite of Twitterrific. Twitterrific’s interface is terrific for reading your friends’ timeline and posting tweets, but it doesn’t let you dive deep into the features of Twitter. Twittelator, in contrast, has a much less refined interface, but supports every Twitter feature imaginable.

From Twittelator, you can view your friends timeline, your own timeline, your replies, your direct messages, the timelines of other users, the friends of the people you follow, you name it. You can search for text on all of Twitter. If you tap on a friend’s icon, you immediately see all their Twitter stats.

If Twitterrific could improve by adding a bit more functionality, Twittelator could benefit from a dramatic tightening of its interface. I found the layout of its main tweet list a bit strange, with numerous small items that were difficult to tap on, and tweet text isn’t as readable as I’d like. Yet it’s actually the least dense of the three programs, forcing you to scroll more.

Twittelator’s most bizarre feature is its “Emergency icon,” which according to Stone Design lets you “create a Tweet with a map of your current location.” The latest update to the software allows you to hide the button, which is a good thing. Twitter’s great and all, but if you’re in trouble, sending an automated tweet about it via a button that’s easily pushed by mistake doesn’t seem like it should be high up on your list of options.

Macworld’s Buying Advice

Twitterrific is currently the class of the Twitter client apps on the iPhone, but it’s got stiff competition close behind. What Twitterrific lacks in features, it more than makes up for by getting the interface and most important parts of Twitter–reading and posting tweets–right.

Twinkle is a lot of fun and quite innovative, showing how location information adds to the richness of Twitter. If only Twitter supported location information in a useful, native way–I’m not thrilled about Twinkle’s use of an intermediary server, nor the inability to block unpleasant people who might be near you. Its interface could also use a bit of toning down, at least as an option.

I’m mightily impressed by all of Twittelator’s features. If you’re someone who frequently surfs around your friends’ timelines and the public Twitter timeline, it’s a better choice than Twitterrific. If most of your Twitter time is spent reading your friends timeline and posting tweets, it’s not.

The good news is, all three of these programs are free, so you can download them for yourself if you’re not sure about which one is right for you. (Unlike Twinkle and Twittelator, Twitterrific’s free version is supported by occasional ads in the tweet list. You must buy the US$10 Twitterrific Premium to block those ads.)

And if you haven’t updated your iPhone to version 2.0 (or don’t want to download a lot of iPhone apps and risk stability problems), don’t fear. Hahlo remains an excellent, full-featured Twitter client that works right within Safari.

All apps reviewed in this round-up are compatible with any iPhone or iPod touch running the iPhone 2.0 software update.

Apple has posted a new application that helps you manage your iPhones in a corporate environment: the iPhone Configuration Utility. It’s available in OS X and Windows flavors and there’s also a Web Utility for Mac.

The configuration utility lets you set up configuration profiles and install provisioning profiles as well as applications, and lets you get information about iPhones, including their console logs. Configuration data can include security policies, VPN information, Wi-Fi settings, Exchange account settings, and certificates that allow you to use your iPhone and iPod touch to work in an enterprise environment.

Presumably, this covers the ability to deploy applications in an enteprise environment, a feature that Steve Jobs touched upon in his Worldwide Developer Conference keynote speech last month. Further information on deploying the iPhone in an enterprise environment is available on Apple’s site, including a full overview of the iPhone Configuration Utility.