Archive for November, 2009

My Super Collection of iPhone Sync Errors

Friday, November 27th, 2009

Is it just me, or does iTunes come up with a different excuse for not syncing with the iPhone each and every day?

Don’t get me wrong – syncing is pretty reliable on the whole, and whenever an error does occur, a resync or reconnect usually sorts it out.

Still, I’m amazed at the sheer number of things that can apparently go wrong during syncing. It doesn’t exactly inspire confidence, does it? I must get an error dialog of some sort at least once a week.

So I started collecting them (sad I know). Here’s the collection I’ve built up so far, over the last few months…

The iPhone sync error hall of fame

First up, we have the good old Microsoft-style “‘unknown error occured’ followed by unhelpful number” dialog:

unknown-error-0xE8000001-450

…and its close “iPhone with no name” cousin:

unknown-error-0xE8000001-2-450

Hurrah – a slight improvement! It got the iPhone name right on this day, and gave me a whole new exciting random number to ponder over:

unknown-error-0xE8000024-450

(more…)

Castle Warriors: A simple iPhone Strategy Game

Friday, November 20th, 2009

Castle Warriors from GameResort is a fun little iPhone/iPod Touch battle game that I’ve been playing with for a while. It falls under the Real-Time Strategy (RTS) category. Rather than waiting for your turn, you make decisions in real time as the action happens around you.

castle-warriors-start

In many ways, Castle Warriors is a 3D version of the excellent Galcon. Instead of planets, you have towers. You start with all your soliders in 1 tower; tap it, then tap a target tower to move a certain amount (half by default) of your soliders to that tower. You can move to empty towers or enemy towers this way – if you move your soldiers to an enemy tower then they naturally attack the tower.

castle-warriors-send-troops

There are 2 play modes: a campaign mode where you move through 12 preset battle scenarios, and a quick play mode where you can replay unlocked scenarios with your own settings for battle length, number of your troops, and number of enemy troops. This is a nice touch which adds a degree of replay value to the game. (more…)