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A road trip with Ohai for iPhone
Those who know me understand that I love traveling. I spent the last four days in Phoenixville, Pa. with my sister, her husband and my two kids. It was purely for fun and an excellent time to test Ohai (US$4.99), a travel journal app for iPhone. Ohai lets your record places you visit, complete with geographic location, a photo and your own notes. The app resembles a journal with one day per "page." It's fun to re-live your excursions, flipping through the pages to see where you've been. Ohai does have some big limitations, however, which I'll discuss below. First, the good. On the road with Ohai We hit the road on Thursday to begin our seven-hour drive (I-95 in Connecticut is endless monotony). While grabbing a snack and using the necessary room at Dunkin Donuts, I decided to make my first entry into Ohai (below). You'll see it on the top of the list, corresponding to the rightmost marker on the map. At this point, I realized that Ohai won't create an entry if you don't write a journal entry. In other words, you can't just "check in." But that's the point, really. It's a journaling app meant to record your thoughts and experiences as well as your physical location. More driving and another rest stop, this time in Jersey. It was unglodly hot, which I felt compelled to mention. At last we arrived in Pennsylvania, showered off the road stink and relaxed a bit. You can see above that my final destination was quite a distance from my point of origin. So much so, that the marker doesn't fit neatly on the map. I wish I could pinch-and-zoom or otherwise re-position the map within that window, but I can't. It would also be nice to tap a marker and jump right to that entry, especially if you've had a busy day. On Friday, we explored the town and I added some photos (below). The images uploaded quickly from my iPhone 4S and add a lot. Entries just look better with a nice picture. I'd like to be able to tap a photo to view it full-screen, but unfortunately I can't. Hopefully this feature will be added. Finally, on Saturday, we visited a farmer's market and Valley Forge State Park. The good and the bad Overall, using Ohai is a nice experience. Entering a point of interest, some commentary and a photo is simple and the result looks nice. Sharing an entry with Twitter or App.net is simple. However, I do have some gripes. First, you can't edit an existing entry. If you notice a typo or wish you can add a photo after the fact, you're out of luck. Also, creating a new spot is difficult. For example, I wanted to add the Phoenixville Farmer's Market, as the app didn't find it on its own. I tapped the "+" icon to bring up the map and held on the blinking blue dot that indicated my location. No go. I tapped it and it still didn't work. At last I realized that you must tap near, but not on, the blue dot and the circle surrounding it. From there, I was able to create a new spot. That seems counterintuitive, as it's the dot that represents my actual location. This one might be on me, but the app kept registering a tap as a swipe. When creating a new entry, you hit the "Tap to Check In" button. It seemed like the app thought I wanted to swipe to the next screen almost every time I tried. Finally, you can't delete old entries. Some places you'd rather forget (like the 7-Eleven parking lot where my son threw up on the way home. Don't ask). Ohai 1.0 is a very good start. I'm sure that it will mature into a fine product and I look forward to its future. But for now, I'm sticking with Rego.
Rise and Shiny recap: City of Eternals
City of Eternals is somewhat of an enigma to me. I've heard of it off and on through the last few years. I've seen it before, and it doesn't seem as though it has changed much, if at all. I am familiar with it just because I have been covering games for a long time, yet I've never really checked it out. Sure, I poked my head into it through Facebook once or twice, but to be honest, I didn't really like what I saw. I am all about independent, different-looking, or not-so-pretty games... heck, if I weren't, I'd have nothing to play but bloated "AAA" grindfests. But there's just something about the skinny-jean, pleather-wearing vampire scene that I cannot stand. My wife is into True Blood, the campy, vamp-heavy, naked-people festival that shows on the HBO network, but at least the show has fun with it and builds up interesting characters. City of Eternals seems to be stuck in that cheesier area of vampire fandom, though. Still, I played it over the last week and started to enjoy it a bit, for a few different reasons. Click past the cut and I'll tell you about it.
Want to sink your teeth into a vampire MMO? Massively can help!
With the recent popularity of movies like Twilight, it seems that the folks at Ohai have timed the announcement of their new vampire MMO just right. City of Eternals is a browser-based MMO set in the world of modern vampires. It is completely free-to-play and is currently in its private alpha testing stage. According to the developer, "You can choose your Vampire look and fighting style, explore a massive city with dozens of story quests, combat instances, and standalone missions. You will learn to harvest valuables and craft useful items, customize your own home, and choose your path to becoming the ultimate Vampire." If that genre appeals to you, and you'd be interested in alpha testing the game, head on over to their invite page where they have 100 invites reserved for the Massively readers. Each person who gets into this alpha will receive 100 "ohais", which are their own form of virtual currency in the game that will cost real money once the game launches.
All-star team gets funding for Ohai MMO
What do you get when you mix former SOE developers, a Flash-based virtual goods environment and about 6 million dollars in capital funding? You get Ohai, a new project in development from such industry vets as Scott Hartsman, Blake Commagere and Don Neufeld. Last fall, the folks at Ohai raised an undisclosed amount of financing (rumored to be $6 million) from August Capital and Rustic Canyon Partners for their new Flash-based MMO. Very little is known about the game, aside from tidbits here and there. Susan Wu, the company's CEO, recently told Virtual Worlds News that it will be a virtual goods focused business, and they're steering clear of the word "casual", in lieu of the much more appropriate term "accessible". Oh, and they're looking to spend a bit of that cash on some talented artists and programmers.
