the-funnest-ipod-ever
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Apple to show off THQ's De Blob at Apple Stores
The good folks at THQ just dropped us a note that they've signed a pretty big deal with Apple -- their game, De Blob, which I played at E3 and previewed for Joystiq (and talked with the creator for TUAW), will be installed on in-store iPhones as a demo game. They say that the game's use of the accelerometer and solid 3D graphics (you use the accelerometer to bounce a little blob around a 3D world and paint various buildings in the environment) was what brought Apple to choose the game as a software demo for their handheld.The good news is that De Blob is a quality game, but the bad news is that it's from a large developer like THQ -- Apple has shown a bias in their official outlets for larger companies like EA, and it's disappointing to see that when lots of the best games on the store are coming from much smaller developers. On the other hand, to their credit, Apple has occasionally passed the spotlight to smaller devs, so hopefully this won't be the only game to ever see a demo in the brick-and-mortar stores.And the other good news here is the Apple seems to finally be giving gaming a space in their marketing, if not in their culture as a whole. For a long time, gaming has had to take a backseat at Apple, but the recent push behind the iPod as "the funnest iPod ever" and these in-store displays point to an Apple that finally recognizes how widespread especially casual gaming has become and how important it is to selling computers nowadays.
Grammar Girl covers the "funnest" iPod ever
I'm a big fan of the Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing daily podcasts -- she does a terrific job, day in and day out, of breaking down major grammar gaffes in a very interesting and clear way. After the big "Let's Rock" event on Tuesday, Grammar Girl had to jump to the rescue on Apple's commercial use of the word "funnest" to describe the iPod touch -- as many language elitists noted, "funnest" isn't quite a real word.Believe it or not, Grammar Girl is suprisingly forgiving -- she says that fun, while originally a noun ("we had fun"), has made a transition in the last century or so to an "attributive noun" which can be used as an adjective ("we had a fun party"). And while old-timers may flinch at the words "funner" and "funnest", the correct way to modify one-syllable adjectives is in fact by adding "-er" and "-est" to the ends. So technically, "funnest" is grammatically correct, even if it isn't exactly accepted; Grammar Girl calls it "grating and horrifying."She finishes today's podcast, however, with a scary note for language traditionalists -- it could very well be that Apple's usage of the word is just what "funnest" needs to go over the edge into regular acceptance. Sure, we get that language evolves, but couldn't they just have said it was "the most fun iPod ever?" Or, even more traditionally, "the most fun you'll have with an iPod?"
