Whilst browsing the app store yesterday I got a blast from the past for the 2nd week running as I stumbled across the works of Big Blue Bubble. The iphone /ipad designers have brought to life a series of books I followed as a child and presented them in a game format. Only last week I had found the original books themselves whilst helping clear my parents attic, almost 25 years on.

Back in 1982 “The Warlock of Firetop Mountain” hit the bookshelves, the first of 50 fighting fantasy works from authors Steve Jackson & Ian Livingstone. The idea centred around single player adventure books with a dice rolling element to them, which formed a role playing fantasy that didnt require any items or clothers from Ann Summers.

The methodology centred around a format where you take your character along the journey, at each turn you make a decision and follow the respective page item to continue along; eg to go left turn to 152 or to turn right go to 185. You found the appropriate page, maybe fought an Orc or found some money for example and onward you went, maybe even creating a map as you travelled.

The idea was a simple but effective one, keeping many a child or even an adult amused for hours at a time until you either ended up victorious or with a sword shoved through your lower intestine as the case maybe. The app follows the same simple strategy, easy to use and a nice revisit to your childhood, the concept fits the iphone very well. Shaking the dice is a simple shake of the phone.

At present The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, Citadel of Chaos, Deathtrap Dungeon and Creature of Havoc titles are all out there to be enjoyed with more along the way.

Slowly but surely more and more retro games are being brought to life on the iPhone & iPad, the likes of Myst, Broken Sword & Monkey Island all having made successful impacts in the gaming category of the app store. All I need now is the app designers out there to bring the likes of the TV programme Knightmare and the offering of Football Director from the legendary ZX Spectrum back to life and I’ll be putting my phone down even less than I do at the moment!

If you like to pit your wits against other fellow football fantatics then take advantage of some World Cup 2010 Fantasy Football.

Two of the most popular forms of this at the present moment are offered by Sky Sports Fantasy Football and The FA World Cup Fantasy Football.

The games differ slightly in strategy, so you may well wish to indulge in both! Sky Sports have based their game around simply picking a team of 11 from players available at the World Cup across all countries, with a limit of no more than 2 players from one International side.

Sky Prizes:
1st - £5000 Cash
2nd - 40” TV with Sky HD and 12 Month Subscription
3rd - Xbox360 & 3 Games

The FA have opted for a more financial based approach to the game, providing each player with a valuation, a budget not to exceed £100m and the option of either playing 4-4-2 or 4-3-3 as you prefer.

The FA Prizes:
1st  - England WC Shirt signed by minimum of 3 players
2nd to 11th - England Umbro Training Top
12th - 14th - England iPod Docking Station

More and more leagues are being created by people all the time so that friends, family and work colleagues can do battle against each other, as well as leagues on a much broader scale so you should find yourself very readily able to get some competition.

If your an England fan and you have a Facebook account then you might want to add this little application to your collection and gain yourself an official England Squad Number for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa from the Official England page.

Simply direct yourself over to the Believe in England application from the England Team page and follow the simple steps to gaining your official england number. You can then post your individually numbered shirt to your profile page or opt to use it for your profile pic as you wish.

The app has picked up numbers quickly and is now approaching the 70,000 mark, so if you have got a moment then go and join the movement.

For any of you Dr Who fans out there that had kind of lost track of time… tends to happen when a Tardis is involved, the Dr Who & City of the Daleks PC game is now available for download from the official Dr Who site.

If you were not aware of the games launch by the BBC, its a free download, then take a look at my previous notes to bring yourself up to speed.

The file download size is around the 330mb mark and the MAC version is due for release on June 15th.

In a nutshell the scenario is that The TARDIS materializes in 1963 to find the human race crushed by the Daleks. The Doctor embarks on a quest to the Dalek planet to correct time and save the last survivor of Humanity - Amy Pond! - Go explore!

If your someone that likes information, especially the world of RSS feeds, plus you own an iPad then this app could very much be for you. I introduce you to Pulse.

While a traditional RSS reader is usually about consuming as much content as possible and delivering it as quick as possible to an end point, Pulse takes this on board in the majority as well as presenting it in a clean & relaxed format thats easy to browse like a newspaper.

Pulse can take in  up to 20 news sources at the present time that you follow, and creates a visual mosaic of your news feeds. You can finger-swipe back and forth across various articles from a single news source. You can tap on an article, and you’re presented with a cleanly rendered view of the news story. Once you have selected a news item to read then the app allows you toggle quickly between a clean RSS text version of it as well as its true web version. The app has gone from idea to a iPad digital news app in just five weeks and plans for expansion on it continue.

You can easily share articles that you read through social media like Twitter and Facebook. In addition, you can share a news article via email.

Pulse is delivered well and adding in new feeds is simplistic, the only real downside to the app at present are a restriction on up to 20 feeds and that video content at present cannot be displayed but if your someone that is keen on the news, or seeing the latest blog posts that you follow then I believe there is more than enough there at the present time to keep you interested while the app evolves,

Presently available in the app store for £2.39, for me it was certainly worth the download.

Well Fabio Capello has finally announced his final 23-man Englnd squad for the World Cup in South Africa, finally in that the entire country already knew the squad a few hours before it was made public due to the power and reach of the press and media as well as even more prominently social media sites like Twitter.

Having named a provisional squad of 30 players, Capello has trimmed his squad by seven having overseen a training camp in Austria and unconvincing victories over both Mexico and Japan in the last week. The seven players that have missed out on the trip and not included in the final cut are Walcott (Arsenal), Bent (Sunderland), A.Johnson (Man City), Dawson (Spurs), Huddlestone (Spurs), Parker (West Ham) & Baines (Everton).

Gareth Barry has been included in the squad after making some good progress on his injured ankle, although at the projected recovery rate is unlikely to feature in the first 3 of England’s group games.

England travel to South Africa on Wednesday evening, with several sides already out there and then all eyes will be on their opening game against the USA which will be played in Rustenburg on Saturday 12th June. Im sure that the starting 11 for that game will bring the next major debate amongst England fans, although in all honesty the majority of the players pick themselves be it 1 or 2 positions depending on tactics.

The England Squad in full for the 2010 World Cup

Goalkeepers
Robert Green, Joe Hart, David James
Defenders
Jamie Carragher, Ashley Cole, Rio Ferdinand, Glen Johnson, Ledley King, John Terry, Matthew Upson, Stephen Warnock
Midfielders
Gareth Barry, Michael Carrick, Joe Cole, Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard, Aaron Lennon, James Milner, Shaun Wright-Phillips
Forwards
Peter Crouch, Jermain Defoe, Emile Heskey, Wayne Rooney

Whether you agree with Capello’s decision or not in the final cut, there are no real surprises in there that couldnt have been logically expected.

Walcott - Lacks a final ball, crossing is weak at times and form inconsistent.Despite the pace that he can obviously deliver and the value as an impact substitution, the better close ball skills of Lennon as well as versatility of Gerrard, Cole and SWP see him receive his first major knockback in the game.

Bent - A very successful season at club level but always the last of the strikers and be it only limited exposure in an England shirt has never shown any real intent. A big shame for the lad to miss out on two successive World Cup squads.

Huddlestone - Another player on the back of a reasonable season but behind in both talent and experience against the likes of Gerrard, Lampard and Barry.

Baines - May well have played himself out of the squad with his performance of uncertainty against Mexico in the 3-1 win and allowed Warnock to slide on to the plane without even kicking a ball.

Dawson - Argubly a better choice than Upson in the 5th centre half spot, who’s season has been flat at best for West Ham but with no game time in recent friendlies was always one of the more likely ones to miss out. The only real other question was do we really need to take 5x centre halfs out there anyway but I guess that comes down to the tactics that Capello has in mind.

Parker - A very solid season at West Ham and arguably more energy and bite than Carrick, again another not to feature in the recent friendlies and always looking to be there more in case it was bad news on Gareth Barry.

A.Johnson - Despite a good season for City and a cameo role in the friendlies, as well as being the only left footed left winger in the squad, Adam Johnson has been left out as the experience and creativity of Joe Cole and also his City team mate Shaun Wright-Phillips is preferred. If his career continues at the same rate and promise then it would be hard to see him not around the squad for the next campaign should England qualify as only 22 years of age at present and finding his way in the game as is Walcott.

So 23 get ready to depart for the airport while 7 will either view it from the TV or continue with their holiday plans, either way the chosen Lions are now known and hopefully come June 12th are all fit and ready to let battle commence,

If your someone like me that likes to know pretty quick whats going on in certain circles of your life, be it when a friend updates their blog, some breaking news on your favourite football team, or general world news then the new, more rounded and friendly version of App Notifications (version 2.0) is certainly worth a download if you have an iPhone or iPad.

App Notifications is an iPhone / iPad app by Fabien Penso that acts as a client for the Apple Push Notification Service using a ready-made Twitter, GMail, Google Voice, and RSS notification service to instantly notify you with a pop up message when you receive new tweets, search results, emails, RSS feeds, you can even create your own custom notifications with the simple and built in REST API.

The app has certainly moved on from the initial release which although in a very clunky fashion, with a less than slick GUI, provide you with notifications, it still revolved around a very large part of the process needing to be configured on a web browser before you could take advantage on your iphone. Not the world’s greatest dilema admittedly you would think, just pop open the iPhone’s inbuilt Safari interface and away you go, sadly not that simple, it had to be done over a full browser and not a mobile version. So the potential for use was certainly there but not executed in exactly the ideal manner.

Bring on Version 2 and alot has changed, theres certainly still room for improvement for sure but the progression is there for everyone to see. The iPhone / iPad app interface is now your control point, if you want to add in a new RSS feed to be notified on for example, its just a couple of clicks in reality, the browser issue is no longer there to hold you back.

As with any push service its probably not the brightest plan in the world to go hammering your device with alerts as you still have a easily reduced battery life to contend with on the iPhone for sure but for a few things here and there it can certainly make a difference on breaking news if you need to hear it.

At just £0.59 its certainly worth a little testing, you can find it in the app store here.

If your someone that likes to look up at the stars from time to time and wonder whats going on up there, or perhaps you check in on NASA every now and again, or maybe Professor Brian Cox intrigued you with his Wonders of the Solar System, then this could be for you - especially if you are a fan of Twitter as well.

The Internation Space Station, an internationally developed research facility due for completion in 2011 at present, is currently the largest artificial satellite orbiting earth and can be spotted by the naked eye, made even easier if you know exactly when and where to look… I introduce you to Twisst, or in a more correct Twitter format @twisst.

If you indulge in Twitter then all you need to do is simply follow @twisst and you will receive a mention in your timeline everytime that its in your viewing area, depending on where you live in the world, which @twisst reads from your country settings / geo-locstion. A simply tweet covering the expected view time and flight path, compass style, then the rest is over to you to pick it out.

Go on, see whats up there amongst the stars.

England have swept to ICC World Twenty20 glory on the back of a thrilling seven-wicket win over Australia in a thoroughly one-sided final in Barbados, a continuation of their tournament domination from start to finish.

Australia set a target of 148 which was overhauled with full three overs to spare, earning them a first global title after 35 years of trying.

England claimed three wickets in the first three overs to hit a powerful Australia batting line-up hard and fast from the start, and although they recovered gradually to finally post 147-6 it just want enough. Craig Kieswetter and Kevin Pietersen tore into the Aussies with a ferocious second-wicket stand of 111 in barely 11 overs.

Kieswetter smashed 63 off 49 balls and Pietersen 47 off 31, which eventually allowed Paul Collingwood to hit the winning runs, deserved reward for a captain who has done so much to re-shape this vastly improved side, physically and mentally.

Kieswetter took the acolade of man-of-the-match Pietersen claimed the player-of-the-tournament. A truly commendable and remarkable tournament performance from England and a thoroughly deserved outcome.

If you have got an iphone, there is a good chance that you would be lost without it and therefore use it a considerable amount. If you therefore use it alot then you will be aware that despite the iphone’s extensive range of capabilities and selling points its battery life is far from being one of them!

If your indulging in such things as Twitter, Facebook, various other apps / games and especially such items as geo-tagging through the likes of Foursquare and Gowalla then some days your phone may seem to be dead again as quick as you charged it.

I am very much one of these people… When it comes to the iPhone, I do confess to certainly getting my use out of it. All the items mentioned above as well as email and RSS feeds being pushed through, voice calls and texts, it isnt long before the dreaded 10% remaining inidicator has made yet another reappearance on the screen.

I have a back up iPhone aswell, as they are very much my life line for both work and play but some days I had even managed to drain both of them of battery life without too much effort so started to look for a solution. Now by all means I could go a little easier on my use of the phone, switch push notifications and wireless off when Im out and about but I kind of thought, why should I?

I started looking at Powerskins for the phone and was initially drawn to the Mophus power skin, sleek and seemed to tick all the right boxes and Apple seemed to rate fairly highly. Any how after a little bit of research and digging around I came across more and more articles on how it has issues concerning charging over USB, some people even found it a little fragile. So I opted for the Mili Powerskin, marketed as the world’s thinnest iPhone powerskin, now that really was a great move to make.

I have had the Mili several months now and to date it has never failed me when it comes to battery life, doubling the capacity up nicely and never really needing to swap between phones anymore apart from the odd mad day. Its slim but solid and doesnt add a great deal of size or weight to the phone. The iphone simply sits inside it, drops on to a connector and use the Mili’s own powersource in the first instance before failing over to its own reserve. Complete with charging indicator its a good all round package which you can pick up from the Mili website at £47.99.

The only slight niggle that I have found with the Mili device is that it is supposed to be able to sync with iTunes over USB but I have found this a little temperamental at times, although achieveable. When syncing with iTunes my recommendation is definitely to remove the iPhone from the Powerskin and charge as per the normal cable.

Definitely worth the investment.