Chickens Can't Fly lands on iPhone and iPad

Seeing as how iOS rules the roost as far as mobile games go, smaller competing platforms like Windows Phone don’t get too many exclusive games worth noting. Windows Phone has had some high profile Xbox-branded exclusives now and then, but they often end up migrating to Apple’s pastures as well. Wordament, Kinectimals, and Tentacles are a few such titles to jump ship from Windows Phone.

Chalk another one up for iOS. Chickens Can’t Fly from developer Amused Sloth has long been considered one of the best Xbox games for Windows Phone. Recently the game got pulled from that platform due to an In-App Purchase formatting bungle on Microsoft’s part, though it will return without Xbox features in the future. At the same time, Chickens Can’t Fly has migrated to iOS – currently the only place to get it!

Staying out of the fryer

In Chickens Can’t Fly, you play as a chicken who must navigate a variety of obstacles courses. The chicken is always falling downward, making for a sort of reverse Doodle Jump.  Tilting the device left and right steers the avian hero.

Chicken literally can’t stop falling, but you can at least slow him down in a couple of ways: touching walls cause shim to slide, while tapping the screen flaps his wings. Still, he continually gains speed the longer he stays alive, so even with those moves at your disposal, things get pretty hectic. Thankfully his speed resets whenever you pass a checkpoint.

Science gone wrong

The game’s 80+ experiments (levels) are divided up into six labs: Hatchery (tutorial levels), Butchery, Cemetery, Military, Physics, and Aquarium.

These labs are more than just different backdrops. Each one has unique powerups, powerdowns, and obstacles, making for a nice bit of variety. New items are usually introduced in their own specific experiment, with creative titles like “Does Chicken like 8-bit?” which involves the Pixelizer item. This teaches players what the items do organically.

Experiments can have a variety of different goals. Sometimes Chicken just needs to survive until the end. Other times he’s fighting against time or has to pick up a certain number of items by the time he reaches the end of the level. If you reach the bottom without meeting the experiment’s criteria, you fail and have to retry it.

Extra modes

Once you’ve completed a certain number of experiments within a lab, you’ll unlock that lab’s Survival mode. Rather than ending after a certain number of checkpoints, Survival is made up of endless checkpoints, so it lasts as long as you can stay alive. Passing checkpoints gives Chicken an extra life, so skilled players can potentially play for quite a while.

Weekly Challenges are specific Survival levels that change every week. This mode has its own global leaderboard, so players can compete against each other for high scores.

In-App Purchases

Chickens Can’t Fly packs a ton of content for $1.99. But players who want even more Chicken have a few optional purchases to choose from. The first is the Dojo set of levels for $1.99. The Dojo adds 10 new experiments and a ninja outfit for Chicken to wear.

Speaking of outfits, the game includes three skins automatically: naked, Girlie, and Diver. Players who need more variety to their wardrobes can pick up the Knight, Vampire, and Alien skins for 99 cents each.

Tastes like chicken

Chickens Can’t Fly is just as engaging now as when it debuted on Windows Phone last year. More so, in fact, thanks to some minor balance tweaks and fixes. Amused Sloth’s game features a charming art style, quirky sense of humor, and catchy music to boot. And GameCenter Achievements, why not. Give it a try and save the Chicken from the fryer.

• $1.99 – Download Now

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheIphoneBlog/~3/snwe1EOueHE/story01.htm
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How Financial Markets View Fiscal Deal

For a glimpse of how financial markets may view the deal by Congress to reopen the federal government and raise the debt ceiling, Renee Montagne speaks to HSBC's chief U.S. economist Kevin Logan.

Copyright © 2013 NPR. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.

RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

And I'm Renee Montagne.

The last-minute move by Congress that reopened the federal government and raised the debt ceiling has brought some relief to the markets. Stocks are mixed in Asia, but some investors are already worrying about the prospects of another fiscal showdown in Washington early next year, saying Congress is merely kicking the can down the road.

Joining us now is Kevin Logan. He is the chief U.S. economist at the banking giant HSBC. Good morning.

KEVIN LOGAN: Good morning.

MONTAGNE: How relieved are investors with the deal that was made, after all, at the 11th hour?

LOGAN: Well, they're quite relieved, particularly investors in the Treasury market. That's where all the risk was, whether or not the U.S. Treasury would actually default or delay payment on some of its obligations. I think away from the Treasury market, it wasn't quite as much an anxiety. We saw that in the stock market, for example. Gains slowed down, but by and large the market held in. And then there was a small relief rally once the deal was struck.

But the big relief, the big change within the Treasury market, were particularly the short-term securities that were due to mature in the next month or so. Those, which had sold off severely, rallied once the deal was made.

MONTAGNE: Well, when you talk about that market - in fact, you are talking about, in a way, the whole world, certainly world leaders were urging the U.S. Congress and the president to make some kind of deal, you know, saying that the U.S. cannot, if it came to that, default on its debt. And China - now China holds something like $1.3 trillion in American public debt. How has this whole thing affected China?

LOGAN: Well, it certainly made them start to think about the safety and security of their international reserve holdings. China has, over the last two decades, been driven by their economic growth, they've been driven by exports to a large extent. They've run current account surpluses that have piled up quite a treasure trove of international reserves. The place they invest most of those are in U.S. government securities, the deepest, most liquid and most easily transacted market in the world. Now they have to think a little bit more about the risk of that market in a way that they hadn't before.

MONTAGNE: Which, of course, would not necessarily be good for the U.S. I mean, China - there was a point at which coming out of China were calls for the international community to move away from the dollar.

LOGAN: Well, yes. Right now we have international monetary arrangements that are based on the relative strength and the quality of the financial markets in different economies. And over time it's shifted. We know that early in the last century it was U.K. with sterling. More recently, the evolution and development of the euro provided a substitute for the dollar and sterling. Things will keep changing over time. Certainly the emergence of China as a strong and potentially dominant economic power will eventually lead to changes in global monetary arrangements. This little episode we've just been through is probably just one more step on the way of making people think about how these changes will take place in the future.

MONTAGNE: Let's get back to regular folks here in the United States. The housing market took a hit momentarily. What do you think this deal will do for that and just largely such things as interest rates?

LOGAN: Well, the main thing is the end of the government shutdown. Housing was bothered by all of this because the processing of loans was slowed down. A lot of loans depend upon FHA approvals or paperwork that might go through to forming the mortgage pools that are backed by Fannie May or Freddie Mac, and all the uncertainty about the government shutdown delayed all of that processing and so held up mortgages that people might get. Hopefully the backlog will be cleared quickly, and the housing market will return to normal.

MONTAGNE: Kevin Logan is chief U.S. economist at HSBC. Thank you very much for joining us.

LOGAN: You're welcome.

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Source: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=236212112&ft=1&f=3
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The Iran We Know

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may be out as president of Iran, but Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, above, is still in charge.

Photo by Maysam Dehghani/AFP/Getty Images

In Geneva this week, an Iranian delegation has been holding talks with six other nations about its country's nuclear program. These negotiations—the first to take place under the auspices of Iran's new president, Hassan Rouhani—inspired little bursts of positive rhetoric. The BBC reported an "upbeat mood" in Geneva. A European diplomat spoke of "cautious optimism." Rouhani himself had pledged to "resolve" the nuclear problem within the next six months.

After years of no progress with Iran, why the sudden good cheer? It's certainly not because Rouhani represents a radical new strand of Iranian thinking about nuclear power. After all, he was Iran's nuclear negotiator from 2003 to 2005. Parts of the nuclear program were temporarily suspended during that time, but it was never eliminated.

Iran has returned to negotiations for only one reason: The new president wants economic sanctions lifted because they have taken a powerful toll on the Iranian economy.

Nor does Rouhani's new Cabinet mark a profound break from those who have run the Islamic Republic since its inception. As his justice minister, Rouhani has appointed Mostafa Pourmohammadi, a former high official in the Ministry of Information in the bloody and violent 1980s. Among other things, Pourmohammadi was one of those primarily responsible for the mass execution of thousands of political prisoners in 1988. He moved on to the ministry's foreign intelligence operations in the 1990s, when its "achievements" included the bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires and the assassination of dissidents in Iran and around the world.

No one is denying this bit of history. After appointing Pourmohammadi, Rouhani went out of his way to praise his "numerous experiences in the government" and his record: "He has been successful, wherever he has been." Little appears to have changed: In the week of Sept. 23, when Rouhani was at the U.N. General Assembly in New York, more than 30 Iranians were reportedly executed without due process of law.

Rouhani's team, in other words, has not gone to Geneva after a process of profound internal transformation. On the contrary, Iran has returned to negotiations for only one reason: The new president wants economic sanctions lifted because they have taken a powerful toll on the Iranian economy. At a recent conference in London, I heard Iranian diaspora economists return again and again to that theme: Sanctions have destabilized Iran's currency, oil and gas industry, international trade, and investor confidence. Of course the shortcomings of sanctions are well-known: They are a blunt and inefficient instrument; plenty of people defy them; and illicit trade goes on all the time. And, yes, they distribute economic pain over the entire population and don't necessarily hit hardest the people who make the decisions. Nevertheless, three decades' worth of overlapping unilateral and multilateral sanctions on Iran, organized at different times by the United States, the United Nations, and the European Union, are, at least in a narrow sense, "working": They have forced Iran's leaders back to a negotiating table they had largely abandoned some years ago.

The sanctions' success has also persuaded the Iranians to try a tactic that has worked well for many other countries, including Russia: Persuade the West to keep its foreign policy concerns in silos—separating economics, human rights, and nuclear weapons, as though they have nothing to do with one another. Iran's oil ministry has even launched a kind of outreach campaign, declaring that "Iran welcomes any oil cooperation, even with American companies." Presumably the Iranians believe that those U.S. oil companies would lobby the Obama administration, hard, to lift sanctions altogether.

Such lobbying would be extremely short-sighted. If Iran is able to make concrete, verifiable nuclear proposals, some changes could of course be made to the sanctions regime. Some have suggested unfreezing Iranian assets held abroad as an option. But while negotiations continue, let's be clear about why the world cares about Iran's nuclear program in the first place.

Certainly we in the United States aren't overly worried about Britain's nuclear arsenal or about India's. The United States is hardly in a position to oppose nuclear weapons in principle, since we and several of our allies have them. No, we oppose Iran's nuclear ambitions for one reason: because we object to the Islamic Republic of Iran, a quasi-totalitarian state that since 1979 has been led by brutal, volatile men with no respect for the rule of law. Their regime is a "domestic" problem for many Iranians, and it's a major problem for Iran's neighbors and the rest of the world.

To put it differently: As long as men like Pourmohammadi are still running Iran's courts and prisons, as long as the Iranian judicial system is subverted by a politicized version of Shariah, there will always be a limit to what can be achieved through any conversations with Tehran. Talking is fine. But the negotiators in Geneva should leave any optimism at the door. 


Source: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2013/10/iran_s_nuclear_negotiations_tehran_remains_a_brutal_and_dangerous_regime.html
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Medina keeps mulling (Offthekuff)

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Windows 8.1 Is Here, and You Should Get It Now

Image: Microsoft

Windows 8.1 is here–it launched at 4 a.m. Pacific time and is rolling out globally.

Do you use Windows 8? If so, then get the new version. It’s a solid, necessary update (and a free one to boot). It has features that will please longtime Windows users who were uncomfortable with 8, as well as features that push the concepts behind Windows 8 even further. It’s a recommitment to the touch-based future of Windows Store apps, while making more room and allowance for the desktop and a tacit recognition that some people will only want to operate in that old familiar environment.

It’s only been 12 months since Windows 8 shipped. It has not been a triumphant year.

It’s only been 12 months since Windows 8 shipped. It has not been a triumphant year. Steven Sinofsky, Microsoft’s longtime Windows chief, is gone. He got the axe just after Windows 8 shipped. Given Microsoft’s woes over the past decade, you could make a compelling case that they fired the wrong Steve. But just this August, on the cusp of Windows 8.1’s release, the company fixed the error: Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s longtime CEO, is now on his way out too.

Between the two Steve slayings, it took a $900 million write down on Surface RT, the computer that was meant to be the physical embodiment of its new, stripped down Windows operating system. Disgruntled PC Manufacturers have been in revolt, openly criticizing the company and its next generation OS. If Windows 8 has had a defining cultural moment, it wasn’t its lavish launch, or any number of commercials, but this YouTube video of a befuddled gentleman trying to use Windows 8 for the first time.

And so now we have Windows 8.1 — in an earlier era this would have been called Windows 9 because it is not what you might think of as a point-one upgrade. Sure, it makes cosmetic concessions to its seething user base, who just wanted their Start button back and the ability to never, ever have to use the system formerly known as Metro. It gave them both of those things, kind of. But it is more than anything else a step further along the road away from the traditional desktop PC. It is even more cloud-focused. More touchable. Better able to embrace a wide variety of form factors and devices.

The thing is, Microsoft had to reinvent itself. PC sales would be lagging with or without Windows 8. The so-called post-PC world has been apparent to the point of cliché for a very long time now. If anything, Microsoft was too slow to move to it. It couldn’t make an abrupt break with its past, stranding its massive install base at their desks while it took up the tablet. And so it gave us Windows 8—the bridge between tablets and desktop; a way to tiptoe between x86 and ARM processors.

People hated it. But it was the right thing to do. As I’ve previously argued, Microsoft is a lumbering giant, but with Windows 8 it began lumbering in the right direction. Windows 8.1 represents another plodding, yet massive, step forward.

Search has become the dominant feature of the operating system.

Let’s start with the ways it goes back to the past. There is a button where the Start button used to be, and clicking on it will do a vaguely Start-button like thing, which is to take you to your Start Screen where your applications live. You can boot to the desktop now with a simple settings change (although it took two Microsoft representatives multiple tries on a total of three devices to demonstrate how to do this). Because you can make your Desktop background mirror your Start Screen background, swapping between the two is less jarring now, although you still get a sense of transition. It feels more like diving into a warm pool and less like being ripped from a moving car.

But the meat of Windows 8.1 is in the way it moves forward, not how it looks back. The most notable change is to the way Search has become the dominant feature of the operating system.

One of the Charms (think: software buttons) that you can access from a right-side swipe is a Search function, and in 8.1 Search has become universal. It queries your local files and folders as well as Bing, and gives you the results in a graphic-heavy manner designed to make it easy to find what you need at a glance. You get previews of web pages, photos pulled from the web, and even the ability to pull up songs and other media that you can play with a single click. Search for a person or a place, and it will show big, graphic-heavy cards with automated information about the query.

Windows 8.1 Bing Smart Search. Image: Microsoft

The cloud is the other dominant organizing principle, or even connective tissue. Make changes in one place, and they are reflected across all your devices. Microsoft pushes you to save everything to SkyDrive by default, so you can access everything from anywhere. You can set devices to sync in various ways so that, for example, your desktop has a local copy of all your photos, while your smaller tablet only has a subset. While you’ll get some SkyDrive storage for free (7 GB) if you really use this, you’re going to have to buy more.

The other major thing you’ll notice is that you can personalize Windows 8.1 to a greater degree, especially around applications. Live Tiles are even more alive—make one for a web page and it can pipe information from that site’s RSS feed. They offer more sizing options, and organizing them into groups is much easier. You can reorganize your windows too. While Windows 8 only allows you to use set fractionals of the screen for multi-window (Snap state) views, 8.1 allows you a greater degree of flexibility to alter the number and position of those windows.

Meanwhile, the company has given its default applications—especially Mail and Music—real and needed overhauls. Both felt like beta releases in Windows 8, and both have finally gotten up to speed in 8.1.

Should you upgrade? Yes. It’s a solid update. The people who hated Windows 8, however, likely aren’t going to be much more pleased with 8.1. While it makes concessions to the desktop, Microsoft clearly is thinking more about touch and a future where devices are mere screens meant to reflect data stored on a server somewhere.

Source: http://feeds.wired.com/c/35185/f/661370/s/32912056/sc/15/l/0L0Swired0N0Cgadgetlab0C20A130C10A0Cwindows0E80E10Eis0Ehere0C/story01.htm
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Obama thanks Senate for passing debt deal

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama is thanking Democratic and Republican leaders in the Senate for passing a deal to end the partial government shutdown and avert a default.

Obama says if and when the House approves the bill, he'll sign it immediately. He says the U.S. will start reopening the government right away.

Obama says now it's time to win back the trust of Americans that's been lost during the crisis.

Obama spoke at the White House minutes after the Senate passed the measure. The bill calls for opening the government through Jan. 15 and extending the nation's borrowing authority through Feb. 7.

Obama says once these issues are resolved, he wants to move forward this year on immigration, farm legislation and a larger budget deal.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/obama-thanks-senate-passing-debt-deal-004009696--politics.html
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How to wipe all of your personal data off an iPad or iPhone

If you're selling your iPhone or iPad or passing it on to someone else, the first thing you'll want to do is make sure they won't have access to any of your personal data. Fortunately, iOS makes it very easy to wipe all your data off your old iPhone or iPad, no computer required. Here's how:

Before doing this, you obviously want to make sure you either have an iCloud backup or an iTunes backup of your data. Otherwise, you won't be able to get your stuff back. Once you're sure you have a backup for your own use, proceed on.

Turn off Find My iPhone

If you're on iOS 7 already and you have an iCloud account linked to your iPhone or iPad, you'll need to sign out of Find My iPhone before you can truly wipe the device.

1. Launch the Settings app from the Home screen of your iPhone or iPad.
2. Scroll down and tap on iCloud.
3. Scroll down once more and turn Off the Find My iPhone option.
4. You will be prompted to enter your iCloud password. Once you're done entering your password, tap Turn Off.

That's it, you can now proceed to wiping your iPhone or iPad. The above steps are only necessary if the iPhone or iPad you're trying to restore is on iOS 7.0 or above.

Erase all data from your iPhone or iPad

1. Launch the Settings app from the Home screen of your iPhone or iPad.
2. Now tap on General.
3. Scroll all the way to the bottom and tap on Reset.
4. Tap on Erase All Content and Settings.
5. You will be prompted to confirm your selection, tap on Erase iPhone.
6. Once more you will be reminded that you can't undo this action, tap Erase iPhone one more time to confirm.

That's it. Your iPhone or iPad will reboot after a few minutes and all your personal data should be gone and again look like the day you pulled it out of the box.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheIphoneBlog/~3/MkZqP6P1t4g/story01.htm
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