I am again pimping more indie game dev friends! Go check out Tile Poker for the iPhone, a clever, pretty and absurdly addictive game from Quiet Mime Studios. Only $1.99, less than coffee. Go support hard-working, worthy indie game developers! Here’s an iTunes link to download:

This is extremely cool! Check out Google Browser Size.

Essentially, this web tool will draw an overlay map of your website marking the different resolution boundaries and showing you how likely people at different resolutions are to be able to see different parts of your website. Some people with low resolutions won’t scroll down to view the site. Here’s a quote from that page showing why this is important:

Using this visualization, Bruno confirmed that about 10% of users couldn’t see the download button without scrolling, and thus never noticed it. 10% may not sound like a lot, but in this context it turns out to mean a significant number of people weren’t downloading Google Earth. Using this data, the team was able to redesign the page to good effect.

This would be a great tool for artists to check the usability of their website at different resolutions and to get ideas on how to tweak the design for better results. What if potential employers simply don’t see all of your art or scroll to view all the content? Google Browser Size could be a great tool for analyzing that. Go check it out!

This is awesome. TweetDeck, my favorite Twitter client, now added support for LinkedIn, my favorite business development networking tool! Now you can follow your connections’ activity feeds in realtime. Every time someone joins a company, updates their profile, answers a question, updates their status, etc, Tweetdeck updates to reflect the change and it makes it easier to get a sense of what’s going on day by day. I’ve actually spotted many layoffs and studio closures first through LinkedIn based on the type of activity that happens immediately before and after.

I’ll explain what TweetDeck is. It’s a full-featured, well-designed and easy to use Twitter client that has support for not only Twitter but also Facebook, MySpace and now LinkedIn as well. It provides a customizable multi-column view with many configuration options and special filters. You can customize which types of notices it shows you, such as Status, Q&A, Connections, Profile updates, Recommendations, Group joinings, and Application installs.

It’s becoming flexible enough that even if you hate Twitter, you can simply not use Twitter at all and instead use TweetDeck as simply a nearly-live news ticker of information from ONLY LinkedIn. It can be a tremendously useful business intelligence tool. :)

Here’s a screenshot of the TweetDeck interface: http://assets.tweetdeck.com/splashes/frontpage.png

To give you an example of how it can be used, I use TweetDeck for both Twitter and LinkedIn. I’ve set up several different columns with various filters:

• One for my full Twitter feed (~400 people)
• One to collect all replies to my tweets
• One for all my private messages
• One for all the Twitter news sites I follow
• One for my close friends
• One for LinkedIn

In other words, the whole world at my fingertips! bwahah!

TweetDeck is available for PC, Mac, and the iPhone, and your custom columns \ filters \ etc are synced to the server so they’re the same on every device you use it on, which is slick. :) You can download it here: http://www.tweetdeck.com

Enjoy!

One of my friends, Mike Arkin at Big Boat Interactive, just released his company’s first iPhone game, CrimeCraft: Kingpin (iTunes link), a free MMO for the iPhone. I’ve been playing it in beta quite a bit and it’s a blast. It’s really reminiscient of all the fun parts of Mafia Wars, except without all the spamming and pointlessness of combat if you have less than 500 friends. Outfitting your gang, sending them into battle, getting new armor and weapons and teaming up against other players is gratifying, and the fact that it’s all real players and is technically an MMO on the iPhone is impressive as hell.

So come support an indie game developer and CrimeCraft: Kingpin (iTunes link)! It’s free, and fun! Clicky-clicky, and spread the word! :)