FarmVille, Guitar Hero coming to iPhone: Rock out on the farm
Would-be yokels and rock stars with iPhones will soon be able to fulfil their fantasies with Guitar Hero and FarmVille apps
Very soon you will no longer have to visit Facebook to tend your FarmVille pastures -- you'll be able to do it straight from your iPhone. That's the news that just broke from Apple's WWDC 2010 conference.
Is this good news? Or the death knell for human civilisation and progress as we know it? We don't know, but we do know the following:
- Push notifications will let you know when your crops have finished growing
- The harvesting process will benefit from a full touch-interface makeover for the iPhone
- FarmVille has over 70m active users. That's a lot of eager farmers
- You'll be able to pay for animals and suchlike using in-app transactions
Guitar Hero for the iPhone was also announced. You'll be able to use multitouch to handle that rock-star strumming. The app is apparently available now in the US iTunes store, priced at a modest $3 (£2). A release date for the FarmVille app hasn't been announced.
In his keynote speech, Steve Jobs had a few more things to say about the meteoric rise of the App Store. We learned that 95 per cent of apps are approved within seven days, and that the other 5 per cent are rejected because they don't do what they're supposed to, use private APIs, or crash. During the presentation, there were demos of the awesome Netflix app, which lets US users stream movies across their PCs and iPhones.
The iBooks software, yet to be made available to UK iPad users, has also had an update. You can now add notes as you read -- they look like Post-it notes stuck on the pages of your ebooks. PDFs are also now supported, alongside ebooks in the ePub format, with a separate bookshelf in your library. You can also tap a page to bookmark it, with a red ribbon marking the page in the contents.
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