I’ve made no secret of my fondness for WriteRoom– the simple but incredibly useful text editor for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Well, a really good app just got even better tonight with an update to version 1.2.

As a minor update it offers the expected bug fixes and a few new features. Among them…

From the guys who brought you Tap Tap Revenge comes a new game, dubbed Puzzlotto, in the same vein as the great puzzle titles Zork and Myst.

The catch?

The first US resident (not residing in Vermont, Maryland, or North Dakota, for whatever reaason) to beat the game can receive up to $30,000.

As soon as the game is released this Wednesday the prize pool will start at $1,000 dollars for the winner and escalate $1,000 a day until it reaches a maximum of a smooth 30k (barring no one claims the prize before then) in approximately a month, which will be the last day of the contest.
 
The game launches for $4.99 this Wednesday and is already looking to be worth its price point, at least according to some early testers, including Dan Pasco, who’s video can be seen HERE.
 
Unitedlemur, the company behind the project, will be keeping the public posted daily via their twitter blog, and a tenth of the proceeds of the game go to Madagascar Fauna Group.

One of our readers commented on yesterday’s post about the recent update to the task app Things. The writer noted that while Things is “pretty” it is also…

“incomplete and development is painfully slow, adding minor features at a snail’s pace while we are still waiting on major ones, ones that are in the desktop app and not on iPhone yet or are simply missing.”

As frusterating as this might be, it is made even worse because…“Toodledo is improving rapidly”.

His comment concluded that as a result, Toodledo…

“….has replaced Things on my iPhone at a third of the price and without the need for a $50 Mac desktop application.”

The post could not have been any more timely.

As we posted last week, Pangea did a great job bringing their game Nanosaur 2 to the iPhone. It has proven to be more than a bit popular and for good reason. The game looks, sounds and plays fantasticaly well. (To get a peak you can check out our video overview HERE.)

In Nanosaur 2 you…

pilot a flying dinosaur from the future who is equipped with massive firepower! Your goal is to find and retrieve the missing dinosaur eggs, and to do that you’ll have to blow up a whole lotta stuff! You’ll battle other Nanosaurs and their defense systems, and collect powerups which give you a large array of weaponry ranging from heat seeking missiles to cluster bombs.

Flying dinosaurs and things that go BOOM! What could be better! At the release price of $3.99 it was a great deal! Well, that great deal just got "greater-er"!

There are some pretty nice options available for managing tasks right from the iPhone now.

Among the best if you want/need to backup and keep tasks in sync with a computer are OmniFocus, ToDo and Toodledo. (OmniFocus syncs with the OmniGroup’s own OmniFocus for Mac and the latter two sync OTA with the web-based Toodledo).

Early on after the App Store came on line I was intrigued by another task app- Things from Cultured Code. Both the desktop and iPhone versions of Things had a beautifully clean interface that was as straight forward and easy to use as you could possibly want. The Things desktop app was especially interesting because it used tags rather than set and/or complex structures the way the others do.

Things is

a beautifully focused and amazingly intuitive task manager. Other todo applications either oversimplify or are too difficult to use. Things instead offers the perfect balance between ease of use and powerful features. Effortlessly manage to-dos, notes, due dates, and projects. A smart today list and the scheduling feature allow you to work as effectively as possible – every day. With Things’ elegant user interface, procrastinating never looked less attractive.

Unfortunately, there were a few issues.

Do you remember back to the early iPhone 3G rumors?

Among the breakthroughs being suggested dreamed of was a second, front-facing camera for video conferencing. Sadly, when the 3G was actually introduced not only didn’t it have the second camera, but it still didn’t even have the ability to record video.

Seems kind of silly since pretty much every other smartphone (and many feature phones) can do video. Moreover, the iPhone’s hardware can certainly support it and, in fact, there ARE jailbreak apps that record video already.

Well, once again developers are filling in some of the iPhone’s remaining omissions. This time it is going to be thanks to…