My Billings license giveaway had a great reception. A big shout out to all of you who participated on twitter, the blog, or on their own blogs; I hope you will also enjoy the set of giveaways that are coming up this year, including at least one with some actual, physical, sent-to-your-doorstep hardware!

The winners of the two licenses are Ben Jacob and Matt Farrugia. In an interesting stroke of events, the first random draw selected two Marketcircle employees as winners, but I have taken the liberty to assume that other people were more in need of a license then them :).

I also want to thank the guys at Marketcircle for lending themselves to a great interview and giving out these licenses, and I am eager to see what they’ll have in store for us in the future with improvements to Billings and iPhone applications.

Congrats to Ben and Matt, and thanks for participating!

Since the last gaming article on Flower, one might expect a post on a relaxing and casual game, but I want to talk about Armored Core for Answer instead; the latest game in the line of the Armored Core series is everything but casual.

I hadn’t played an Armored Core game before, but as a vocal mecha lover, I wanted to give it a shot after I had jumped through a bazillion hoops to make a Japanese Playstation Network account and downloaded the (also entirely Japanese) demo. I started up the game, enjoyed the horribly designed menu – a real stalwart quality of Japanese games in general – and went straight into the first mission.

I lasted about 30 seconds. I was literally blown away, mentally and ingame, by a 3000-feet (about a kilometer) high walking fortress with six long-range cannons firing projectiles the size of a bulky SUV. At that moment I realized that this was a game that was practically tailor-made for me.
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A lot of people ask me about the ‘boring’ part of running a freelance shop, like time tracking, billing, and invoicing. My workflow is very simple, and for the last few years it has depended almost completely on one solid-as-a-rock app: Billings by Marketcircle.

As a nice extra, Marketcircle’s Ryan Cash and Alykhan Jetha were kind enough to allow an interview about Billings to supplement this look at my personal workflow and share some background on the application and great upcoming things for users.

You guys can also win a Billings license – details on that at the end of this article!

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As I mentioned in my Pokémon brands post, sometimes the strangest ideas hit you, and given their perceived coolness, they stick in your mental lists of weird things you should indulge in as a designer. Ever since I got my Airport Express and took it out of the box, I thought it resembled a robot head. A cyclops robot head, perhaps, but a robot head nevertheless. After that, I couldn’t stop thinking of the ways my hardware tools could come to life in robot form. I did a few speedpaints to see how that would look.

I know, I know, I totally promised to update weekly or at least biweekly on my tablet progress, but life’s not always easy that way. Right now, I’ll try to do something monthly, because it’s a lot of fun to do.

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As I promised for my birthday, here’s a nice wallpaper goodie. I lost my files for it in a hard drive crash, but I must say the redesign looks a lot better than the original. Those familiar with the series may recognize it as the tunnel of light that ships enter when traveling at faster-than-light speeds.

I’ve expressed my love for the new Macross series before, and I’ve uploaded some pictures of nice new Macross Frontier toys on my Flickr stream, so the last thing that was missing was a nice wallpaper to go with it!

Space Fold Wallpaper – 1.4 MB

This wallpaper is intended for personal usage and desktop customization only. Macross Frontier is © 2008-2009, Bandai and the Macross F Production Committee.

Steven Frank puts into words what we’ve all been feeling for almost a year:

It continues to kill me, seeing that iPhone apps are still getting rejected for ridiculous reasons.

The Cocoa Touch platform is so great, and this approval nonsense is so absurd that it’s hard for me to reconcile.

Almost a year now, and Apple still has a stranglehold on the platform. I’m an adult, and I am quite sure most iPhone owners are adults, but apparently there still needs to be someone who decides that I can’t use anything that has as much as a nipple in it on my phone. In the mean time, people I know that aren’t very tech-savvy have heard about the news buzz over strange App Store screwups and get completely turned off.

I’m not afraid of competition to the iPhone. I’d be really happy with a good competitor to keep Apple on its toes. I’m much more afraid, however, that something that is qualitatively far worse (but ‘good enough’) than the iPhone platform comes along and wins out because it’s perceived as being more open and people feel like they can do with it what they want. Which may be some really stupid stuff that Apple doesn’t allow on their store. The platform just needs to be ‘good enough’ and not buried in critical news coverage.

Sounds a bit like the old Mac vs. IBM PC battle for supremacy, doesn’t it? We all know how that one ended.