Chuck Gnome was chosen as our Daily App here on the site about a month ago, and now Movable Sprites has offered us a few copies to give away to you readers. Since we last posted about it, the game has updated to version 1.1 and added in a new episode, a new mini game, new music, and lots more. Plus, the price was lowered to 99 cents (and there's still a lite version available for you to check out).

But if a buck is still too much for you to check out this gnome tossin' good time, you can enter below to win one of 10 copies from TUAW and Movable Sprites!

To enter the giveaway, leave us a comment telling us what you'd like to chuck Chuck at in real life. Here are the official rules:

• Open to legal US residents of the 50 United States, the District of Columbia, and Canada (excluding Quebec) who are 18 and older.
• To enter, leave a comment telling us what real-life object, place, or thing you'd like to throw Chuck Gnome at.
• The comment must be left before midnight on Monday, September 6, 2010, 11:59PM Eastern Daylight Time.
• You may enter only once.
• Ten winners will be selected. All will receive one promo code for Chuck Gnome, valued at $0.99 each.
• Click Here for complete Official Rules.

Good luck!

I'll admit it. I'll buy almost anything Apple makes. I was going to hold out on the iPad, but after reading more about it, I wound up in line the first day it was for sale. As they say, resistance is futile.

That's not the case with the Apple TV. When Apple brings a product out, I expect a small revolution. Some exciting new concept, or new and unique feature. With the Apple TV, it's certainly lower in price, but instead of revolutionizing the idea of a set-top box, the new unit actually takes features away from the now discarded Apple TV 'classic'.

First, there is the loss of actually owning a movie or a TV show. When the VCR first appeared in the 70s, the idea of owning a movie was quite unique. Before VHS or Betamax you went to a theater, paid your couple of dollars, or watched the oldies on TV loaded with commercials.

Second, the Apple TV requires an HDMI connection -- its HDMI port means you need an HDMI hookup or nothing. I understand the reasons for going with that standard, but I'm still holding on to an older AV receiver, and my 'classic' Apple TV works just fine with that.

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Seems like only yesterday that Linux was vastly outpacing iOS in terms of how many were using it as a browsing platform. Actually, make that last November; at that time, Linux's presence more than doubled the total iOS stake. Now, iOS-based browsers claim 1.13 percent of all browsing platforms, compared to a declining 0.85 percent for Linux.

To the right is a screengrab from Google Analytics, as I see traffic coming to one of my own websites. However, I'm sure the list looks very different depending on the content. For example, I'm pretty sure TUAW's #1 OS isn't any flavor of Windows (but I'll check).

How long before the total of all mobile-only OS clients outranks desktop OS users in this area?

[via AppleInsider]

Analyst Katy Huberty from Morgan Stanley tells All Things D that she believes Apple is ramping up production on the iPad, aiming to build as many as three million a month by the end of this year. That would mean that the company could make 36 million iPads next year, which brings the total close to (but not quite) the whopping 40 million units predicted by her supply chain analysis. Sales estimates for next year started out around 10 million iPads, but have since risen to as high as 42 million units, which would be quite a year for a product that didn't exist before this past April.

Currently, says Huberty, Apple is producing about two million iPads a month, and that's brought shipping times on the website down, and helped availability across the board. But the manufacturing process needs to be refined even further, and of course if, as expected earlier next year, the device sees a revision, that may delay things even further. There seems to be one thing most analysts agree on, however: Apple is going to sell a whole lot of iPads in 2011.

If you depend on Automator workflows for managing music or other tasks in iTunes, the upgrade to version 10 may have come as a bit of a cold shock. Macworld pointed out that most available workflows for iTunes simply would not load with iTunes 10; a frustrating circumstance, to be sure.

Fortunately, the problem turns out not to be that complicated; Automator's version checking thinks that iTunes 10.0 is a lower version than 9.0, because the versions are sorting alphabetically instead of numerically (oof!). Macfixit points to a workaround: opening up the Info.plist files inside the packages for the dysfunctional workflows and manually changing the version threshold. It's not ideal, but if you have critical Automator functionality that would otherwise keep you on iTunes 9, it's worth a try.

Since people still seem to want to leave their houses and go to the movies (despite Apple's best efforts to keep them firmly on their couches), the iTunes Movie Trailers site now features a sophisticated Showtimes view. This HTML5-savvy offering uses location awareness in your browser to show the movies playing nearest you, along with the upcoming screening schedule and links to the theater sites for ticket purchases.

The site works great in Safari, Firefox 3 or Chrome on your Mac; it also works perfectly on the iPad, although on the iPhone it's a little bit compact.

Check it out for yourself, or see our gallery of screenshots below.


[via Ars Technica]

Crokinole is a beautiful, simple game with a long history. In the tradition of pool and Carrom, Crokinole is a dexterity game that pits two (or four) people against each other around a circular wooden board. Players try to flick little wooden discs towards the center, knocking out opponent's discs if they're in the target area. It takes a minute to learn and a lifetime to get frustrated at because you're just not good enough.

The trouble is, if you want a decent Crokinole board at home, it'll set you back a few hundred dollars; $130 or so is the minimum, and you can always pay more if you really want to go all out. It's not hard to find boards costing $400 or more (don't ask how much the Death Star board costs) and you need someplace to store it when it's not in use. These things are about a meter across, and made of heavy wood, so this isn't a trivial issue.

With the Croke iPhone app, you can have a somewhat similar experience on a touchscreen. It's not the same thing, but it's also only $1.99, so you're getting to play without paying through the nose. Read on to see if this flick's for you.

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When Apple released the third-generation iPod shuffle in 2009, I saw it as a perfect example of the design hubris that many Apple detractors point to. From a usability perspective, there really wasn't anything wrong with the second-generation iPod shuffle -- it had a minimal number of buttons, true, but their functions were fairly obvious. In a textbook example of the emphasis of form over function, Apple's third-generation iPod shuffle removed all of the controls from the device itself and moved them to the headphones' inline remote. Not only was the remote far more complex to use than the old shuffle's simple buttons, it also meant that, if you wanted to use third-party headphones, you'd either have to give up all control over the iPod or shell out more money for an inline remote adapter. The third-gen iPod shuffle got savaged in reviews, and it deserved it.

Apple's fourth-generation iPod shuffle mercifully brought the buttons back. Apple even lists "buttons" as a feature on its page for the iPod shuffle. In a rare departure from typical Apple design, the fourth-generation iPod shuffle is much larger than the third-gen; it's not that Apple can't make a music player the size of your thumbnail, but it seems like Apple realized that it shouldn't. So, the return of buttons to the iPod shuffle proves that Apple doesn't always emphasize form over function. Right?

Unfortunately, although the iPod shuffle proves that Apple is perfectly capable of learning from its design missteps, the new iPod nano and iPod touch both feature design compromises that are almost as boneheaded as the buttonless third-gen iPod shuffle. Click "Read More" to see the way these new iPods, nice as they are in some respects, are in other ways an example of a "one step forward, two steps back" design.

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Epic Games, creator of the Unreal 3 game engine, has been working on getting Unreal Engine 3 running in iOS for a while now. They showed off some of their efforts with a demo of "Project Sword" at Apple's iPod event, and Mike Capps of Epic Games talked about the direction he saw gaming on iOS devices taking in the future.

The fact that the Unreal 3 engine now runs seamlessly on iOS devices is a huge deal. This is the same game engine that's responsible for many high-quality titles on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, so having it run games on a device that fits in the palm of your hand is pretty mind-blowing. You can get a taste of Epic Games' Unreal 3 in iOS efforts with Epic Citadel, available on the App Store -- but because of the demanding graphical requirements, it's only compatible with the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPad, and 3rd and 4th generation iPod touches. If you don't have one of those devices, the demo likely won't run at all.

A demo is really all Epic Citadel is; it's not a game as such, since there's really nothing for you to do except wander around and gape at the environment. And gape you will, because this is console-quality graphics on a 3.5 inch screen. While wandering through the castle grounds, I exclaimed several times, "I can't believe this is running on a freaking cell phone." The graphics in Epic Citadel easily surpass anything I've seen on the iPhone before, and they put the Nintendo DS to shame. Even the Wii doesn't put out graphics with this level of detail. To my eyes, only the Xbox 360, PS3, and PC games are competitive with the graphical richness I'm seeing in Epic Citadel on the iPhone.

Don't just take my word for it, though. Either download the demo yourself ,or if you can't run it on your device, check out our coverage in the video above. The game engine is truly amazing on the iPhone 4, especially with the Retina Display. And if this is the future of gaming in iOS, ... Nintendo and Sony had better step up their game.

This past week, Apple had a host of new patents officially approved by the US Patent and Trademark Office. From streamlining the way images are rendered to preventing the accidental opening of applications, a large chunk of the patents seem to relate to the ways that a user interacts with a device. Macsimum News has a synopsis of all the patents awarded.

A few of the patents that stick out are for operations that we take for granted on a daily basis.

One of them relates to scrolling through a list on a touch input device (say your iPhone contacts list), with the acceleration of the scrolling of that list being determined by the input of your finger. That's pretty nifty!

Another is for immediate search feedback on a Web browser application, like the Safari search bar. So, for instance, when you start typing in the first few letters of a search query and a list pops up of the potential items that you're searching for - that's immediate search feedback.

I think I would be lost without this feature. Often times, I can't remember the title of a song, but if I can remember the first couple lyrics, I can type them in, and a link to the song title will appear in the list. Or when I can't quite remember how to spell a word (embarrassing, I know), I go to the Safari search bar instead of going to the dictionary. Somehow, it's always the easier place to turn to.

These are some pretty simple features, but they make such a profound difference in the ways that we use and interact with the computer devices around us on a daily basis. There's some solid innovation going on over there in Cupertino.