Architectural surrealism is Monument Valley’s signature. Austere, beautiful structures transform and rotate at the player’s touch, creating new paths and staircases for its minimalist characters to traverse. Doorways can lead anywhere. Switches cause columns to rise out of the ground, a perspective shift can reveal a cache of hidden pathways. Since 2014 these games have been smartphone must-plays, one of the best and most elegant examples of satisfying touch-screen puzzlers. But the third in the series, released last week, is a little different.
The Moroccan-inspired architecture that made the game famous is still present, but this time your geometric character Noor walks alongside blooming flowers and twisting vines, too. She sails a small boat. She gets lost in fields of bright yellow wheat. And there are many more people around her: she is a lighthouse-keeper’s apprentice, charged with the welfare of her community – which, a few scenes into the game, is ravaged by a flood. In some scenes she is accompanied by someone else, or there is someone there to rescue. It is a game about buildings still, but also a game about rebuilding, together.
Apple TV+ and Apple Music have dropped a surprise holiday edition of Carpool Karaoke featuring segments with Lady Gaga, Chappell Roan and Dua Lipa.
Disguised inside a thin, credit-card form factor, the SwitchBot Wallet Finder connects to the Find My app on your iPhone, so you can follow its location, and it even houses a speaker so you can make it beep to help you find your wallet when it inevitably gets lost somewhere in your home.
As a novice guitar and piano player, I love to learn chords by playing popular music. The Ultimate Guitar app is easy to use, provides access to chords across multiple instruments, and even has background tracks included with a subscription.
Over a lifetime of programming that began with a ZX81 and hasn’t quite ended yet, I’ve found a few principles enduringly useful. Principles are more flexible than rules, and might be more widely applicable. So here are my five rules for CRISP code in Go: they’re not necessarily in order of importance, except for the first one, but it makes a nice backronym.
Carpool Karaoke? That's something we haven't hear about lately.
I hope no one is proposing Apple also brings back Planet of the Apps.
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Thanks for reading.