We have some exciting news today. After months of work, we are finally launching a project for our friends at Faile. We created a digital representation of Faile Puzzle Boxes, available as an app for the iPhone/iPad and a Web App. Best of all, both are free!

The webapp allows Faile to upload new puzzles for both webapp and iOS app. When new iOS puzzles are uploaded, it becomes available to the iOS app users for download. In the coming months, Faile will be adding new puzzles periodically, so make sure you download the app now!

The iTunes AppStore has lots of games and utilities. Why I’m excited about this app is because it’s an art object — a digital recreation of the physical puzzle box; not slick or pretentious, just simple and honest. It will be interesting to see how art can be distributed through the AppStore.

Finally, big thanks to Faile for hiring us for this project. The hardest part of creating an app is to have a client that is willing to fund the project.

Now available in the app store: Pendipity.

Pendipity is a collaborative drawing app for the iPad. Similar iPad apps in the app store can connect you to someone only as long as they’re on the same network (i.e. sitting next to you). What’s particularly unique about Pendipity is that it connects you to remote users randomly, regardless of physical location. If you’re thinking, “Hey, this is just like a Chatroulette for drawing!”, you’d be right. While a single-user drawing mode exists, Pendipity is most enjoyable when drawing with others. Open the app, and wait for another user to connect. Once you’re connected, you’ve got a shared drawing canvas with someone that could be down the street, or around the world.

As we’ve learned from the logo drawing tool we offer on the main BuzaMoto page, there are those types of people that prefer to draw obscenities under the guise of anonymity. We’re hoping that the $2.99 price tag will prevent such users from entering into the pool of Pendipity users that you might get paired with. Time will tell.

In the meantime, if you’ve got an iPad, grab Pendipity from the app store and get drawing!

iPad-based news reading apps are a dime a dozen these days.

Unfortunately, while many of them differ from an aesthetic/usability standpoint, they all generally present the same types of content in the same way. Strip out some text, pull out an image, and display the result in a little box. The end result is something that gives you little snippets of information devoid of context. I like seeing the web in the way it was originally intended — the font, the layout, the image arrangement, everything. The problem is that web pages take a few seconds to load. Every time you click, you have to wait, and this makes casual browsing of *real* web content very difficult.

Percolater is an iPad news reader app that does the waiting up front, so you don’t have to. What you get is full screen previews of the pages you’re friends are sharing on Twitter (or items from your Google Reader account) that you can flip through as fast as sifting through a stack of paper, even when you’re without a network connection.

We recently demoed the app at an Apple-sponsored Stanford iOS app showcase, and got some really great feedback from Yahoo! researchers, Apple employees, and the Stanford community. Remarkably, we had two users tell us that while they enjoyed Flipboard, one of the best designed iPad reader apps available, they said they liked Percolater better. Aww, shucks!

You can grab Percolater from the iOS app store.

I just posted JSGestureRecognizer which is a bit like a JavaScript implementation of UIGestureRecognizer on iOS for Mobile Safari. If you’re familiar with UIGestureRecognizer, this should come in really handy.

I wrote this because:

1. I got sick of writing touchstart/touchmove/touchend events to support Mobile Safari
2. I didn’t see any implementation out there that I liked
3. I like how UIGestureRecognizer works in iOS and wanted Mobile Safari to work similarly
4. I wanted to be able to easily create my own gestures

Anyway, there’s documentation on the project page, and you can get a copy of it on github.