Eric's Ultimate Solitaire doesn't run on Mac OS X Lion (yet?)

Good news! Eric's All-in-1 Solitaire for Mac OS X 10.6 and later is available in the Mac App store. Click here to check it out


I've started getting email from users about Eric's Ultimate Solitaire for Mac OS X Lion. The problem is that it's not compatible with Lion and they need their solitaire fix. I'm busy finishing some iPad contract work, but once I'm done I'm going to work full time on my own Sniderware games. There's a lot on the to-do list... One of the big items is writing a new Mac solitaire game based on my iPhone and iPad solitaire games. I need to talk to Joe at Delta Tao Software again and see about licensing the "Eric's Ultimate Solitaire" name. Although whether it's called "Eric's Ultimate Solitaire" or some other name I'm a long way from being ready to ship the game. Okay, I just emailed Joe to see what he thinks! It's weird, but maybe I'll be porting from iPhone/iPad to Mac OS. Weird since I started long ago on Mac OS...

Do I have pink eye? Also. Scratch programming.

My eye is crazy itchy. Someone in Jonah's class had pink eye a couple days ago. Do I have it? I'm always getting pink eye from the kids. Man.

In other news... I'm trying to decide if I should be working on Mac solitaire or Android solitaire first. But really I'm busy with contracts so it's not that big an issue. Still, I'm excited to do something new.

Jonah has started doing some programming stuff with Scratch. It's a free and cool programming thing from MIT. It's sprite-based and the programming is drag & drop scripting. He showed me a tiny program he wrote yesterday where he said "Yell something." When I did a dragon appeared and it instantly changed size based on how loud I was. Cool. :) Anyway, Scratch is really well done. Check it out. I've also heard that Game Maker is really good for kids who want to learn to program and make games... But I haven't tried it yet.

Better Book Titles

I just discovered Better Book Titles. It made me laugh out loud more than once. There's no writing to go with each one, which is different than one of my favorite sites, Cake Wrecks. But these are funny all on their own.

This page is for people who have trouble slogging through the information on book jackets or feel intimidated by the title and cover itself. How many times have you perused the cover of a novel only to rub your sore eyes and realize you've learned NOTHING from the book's title?!

2010...

Overall... 2010 was really good. Baby Colin is starting to sleep more at night and smiles a LOT. We all like Jonah's school pretty well now (we switched him to a magnet school, but it's farther away, but they don't hold him back like his old school). Ari is becoming a big kid, which makes us a little sad, because he's such a cute little kid. He's starting to read a little bit and that's exciting and I'm curious to see what kind of big kid he'll turn out to be. Kelly's looking for work and there are some good prospects. I've had lots of great contract work this year and my own games are selling well. I've learned more, had more fun, had more free time, made more money, seen my friends more and spent more time with my family this year. It's been really good. Here's hoping 2011 is just as fantastic for us and everyone we know.

I've gotta go watch Baby Colin and make some nachos. More later... :)

Lots of stuff going on

We visited my Mom, Dad and brother David in Florida. It was super fun although also super cold. That was okay 'cause I don't like when it's hot and humid. It was ~36 degrees the morning that we flew home though!

There was a leak in our roof while we were gone. It was right above my tiny desk, next to my new Hackintosh PC. Yikes. Luckily my nephew Joe spotted the problem and did a ton of good work including moving all the junk out of my office, met with the contractor and more. My PC is working great and things are all in good shape. Plus the leak is fixed.

I'm busy catching up on lots of Sniderware stuff. Christmas Solitaire for iPhone and Christmas Solitaire HD for iPad just got approved by Apple and I need to do some promotion before it's too late. FreeCell and FreeCell HD have been doing well. I'm going to revamp the art in Spider and Klondike and release them with a bunch of bug fixes and a few new features (e.g. No more tiny text on retina displays, no repeated deals in Spider(!) and a new "Start Deal Over" option). Once everything's updated I'll get crackin' on an all-in-one solitaire. Maybe just a free one that you can buy extras in. Although maybe a paid version and a free one.

No possums while we were gone. In fact we got four eggs which is miraculous since the chickens haven't laid any eggs in months.

I'm cleaning my office and found some old haikus I wrote back when I worked for Delta Tao Software making Mac games. It was probably Haiku week there or something :) The main themes are Customer Support, Moving, Things that are delicious, and Trouble at school:

Haikus June 18th, 1998 Moving/New Roommates

Hello Matt and Sean
There sure are lots of boxes
I will never clean

Picture of sunflower
My mother gave it to me
Housemates say "too girly"

Customer Support/Delta Tao
Dear Ruth Ohara
You returned the disk months ago
Yeah, still doesn't work

(This was a disk a nice user returned because there was a problem. I think I found it and we hadn't responded to her yet. So I wrote this haiku.)

The phones are ringing
I'll be making more money
John will just be mad

Old people call us
Irritating John Walter
That's how I make dough

Dude, 'sup? Lance is here.
Plays Starcraft. Then does shipping.
We pay him little.

Replacement dog here
Bippie is irritating
I sort of like her

I hold the baby
Get a mocha in return
Mmmm. Oh yes. Caffeine.

Solitaire won't go
Preferences file is bad
Throw it in the trash

Delta Tao Software
Secret Motte "Games that Joe likes"
Please do not tell Joe

Miscellaneous
Maybe you are tough
Maybe you take us all on
Well, maybe not though

-- Some optional endings here...
Many types Pocky
Royal Milk Tea marble kind
(Tastes and smells so gross)
(So much like poison)
(Is disgusting taste)
(Unnatural taste)

Kid in second grade
Throws the hamster in the air
Why didn't he catch it?

Calculus exam
Lots of memorization
Notes in pocket watch

Sleeping through test bad.
Teacher nice. Take it later.
I get 6 percent.

-- This was when I worked at Babbages software store in a mall. I was talking with my friend, John, and here's what happened:
Used to work in software store
Old man wanders nearby us and says
"Mostly for women I guess"

Hello? Is this thing on?

It's been like a year since I wrote anything. Blogger changed up their stuff so I couldn't host my blog on my own site via FTP any more. I've been procrastinating since then about updating it so it would work on their site but finally made the move.

I built a Hackintosh... a speedy PC that's running Mac OS X (2.8GHz i7 860 with 8GB of ram and cousin Joe's video card :) ). It's really cool although I think it's officially a hobby since it keeps taking up more of my time than I expected. It's fun to work on though.

Hey, more importantly. It's late. And I just killed a possum. With a pitchfork. Really.

Sometimes it's weird around here.

I hear something outside, right now, and it seems possible the possum was playing possum (literally? Figuratively?). Although the last I left him there was a pitchfork stuck pretty far through him*. Enough that the pitchfork was sticking out into the air from the possum. I should have taken a picture. Anyway, tomorrow maybe I'll work a little on my McAfee project. Plus Jonah's got school off. Maybe he and I can remove the pitchfork and bury the possum. You know typical father/son bonding in San José. Just the usual stuff over here. Good times.

* I was pretty mad. He was scaring all our chickens and I think trying to eat them. Aww crap. I hear the pitchfork knocking on stuff. Most disturbing. I mean, do they have undead possums? Possums are really creepy already. But an undead possum would NOT be good. We have a kitty door too. He couldn't fit through with the pitchfork though.

Racoons, Broken MacBook Pro, Stuff

A raccoon woke us up a couple nights ago at 3am because the chicken it was trying to kill/steal/eat was so loud. We scared off the raccoon enough to find the chicken, decide it was too hurt to live, and then I got the job of killing it. So that all sucked.

I fired up my MacBook Pro once we were back inside. I was either going to google up stuff about raccoons or maybe write up the story here. The screen was black though. I rebooted and tried other smart stuff and nothing worked. I plugged in the external monitor and nothing. I guessed it was the crappy Nvidia 8600M chip problem that lots of other people have had on Macs and other laptops. They used bad solder or did something low quality.

I was hoping my suspicions were true because my laptop is out of warranty but the Nvidia issue is covered for 3 years. Anyway, the Apple store confirmed that it was the 8600M graphics chip and they'd replace the logic board for free.

They told me they had to wait for the logic board to arrive but it would get there the next day (Saturday) or on Monday. It arrived Tuesday which wouldn't have bugged me but they'd gotten my hopes up of a much quicker repair. I got a call Tuesday night 20 minutes before they close to say it was fixed. I rushed over and it looked like it was working okay and brought it home. They mentioned on the phone and at the store that they thought it had bad RAM and I should get it replaced (for free under warranty) by Crucial (the manufacturer). That seemed weird because I haven't had any random crashes or other nutty behavior.

At home I decided to boot the Mac OS X 10.6 install disk and see if it had a RAM test like I had read online. I started to push the DVD in and got nothin'. Normally the DVD gets sucked in automatically. It didn't work, didn't work from Windows and doesn't show up in the System Profiler either. So either they broke my DVD drive or more likely they didn't connect it to the replacement motherboard. :( It's not a big deal but it's just another thing I have to resolve now.

Jonah and Wishes

On the way to school today Jonah said if he had a wish he would wish for more wishes.

Then he said he would wish for:

Being able to eat all the junk food he wanted without getting sick and so he'd still grow and be healthy

That heaven was real

That he was a clone*

The middle one there made me almost cry. We've had (grown up) friends who have died in the last few years and it's definitely gotten our whole family, including Jonah, thinking about what happens when we die, or someone else dies. And what does that mean, and what happens? And it's scary.

* Well... cooler than just a clone. A Clone Trooper, like from Star Wars. I asked "Wouldn't it be bad to be a copy of the same person?" and he said "I'd have a lot of brothers."

Kindle and Video Games

The word online from Amazon is they're intending to release an SDK (software development kit) for the Kindle digital book. That means it'll be able to run games and more instead of just being a fancy book viewer. That's cool... Maybe I'll port my solitaire game to it from the iPhone. The performance (aka speed) of the Kindle isn't great, but hey, I've written games for a long time, including on really low-end and ancient consumer devices. So the slow Kindle with it's weird screen should be no trouble!

I'm on a video games developer mailing list and someone griped about how the Kindle and all digital books are doomed to failure since no one wants them. I disagree and it kind of got me fired up, so I wrote this:

I'm not a big fan of the Kindle -- The biggest issue for me is that the contrast of the screen is too low. With that said, I'm a huge fan of digital content. I like real books, but I don't really want to store the books, waste resources on having them printed, shipped etc. It's nice to be able to buy things digitally, including books. The feature of the Kindle where you can buy a new book from almost anywhere in the world and get it almost instantly is pretty fantastic too, for those users who want that.

It's clear that the way audio, video and video game distribution is going is that it will all shift to digital delivery. Physical media just gets in the way. My expectation is that book publishing will do the same thing. I bet printed books will be around forever, printed books are awesome, but the price of those books will be higher than digital versions and in tangible ways will be less convenient (e.g. No searching, harder to share, harder to do research with, wear out over time, don't get updated dynamically). There are a lot of reasons that digital distribution of books will win over customers, especially younger customers who grow up with digital versions of books their whole lives.

2010 Coffee, contracting, health insurance

Flash forward three months from my sort-of-weird calls from recruiters in India... That all turned out to be legitimate and not a convoluted Nigerian money-making scheme like I was predicting. In fact I'm still working on that project and it's going great. It's an iPhone app, but as is often the case with cool stuff I work on, it's secret.

I'm going to stop drinking coffee. I don't drink that much. Like one cup or less a day. I'm pretty sure caffeine isn't that great for me anyway.

In health insurance news... we still have health insurance. Yay! I got laid off months ago and we have health insurance through COBRA. Thankfully the Obama stimulus somethin'-somethin' pays for 65% of the cost so we pay ~$400 instead of $1200. For a couple days I thought the stimulus money was going to stop so we'd want to switch insurance companies. That's when Kelly found out that no one will insure her where her pregnancy would be covered. Apparently since we have COBRA they don't have to cover pre-existing conditions. Good times. If we didn't have COBRA then I think they're forced by HIPAA to insure pre-existing conditions. So overall we're okay and once again I am super happy about the COBRA stimulus thing. I wish health insurance was easier and cheaper to deal with. We know people who have health problems and who can't afford to have them taken care of. That sucks.

Job Recruiters

I'm never super excited talking to job recruiters. I understand their jobs are hard. But any job where the person is paid based on commissions makes me suspicious of that person's actions. Sales people who work on commission don't want you to buy something and return it, but other than that they get rewarded for selling you things that you keep. It doesn't matter much beyond that. Like whether you need it, whether a cheaper product would be as good or better etc.

So in general I make the assumption that someone working on a commission isn't looking out for me. They're trying to maximize how much money they make for their time.

Job recruiters work in the same kind of commissioned way usually. Some are employees of companies. And that's awesome. But most, at least that call me, work on some kind of commission basis. Maybe they get a flat fee for filling a position, or a percentage of your hourly rate if you're contracting etc. I updated my resume on monster.com today and got a bunch of email and calls from recruiters. Overall that's nice. I like to feel wanted. But a lot of the time the recruiters have no idea what I'm good at, what I like, or sometimes what city I'm in. They just want to fill some position and saw a couple keywords on my resume. It's weird.

Today was my first, I think, experience getting a call from recruiters in India. At first I thought it was just someone with a fantastically thick accent who was calling locally even though his caller ID came out weird looking "+40 890 791 13." The number was intended to look like "+408 907-9113," but my iPhone changed the formatting because of the +. I did a quick Google search while we were on the phone and figured out he was calling from India. Anyway, the job he described sounded good, but overall the experience was a little sketchy. I'm still suspicious of the whole thing. I spoke with him, sent him my resume, and then he had his manager call me. Next I'm supposed to get a call from (I assume another recruiter) at some US-based recruiting company.

The Yucatan

I paid a company ~$600 to restore a crashed hard drive of mine. It had all our honeymoon pictures and more on it. I'm a lot better about doing backups now... Anyway I need to start gettin' some value out of this rescued drive so here's a story with some pictures from the trip.

Kelly and I went to the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico for our honeymoon. We have some great stories and pictures. But overall if you asked either of us we'd primarily say how it was really really humid there. Also. Small towns are boring after a few hours.

We started off in Cancun because it was easy to fly there. We stayed at some big hotel which was okay, but really we wanted to see Mayan ruins and other cool stuff. We exclusively rode on buses from city to city. It was cheap and avoided our enormous fear of driving in Mexico. Plus the delicious (super strong) smell of strawberries was a frequent feature. :) Anyway, we left Cancun for small cities and towns, like Merida. Eventually we finished up all of that and flew to Mexico City.

Mexico City was really fun. Tons of cool things to see. A 24-hour Churros & Chocalate place that h ad been there for like 70 years. It was amazing. A guy on the street was doing cool oil paintings on CDs. There were tons of people, things to see and great food. Anyway, I'll post more stories and pictures another time. Today's quick story is about Merida.

There wasn't a lot to see in Merida. We covered the touristy stuff (I think a cenote and maybe that was it) in a few hours. We were bored and looking for a bakery. Kelly and I like to scout out bakeries and barber shops or weird salons in foreign countries. I don't know why. Although baked goods are good. I mean... they have "Good" in the name, right? And I like to get my hair cut. We didn't find a great bakery, but man oh man we found a fantastic barber shop. See the pictures to the right... This time I didn't get a haircut, but I did ask the barber to give me shave. My barber-related Spanish is not-so-good.

I showed the barber I wanted him to get rid of my whole beard. He had a straight razor which was kind of scary. And I wondered how clean it was. Good times. More importantly... he gave me a mustache like I never had before. I didn't want a mustache but I thought I'd see how it came out. Pretty funny is the answer there. One advantage was that from that day on strangers ALWAYS thought we were from Europe instead of from the US. Cultural differences are weird. Guy with kind of weird beard = From US. Guy with kind of weird mustache = Clearly European.

Kelly liked it. Or at least she said she liked it. I have a conspiracy theory that she actually advises me to dress or shave in ways that make me look crazy so other women won't even look at me. Well, maybe they'd just look in horror. I made it three days before I had to get rid of it.

Vector Conflict: The Siege

Hey, my game developer friend, Oliver, just finished a really fun Flash game -- Vector Conflict: The Siege. For you old timers it's like Battlezone (1980), but an order of magnitude more fun and you don't have to drive a tank around. That's BattleZone to the left. I played Vector Conflict on "Medium" and it was fun, but very tense at times. The levels are really well designed. Once you master the tutorial you can play the endless mode and try to get a high score.

What makes the game fun is that there's a good mix of bad guys, and they're introduced gradually through the 10-level tutorial. Plus there are upgrades. Everyone loves upgrades, right? So you shoot a lot of bad guys, that come in waves, and each level is different... then you decide what to use your resources to upgrade or buy.

Anyway, it's fun and free. Check it out.

Also. See if you can buy another copy of my iPhone solitaire game. Maybe create a new iTunes account and buy it. Okay, thanks. Or tell your friends. Okay? Well, I'm worried it's going down in the Card Games rankings in the App Store. :( Gotta finish the free version...

Eric Snider's Solitaire: Klondike -- Ready for sale!

I just checked Apple again to see if my iPhone solitaire game was approved. I check every 9 minutes. It's said "In Review" the last 1000 times I checked in the past 11 days. I've been dreading the email that would say "Sorry, Solitaire wasn't approved because we don't allow applications to include images of clouds." Or something nutty like that which would mean another round of fixes and submitting the game again.

But no! Some fantastic reviewers at Apple have approved Solitaire. It's not in the store, yet. But from what I know it should appear in the next hour or so.

I'm going to call everyone I know.

:)

If you're stumbling onto this page because you bought Solitaire then please leave me a comment or question. I'm nice. I'll help you. If enough people ask for features or new games... I'll add them. Or make them. You'll see.

Thanks again to everyone who helped me with Solitaire.

Update: It took a few hours but then it appeared in the store. It had the wrong release date though (it was showing the date I submitted it). Is there an "App Store for Dummies" book yet? 'Cause there are a lot of crazy things about submitting apps to Apple... Anyway, I changed the release date as a friend advised and now it's in the new games listings.

Here's a link if you're looking for it: tinyurl.com/EricsKlondike. This link includes my iTunes affiliate info so I'll get 5% extra on sales that use that link. So... feel free to use it, give it out, print t-shirts, use it as your new nickname... :)

Did you mean...?

I'm working on some iPhone programming and had a question about something. Google didn't turn up anything great so I just searched for help in the Apple Developer Forums. I searched for

opengl view tabbarcontroller

and the forum page offered this helpful advice:

Did you mean: openly view Tabasco

Making stuff with yeast

Yeast is weird, and cool. At least if you're baking with it. I made bagels from scratch yesterday and they come out really really good. I used our bread maker to do the mixing etc, but I boiled 'em and baked 'em. Anyway, here's the bread-machine bagel recipe. The bagels came out better looking than the picture. Kelly and the kids were napping when the bagels were done. I tried the most misshapen one. It was good. Really good. I figured I'd better try one of the bigger bagels. You know, to make sure it was done in the middle. It was done. I almost ate the other nine bagels immediately but I think the nappers started waking up and I wasn't sure how I was going to explain myself.

To continue SUPER FUN BAKING WITH YEAST WEEK I looked around for more recipes. What started this all was I saw an episode of Good Eats with Alton Brown about cinnamon rolls. So that's what I'm making now. Well, we're in preparation to make them. All the ingredients need to be at room temperature. It's ridiculous. Also it requires lots of egg yolks. So we had to figure out what to do with all the egg whites. The answer: Chocolate meringue cookies. They're baking right now... We didn't put any chocolate chips in. But we're kind of heretics like that. We usually don't go for the super double chocolatey desserts. I'll go take some pictures so this won't be so boring.

Next up: Cinnamon Roll report.

Making Pizzas

I've been making pizzas with pre-made dough from Trader Joe's in the last couple months. A few came out amazing, but many came out just okay. It turns out our oven is crappy. It's this weird little European one that only goes up to 450 degrees and only has a burner on top. A combination to ensure our pizzas are never very crispy or cooked quickly.

Anyway, I was googlin' up some Alton Brown* stuff to scout out his cinnamon roll recipe. I stumbled onto some people griping about some pizza dough recipe of his and found a link to this Pizza-making page -- The Ridiculously Thorough Guide to Making Your Own Pizza It looks good and I want to remember it. So now it's in my blog. You can use it too, if you want. Normally I'd just choose "Add Bookmark..." and save a link to the page in my web browser. I'm totally ineffective at saving bookmarks to good web sites though. Well... that's not true. I'm very effective at saving them. I've never in my entire life used a bookmarked site after bookmarking it though. The good news there is that when something goes wrong and I lose all my web browser settings I hardly notice the difference.

* Alton Brown has a show called "Good Eats" which is really good. At least for geeks. He's geeky, likes science and is weird and funny. He's also the host on the American version of Iron Chef.

I Hate Ad Hoc Distribution on the iPhone

Seriously. Ad Hoc Distribution? I hate it. I've wasted so much time with it. Apple has such tight control over distribution to iPhones and iPod Touches that you can't just download and install an application on your device. More importantly my testers can't install my game without having things just so. There are all these hoops to jump through to set up provisioning files etc. It's not super difficult, but there are lots of places to go wrong because there are so many steps. Half of my testers have run into problems because of iTunes, some mistake I made, or who knows why. I have too. From my end sometimes the solution is to ignore the errors that Xcode is reporting and just restart my iPhone. For users we've done a lot of trial and error. I'm sure there are some testers who just punted and gave up.

My artist, Andy, wasn't able to run Solitaire for a month and a half. Really. I made new builds. It worked for other people. It worked for new testers. No prob. I started just making screen capture movies for him so he could see what the game looks like. We were joking about how he should sell his iPhone on eBay. He could market it to people who need a phone but hate solitaire.

The reason I'm writing this post is that once again Google has saved the day. I found the iPhone Configuration Utility (wtf? I never heard of this thing before) and with it Andy was able to clean out the old version(s?) of Solitaire and install the new one. I don't know what iTunes is doing, but it's clearly f'd up. I hate iTunes. The interface is so bad. And it's non-standard in these horrible ways. Like you click the zoom button and expect the window will ZOOM. But instead the window changes into a tiny weird control panel. Also. the UI button to close, zoom and minimize all move. Beautifully, the buttons only differ in color. That's fantastic UI design for all of us who are red/green color-blind. The buttons have moved and the whole window looks different instead of zooming like 99.9% of all other apps would have done. WTF! Maybe I'll write about the horrible ways iTunes handles focus on lists. I swear to you it never does what I expect when I use the arrow keys to try to do something.

Okay. So iTunes, right? Once it has a problem installing an ad hoc app it just loses its mind. It's just crazy. It's like "Hey, how ya doin'? I'm iTunes. What? Yeah. I installed that app. Seriously. Super Serious. No probs. What? It crashes? No it doesn't. Don't lie. I'm iTunes. What? Yeah, I'll install that app. Okay. Done. No. Serious. Cereal. Super Cereal. Done. It's in there. Ha, no just kidding. I installed that old one again. Here. Try again. I swear I'll install it. jk."

Anyway, you struggling iPhone developers who've found my boring blog with Google... I wish good luck to all of you. If your users haven't given up yet have 'em download the iPhone Configuration Utility from Apple. Or I hear it's nice developing for Android.

Gmail is down?

Gmail is down so I'm reading my email with the webmail browser for my site. It's not-so-good. Also, apparently GMail filters out the spam that normally gets delivered to me but now I'm stuck reading it. Today's spam highlight:

Hey We have hijacked your baby but you must pay once to us $50 000. The details we will send later... We has attached photo of your fume

"We has attached photo of your fume?" WTF is that? I know whoever wrote this doesn't speak English as a first or second language. But still. "Fume?" Weird. If I translate it back and forth with an online translation site I get this:

We there are attached photo of your smokes.

This is pretty fantastic and makes more sense. Of course if you've hijacked* my baby I'm definitely going to want a smoke. It's almost ensured once I see that picture of my very own smokes. I bet this is a ploy from the cigarette companies to get me to smoke. I'm too scared to open the attachment so we'll never know. Stupid cigarette companies.

* Not "Kidnapped," but "Hijacked." What are they gonna do, like fly my baby somewhere? If my baby flew I wouldn't be wasting time on the internet. I'd be making millions from Eric's All-New Flying Baby Cirque Du Soleil. "Come for the flying baby, stay for the weird clowns"

New Cell Phone

My Palm OS Treo 680 is failing. The case is cracked, there's dust behind the screen and it has lost its mind. Sometimes it just doesn't respond or takes a minute before doing anything. Sometimes it doesn't want to talk to T-Mobile any more. Also. It's a little shaky on letting me send text messages. Sometimes I can, sometimes I can't. Weird. I used this Treo a LOT though. Every day for years. When I was working in San Francisco and commuting on CalTrain I used it for dial-up networking for my MacBook Pro. It's seen a lot of use. Still, it sucks that it's broken or breaking. It's a mess.

Now that I'm going to be so rich (see previous post) I bought a used iPhone 2g. I need a new phone and I'll use it for development too. I just unlocked it and it took a little under one hour. So now I have an iPhone 2g that works with my T-Mobile plan. Nice.