iPhone News Updated

Casper heading to iPhone and iPod Touch

Classic Media property makes the move onto Apple handsets.

Classic Media has signed a deal with games publisher Mastertronic and developer Codemonkeys to bring Casper’s Scare School to the iPhone and iPod Touch handsets.

Launched to coincide with the Halloween period, Spooky Sports Day is available on digital download from Apple’s app store.

“iPhone has for a long time been a very attractive proposition for the company and we are thrilled to be bringing Casper to the app store,” said David Tovey, licensing manager at Classic Media. “This extends the brand’s outreach into the digital space and complements the ongoing brand activity surrounding Casper’s 60th birthday.

“Casper’s Scare School will be scheduled heavily on Boomerang UK during the Halloween season and the brand is currently embarking on a retail tour of all major Westfield shopping centres in the UK.”

Meanwhile, over in the US the celebrations for the 60th anniversary are beginning. As well as the new TV series, Dark Horse Comics will release a hardcover graphic novel featuring a reprint of Casper’s first ever comic book in the autumn.
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WordPress’ sophomore iPhone debut impresses

Despite increasingly better software, blogging on phones is still a real pain compared with doing it on a regular computer. However, credit is due to WordPress, which has gone to great lengths to make the latest version of its iPhone app much better for users to both create and manage their blogs on a small screen (and without a keyboard).

Besides a new look, one of the biggest changes is that the app remembers exactly what you were doing between sessions, so that if you quit it, or get a phone call, it will take you right back to the page or menu you were looking at. This also keeps you from losing anything you hadn’t saved if you’re interrupted–even if you were in the middle of a writing a sentence when your phone rang. This should change the beginning of such a conversation from “I am so mad at you right now” to a simple “hello.”

In addition to remembering what you were doing, the app does a much better job at letting you manage user comments. The approval screen itself looks almost identical, but the app now lets you quickly switch between the ones that have been approved and the ones that still need to be looked at. It also displays each users’ Gravatar (user icon) next to their username and URL, which ends up taking up a little more space than it did in the previous iteration of the app but adds a sense of familiarity with its desktop sibling.
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