Civilization on iPad

I have been a fan of Sid Meier since I started playing videogames. The first of his games which I enjoyed was Pirates! back in 1988/89. The next one I picked up was Railroad Tycoon before Civilization came into the picture.

Over the years, there had been many iteration of the classic game. In 2015, the sixth installment of Civilization came to the market and it was a surprise that a year later a working iPad version of the game was available. And I wasn't talking about a watered down version of the game a la Civilization Revolution. It was a full on version and since it was hard on the processing power, it took some time to get used to the slower phase of the portable game.

But on the whole, I was impressed. I was able to play the standard-sized world game at a steady pace in my iPad Pro and had not missed any of the features available on my Mac. Even the sound and atmosphere were comparable. I only wished that I had more time to kill playing that game.

Highly recommended. Yes, it drained the battery somewhat and it was not available on the iPhone - maybe due to the resources needed. A great effort and hopefully it would open the door to more desktop-level game onto the iPad.

Update Time

As Apple was gearing up to their next iteration of the iOS, the iOS 11, the 10.3.3 update came out. I didn't waste much time doing the update and the process seemed to be straightforward enough. No hiccups.

Let's hope that it brought some improvements ...

Going Premium

I have been using “Day One” app since 2011. It had been great to put together my ideas and doing drafts of my blog entry. Over the years, the app developer - Bloom Built Inc - had expended with many features including photographs upload and syncing across platform.

An entry on my iPhone would instantaneously appear on my iPad and my computers. Six years on, the company behind it needed to pivot into a subscription model and I kinda understood their predicament.

When I use the app this much I felt that it was only right to contribute. So, I went premium. This only affected my iOS version as far as I could see but with the one payment, the subscription was upgraded to my iPad as well. I didn’t notice much change on the MacOS version thus far. The syncing still works fine and I hope by this new model, the app would expand in the future to offer more features ....

iOS Update

So, this would be the first of series software updates to tag along the launch if both the iPhone 7 and the Apple Watch Series 2. First the iOS 10, next would be the Watch OS 3 and next week, the new Mac OS Sierra.

The download was bigger than I expected. 1.1 Gb. Luckily it was a doddle with my bandwidth but I would imagine that it would've taken ages on my old speed.

The update process was smooth. It did render my Squarespace app useless. From now on in would have to update the blog only from the computer. No more mobile upload, at least for my main blog. Harisrahman.com was still running the legacy Squarespace version 5 engine and I liked to leave it that way. They were more predictable and stable.

My phones, I pads and watch had had their update. Time to wait for the Sierra.

Updating

So, the iOS 8.2 update was out tonight. And with that, you would be able to connect the iPhone to the upcoming Apple Watch at the tap of a button. And no, I have yet to own the Watch.

Anita on the other hand had been fascinated by the gold MacBook. Looked slick according to her, until I pointed out that the connections in and out of the thing would be tricky and proprietary. But I supposed she only need the port for charging.

As for the update itself, it was rather a big one. Around 2.2GB on my Mac Pro. I used that instead to save time rather than over the air. Thankfully there was no glitch so far as I would be on call tomorrow.