If you haven't read the previous blog post about Yay! Zombies here's the abstract again:

Yay! Zombies is an action-fueled slice and shoot casual game with accurately simulated ragdoll zombies, highly polished visuals and emerging sound-effects. 

Slice and shoot ragdoll zombies and cut off all their limbs for extra points in this incredibly fun game!
Hit a running hand to get one of many power ups like "Freeze". But avoid the bombs, they'll end the game in "Classic Mode" or you'll lose five seconds in "Blitz Mode".
Dissect all limbs to get a humiliation bonus or earn combos by slicing multiple zombies at once.

Also, check out the über epic trailer below and let us know what you think, by writing a comment or posting on the Yay! Zombies facebook page.

Yay! Zombies is now available on the App Store and for a limited-time the price has been set to $0.99 so grab it while it's hot!

Don't forget to follow us on twitter (@drahtwerk) and like us on facebook to stay up to date!

It's called twitflicks and you can check it out at www.twitflicks.com. twitflicks is a web-application that generates movie-rankings based on what the people on twitter have to say about it. What makes twitflicks so great (besides the epic design) is that our rankings are not based on the latest releases or the box-office results, they're based on twitter buzz.

Naturally this also makes the latest and greatest movies appear in our top rankings, but they will be next to classics you might have missed. So twitflicks is a great way to discover great movies whether they've just been released or not.

But how are the rankings established?
The ratings available on twitflicks are generated by parsing the messages that are posted by the twitter community. But we're not just looking at them. We have developed our own lexicographical analysis to determine whether the tweet about a particular movie is positive or negative.
And we're taking it even further, we're determining the strength of the emotion towards the movie contained in the tweet.

The emotional analysis is not an easy job, but it gets worse: we can't just parse the tweets we get from twitter until it matches the name of one of our movies in the database. Folks on twitter typically use hashtags and abbreviations to communicate. And we have to do the same. twitflicks automatically generates the abbreviations and hashtags for movies as they're commonly used.

Yes, it does happen that we mistakenly identify a positive for a negative. But consider that our rankings are typically based on thousands of individual reviews and not only on a dozen people's opinions like most other movie review sites.

It took us about ten million tweets and a little more than a year until we had perfectly adjusted and tuned our algorithms. We're not trying to compete with iMDB or wikipedia in terms of information about a movie, but we're confident to say that you'll get the best and most unbiased user based reviews on the web.

And if you're developer and you want to build a cool mashup or tool, we've got you covered with the twitflicks JSON API that grants you full read access into our database. It's extremely easy to do searches, request a list of buzzing movies or get all the details about a particular movie. Visit the API page on twitflicks.com for more information.
 

We've been quietly working on Yay! Zombies for the past six months and we're more than happy to finally introduce the game to the interwebs:

Yay! Zombies is an action-fueled slice and shoot casual game with accurately simulated ragdoll zombies, highly polished visuals and emerging sound-effects. 

Slice and shoot ragdoll zombies and cut off all their limbs for extra points in this incredibly fun game!
Hit a running hand to get one of many power ups like "Freeze". But avoid the bombs, they'll end the game in "Classic Mode" or you'll lose five seconds in "Blitz Mode".
Dissect all limbs to get a humiliation bonus or earn combos by slicing multiple zombies at once.

Check out the über epic trailer below and let us know what you think, by writing a comment or posting on the Yay! Zombies facebook page.

The accuracy of the ragdoll simulation is absolutely amazing and the ability to chop off individual body parts, like a hand, makes things so much more fun.

Something that's not visible in the trailer is the main menu and game over screens we have designed for the game. 
If the game is over we don't just present a simple textbox overlay containing the score, we're displaying a goregous UI with a zombie-ragdoll that's got the score strapped to it's chest. We spent a huge amount of time polishing every single aspect of the game from gameplay to userinterface, the result is amazing.

So what engine is it running on? Yay! Zombies runs on our own engine called "drahtkern". drahtkern is a powerful 3D engine that has been designed from the ground up to run on low-power mobile devices but it's also capable of scaling up to incredible visual quality on higher end devices and computers. Next-generation graphic effects like shadow-mapping, bump-mapping and parallax-mapping are already built into the engine and we're eager to use these features in our upcoming titles. 

The engine also comes with a physics engine, support for many model formats, a sound system and many more amazing features like the ability to develop games (or parts of a game) not only in C/C++ but also in Java. The Java code will be compiled to native machine code during compilation or engine startup, so it's really zippy!

Among all these features drahtkern is also multi-platform that means we will be able to ship Yay! Zombies on the Mac and Windows and even release the game on Android. However, further development depends greatly on the success of the game. If we are not able to spawn a solid user-base for the game it does not make sense to spend further development time on the game, instead we're going to focus on new releases.  

Yay! Zombies will be submitted to the App Store on Friday, 16th March and an official release date will be announced soon.

Don't forget to follow us on twitter (@drahtwerk) and like us on facebook to stay up to date!

And what about the price? It's free - well, ad-supported free. However we've taken great care to implement the banners so it does not ruin user-interface experience. And there's the option to completely remove the banners through in-app purchases.

Holistic has been submitted to the Apple App Store and we hope it will be available by the end of this week. 

It's a huge update that will introduce a gazillion new features. So I'll just introduce a few of the amazing new features that will be available in Timelapse Pro 3.5 here. First off, the overhaul of the insanely popular built-in timelapse gallery:
We basically rewrote the entire gallery adding many new features. So what's new? The gallery now supports page loading for faster loading times! The gallery will automatically load more videos while scrolling down so basically you'll have an endless stream of timelapse videos. We have also added categories to the gallery: "featured", "latest" and "most viewed". As some users are creating brilliant pieces of work we have decided to honor these users by featuring their creations directly in the app. Videos can now be commented directly in the app and if you like the video you can share it by email, on twitter or with your facebook friends!
Another great improvement in this upcoming version is the new camera UI. iOS devices with camera autofocus and white-balance can now lock the white balance and/or the autofocus by tapping the on screen buttons. To perfectly align your timelapse videos the camera features a grid overlay. But there are also a lot of cute tweaks and improvements like the timer button in the lower left corner now animates if the timer is active.
A feature that was requested a couple of times has finally made it into Timelapse Pro: the ability to import photos from the camera roll into the app!
My personal favorite among all the new features are "reminders". It's now possible to configure a reminder for a project that will automatically remind you to take pictures for the project after a specified interval. Best of all is that this system is running in the background just like system timers and alerts.
 

Timelapse Pro 3.5 contains more that 30 features or improvements and will be available for free to all customers of the previous version. Timelapse Pro 3.5 is a dramatic improvement of an already amazing application! We can't wait to see what you guys will do with this version.

With the launch of OS X Lion by Apple we have submitted an update for iScreen that establishes full compatibility with the new OS.

Besides supporting Apple's new operating system in this upcoming update we're also supporting an outdated Apple platform: the PowerMac G4/G5 and Powerbook series. But wait, there's more in this update! We're also introducing multi-touch support, to scroll the contents of a window simply place two fingers on the screen and pan around.

If you're one of the unlucky users where the Bonjour protocol is blocked we have added a manual connection by IP or hostname.

Improved performance, disabling the slow network indicator, multitouch scrolling, OSX Lion, PowerPC, new drivers, a built-in online FAQ — there is a lot to look forward to!

With our 4th redesign since 2008 we have decided to strafe away from the nowadays way too common "Apple" style and try something different.

This new design focuses on the important contents of each page by using solid shapes, strong colors and bold fonts. It's also making use of the latest CSS3 tech like 3d transformations, rotations and transitions. Unfortunately this stuff is currently only available in Webkit browsers like Safari and Chrome. But thankfully the site degrades gracefully on all other standards compilant browsers. That means all browsers except IE6.

If you are using either Safari or Chrome and you want to see some CSS3 magic in action then jump to the Homepage and hover over the blog headlines in the lower left corner of the page.

One of the main usability improvements is the Our Apps section. The redesigned app listing displays short project descriptions and availability information therefore navigating onto the project page just to read the tagline of the project is not necessary anymore. The new filter allows you to display only mobile apps or web apps. This is especially useful because we previously haven't displayed some of the cool web apps we have developed. With the relaunch we're unveiling u-likes and our own content management system and we're going to release more information about other web apps within the next weeks.

u-likes is a solid and clean webapp that extends facebook's functionality. The main purpose of the app is to create new likes that you and your friends can "like". The great thing about the app is that it requires absolutley no on-site registration so you can go there and start using it right now. Even if you don't want to create a like you might discover something that you do want to like. The app is still in development, mainly the like discovery and rating needs to be improved, but the core functionality is available and working fine. Check it out at http://www.u-likes.com.

So what's going on besides this relaunch?

Well as Apple is about to release OSX Lion we've been preparing an update for iScreen that ensures full compatibility with Lion and PowerPC Macs as well as some other features. Final testing should begin within the next days.

The Skype team finally released version 5.2 of their popular VoIP software that brings back compatibility for third party webcameras. So we can begin finalizing and testing the next major release of iWebcamera.

If you are following us on twitter you might remember a tweet about our upcoming and unannounced todo manager app and how iOS5 ruins it. It was tweeted during the Apple keynote when iOS5 was introduced. As the project was more than halfway done, we decided to finish it. Mainly because there are still going to be a lot of iOS 3.0 and iOS 4.0 devices around and we truly think there is still a place for our app. Besides that it's basically been designed to sync with Microsoft Exchange so it supports all properties and features you're used to if you're working with Exchange.

And finally some exciting news about the company. We're going to have our first intern starting next month! Let's see how that works out. 

If you're interested in the original press release then click here to display it.

As a present to our frequent blog readers we've got three promo codes that
we're giving away for free. Click here to display the Matrix Camera promo codes!

By the way we're still building our testing team for the upcoming iWebcamera 3.0 release. If you want to join the team, feel free to apply here.

If you're interested in the original press release then click here to display it.

On an unrelated note, we're starting to build our testing team for the upcoming iWebcamera 3.0 release. If you want to join the team, feel free to apply here.