Tag: Dragon »

Like an angry union of Tiny Wings and Super Mega Worm, Rebel Twins' new game Dragon Hills is lurking just around the corner.

The game is about a one-tap dragon of destruction that will leap from the ground, slide down hills, and crash though windmills, villages, knights, and anything else stupid enough to get in its way. You are the furious princess that controls the dragon, and you're bent on revenge.

Check out the trailer for Dragon Hills below, which is coming out this spring.

Single player gameplay in Dragons vs. Unicorns consists of protecting unicorn eggs in their nests while waves of various Dragon Minions come in successful levels to destroy them. The player earns points for hatching more unicorns and earns gold for killing the minions. Golden eggs occasionally appear that hatch the special Golden Unicornling. Protecting bunnies is also a priority. The bunnies come from the opposite side of the screen to incubate the unicorn eggs. Hedgehogs, which apparently have a magical pact with the unicorns, can be used to throw boomerang-style into the minions to cause maximum destruction. Check out the labeled picture in the gallery for a more detailed account of gameplay.

Digital Harmony Games already has one game on the App Store, Chin Up. Dragons vs. Unicorns is projected to be released with both single and VS modes, player data options, and social connectivity. To keep up with development of Dragons vs. Unicorns, keep an eye on the Digital Harmony Games blog here.

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Dragon Dictation was a surprise when it showed up in the App Store this week. While I guess it's no surprise that more and more developers are launching applications for the iPhone so we should see more surprise launches like this.

Dragon Dictation does a pretty good job of translating speech into text. In a few tests I read some standard political quotes into the phone and it seemed to translate with around a 95% accuracy. Very good results really. I particularly liked the way it capitalized words when they were in a particular context. For example, United States was properly capitalized in one text example.

Once you have your speech dictated, you can send that text in an email without even leaving the app, a nice touch. Or you can send it to the clip board and use it in a text message or paste it into another app. Would really like to see more options here. Would be great to have it automatically launch Tweetie 2, or Facebook, or other apps to allow status updates via voice.

There has been some confusion on one part of the end user license agreement (EULA) for this app. That passage states that your contacts will be uploaded to their servers. This, of course, got people up in arms, and generally confused. We asked Nuance, developers of Dragon Dictation for some clarification on this.

Dragon Dictation transcribes voice to text with fully automated speech recognition software and only uploads users' contact names - no email, phone or any other personally identifying information - to optimize name recognition when a user dictates. From there, speech recognition requests and contact names are processed in data centers based here in the US that meet Nuance's stringent security and privacy standards - the same standards that we use for processing private information in other areas of our business. We keep the contact names for the life of the service in order to keep synchronized with the user's address book.

For additional details, feel free to review our corporate privacy policy at http://www.nuance.com/company/privacy/.

-- Rebecca Paquette, Nuance

While some users still won't be happy about this, it's good to know before you download the app. If it bothers you, don't download the app.

Dragon Dictation is currently available for free from the App Store. There is some indication that the app is free for only a certain, unknown, amount of time. So if it is interesting to you, grab it now!

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