Flirting 101 is the latest title in Ridiculous’ series of books-on-device. Developed in partnership with St. Martin’s Press, Flirting 101 contains the entire text of Michelle Lia Lewis & Andrew Bryant’s book on flirting. Written for both sexes, it covers the ins & outs of how to flirt–in person or via email/SMS.

Flirting 101 is currently in development, and has not yet shipped to customers.

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The Pocket Idiot’s Guide to Getting Girls continues our experiment with providing an entire book inside an application. The application contains the entire contents of this “Idiot’s Guide” book published by Penguin USA. Every one of the 200+ pages are included, along with formatting specific to the Hiptop/Sidekick family of devices. This book, as you’d expect, is definitely written for men looking for women.The splash screen, with the famous Idiot’s Guide logo:

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Dating Boot Camp is something new we’re trying: an entire book contained in an application! We partnered with Alpha Books, a subsidiary of Penguin USA, to bring the book Dating Boot Camp by Lisa Altalida to the Hiptop/Sidekick family of devices. All 270+ pages of the book are contained inside the downloadable application.

Dating Boot Camp’s intended audience is a woman who’s looking for a man. Of course, men certainly might enjoy reading what approaches women might be using….

After the splash screen:

The folder view of chapters lets us quickly navigate anywhere in the book:

Individual sections can be selected within each chapter:

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The Cycle enables you to track your menstrual cycle, in order to better predict your upcoming cycle and upcoming fertile days. Alternatively, you could track this information for a friend/girlfriend/wife. This app might sound a little out of left field for a mobile device, but bear with us.

The app name & splash screen try to be discrete:

On entering the app, the first thing we do is enter the date of our last menstrual cycle start:

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Crossword Puzzler Vol. 2 is the sequel to Crossword Puzzler Vol. 1, with 30+ all-new custom-made crossword puzzles to solve.

New Features

A few new features were added with Crossword Puzzler Vol. 2. Notably, the grid color can now be set to something more interesting than gray. The intersecting-clue view and the all-clue view can also have their fonts set to Large.

Here’s a puzzle in progress with a purple grid, blue word color, and green highlighted-square color. The intersecting clues are set to the Large font, with the word length shown after the clue:

The squares containing multiple letters have “penciled in” letters. And, ah, we aren’t saying we endorse this color scheme, we’re just saying it’s possible….

Here’s an example of the Large font used in the all-clue view, with the already-completed letters shown, and the already-completed words grayed out:

For more screenshots, check out Crossword Puzzler Vol. 1!

Crossword Puzzler Vol. 1 contains 30+ custom-made crossword puzzles! The puzzles generally steer clear of obscure clues–you won’t find any clues involving “the third-longest river in Germany” or anything like that. Instead you’ll find more pop-culture references than usual, along with some extra twists like basic spanish words, computer terms…even “LOL”….

Basic puzzle layout

Here we see the basic layout, with a particular word selected. The clue for this word is “Karate master’s accessory”, shown in the title bar at the top of the screen:

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Sudoku Puzzler Vol. 2 is the sequel to Sudoku Puzzler Vol. 1 and incorporates a few changes. The most obvious change is the art next to the puzzles:

Vol. 2 has some feature upgrades:

• Puzzle names can be edited
• Puzzles can be sorted by progress
• Penciled numbers can be sorted within each square

Vol. 2 also enables choosing a number with a number picker:

This allows easier one-handed play using just the wheel, for those sudoku-filled train or bus rides.

Check out Sudoku Puzzler Vol. 1 for more screenshots & info!

Sections:

• Choosing a Puzzle
• Playing a Puzzle
• Creating a Custom Puzzle

Choosing a Puzzle

Sudoku Puzzler starts by presenting all 65 puzzles organized into folders by difficulty. Custom puzzles are stored separately, in their own folder. Click a puzzle to begin playing.

Playing a Puzzle

When navigating the sudoku puzzle, the currently selected square is always colored. The relevant row, column, and 3×3 box are also highlighted.

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Dr. Banana Reloaded is the sequel to Dr. Banana’s Word Search, with 30 (or more???) new word search puzzles to play.

What’s new in Dr. Banana Reloaded?

While the main attraction is the 30 new puzzles, a few tweaks & improvements were made too:

• All puzzle difficulties are available at all times. Some people wrote in to say that they like doing the puzzles on Easy, then Medium, then Hard. You can do that in Reloaded!
• Medium difficulty displays more letters. Now a phrase with spaces includes the first letter after the space. So the phrase “Bill Cosby” looks like “B___ C____” on Medium difficulty.
• Online word lists! Some folks reported that they like to look up the words they find. So if you head to “Puzzle Info” in the menu, you can click on a “Word List” link to take you to the Ridiculous web site and the list of words found in the puzzle. If we can find good links for the words, like Wikipedia, we’ll point you to those sites.
• The letter ‘a’ acts like a wheel-click in puzzles. Users with the original Sidekick, where the d-pad is on the right, can now use their left hand to click. Sidekick2 users might also enjoy being able to navigate with just their left hand. Implemented thanks to a user suggestion!
• Many of the puzzle topics were taken from suggestions people wrote in with. You might even recognize your own…..

Check out the main Dr. Banana’s Word Search entry for more info and screenshots of the game in action!

Dr. Banana’s Word Search is a word search game, with 30 puzzles of different sizes and difficulty levels.

Making His List, Checking It Twice

Dr. Banana starts up with a list of puzzles. The list includes the puzzle name, the difficulty level (Easy/Med/Hard), the puzzle size (S, M, L, XL), and how much progress you’ve made on the puzzle.

The difficulty level determines how much information is shown in the puzzle’s Word List:

• Hard: only the first letter of each word is shown.
  
• Med: each word’s first letter, punctuation, and length are shown.
  
• Easy: every letter for every word is shown.
  

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