Get Slammed! Tournament Pics from #PAX

If you played Uncle Slam on Friday, you had the opportunity to enter the Get Slammed! Tournament with prizes ranging from Handelabra swag all the way up to a brand new iPod Touch or iPad. Check out the pics below to see all the action and click here to watch the final round between Nick K and Chris S.

Chris S took second place and won himself an iPod Touch and our grand prize winner was Nick K who took the unsung hero Millard Fillmore all the way. He went home from PAX with a brand spankin new 16 GB iPad! Congrats guys!

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UncleSlam.com and the countdown to #PAX

Well folks, it's Friday, August 19th. That puts us 1 week away from Uncle Slam's coming out party.We know you have questions-

• Who is Uncle Slam?
• Why should I care?
• Where can I play?
• When can I play?
• Is it true you are giving away an iPad and an iPod Touch?

To answer these questions in reverse order -

YES - To celebrate the first public display of Uncle Slam we will be giving away an iPod Touch and an iPad at PAX Prime. How can you win? Stay tuned for more info this coming week.

August 26th-28th in Seattle - Those are the dates of the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle. Whether you are there for just one day, or the whole weekend, come find us!

Booth #6014 on the 6th floor (you can see it here) - Head up to the tippy top floor and look for the oval office in a boxing ring. No, seriously. That's what you're looking for.

Because you, like us, have always wanted to box a President - Uncle Slam is a boxing game for iPad (and also for iPod and iPhone but at PAX we're just showing off the iPad version). And c'mon, who hasn't wanted to punch a politician in the face?

So who is Uncle Slam? That is a question that is going to take a little extra effort. To get a feel for who Uncle Slam really is, you can start by following him on twitter. Maybe like his Facebook page too. And if that's still not enough, just visit UncleSlam.com to get the full backstory. And don't forget to follow Uncle Slam in GAME.minder so you're notified when it's coming out.

Just 7 days left!

We'll see you all in Seattle.

Better Clock now available for iPhone - iPad soon

Handelabra Studio is happy to announce the release of Better Clock v1.0!When we heard that iOS 4.2 was going to finally bring Multi-tasking, local notifications and background audio to iPad, we set out to create a great nightstand alarm clock using the latest iOS technologies.  Is it the best clock? Maybe.  But it's definitely better.

Some of the great things that Better Clock can do:

• Using background audio, our sleep timer lets you fall asleep to ANY app that supports playing in the background.  Like the Pandora station you created?  Start it up and set the sleep timer in Better Clock.  We'll handle the rest.
• If you have a white noise app you like to use, the magic of background audio helps you there to.  Rather than try to build our own white noise function, we decided to just get out of the way and let you use the one you like.
• We made Better Clock to be a nightstand clock for those of us who charge our iDevices at night but you can use it anywhere.  And if you forget to come back to Better Clock, we can still play alarms in the background.

Better Clock is available on the App Store as a universal binary for just 99¢.  You can start using it today on iPhone and iPod Touch and if you download it now, it will sitting in iTunes waiting patiently to take iOS 4.2 out for a drive on your iPad once it is released (whenever that may be).

We hope you like it!

Legal and in the wild, on the current iDevice Jailbreak

So the web is all abuzz today as a a new jailbreak has been officially released that allows ALL (according to what I've read) iDevices to be jailbroken with a simple trip to a website.  And following the DMCA rule changes handed down last week, the legality of iPhone jail breaking is no longer grey but pretty black and white.When I first jumped on the iDevice bandwagon a few years back with a first gen iPod touch, I did the jailbreak just to see what was out there.  At the time, there wasn't much that interested me and I soon after took it back to "blessed".  When I got my first iPhone (a 3G), there was one, and only one feature that tempted me to jailbreak - custom SMS ringtones.  I once again waded into the jailbreak waters and found that, while I did manage to get the custom ringtone I wanted, the battery life of the device suffered overall so I once again went back to "blessed".  This was more than a year and a half ago.

Now that jailbreaking is declared legal, and now easier than even for end users, I find that the one feature I still want has yet to make it into the official version of iOS - custom SMS ringtones.  So do I jailbreak or not?  While the reasons behind the decision to keep this oft-requested feature out are undoubtedly typical apple "we just don't want to" fare, I find that I have no real desire to follow the masses down the rabbit hole anymore.  Part of it comes from a desire to keep things on the up and up on the developer side of things but honestly, the multi-tasking brought by iOS4 answers the only other real complaint I have so for the time being, I'll sit tight.

What about you?  How many people are going to jump on this most recent and simplest jailbreak?  If so, what features are drawing you to it?