Scott Adams "The Count" Download

[Razz2]

Early with Frotz on the iPhone I was able to download and install the
Scott Adams games like "The Count". Now when I try that on iPhone or
iPad 2 I get an error that the game was not bundled and can't be
downloaded. Even if I place Count.z5 online and unzipped, and then
browse to it, it fails. Could this be bundled or will we be able to
install again?

[Irfon-Kim Ahmad]

If you have the file, you can put iFrotz in file transfer mode from its
preferences and use your web browser to upload it. Alternately, I find
that you can get most supported files right from the iPhone or iPad by
browsing to them from Safari (rather than from within iFrotz) and then
when it says it doesn't know what to do with the file type, you can
select the curved arrow at the top and tell it to open it with iFrotz.
*Sometimes* that seems to produce a weird error message in iFrotz the
very first time about not being able to find the file or some such, but
then it plays fine and opens fine without the error from iFrotz' game
menu from then on.

[Craig Smith]

This is caused by an error in the metadata for Frotz and the ability
to do this will be restored in the next update. See the last
paragraph of this post for a workaround.

It actually wasn't 'early with Frotz'. The ability for iOS apps to
register as handlers for custom file types was added in iOS 3.2 (iPad)
and iOS 4.0 (iPhone). The first version of Frotz to support this was
Frotz 1.4, and this appears to be the feature you're talking about.

Because of Apple's App Store restrictions, Frotz (or any app) is not
allowed to directly download game files because they are "interpreted
content". Frotz 1.0-1.1 was able to do this, but Apple rejected
subsequent updates until I removed the feature, so 1.2 and later do
not support direct downloads and instead have bundled archives.
However, with the aforementioned custom filetype ability, Apple
introduced a loophole to their restriction you could drive a truck
through. You just let Mail or Safari download the file, then use
"Open In..." to launch it in Frotz. This feature was disabled because
of an unfortunate typo in metadata that lists what filetypes Frotz
handles, and will be fixed soon.

You can still manually transfer any game file you want to Frotz from
any computer with a web browser on the same wi-fi network by using
Frotz's File Transfer server. Select it form the (i)nfo/settings page
and follow the instructions.

[Razz]

Thanks! That did it.