Anyone who has taken the time to find a geocache or followed an alternate reality game can confirm the excitement that goes with figuring out the puzzles involved. Unfortunately once you’ve figured out how to solve a puzzle, you may have to continue working out messages in much the same way. Often this happens with a pencil and a scrap of paper. Enter ARG Tools for iPhone by Netninja.

ARG Tools is a free iPhone app that assembles a number of decoding/encoding tools in a clear interface. The collection of tools include:

• a Countdown Timer Predictor;

• a ROT-N, Vignere, Beaufort, Transposition and Substitution cipher tool;

• letter to number conversion tool;

• Braille indexes;

• Semaphore indexes; and among others

• a periodic table of elements.

These tools encode and decode messages on-the-fly, making it quick and easy to copy and paste encoded passages. Each of the tools is accompanied by an explanation of the theory behind these cryptological techniques. Additionally, there are links to online resources like a Sudoku Step Solver and the Internet Anagram Server.

Since this is an iPhone app makes it easy to solve puzzles wherever you happen upon them. While this app isn’t a Universal Binary (it’s not optimised for iPad) you can still install and use it on an iPad or iPod touch. I am, however, disappointed that the latest version of the app has removed links to ARGNet, Unfiction and the like.

The Thomas@ series by Carina Diedricks-Hugo is a popular title amongst Afrikaans teens. LAPA Uitgewers approached Etiket with the desire to make a more engaging reading experience for the next title in the series. In many ways, this project came along at the perfect time for me.

I found out about JC Hutchins & Jordan Wiseman’s book, Personal Effects: Dark Art, on Adam Christensen’s MacCast. Despite never having seen the title in the flesh, I was immensely inspired by the big ideas that form part of the storytelling.

I had just finished an initial brainstorming sessions to conceptualize the rough ideas for an ARG for a locally produced feature film. All I could see was possibilities. Alongside a couple of colleagues we threw around ideas on how to make this book interactive and engaging in meatspace.

The project progressed to a point where I had to bring together all of the ideas into a concrete way to extend the reading experience without changing the story for those who didn’t have access to things like smartphones or internet connected computers.

In certain places Microsoft Tags and URLs appear alongside the text of the book. The reader is prompted to scan these tags, at which point they are taken to an element related to that particular point in the story. The collateral created for these sections include photos of characters in the book, chat conversations between these characters, audio clips and a video performance of the characters’ band, webpages and Flash games.

For budgetary reasons approximately 60% of the initial ideas made it into the book. Etiket submitted the Thomas@ Augmented Reality reading experience for 3 categories of the Pendoring Awards 2011 and we got 2 nominations for it. I’m very much looking forward to the awards ceremony later this month.