Long before the SDK, long before jailbreaking your phone became a one click process, backwhen a jailbreak was a 45 step, multi-hour committment, there were “web apps,”  iPipes has been my favorite “web app” for the iPhone since then.   There are many apps out there, but – put simply – web apps just don’t compare to native speed, especially on a 1st gen iPhone’s EDGE connection.   iPipes, like the other software made by “themacbox,” is top notch, works very well, and is still a challenge long after games like Dominos and Rock, Paper, Scissors have lost their mojo. 

iPipes is based on a very simple concept: given a time limit, contruct as long a pipe as possible using the given pieces to contain a crawling green “snake.”It’s easy to string together the first dozen or two pipes, but eventually you may find yourself backed into a corner or wrapped around with no way out.  Passing several levels is easy and you will likely do so in the first try.  But stringing together 100 pipes is a challenge, even on the early levels.    

Although I’ve never really spent too much time obsessing over high scores  (I usually get somewhere in the neighborhood of 80-85 per level), I once got 99 and then the counter stopped counting, the green stopped crawling, and it just… stopped. So I sat down determined to finally break 100 and see if the game would crash again.  It didn’t.  I got a 107 — which could probably be easily beaten by someone with more than 6 minutes to spare — but is still my high score.   If you have an iPhone, I encourage you to check out iPipes – it’s free and available online.