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In case you’ve been living under a rock… Apple released the iPhone 3g last week. My wife and I stood outside the San Tan Village Apple store for a good 4 hours last friday to buy her one. Thankfully, the weather cooperated and it was a nice pleasant morning.

As part of all this, we released two apps for the iPhone – iZen Garden , and Tiles .

Both apps are awesome fun, and you should definitely check them out!

Tiles is a sliding tile (15 puzzle) I developed on a spur of the moment. I had been thinking about how nicely the touch screen on the iPhone would lend itself to sliding things around in a grid. During research on the project, I discovered that there’s actually quite a bit of history behind the 15 puzzle . I had no idea it had been invented in the 1800s!

Anyway, Tiles let’s you do more than just a 4×4 grid, you can do a 3×3 if you’re a wimp, or if you’re a real manly man, you can attempt a 6×6 puzzle. I’d argue that these are every bit as hard as a Rubik’s cube to solve… at least for my meager puzzle solving abilities.

iZen Garden is a portable Zen Garden in your iPhone. If you don’t know what a Zen Garden is, look it up over at wikipedia . It was the first app I really thought seriously about developing on the iPhone. It seemed like a logical way to “do the dharma” in iPhone development.

We were thrilled that iZen Garden was chosen as a Staff Favorite! That made us very proud! And also was picked up at CNNMoney and Silicon Republic And on Monday, Erica Sadun was kind enough to give us a pretty positive review over at TUAW

We also decided we would take 5% of our profits from iZen Garden and donate it to a Tibetan charity, so we’re spreading the dharma in two ways!

We plan to do the same with Tiles, but have not yet settled on a charity for it.

All that said, we are really excited for the potential that the App store opens up, and really looking forward to making more apps for it. It seems like every time I finish an app, I come up with 4 more ideas!

So go check out the apps! And watch this space for more in the future!