Awww. “Compare your baskets.. find love,” says Asda Dating. (Never mind the attempt at The Lady And The Tramp spaghetti cuteness in the site’s photo—the woman looks like a bit too intent, but it’s OK, because her bloke can defend himself with the power of a fork.)

But will Asda also offer its price promise? “If your date isn’t 10% cheaper than our rivals, we’ll give you back the difference.”

Hat tip: Nigel Whitfield. Amusing follow-up from @MayorWatch: “Presumably this is [where] that Asda bum-slapping thing really comes into its own?”

I’m Contributing Editor to Tap! magazine,  Future Publishing’s spiffy and chunky iOS magazine. I look after the games section, and I therefore get quite regular emails from developers and PRs, asking how they can get games reviewed in the mag.

Ultimately, there’s no way to guarantee a slot in Tap!, bar releasing a totally amazing game (i.e. along similar quality lines as World of Goo HD and Strategery), but there are a number of ways you can at least boost your chances. None of these things are rocket surgery, but it’s amazing how many devs utterly ignore them.

1. Let me know about your game. Email me or get in touch on Twitter. If I know about your game, there’s obviously more chance of it getting coverage.
2. Send me a promo code. Bizarrely, this surprises many devs, but, yes, send me a promo code and your game is more likely to make the cut, simply because something that’s good and had a quick test beats something that might be good but that I’ve not tried.
3. Be responsive. If I email you and ask something, get back to me in good time. I’m not suggesting you need to be at my beck and call, but when I’ve a question about some stupid bug or issue, it’s in your interest to say “actually, we’re releasing an update tomorrow that fixes things” (whereupon I’ll rereview the product) than nothing.

Devs also do themselves a massive disservice in general regarding their App Store pages, wrecking discoverability. I have an RSS feed that pipes in every new iOS game release and I check every entry, to make a shortlist for Tap! Some games are overlooked or discarded because they don’t immediately make it clear what the game’s about. So, some handy tips:

1. Your first App Store grab should show gameplay. It should be an in-game shot that shows your game at its best. If you’re showing a title screen, or, God forbid, some kind of options screen or social-networking bollocks, you just scuppered your chances of coverage by at least 50 per cent. (And if you’re dumb enough to not include any gameplay shots at all, I don’t even want to look at you.)
2. Your description should start off with an extremely succinct overview of what your game’s about. Don’t get clever and don’t start by boasting how Game Blog No-one’s Ever Heard Of (dot com) gave you 4/5 and thought your game was “the dog’s doo-dahs”. Practically every game gets a good review from somewhere, but I don’t care about that—I want to know what your game’s about. (By all means include snippets of reviews, by the way—just don’t lead with them.) Note that this and the previous tip will also benefit you regarding snaring customers—make them excited right away, and don’t make them scroll.
3. You should make it amazingly obvious how to get in touch. You have company and support links on your App Store page, so bloody well use them. And don’t link them to nothing. If I’m reviewing 30 games for a single issue of Tap!, I’m not going to waste an hour tracking down each developer. Link to your Twitter or an email address, or if you link to your website, make damn sure there’s a very obvious means of getting in touch with you. Also, ensure you check your incoming pr@ (or whatever) address more than once in a blue moon.

All these tips may seem obvious, but when I constantly hear how developers are pissed off at a lack of mainstream coverage of their games (or how unfair the App Store is, because big companies get more coverage), it’s amazing how many make almost no effort to fix things in their favour. The second set of above tips would maybe take you a half-hour to implement, but they could be the difference between your game being ignored entirely and it getting a two-page spread in a magazine.

The BBC reports that the 2011 Census is underway. As always, the form is compulsory but the Census is also anonymous, so your answers “can’t be used against you”, as noted on a few council websites.

The thing is, your answers can be used against the country. Many thorny issues in the UK (such as faith schools) are to do with religion, and a government can use Census results to justify policy. If you’re religious, fair enough—tick the relevant box. But if you’re not, tick the closest answer to ‘none’—don’t get smart and say you subscribe to a faith made up by George Lucas, because otherwise when government simply splits the results into ‘religious’ and ‘not religious’, you’re batting for the other team.

UPDATE: Apparently, the ONS is wise to Jedis. However, the general point stands—only select a religion if you’re actually religious.

At the iPad 2 launch this week, Steve Jobs unveiled his new and slightly annoying favourite catchphrase: post-PC. I say slightly annoying, because it’s clearly tech buzzword bingo fodder; but, unlike the astonishingly irritating ‘magical’ (Does the iPad do tricks, joining Penn and Teller in Vegas? No it bloody well doesn’t.), post-PC makes sense: we’re entering a world where the typical PC is no longer the star of the show.

Microsoft is currently almost dead in the water in this area of computing, thrashing around, clinging to a half-deflated lifeboat with ‘Nokia’ spray-painted on the side, and lunging half-heartedly for a favourite possession: a book entitled We Will Love Windows Forever.

Bloomberg reports Microsoft’s cunning plan to rescue itself from sinking to the bottom of the ocean and being eaten by iSharks and myriad Android fishes with pointy teeth is as follows:

[Microsoft] won’t release a competitor to Apple Inc. and Google Inc.’s tablet operating systems until the 2012 back-to- school season, people with knowledge of the plans said.

Public testing of a new version of Windows will begin at the end of this year with partners and customers, said the people, who declined to be identified because the plans haven’t been disclosed publicly.

As Bloomberg notes, this will likely pitch whatever Microsoft comes up with against the iPad 3; frankly, its tablet plans had better be nothing short of spectacular or the post-PC world will also be post-Microsoft.

John Gruber’s excited about GarageBand for iPad:

GarageBand for iPad—impressive doesn’t even begin to describe it. There are a bunch of musical instrument apps for the iPhone and iPad, and they’ve been used to great effect by many musicians. […] GarageBand for iPad is of a different scope. This is Apple taking the idea of the iPad as a musical instrument and tackling that idea with the full strength of its collective creativity. It is the most iPad-ish iPad app I’ve ever seen. Good iPad apps can make the iPad feel not like a device running an app, but like an object that is the app. GarageBand isn’t a musical app running on an iPad. It turns an iPad into a musical instrument. The  interfaces for each GarageBand instrument are exquisitely skeuomorphic. Every control—every button, every switch, every slider—is custom designed. The keyboard’s use of the accelerometer to detect how hard you hit the keys seems impossibly accurate for a device that doesn’t have a pressure-sensitive display.

I’m also excited about this app. I use GarageBand for Mac very regularly, and I’ve written loads of articles and large chunks of bookazines about the app, shoe-horning in the entire song-writing process into tutorial spaces in reality designed for far less.

However, I think Gruber does a disservice to apps that already exist for iOS. I’ve no doubt GarageBand for iPad will be polished and look great; it will likely be at least reasonably accessible to newcomers, but offer enough power for amateurs and perhaps even semi-pros to get down song sketches (although the eight-track restriction will stop many in their tracks). If compatibility with the Mac version works, that will also be fantastic (although, having worked with iWork apps for Mac and iOS, I’m not holding my breath on that front). But other apps already do the things GarageBand for iPad is being lauded for (bar accelerometer-based intensity when you strike a key at different speeds). Korg has a number of instruments with custom-designed interfaces, such as iMS-20. NanoStudio—probably my favourite iOS app—offers a highly editable synth, pads, MIDI editing and sampling. In some areas, it’s not as glossy as GarageBand, but a four-by-four drumkit grid is more usable than Apple’s picture of a drumkit to smack.

What I hope is that there’s enough room left for the pioneers in this space, and that Apple won’t just steamroller the lot of them—unless GarageBand actually proves to be far better than the competition and the competition then doesn’t make an effort to catch up. NanoStudio in particular looks to have a real fight on its hands. It’s one thing to be Korg, with many years of branding behind you, but when you’re an indie who’s effectively created GarageBand for iOS and priced it at £8.99, it’s not going to be a fun time when Apple steams on in with GarageBand proper for a third of the price.