What is Make My Day? It's a free interactive video choose-your-adventure for iPhone. If that sounds like an awfully complex way to describe a game, well, it's hard to describe it any other way. Make My Day offers a story where you make decisions at critical points. The program works by contacting a central media server and playing segments of your story. Your choices drive which video segments you watch.

You start off the game by waking up. Soon, the program prompts you whether to answer a phone or to open a door. From there the branch points just get more and more bizarre. It's a delightful game put together by a cadre of college buddies and offers far more entertainment than a free program ought. Your choices range from hilariously unforeseen to seriously amusing. Case in point: the bits about being struck by lightning and the "dance off" with your mugger.

Download your copy via Installer.app. The iPhone adaptation was put together by Nate True, the same guy who brought you the fabulous "Tap Tap Revolution" and who engineered the special effects for the project. He was responsible for the "lightsaber" bit. When you see it, you'll know what I mean. Make My Day is actually the first iPhone app I know of to employ live streaming video.

If you find yourself replaying parts over and over and want to own a copy, you can buy a DVD version from the Make My Day website for $16.

Lots of drama in the iPhone development community since last night, and it all revolves around a decision that "lg," the developer of Installer.app, made to remove PXL from its list of installable applications. PXL is another package manager for iPhone (open source, while Installer.app is still free, but currently closed source), that works with either Breezy, iBrickr (for Windows), or any other PXL manager. A little while back, the PXL guys decided that the easiest way to get their packages onto the iPhone was to actually run through Installer.app, but lg, last night, apparently decided that he didn't want them doing that, and locked them out of the application.

And that, according to many iPhone developers, is not cool. The creators of NES.app, in response, have pulled their application from Installer.app completely, posting a notice on their site that "NES.app will no longer function from Installer.app or other third-party package installers that we believe are not trustworthy/secure. You will need to remove these tools to use NES.app."

TUAW spoke with drudge, the developer who originally wrote the package for PXL in Installer.app, and he makes it clear that this is a bad move for the iPhone community. "We need to grow and learn each step of the way," he told me in an email. "Releasing closed sourced apps at this stage in the game doesn't help anyone." But the problem, according to drudge, isn't that Installer.app is a closed source application. "The only problem is it is a centralized management system... meaning "lg" has the final say in what happens with any package." And when lg decides, as he did last night, that someone's out, everyone suffers.

lg has not commented on what happened yet, as far as we've heard. At this point, it sounds like everyone involved is trying to work towards a solution, and get the PXL package back in Installer.app (the alternative would be for PXL to create their own Installer.app type of program). As drudge also told us, "The community is only 2 months old so for developers to be taking sides... makes it harder on iPhone users and developers."

Thanks, drudge!

Update: They've reached a solution-- NullRiver (lg and the folks behind Installer.app) are going to create their own open source library for package management. Since PXL was created because Installer.app was closed source, another open source solution means PXL will likely not exist any longer.

Update2: Here's the latest.

Things go fast in the iPhone world. Yesterday, I posted about Nate True's scrolling dock application. Today brings an entirely new generation of Dock. Dock 2.0 introduces a sunshine-bright hot spot on your iPhone's lower right corner. Drag out from there and the iPhone presents you with a curved selection arc. Move your finger along the arc to choose an application to open. The currently selected application echos just below the arc so you know which item you're selecting. It's a lot easier to use than it sounds and feels a lot like picking a name in the address book using the A-Z slide control.

And now the downside. The iPhone has little tolerance for running more than one non-Springboard application at a time. (For whatever reason, it refers to these applications as UnknownPurpleApps.) When more than one purple app attempt to launch, they conflict and the new app will not run. So what does this mean? When using Dock 2.0, you cannot use my screen shot utility or many other command-line apps.

You can easily enable and disable Dock 2.0 by using my launchctl GUI. Select com.natetrue.dock and choose unload -w to toggle it off or load -w to switch it back on.

The iPhone home screen doesn't scroll. This 16-application limit is just a reality most users have come to accept. Third party developers have turned to launcher apps that search for additional applications and let you choose one from a list. Today, Nate True introduced an iPhone mod that smashes these launchers into yesterday's news.

True's Dock package loads your entire application collection into a single usable list that appears directly on your homescreen. Just use a finger to scroll the bottom row of icons left or right and tap the application you want to launch.

This is still a relatively early release--so there are a few bugs here or there--but I've tested it out and it works fabulously. To install, download a copy of iBrickr (Windows) or Breezy (Macintosh Universal Binary) and use them to load the Dock package to your iPhone.