Well how about this — Facebook and social game giant Zynga has bought up iPhone developer Newtoy, makers of the popular Games with Friends apps, including Words with Friends and Chess with Friends. Newtoy has now been rebranded as Zynga With Friends, and will apparently be working on new titles for Zynga in their own style. There’s no word on what kind of money changed hands, unfortunately, but Zynga is worth around $5.6 billion, so it has plenty to spend. This is that company’s seventh such deal in as many months.
As deals for iPhone devs go, this is a big one — Newtoy previously also worked on the We Rule title for Ngmoco, so the studio has extensive experience in social mobile gaming and monetizing those experiences. Zynga is the company behind Farmville, the most successful social game out there, with its own deep roots in the social gaming field. So this will be an interesting combination to be sure.
We just chatted with Newtoy’s David Bettner at the Austin GDC a little while ago, and he’ll be stepping into the position of studio director, with his brother Paul Bettner becoming a Zynga VP and GM of the new studio. Bettner also told us that the company was working on “at least three prototypes that were up and playable,” but it’s not clear whether those titles will continue to be made or whether Zynga will have their own products for the former Newtoy devs to work on. If nothing else, this is a big vote of confidence in the App Store yet again — Words with Friends has been a runaway hit for Newtoy, and clearly Zynga sees potential in the “with Friends” brand.
Zynga buys Newtoy, studio rebranded as Zynga With Friends originally appeared on TUAW on Thu, 02 Dec 2010 13:18:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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The 
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Apple’s latest 
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When you launch the application you are given a blank canvas and a set of controls to work your creative magic. The first icon is an arrow which is your “undo” command, shaking the device also acts as undo. The next icon is a brush, the menu houses the color palette and all of the options for the paint brush, chalk, extras, smudge, and an eraser tools. After that is the stamp section which has a ton of pre-drawn stamp icons you can use on your masterpiece. The text box and stencil list is also there. The next icon is for the background, you may choose a background other than a white canvas to work off of. There are options to import and take pictures to use and a list of pre-made backgrounds to choose from. The final icon is your settings panel and gives you options for sharing your art, hiding the ads, turning sound off, and visiting the store to see theme packages of backgrounds and stamps you can purchase with “Doodle Bucks”. You can get more of these “Doodle Bucks” by installing other apps that Pinger has suggested you install.
Playing around with the app was interesting but is not something that can hold my interest for long periods of time. However, if you are creative and enjoy doodling and don’t want to keep pen and paper with you, this app may be for you. It does have a potentially cool feature that my girlfriend and I tried which is “Draw With Another User”. While a cool thought, it was quite buggy when we tried to do so. Once you do get connected it’s kind of fun to share a canvas with someone for a few moments. The “Draw With Another User” feature was the most fun part of the application all together. I did notice some accuracy problems when working with the app, not sure if it is the iPhone 4 screen or me being too twitchy, but close detail tended to move slightly. Also performance on the iPhone 3g was quite slow.
