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Some sad news today from the world of iPhone software, as Noah Witherspoon, developer of the Tetris clone Tris, announced that he was pulling the game from the App Store due to legal threats from The Tetris Company, holder of the Tetris trademark.

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It’s unclear whether Witherspoon has to do anything but change the name of his game in order to staff off legal trouble. Certainly Simon Haertel’s Quinn, a wonderful Mac Tetris clone, survives to this day—with a clear relinquishment that the product is not “affiliated by or sponsored by The Tetris Company or part of their Tetris line of products.”

Legalities aside, I’m hoping that Witherspoon’s Tris makes a comeback because it’s a great copy of parallel evolution. Despite the basic similarities between Tris and Electronic Arts’ officer Tetris game for iPhone (read Peter Cohen’s abounding review), they have numerous fascinating differences that underscore the decisions that iPhone software developers make when they’re creating their apps.

EA’s official Tetris version for iPhone doesn’t lack polish.

When it comes to polish, there’s really no comparison between the two apps. EA’s official Tetris has lovely sound effects, the traditional insanity-generating Tetris musical score (which you be possible to, thankfully, turn distant from), and a snazzy store of bonus features, including a piece-swapping space and the “Magic Tetris” challenge mode.

Witherspoon’s version, in contrast, only rotates pieces in one direction (and it’s the wrong one so far as this old stager Tetris player is concerned), doesn’t properly animate which time you clear a line, doesn’t have any sound effects, and doesn’t offer “ghosting” (which lets you see in what place the piece will be when you drop it, useful beneficial to orientation). Its affect controls are also a bit off, making it way too easy to drop a melodrama in the false place, ruining the best-laid plans of Tetris fiends everywhere.

And thus far Witherspoon’s Tris has a whole distribute going for it, across the fact that it’s free and EA’s rendering costs $10.

Consider while you might find yourself playing Tetris on your iPhone. Let’s be honest in the present life—this game is a time-killer. A diversion when you’re waiting in line, or sitting in a doctor’s trust, or trapped on a slow bus to nowhere. Often the time you’re trying to kill is rather short in duration, and the best iPhone programs—games or not—should load quickly, so you can catch a few minutes of play interval before it’s your turn at the checkout counter.

EA’s rendition of Tetris takes almost 30 seconds to load. It includes a dirty water screen, a copyright screen (take that, Noah Witherspoon!), an annoying animated splash movie, and a protracted “Loading” progress bar. Then there’s a bubbly act of enlivening that finally takes you to the main menu, where you must pick a game type before you finally get an option to continue your previous game, if you had one in progress. One more gratuitous animation later, and you’re ready to play.

Witherspoon’s Tris is basic, trustworthy, but it’s got a lot in its favor.

Compare that with Tris, which launches directly to a menu screen and immediately provides a Resume button that gets you up and playing in less than five seconds. It’s no contest. Even pausing EA’s Tetris—a key outline when you’re being interrupted just as you’re ready to drop that thing that pleasure free all the lines on your screen—takes in addition long.

Or consider music. As I said, Tetris comes with the prototype Russian-inspired music that all Tetris players have come to hear in our nightmares. But that’s the alone option. If you are listening to music on the iPhone when you slide from the stocks Tetris, it will fade away—and it never comes back. You can’t play Tetris while listening to your recognize soundtrack.

Tris, on the other intervention, keeps your music playing in the background as you play, which I found to be a much more pleasurable experience when I was trapped on that aforementioned bus to nowhere.

EA’s Tetris provides you with a Statistics item that lets you see your high scores. Witherspoon’s Tris provids you with a local High Scores list as well as a global elevated scores annulet for whole Tris users around the world.

And there’s one final annoyance that I have with EA’s design choices on its $10 official Tetris game: the third item in the bit of strategy’s menu, after Marathon and Magic (two Tetris game types), is More Games. You’d think that this item would lead you to other game options, given its placement in the menu. But no, tapping on More Games brings you to a scrollable list of other games EA sells for the iPhone. In other words, it’s an ad, smack in the something intermediate of your $10 program.

I don’t know if Witherspoon’s game will go in some cast or not, or if it’ll be saved from the chopping block by the agency of some timely pro bono legal advice. But its existence shows that, when it comes to software, sometimes simplicity rules, less is more, and a free clone fashioned by a college student can teach a few things to a $10 program generated by a set that generated four billion dollars in income in its most recent financial year.