If you have or know someone who has an Xbox 360 you are probably familiar with the Xbox Live Arcade – a way to purchase smaller, casual, or more obscure game titles via fairly inexpensive downloads. Everything from fun little diversions like Geometry Wars to a title like Settlers of Catan – a game that is cerebral and awesome, therefore ensuring it has almost no audience at all – is available for via online shopping from the comfort of your couch.
This is a good thing.
If you have or know someone who has a Wii you are probably familiar with the Wii Shop channel – a way to purchase classic Nintendo games from consoles past. Hundreds of titles from the NES, SNES, N64, Sega Genesis, and even the dreaded TurboGrafix are ready to be downloaded to your Wii for five or six or eight bucks a pop with a wave of your Wiimote.
This is also a good thing.
Sadly for Microsoft, they have no way to get in on Nintendo’s action here since they don’t really have a catalog of “classic” games. Nintendo, on the other hand, is more than willing to horn in on Microsoft’s cash cow and sometime either today or tomorrow they will announce just that – new and original games for your pretty white console, available from the Wii Shop alongside the classics. It won’t happen right away – in fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if it takes at least until 2008 while Nintendo modifies the firmware of the Wii (via download, natch) to accept an external USB hard drive to store all of the goodies. But it is definitely coming.
If you wandered on down to your local retail gaming outlet you might look at the shelves full of DS games and think “Damn, there are a lot of games for the DS.” However, if you took a quick flight to Japan and went down to a gaming retailer there and looked at the shelves full of DS games you would think “Holy fuck, how can there be that many fucking games for this thing?”
Like the PS2, the DS boasts hundreds more game releases in Japan – a land where people have wildly different expectations of games than the average mope does here. Some of the games are so far out there than the average gaijin has absolutely no chance of getting a handle on their content. These games are best left untouched, peered at from across the pond with a sense of wonder and dread. On the other hand, some are way out but also wickedly cool … games that you feverently hope will be brought to our fair shores and translated into our heathen tongue.
Elite Beat Agents was one of those games. Taiko DS is another.
One of the worst parts of buying a new cell phone is the part where you actually buy the new cell phone – some minimum-wage drone in the store rips open the box, does some mumbo jumbo with the SIM card and a phone call (or three) to the service provider, tries to sell you upgraded plans, insurance, and maybe chocolate for her kid’s soccer team, and an hour later you finally get to leave the store with a phone covered in fingerprints and a heart full of simmering hate.
The folks at Apple know that this is not a process that meshes well with the sort of experience that they like to give their customers. They also know that actually opening the package on an Apple is one of the blissful little joys in life – an “unboxing” that becomes more of an event, something that has inspired parties, photoshoots, and quasi-religious experiences.
To that end, Apple has short-circuited the cellular buying experience with the iPhone – you buy the phone, you take it home in the box, you lovingly open it like any other Apple product, and you activate it yourself through iTunes. You pick the plan yourself and it sets the gears in motion as your songs and addresses and whatnot sync to the iPhone through iTunes – no grubby fingers but your own need touch your new baby.
To the zealots in the anti-videogame lobby, there are two kinds of news: The kind that agrees with their beliefs, and the kind that is complete and utter lies. The have no mental ability to deal with the concept of facts that may refute or cast doubt on their “religion of fear”.
Case in point: Despite the fact that there is zero credible evidence of any sort of systemic causality between videogames and real-world violence, the people looking into the Virginia Tech shootings felt obligated to investigate the possibility anyway. To no sane person’s surprise there is no mention of videogames at all in the findings – the nutbar in question never played them – and instead the blame goes to the fact that he was mentally ill, got no help for that, and maybe there should be some sort of control on who can get a gun.
You would think that these results are just common sense, but some people aren’t able to process that result. They want their videogame scapegoat to take the blame, and any other possible reasoning is a cover-up. Facts be damned, I guess.
There is an unintentionally hilarious article in the Wall Street Journal today claiming that the iPhone has a huge problem in that it “can’t” retrieve or send messages through “corporate email systems”. I use quotations there because both of the terms thus noted need some translation so that you can understand the spin that is being applied here.
Speaking of quotations – I am going to quote liberally from the article because the Journal hides all of it’s content behind a “subscription wall” after a couple of days. If you want to read the entire thing – highly recommended if you need a laugh – then you had best hurry up. If you are late to the party, don’t fret … I am also going to quote liberally from the article to keep things relevant.
Anyway – back to the first paragraph. It’s not that the iPhone “can’t” talk to these “corporate email systems” (translation: Microsoft Exchange Servers), it’s that the type of IT people quoted in the article don’t want to allow it. Here’s the deal: The iPhone supports both POP and IMAP, two standard and open protocols that the vast majority of email traffic on this planet is based on. Microsoft’s exchange server also works via IMAP, if the mandarins that run the server choose to allow it. However, those same mandarins are almost always MSCE types who have been brainwashed by the people at Microsoft to believe that the only safe way to talk to a mail server is with Microsoft’s proprietary exchange protocol:
A business email system can use a popular email standard known as IMAP to sync with an iPhone. While many large companies have the ability to activate IMAP, they have chosen not to because they are worried about exposing their mail servers to the public.
This is transparent bullshit to anyone capable of independent thought. If the mail servers were not “exposed” to the public, then those companies could never ever send email to and from the outside world. Microsoft has pounded into these drones the idea that IMAP has cooties and, unlike “secure” (sarcasm intended) protocols from Microsoft, open standards can lead to all sorts of data corruption, hacked networks, and probably war in Iraq.
The Journal, being an absolute bastion of journalistic integrity (more on that in a minute) then points out that Apple could be doing something to fix the “problem”:
“One way Apple could make it easier for corporate users would be to license software from Microsoft or Research In Motion for their devices that would allow them to act like virtual BlackBerrys or Windows Mobile devices.
Two things about this are comedy gold: One is that this would somehow make things easier for users … nothing could be further from the truth. This would make things easier for one group and one group only – corporate IT departments that have chained themselves to Exchange. The second is that Apple would even consider this, and somehow see any value in paying for the right to use a second-rate and difficult to work with technology from a competitor. Apple’s mindset right now is that they have a far superior product to any other so-called smartphone or wireless handheld on the market. The product is so good and so desirable that they do not need to bend to any particular technology, the market will instead bend to them. They picked IMAP for a reason – it is a standard and everyone can use it if they choose to do so. Apple knows know that if people find their IT departments unwilling to support IMAP, then they will just forward their Exchange mail to a Yahoo or Gmail server and use it that way:
Mr. Saxton-Getty says he is worried that “rogue†employees may figure out ways to route their corporate emails to their iPhone. “I am getting a lot of push back, and people saying they are just going to go get it on their own,†he says, adding that an employee asks him about the iPhone and whether the company will support it about every hour.
Corporate IT departments like this one will bluster and harrumph and refuse to allow their employees to hit their mail servers with IMAP – and you know what? It won’t make a lick of difference. People will buy iPhones, find their own way around the restrictions, and just maybe end up pointing out that there is a far better solution than Exchange. There is no pressure at all on Apple to support Exchange. But there will be all the pressure in the world on the minewseeper lovers to get with the program and adopt open standards like IMAP.
It comes down to this: Apple has a cool phone, and smart people want it. Microsoft hates open standards and demands that they be rejected by their army of drones – an army that includes strategic media outlets like the Wall Street Journal who just happen to be a “technology partner” with Microsoft. The lines have been drawn in the digital sand, and it will be interesting to see which force wins out.
I have been playing with Leopard for one full week now, and I am about ready to check in with detailed impressions of the new bits and pieces. But not today – I have been typing all day and I am about typed out. In the meantime, however, I have found a very cool change in a fairly obscure feature of OSX that you might find interesting and/or actually useful.
First, some background for any non-geeks that might wander by: Cocoa is the most advanced (and most popular) programming environment for Apple’s OSX operating systems. Cocoa provides a set of tools to take care of all of the “nuts and bolts” of any program you might write – as a wildly simplified example, it lets you call a single routine to “type text into a window” instead of going through all the hash of “drawing the window, defining a text area, reading the keyboard, placing the text that matches the key into the text area, moving to the next letter, etc. etc. etc. and so on”.
Now – this is not a surprise to you. If you have ever used OSX you have probably control-clicked on a word to bring up the contextual menu that deals with spell checking, thesaurus use, dictionary management, whatever. However, I am betting you have never used the “hold-click + escape” combination to bring up the “word completion” menu. This is because using that particular trigger sequence is completely and utterly unwieldy, and the annoyance of using it far outstrips whatever usefulness you might find in the resulting feature. You can try it now – open up any OSX application that lets you type in text, start typing a word, stop halfway through, and then click and hold on the end of the word while pressing and releasing the escape key. This would be great if you are semi-sure of the word you want and kind of know the start of it. Would be, except for the totally bush way that you need to get it to work.
Well, no more. Once you move to Leopard you will probably find yourself using this more frequently – the new triggering sequence is simply to hold down the escape key for a full second when part way through a word. No clicking, no taking your hands off the keyboard, just instant lookup bliss. It is one of those fabulous “little things” that you stumble across in OSX that never get any hype or even barest mention, but remind you that you are dealing with a company that thinks the little things are as important as the big ones.
The concept is dead easy: You grab the “nodes” and move them around (when you can, some are stationary) so that the Laser Beam Of Death that flows between them hits all of the blue “bulbs”. When all the bulbs are lit, you go on to the next screen. It starts out with a couple of “tutorial” screens and then it gets hard in a hurry, so you don’t need to invest a lot of time until you get to the hair-pulling phase.
A couple of people were clever enough to capture the live feed from the keynote and snip out the John Hodgman (with special guest star Justin Long!) into for the inevitable posting onto YouTube. If you haven’t seen it yet, enjoy.
There is a Magic Juice Fridge on the second floor of the Moscone West – no matter how many people take bottles of juice out of the fridge, it never ever gets empty.
I love the Magic Juice Fridge.
There are different kinds of juice – orange, limeade, fruit punch, and so on – but my favourite is the “Strawberry C Monster”. It is a sort of a strawberry smoothie with some orange and apple in there for extra tang, and it is seriously tasty.
I have been downing 10 or 12 of these a day, but didn’t think until just now to peek at the nutrition label. Check out the RDA of vitamin C:
Apparently that is not a typo. Linus Pauling would be proud, I guess. Sheesh.
There is a delightfully upscale mall up the street with the oddly prosaic name of “The San Francisco Shopping Centre”. It is the kind of place that prides itself on offering every possible amenity to their customers, from complementary bottles of water to porters to concierges hovering everywhere to … an interactive touch-screen directory that guides you to the store of your choice with “follow me” maps.
Tragically, they chose Windows as the operating system for the thing … with mostly predictable results.
NOTE: This rather public failing of Windows has nothing to do with the MacBU team, who remain entirely awesome.
There have been a few occasions in the past when I may have said some things in These Very Pages that might be seen as less-than-complementary to Microsoft and the hordes who toil therein. I apologize. I have been tarring and feathering people at MS with a very broad brush, and that is both unfounded and unfair. The Macintosh Business Unit team at Microsoft is staffed from top to bottom with wonderful people, the cream of the crop, the salt of the earth, and I love them like family. Maybe more.
From now on I will make a point to specifically exclude the MacBU people from any and all comments about Microsoft that may seem to be somewhat jaundiced. The MacBu gang are golden.
I am told that my keynote rantings took pretty much all day to dribble onto these pages – sorry about that. They have a kinger wireless network here, with 5G repeaters literally everywhere, but the simultaneous connection of virtually every Apple geek in the western hemisphere was just too much for it. I saw Cisco techs running about all day, and it looks like everything is up to snuff now. Enjoy.
There is nothing that can really prepare you for the strangeness of sitting in the crowd at a Jobs keynote. Rows upon rows upon rows of geeks gazing adoringly at the stage, their eyes shining with the reflected light from their laptops. Everyone has their laptop open and is madly – yet oh so quietly – typing away. Including me.
There seems to be a large Brazilian contingent here – the cameras are panning the crowd and at least three dudes have held up their MacBooks with Brazilian flags as desktop pictures. WTF?
Okay, so not all of the media were successfully rounded up downstairs – Ryan from Engadget just walked down the aisle towards the front and the girl three seats over from me had to fan herself and squeal. She also has a brand new LCD MacBook. I hate her.
Wow – almost right on time – must be a new alarm clock widget in Leopard or something. One minute after 10 and the lights go down and John Hodgman appears on the big screens and the place goes bonkers. Truly, the man is a rock star. I think the girl three seats over has fainted. We have the obligatory hilarious “Mac/PC” intro and then Mr. Jobs himself takes the stage. There is a synchronized craning forward by the crowd as everyone tries to see his shoes. They are indeed New Balance, so the world is back to normal. Everyone relaxes. On to the news!
Steve starts by pimping the success of the Intel Mac lineup. Can’t argue with that, I was one of many nay-sayers there and had to eat crow. Well done.
They turn to games on OSX – something that, outside of Warcraft, has been lacking in recent years. They trot out Bing Gordon from EA, and as always at these sorts of things he seems to be drunk. He pimps Command & Conquer, Need For Speed, Tiger Woods, Madden, and some obscure franchise called Harry Potter. First the Wii, then OSX … EA always seems to be playing catch-up.
More game news, this time from ID. Duke Nukem Forever? Ha ha, no. It is some sort of unfinished graphics engine for games. People are scratching their heads, wondering why ID showed with what appears to be a pre-alpha proof-of-concept thingie. I scratch too. Maybe Steve needed to use the can.
Steve is back and it’s time for the meat of the show – the ten new things about Leopard that turn Steve on.
1 – New Desktop. Things are cleaner, and the shiny grey bars and dock are front and centre. Also, the old “sticky folders” from OS9 are back, this time in the dock and called “Stacks” … you can cram all of your loose documents into them and they sproing out to be revealed when needed. Also, the main design philosophy is that people will want to use their own desktop pictures instead of the thing that gets installed by the programmers.
2 – Cover Flow. You can now page through your documents in the finder the way you page through CD covers in iTunes. Sexy as hell, and makes that application switcher dealie in Vista look like crap.
3 – Quick Look. This lets you look inside any document without opening the application that created it. No shit. The application hooks are plug-ins too, so it works with current apps and ones they haven’t thought of yet. You want to peek at a PDF or a Keynote file to make sure it is the one you really want? Quick Look does that. Fast as hell, too.
4 – 64-Bit Top To Bottom. Yeah, we knew this. Get on with it. You can gloat over Windoze and their ghetto 16-bit MMU later. Although I have to admit, the 64-bit apps are insanely fucking fast.
5 – Core Animation. This completes the “core” suite with Core Graphics, Text, and Audio. Steve shows a grillion QuickTime movies running on the screen at once and then does real time elimination searches and shit on them without a single dropped frame. Okay, that was hot. Really hot. Core Animation lets the system take care of all of the background when it comes to moving pictures so that the apps only have to worry about presenting the user with the output. This will make the eventual PVR version of AppleTV completely awesome.
6 – Boot Camp. It is now built-in to every copy of Leopard, no downloads, no installs. Steve shows that – along with Parallels and VMWare – this gives you three ways to use your “important Windows applications”. As he says this, Solitaire and Minesweeper pop up on the screen. Big laffs for that. I have never been a fan of Boot Camp – I hate the idea of limiting your user experience to run one or two apps. But some people are fans and hey, it’s free – a selling point that Parallels and VM can’t compete with.
7 – Spaces. This is the new “virtual desktops” part of Leopard and – being a KDE guy from way back – I have been dying to see how Expose integrates with it. Sadly, Steve leaves me high and dry – no mention of Expose working with Spaces at all. The engineers must still be bashing away on that part. Damn. Also, Steve is oddly careful never to call the “Spaces” screens “desktops” … no idea why.
8 – Widgets Reloaded. There is a new version of Dashcode (no news there, most of us downloaded it two weeks ago) but there is some awesome widget news – Web Clips lets you “clip” any part of a web page and have it as a live-feed widget. It is insanely fucking slick – just click on the part of any web page that you want to keep up to date on and off you go. It’s like a free-form graphical self-defined RSS feed, but better. Wow.
9 – iChat. They are really trying to pump iChat into both the home and enterprise markets – there must be big money in the future of instant messaging, but I just can’t seem to figure out where that money is. The big news is something called “iChat Theatre” and it looks to have applications for both the suits and the teenage crowd. For the cubicle dwellers it lets you share a document in real time, and step through it regardless of whether it is a spreadsheet or a presentation of what (obviously Quick Look is at work here) – I can see starting to use that the minute my staff gets upgraded to Leopard. When you aren’t working, however, iChat Theatre lets you do all sorts of wacky video shit (think “live Photo Booth” and you will get the idea) during chats – something that may or may not turn your crank. Certainly there will be a poor-quality video of the thing on YouTube later if you want to check it out. Me, I am all about the document sharing.
10- Time Machine – Finally, actual easy-to-use backup and recovery for the masses. I back up, you probably back up, but I bet your parents don’t back up. Time Machine has a one-click setup, and after that you dont even know it is there. You can search with the finder “into the past” and it will even find documents that you have deleted, along with your current shit. Need something you threw away? Just open it like any other document or item – Time Machine seamlessly restores it and brings it back to life. This would seem to be the final death knell for HFS and Mac Extended file systems, since this obviously runs on ZFS and is also the best thing since sliced pizza.
So yeah, Leopard looks beyond awesome. More details on the bigger items (and the iPhone development environment news, once I get my head around it) later. Right now there is some Leopard to install …
The lineups to get into Jobsnotes at any Apple conference are legendary. Usually they spill out into the street, a raving mob of t-shirt clad geeks pushing and heaving to get into the hall that actually contains Mr. Jobs … those who are late and/or unlucky are relegated to the “overflow” rooms where you watch on television screens. Oddly, the view is often better in those rooms, but it just isn’t the same. The presence of the great man is part of the show – seeing it second hand somehow filters out some of the mojo.
This year they changed the lineup strategy and wound it through the recreation and hangout halls, an endless snake of mopes shuffling forward through switchback after switchback until finally funneling up the escalators. In a kind-hearted sort of move, they posted water stations at strategic points along the trek for the comfort of the unwashed. This kept people moving along, even when they weren’t really going anywhere, and helped to stall the inevitable grumbling … it seemed like a helpful sort of development.
And the end of the line – 8:00 am, two hours to keynote:
Moving forward …
and forward …
and forward …
every now and then there is a place to get water, which is kind of them.
Still trudging along …
It appears that they managed to round up all of the media and pen them in where they can’t harm themselves:
8:45 and finally the doors are within sight!
The escalator! Praise Steve almighty, we are almost inside the main hall!
Or not. This turned out to be nothing more than the “pre-line” … a sort of a test of your mental fortitude to make sure you were worth letting into the real line upstairs. The phrase “seething mass of humanity” comes to mind …
Gack. 9:00 am and this far back in the mob. I must have been a bad person in a previous life. No, wait, just a few moments later and … it seems that the first line was really the pre-pre-line” and the seething mass was the real pre-line and now, finally, finally this is the line. You could just lift your legs and be swept into the hall. Jeezus.
Giant thanks to Dennis at Sony for lending me the USB cable I needed here.
I installed my copy of Leopard last night and the default skin is packing a SHITLOAD of grey. Grey theme, with shaded grey bars and buttons, very mechanical and clean. It will be interesting to see if that is the default skin when this hits retail, or they are just dicking with it.
We interrupt this regularly-scheduled blog to bring you live coverage of the World Wide Developer’s Conference in beautiful downtown San Francisco. There should be awesome news a-plenty, including this morning’s keynote from Mr. Jobs. Stay tuned.
Shuffle is a perfect little diversion for a Wednesday afternoon at work. Or a Monday, or a Tuesday, or in fact any day that ends in “y” and finds you at the office. The game sits somewhere between shuffleboard and skittles, and has a surprisingly aggressive difficulty curve as you get fewer and fewer balls to play with as the game moves along.
As always, fewer balls to play with is a bad thing.
There is also an online chat function to gab with other players, but for me that just got in the way of the zen of this delightful little game and I preferred to keep that turned off. Have fun.
I may have to eat some crow on the whole iTunes/DRM-free music/Steve Jobs gets all high and mighty and then backs it up thing. Yes, you can now get your music in an unprotected format at the iTunes Store from certain labels, that is a fact. But those downloaded tracks are watermarked with your name and email address, something that Mr. Jobs did not mention, imply, or remotely hint at. So what’s the deal here? Apple refuses to comment on the issue, giving the issue a somewhat dodgy air, and certainly privacy advocates are cocking a Spockian eyebrow at the whole thing.
There is a temptation here to say that Apple is just hedging their bets and covering their corporate ass if EMI or any other label decides to backtrack and get litigatious, but if that is the case, why not come out and say so?
In the meantime, the watermark info is stored as plaintext so it is a fairly trivial matter to write an Applescript to change the name and email address to that of Steve Jobs. No harm, no foul. Still a pisser, though.
Even if you don’t like the Computer Key Of Doom, it is worth poking around the site to see the other “giant” things they are selling. This is a shining example of the “ultra-niche” retailer that could never really exist without the global reach of the web – you just can’t get a big enough market for this stuff with a meatspace store.
For the most part the site is very cool, but the giant pickle does worry me somewhat.
This is one of those items that is either really cool or a complete waste, depending on the state of your liver. The iWay is a straight-shot SD card reader that lets you upload photos to your video iPod without using iPhoto (or the photo management software of your choice) as a digital middleman. I can see where this would be pretty swank if you were on a long vacation and didn’t want to haul along a laptop to cleanse your memory cards as they filled up. On the other paw, though, I can see where this is Just Another Thing To Keep Track Of When Traveling.
Apple quietly released the promised mercury-free, LCD-illuminated MacBook Pro models today, and they are apparently all that and a bag of chips. The new environmentally-friendly units are faster and much brighter than before, and you can lust over the obligatory unboxing over at GeekSugar.
I am semi-surprised that the release was this low-key. While it is true that there is traditionally only a Jobsnote introduction of computing hardware if there is a noticeably new form factor, Apple has been taking such a beating on the environmental front that it wouldn’t have been a bad idea to trot the big man to try and get some good press on this issue. But hey, what do I know?
You may recall the heady days of October and November last year, when the mainstream media was all in a later about the impending launch of the Playstation 3. There were gobs of stories about the possible consumer frenzy, the amazing high-def graphics, the three-day lineups, blah blah blah and so on. Rare was the mention of the subsequent launch of the Wii two days later … concrete evidence that the fenderheads who report on these things for the traditional media outlets get their information from press releases and marketing handouts. They don’t know enough about the business to be able to ask their own questions or make their own evaluations, so they simply parrot the words of the company with the largest PR budget.
The number of people who had the vision to see through the hype and understand that one console was going to be “more of the same” and one console was going to change industry forever were few in number and rarely had a broadcast voice. Which meant that the
“more of the same” console got all of the press and most of the hype.
Which brings us to the new issue of Fortune magazine. There is an excellent cover piece on Nintendo in general and the Wii in particular, covering everything from the way that the media dropped the ball to the insane amount of coin that the Big N is now raking in. It is pretty rare to see this sort of quality coverage of a “fringe” industry in the news and business glossies, so big ups to Fortune for finally getting it right.
