- Picked up a new router as the old Linksys was starting to misbehave with Xbox Live. The D-Link DIR-655 has performed admirably since purchase with no issues to report. The wireless N has also increased speed for the laptop and has a far better range than the G Linksys. Gigabit ethernet has also increased speeds from the NAS and web sites and downloads are also a lot snappier. A great purchase!
- Turned 34 last week. Getting old. Fast.
- Spaces on the laptop works really well.
- Still not bought an iPhone 🙂 Getting over the initial urge is the biggest hurdle on holding off for version 2. Christmas is next followed by official app’s in Feb.
- Leopard is performing well although there are a few niggles here and there like images not dismounting or Finder taking a while to refresh. Nothing big really.
- Four shopping weekends to Christmas – not got a clue what to get.
- Weight loss still progressing well. I’ll do a proper progress post later in the year.
- Some job changes at work are in progress. Hopefully. Maybe. Probably.
- If you miss OS X hierarchical folders then OldFolder is for you.
- The new Worpdress plugin update feature is great. Makes managing plugins a lot easier than it used to be.
- Shut down Forza Leagues this weekend. We put a lot of effort into it but unfortunately the game and the small community let us down really. It still niggles just how much people demanded from the site and the admin team but put little back in themselves. It’s the first time I helped to run a community site and it’s an experience I don’t fancy repeating soon. Once bitten.
- Still got a really nasty cold. Tiredness now gone but the snot hasn’t.
- COD4 is the new Halo 2. The abuse and shouting before a game is tiring. If the dev’s could have picked up one thing from the beta or Halo 3 it should have been a quick method of muting and no way of hearing the other team until AFTER the match. Still, it’s a great game and the upcoming patch should address the small issues the game currently has.
- OmniFocus now available. Looks nice and integrates well with iCal and Mail. Need to see how it stacks up against iGTD which is free and includes .Mac syncing.
- Car passed it’s MOT with little trouble. I’ve had the Focus for six years now. While I’d like a new car, I don’t really need one so I’ll have it for a while yet I’d imagine.
- Only four more weeks at work before I stop for Christmas break….and three weeks off. Bliss.
Author: iandick
Emotion
Never has a football game been more looked forward to than tonight’s Scotland – Italy match. All week I’ve been getting more and more excited about it, more and more drawn in to the drama and passion surrounding it. Flower of Scotland has never been sung more louder at Hampden I reckon. Never have I felt so cheated and so down after a game of football.
We got off to the worst possible start and lost a really soft goal. To many not paying attention, Toni given too much room. At times we looked a real second best and a cracking Gordon save followed by a great decision by the linesman kept the score 0-1 going in to half time. But we had hope. Hutton came close and Weir’s header was cleared of the line. Second half was certainly better for Scotland. Hutton started to make the run’s we’ve become used to, Brown roamed as the game opened up and from a poor free kick we scrambled an equaliser. I went mental!! We had another glorious chance that McFadden just couldn’t connect cleanly with but it looked like a great draw for us and a nail biter on Wed as France went to Ukraine looking for a win. Italy brought on a defender and we seemed to have defended a late attack as Hutton covered in defence and then got fouled on the ball. WHAT? Crazy decision. The ref (bastardo) gave the Italians the free kick and they promptly scored. Game over, Scotland failed to qualify again.
I’m still gutted, almost empty at the loss. However it would be too easy to dwell on negatives, to familiar to adopt the unlucky loser mentality. Scotland have had a great campaign, one of their best ever and if it wasn’t for the group of death we were drawn in then who knows. To get to the position we were in tonight with three of the top ten teams in the world, the world cup runners up and the world cup holders is amazing and the whole Scotland team, past and present management and especially the supporters should take a huge amount of credit and also a massive amount of confidence into the soon to be drawn world cup campaign. Bring it on!
Stacks Tweak
The ever changing stacks icon is a bit of a distraction on the Leopard dock. However thanks to a really smart idea and some well designed icons stacks can now have boxes to hold the contents. XD has the info on what to do using these well designed icons.
Much better. Also notice the Firefox icon next to the minimized widow – a nice touch that helps identify which app is minimized. I’m sure this wasn’t in tiger. The stack when opened will show your chosen stack icon first but this actually looks pretty good, almost as if the container is shown and then the objects within.
Blog Comments
Looks like there is some competition for your blog comments. Disqus and Intense Debate are both offering plug-in’s which really will change how your blog comments look and feel. User profiles, threaded comments, comment rating and even a forum for your comments are offered by both. I’ve not tried either as I would have two main worries.
1) Where are the comments held and could I move to another service with ease or just back to WordPress?
2) Spam!
Ultimately one of these (there are other services too) will start to dominate and maybe then I’ll take a look. It would be great if some of the bigger sites like Digg or BBC supported one of these services so you could have a standardised commenting system to use on any site. Certainly Intense Debate seems to have the most features, including OpenID support but their name is really bad. One to keep an eye on.
Recommended Mac Apps – Updated
I posted a list of my favourite Mac app’s almost a year ago. With advent of leopard and some badgering from other’s, here’s an updated list of what I would install on my mac.
Delicious Library
http://www.delicious-monster.com/
$40
I’ll admit this is a very non-essential app but was the first I bought for the Mac. Delicious Library allows you to catalogue, store, rate and search your music, films, games and books. There are many other media cataloguers out there but none look so good as Delicious Library or carry out the task with such elegance. Using the iSight I can scan in media barcodes for easy compiling of the library. The virtual shelf allows for browsing of titles, the app comes with spotlight support, a widget for easy title searching and option to export the library to iPod. There isn’t much in the way of web exports though (although the DeliciousSQLExport utility allows for exporting of the library to MySQL) and you can’t add your own media types. Coming soon is Delicious Library 2 which promises a fancier user interface, publishing and sharing capabilities and support for a lot more media types. Can’t wait.
Yojimbo
http://www.barebones.com/products/yojimbo/
$39.00
This was the first app I installed after Leopard. It’s an app that groups together miscellaneous items into one place. You can store text, rich text, PDF’s, serials, passwords and web page snapshots. It’s support tagging and also folders/projects and I’ve found it invaluable over the last few months as I took on a number of projects in my own time that needed a fair bit of management. It also support Spotlight searching and importantly for me, .Mac syncing. This means the Yojimbo library is the same on the desktop and laptop. As it uses the same storage method as Aperture there are some compatibility issues with Time Machine but I’m sure these will be addressed over the next month or so.
Leopard Thoughts
I’ve used Leopard for around a week now (seeing as I didn’t pirate it) which has given me time to get used to the new features on offer. I’ve pulled together some thoughts below on the main features that impact me but for a detailed review read Ars Technica’s Leopard review. Their Leopard review is the best (and longest) I’ve seen not only covering the obvious new features and graphical changes but also what has altered under the hood.
First Impressions
On logging in to Leopard you notice the most obvious visual change – the new pseudo 3D dock. Instead of a flat dock as in Tiger the icons are displayed on a pretend three dimensional shelf. Reflections of the icons are shown on the shelf as well as any windows above the dock. The icons are no longer bound within the dock and can encroach on your app’s. In Tiger small black triangles indicated the currently running app’s but they have been replaced with blurry glowing lights which don’t stand out very well against the shelf.
Original Tiger Dock
New 3D Leopard Dock
I like my graphical flourishes as much as the next geek but when they come at the expense of usability then it grates. The new dock tells me less than previously and takes up more room. Move the dock to the left or right and you get a far more usable dock – if only you could swap the dock when placed at the bottom of the screen to this. There’s no default option but a variety of ways to solve this are available.
Leopard 2D Dock – far more usable
The next new feature is Stacks. Continue reading “Leopard Thoughts”
Upgrade
So today was mostly spent upgrading the iMac to Leopard. All went well. In fact it was relatively painless which is more than can be said for my calf which I’ve aggravated again just walking about town. I don’t think I mentioned this but I tore my calf last week playing badminton. 10 days later and it’s still sore(r) but then I knew it would take a while to heal properly.
Anyway, this was supposed to be a Leopard post. Well I’ve not really had chance to play with it much so I’ll get the laptop done tomorrow and then take a few days to mull over what has changed. It ain’t all good you know!
Bizarre
Totally agree with John Gruber that not releasing the GM of Leopard to dev’s is a really bad decision from Apple. Already there are app’s not quite working with Leopard which will only be fixed after the release of the new OS, not before. The decision not to seed GM didn’t stop piracy either as the leechers have been able to download it since Tuesday.
PGR4
December 2005. PGR3 on the newly launched 360 is met with plaudits but also some frustration. Not a true HD game, 30 fps and a lack of variety compared to PGR2. What guaranteed it’s success was a lack of competition. It took over 18 months before a game challenged PGR on the 360. That game was Forza 2. However there was never any doubt that Microsoft would cash in with a PGR sequel.
I should point out that I loved the PGR series and it’s predecessor Metropolis Street Racer with PGR2 being the highlight so far. Great track variety and a superb online mode supplemented with downloadable content that extended it’s life. However it was widely known that Bizarre was forced into releasing PGR3 as a launch title which meant corners were cut. With a sequel given the green light I can imagine they wanted to throw as much into PGR4 as they could. Unfortunately too much can detract rather than add to the game.
So What’s New?
There are now 10 cities within the game and this really helps to reduce the repetitiveness of the tracks seen in the previous version. However four of the cities were also in PGR3 so you do feel a little cheated. Before PGR4 was released the dev’s made a big play on how the tracks were now more forgiving and you can see that in some places but in general there are some incredibly tight sections that inevitably lead to contact, especially online. More on that later.
The game modes are almost unchanged from previous versions. Street racing, eliminator, one on one modes and time challenges are still my favourites. This leaves the dreaded cone challenges and kudus star chases. I detest both with a passion and these modes detract from the game.
What is new are the vehicles available. Some older models are now in the game but by far the biggest addition are the bikes. These obviously handle differently from the cars and they just feel a bit odd. When you start to turn a bike the head moves with the first movement of the pad and then the bike starts to turn. It takes some time to get used to and to be honest I’m still not that happy with them. They are also far more resilient than for example Moto GP which is understandable as no one would use them if they fell down at the slightest touch. However use them online at your peril – almost every game online has seen bikes taken out before or during the first corners. It’s a dirty world out there. It’s also amazing how much draft you get from a bike!
Graphics and Sound
The graphics are stunning. The detail of each car is amazing but the bike models show off the graphics to an even higher level. Look at the pic below – bike chain, nuts and bolts…almost too detailed. Cities are also rendered to a far greater detail than PGR3 as are the few tracks that are in the game. The F1 track looks miles better than before.
The game is also very smooth with no pop-up and no glitches seen during both off and online racing. Special mention must go to the weather effects. The rain is stunning. Riding on bumper view and it looks spectacular and the puddles gathering on the tracks not only look realistic but grab your car as well. However swapping to in car view shows an amazing simulation of rain on the windscreen. Streams run up the windscreen as you accelerate and on stormy nights the wipers struggle to give you a view. It really adds to the immersion!
Engines also sound superb with the best reserved for some of the bikes – they sound monstrous apart from maybe the jet bike which just sounds odd.
Playability
This is an arcade racer. Get that into your head and you’ll enjoy the game. If you expect handling approaching Forza 2 then you will be disappointed. In saying that it is good fun although I do find the cone and star challenges incredibly dull.
The usual Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum difficulty levels apply but there is also a career mode that allows you to climb a world ranking table taking on challenges over the period of a season. This is a nice mode and much better than the arcade challenges.
Along with the multiplayer, online scoreboards etc it’s a pretty deep game with plenty to keep you occupied with. It’s annoying though that lap times and split times aren’t displayed but that just highlights the lurch to an arcade model. It’s also disappointing that modes like capture the track are missing from the game. I hope it’s not released as a paid for upgrade as it should have been available from the start.
Online
There’s a couple of major changes to the online options in PGR4. Firstly there is now a party mode similar to Halo which allows you to take up to three other friends into opponents rooms and race as a team. Sounds great but in practice it has a number of issues. The matchmaking is slow. Really slow. Amazingly badly slow. We were waiting at least two minutes between finding rooms although there were times that after five minutes we had to stop and start the search…only to wait another couple of minutes. The second issue is that the online world is full of dirty players. Almost every game is ruined by opponents taking you out of the game. I accept this is an arcade game but it is frustrating to be taken out on the start/finish line or the first corner on almost every race. You can see some stats on PGR Nations like the screen below but I’ve no idea how a clean race is calculated.
The third major problem was the graphically fantastic weather. Almost every game was wet or…very wet. While I appreciate the effort that has gone into the weather modes the matchmaking needs a tweak to reduce the rain’s frequency. If only we could do that in real life!
Unfortunately those aren’t the only issues. A gap of a few feet between cars but you still cause a crash? It’s also annoying that spins are so easy online but offline you can’t do the same to AI racers. That sounds to me that spins could be addressed but the developers have chosen to allow spins to easily occur.
The other major new feature is PGR Nations. The site allows you to upload photo’s and see world rankings, you and your friends stats and also enter tournaments and see the worlds best players. It’s a nice addition especially the photo mode. On PGR4 you can also save and view friends video’s and also rate them. Some of the top 20 video’s are superb and well worth a look.
Overall
PGR4 is a good game. Not great, but good all the same. If it hadn’t come out during this golden time for games then I may have appreciated it more but it just doesn’t do enough compared to others in the series. Hopefully over a longer period it will show some hidden depths.
Flickr Related Tag Browser
A great Flickr search tool – Flickr Related Tag Browser. Type a tag and watch the preview window fill. Move your mouse to the edge of the screen and related tags to your search will be shown – click and view those photo’s. A great visual way of searching through Flickr.
With updated map searching, video support and online picture editing all coming soon it’s looking like good times ahead for Flickr.