Author: iandick

.Mac Web Galleries

After all the hype I decided to try out the new Apple web galleries so I uploaded my first album. The upload speed seemed pretty sluggish as did the loading of the actual album on visiting the web page. Presentation on the website is superb though and it’s a great way of showing off your photo’s.

First .Mac Web Gallery

One of the nicest ways of viewing the album is using the carousel. This is like coverflow in iTunes and allows you to scroll through the pictures. Only annoyance is it takes a while for pictures later in the album to get the high res sharper version of the photo so you can spend a while looking at fairly fuzzy pictures. Another feature I like is that as you move the mouse over the album photo in the gallery page it flicks through the images in the album – very slick and mirrors the functionality seen in iPhoto.

While many have seen this as a Flickr competitor for me they are two different beasts. .Mac Web Galleries allow you to easily upload albums of photo’s (and also video’s) and let your friends view or download them. Flickr lets you do the same but with far more disk space and has a whole community supporting it with forums, groups and commenting. It also has far stronger tools for editing sets, albums and also supporting geo-tagging. One feature that .mac has got is photo uploading – letting people upload photo’s to your album which then sync back to iPhoto. I find that pretty odd as thats something I don’t think I would ever use. Due to space and speed alone I’ll be sticking with Flickr – be nice to see them up their game when it comes to presenting albums though.

Mac Announcements

Initial thoughts…

  • New iMacs. I don’t like them. The design isn’t as clean as the iMac’s of old. Not convinced by black surround or by glossy screen. Love the size of the new keyboards but would need to try them first as the key’s look close to the style of the Macbook. Fine for laptop – not so sure for desktop. Good options on hard disk size though.
  • iLife – some nice improvements here on photo management and also video creation. Not much else for me
  • iWork – Numbers look very interesting. Tried Keynote over the last few days and it is very impressive. Must try Pages to see how good/bad it is especially as Office is delayed until next year.
  • .Mac. Some improvements at last. Disk space upped to 10Gb which is nice. Was also impressed with the new picture and video albums – .Mac Web Gallery. Very clean presentation and it reallt does feel like an app on the web. Sharing options were also nice to see with friends able to upload photo’s with them sync’d back to your mac. A nice upgrade to .mac but still feel they could do so much more.

More meh than yeah for me but some nice changes all the same. If you commit to everything Apple I can see why it makes sense but with sites like Flickr and so many other websites established with communities it’s hard to see many people moving over to the web albums. Good for one off’s more than a whole set of albums for me.

Mac Rumours

So, my thoughts on Tuesdays announcements? We’ll see an iMac replacement. This was my worry when I first bought a Mac almost a year ago. It wasn’t the switch or the initial purchase. It was the upgrades the following year to lovely new hardware. However the iMac still feels new to me so I’m not too fussed. I guess we’ll see how true this is later in the week.

I expect something on iLife as well although that might come later on with Leopard. The one product I’d liek to see change is .mac. I bought it earlier this year and it’s been great for keeping the mac’s in sync. However the access over the web is lame compared to other Web 2.0 apps and the tiny 1Gb disk space makes a mockery of taking docs anywhere. Increased disk space, an improved range of apps and more than the ‘Back to mac’ functionality announced at a previous Leopard demo. How about a nice wrapper around the Google suite of tools coupled with the web disk. That would really make a portable office accessible from anywhere.

So that was much of the draft I wrote at the weekend. Now there’s speculation that there really could be some .mac announcements as there’s downtime scheduled on the .mac service during the keynote. I still have my doubts. Hey ho – we’ll all know this time tomorrow.

Forza Designs Update

Couple of belters have been gifted to me in the last few days.

Foe Real Designs

Another Foe Real car and in my opinion the best yet. Photo’s don’t do it justice – it looks amazing in game. The second car looks superb too…

Hunderbolt

The text is great and coupled with a Rangers badge on the bonnet, what more could you wish for. Cheers David (aka Wee Piglet on Xbox Live). Ricky – this car could be yours!!

Gaming Costs

It’s been covered loads of times before, but releasing one car for Forza2 at the cost of 50 gamerpoints sounds expensive. Taking today’s Amazon prices that’s 43p for one car. If Sony applied that pricing model, and the rumours of 1000 cars in GT5 but only 300 included in first purchase are true, that’s an extra £300 to own the full game. Madness. Of course no one is forcing you to buy the content, and the likelihood is that you’ll buy only a few select cars, but the micro transaction gaming market is only heading in one direction and it’s not a cheap one.

Game Quickies

In no particular order…

  • Heavenly Sword demo was released today. It’s quite possibly the largest (almost a gig) shortest (lasts less than 10 minutes) demo I’ve played but afterwards I pre-ordered the game so I guess the demo worked for Sony. The graphics were stunning and this looks like something the 360 could struggle matching. Game on. I know there was some bad press about the gameplay being short (12 hours from memory) but I’d rather have a corking 12 hours than a spun out 30 hour game that I don’t complete.
  • Bomberman is superb on the 360 and well worth 800 points.
  • Played the Moto GP demo on the 360. What was once THE game on Xbox Live is now a shadow of it’s former self. Talk about milking an original format and regurgitating each year, this is little more than a bug fix from last years release.
  • GTA IV – only complete experience on the 360 according to Rockstar themselves. Made me grin thinking back to the exclusives that the PS2 had for so long. Not any more.
  • Had a large room on GRAW2 last night – blind siege with > 6 players is sooooo much more fun
  • Another firmware update on the PS3 – Sony are developing aggresively for the PS3 now and ar catching up fas on the 360. Music playback and X bar available in game for firmware v2.0?
  • Forza Leagues is going well and we have over 30 members with little or no advertising. Biggest issue has been lag within Forza. We struggle to get anyone to host a stable room with more that 6 players which is very limiting. It frustrates that the console model for online gaming is still mostly peer to peer which limits the amount of players you can realistically play with at any one time. I would quite gladly pay extra for server based gaming if it allowed 16, 24, 32 player gaming while limiting lag. I would love Sony to do more with server support in the hope it would encourage Microsoft to move in that direction as well.
  • Resident Evil 5 – another game that looks amazing!
  • The Metal gear Solid gameplay video was very impressive. Some nice touches, great humour and a graphics engine that looked up there with the best around. There was also a nice array of weapons. If Sony have lost exclusivity on this one they will be kicking themselves.

B Day

No, not the Beyonce album.

Not even a low-mounted plumbing fixture or type of sink intended for washing the external genitalia and the anus.

It’s Bomberman day on Xbox Live. David & Ricky D – I expect to see you online at least once this week for a session! To other 360 owners – get this! 8 player online. It can’t possibly fail*

*Obviously it can go wrong and online could suck salty balls and be one of the worst lag fests known to man. The recent Bomberman games have been awful as well, but I’ve kept the faith and hopefully this will be the reward. However, for old time’s sake ….you can’t go wrong, can you?

Forza Leagues

Over the last three weeks I’ve been beavering away on a new website which is finally ready to roll – www.forzaleagues.com. For the last few years I’ve gamed with a great but dwindling bunch of guys known as The Lickers. We’ve ended up with a core group enjoying mostly racing and first person shooters but we have a problem – no site to run leagues and a habit of starting a league but never finishing it.

So myself and Cheesy (fellow Lick) decided to try and do something about it, hence Forza Leagues. The website allows us to easily run multiple leagues and seasons for Forza 2. It should make the admin part as easy as possible and give us some nice stats along the way. It also allows us to attract 360 users from other forums and websites to join our leagues or form their own using the software we’ve developed.

forzaleagues.com

Now when I say we’ve developed the software it’s really all down to one guy – Graeme (he asked me not to link to his homepage). So it’s a big thank you for the coding you’ve been doing over the last couple of weeks. Everyone’s feedback so far has been really positive. I also need to thank Robert (Foe Real) who’s logo work in Forza is superb and can be seen above. Soon we’ll all be riding using his designs.

forzaleagues.com

Longer term we hope to add more games, leagues, ladders and team tournaments but for the moment, to get us started, we’re focussing on Forza 2 only. We’re looking for clean racers to join up and take part. Don’t worry about fast times as there will be leagues to cater for all abilities. The important thing is that you race fairly and don’t abuse your fellow gamers. If that sounds like you and you enjoy Forza 2 then feel free to register with Forza Leagues and at least give it a go. Hope to see you there.